The Cat that Wears the Night Sky for Skin:
Charles Bowden and the Northern Jaguar
By John Macker
I’ve never seen a northern jaguar in the flesh, across from me or crossing the border or anywhere else, but then, I’ve never witnessed the birth of the blues or border author Chuck Bowden’s feral ghost. But I believe in them both. Just as I believe in the hot dry ground that sings under its breath for rain; that fantasizes with all of its stoic forbearance: one day it’ll ride the storm out once again.
It still gathers itself at the horizon for the redundant miracles of twilight. The cooling, the operatic softening. Perhaps, for the jaguar’s silent tracks as well: south of the border but close, so close, slowed on its journey by drought, or human predation, the wall. Maybe a sordid combination of all three.
The Mayans believed if you spread out the skin of the jaguar, you’d see a map of the celestial heavens.
In a perfect world, their range would include the American Southwest all the way down into Argentina as it did a thousand years ago. They’re considered endangered in Mexico and in the U.S. if they ever make it that far north. There are rumors. Some legitimate sightings over the years. In northern Mexico, in the Sierra Madre Occidental, his home territory, the Northern Jaguar Reserve⸺ the wildest, most isolated place, where between 8 and 20 of them roam, mate, raise their young and survive⸺ is located about 125 miles south of the U.S./Mexico border and is a protected space. It is 56,000 remote acres of canyons, perennial streams, sheer cliffs, jagged mountains and forests. It is managed by the non-profit Northern Jaguar Project, headquartered in Tucson.
“Around the campfires of Mexico there is no animal talked about, nor more romanticized and glamorized, than el tigre. The chesty roar of a jaguar in the night causes men to edge toward the blaze and draw serapes tighter. It silences the yapping dogs and starts the tethered horses milling. In announcing its mere presence in the blackness of night, the jaguar puts the animate world on edge. For this very reason it is the most interesting and exciting of all the wild animals of Mexico.”
– A. Starker Leopold, Wildlife of Mexico
The Northern Jaguar Project also manages Viviendo Con Felinos, which operates at the core of the Project’s mission statement and its brilliance is matched only by its fraught simplicity. Many jaguars, as well as the Reserve’s other feline inhabitants including pumas, lynxs and bobcats, were at the mercy of ranchers whose livestock were endangered by these predatory cats. Viviendo Con Felinos has contacted many ranchers and reached an agreement beneficial to the humans as well as the felines. If they could get ranchers to hold off on gunning them down, Viviendo Con Felinos would pay them for every large cat caught on one of the many cameras set up throughout the Reserve. Capturing still (or video) footage of a jaguar passing through their property produces the biggest bang, monetarily speaking, for the rancher. Since 2007, they have worked with ranchers in this “buffer zone”, easing tensions and hostilities that have persisted for generations. According to the NJP website, “Participating ranchers sign contracts not to hunt, poison, bait, trap, or disturb wildlife, including the area’s four felines – bobcat, ocelot, mountain lion, and jaguar – and the deer and javelina they prey on. We place motion-triggered cameras on their properties, and they receive monetary awards for feline photographs.” In addition, “Every rancher has been challenged by unprecedented and prolonged drought. We assist with water infrastructure and restoration projects, expanding the network of gabions and other earthworks to slow stream flow, curb erosion, stabilize soils, and help re-vegetate habitat. For ranchers concerned with depredation, we provide site visits to discuss strategies to minimize human-wildlife conflict.”
Jaguars once roamed as far north as the Grand Canyon. Seven jaguars have been seen in Arizona and New Mexico since the mid-1990s. Jaguars have blue eyes when they are born but when adult, their eyes glow like torches in the moonlight. I’ve never seen a jaguar in the wild but I see them in my dreams and when they see me, their gaze pierces to the heart. These jaguars are smaller than their South American cousins.
They’re the only mountain lion that roars.
Their colorful skins can be seen on an Aztec codex from the 16th century.
In Mesoamerica, the jaguar is a powerful symbol of the underworld. These are just facts, you
can find them anywhere in the estranged world.
There is evidence that a jaguar nicknamed El Jefe, which lived in the southwestern United
States from 2011 to 2015, preyed on a young American black bear sow. There is talk of formally reintroducing the jaguar into the American southwest, as Arizona and New Mexico have ample wild room for them. Wolves as well. The successful reintroduction of both these species would mean, just maybe, that we aren’t as estranged from each other as we think we are, that, in fact, with some effort, we still have wise hope; that the thought of the wildness of these two creatures in closer proximity to us is reason to believe in our innate goodness, that we can unify, if the idea of working together to prevent the extinction of a species or two appeals to the better undomesticated angels of our nature. We can only hope.
The author, Charles Bowden, when asked what non-profit organizations were most effective in dealing with wildlife issues in the southwest, he named the Northern Jaguar Project. Of course, he had the jaguar running through his veins, maybe El Jefe himself, consuming large quantities of mother bear and anything else that moved on this blighted, inferno of a ground. He died at 69 in 2014 in Las Cruces, New Mexico, down the road a few hours from where I live. We exchanged exactly one email. I had written to him in December of 2013 after sending him two books of my poetry.
John
I want to thank you for the two volumes. I look forward to them. I am sure they will help me through this hard season, the dismal ramp up to the solstice when the nights grow long and the sun feels faint. And of course, your kind words help. As you well know writing is a lonely business and it is always a pleasure to learn someone has found some pleasure in the work.
Chuck
He was the author of many books, a few of them drug-themed including Murder City: Cuidad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Field and Down by the River; some of the other non-fiction, Blood Orchid, The Sonoran Desert, Blue Desert, Some of the Dead are Still Breathing and Blues for Cannibals are relentless interrogations into the darker soul of the southwest desert and its borderlands; its two and four-legged characters, its grueling days and incomparable universe of starry nights. Its stings and rattles. He also collaborated with renowned photographers Julian Cardona and Michael P. Berman for three books on the border desert published by University of Texas Press, Trinity, Exodus and Inferno. Three unabashedly brilliant Bowden titles, Dakotah, Jericho and Sonata were plucked off his computer and published posthumously by the University of Texas Press. Appearing in 2019 and 2020, they became my pandemic soul mates. They kept me company navigating those dry rivers of isolation.
I came across Chuck Bowden’s work about 20 years ago. The first one I read, Blood Orchid
intermingled his studies of the blood orchid’s reproductive eccentricities with other observations about the natural and not-so-natural world, in a ferocious rhythm of words more suitable to a prose stylist than a journalist or “reporter” as he referred to himself. From there I read most everything else at one time or another. He’s most celebrated for his books on the killing fields of Juarez, drug cartels and what makes them flourish, the death of a DEA agent and probably most notoriously, for his book length interview and film with a cartel assassin called El Sicario, a project he did with Molly Molloy.
In his younger years, he liked hiking for miles across the Arizona desert and did so with
journalistic bravado; one particularly harrowing hike (with Bill Broyles) occurred in his early
book, Blue Desert. Their intoxicatingly dangerous walk across the desert was memorable for not only the existential threat of the June heat but the rattlesnakes and exhaustion as well. They were following migrant trails, Bowden wanted to witness the journey first hand. His prose reveals the Sonoran desert’s formidable beauty is as captivating as it is threatening. The hike is holy. The two young writers, near broiling temperature just north of the border, insist it so. He suggests, not at all plaintively, “We have entered the killing ground.”
At one point, later on, he never went anywhere without an armed bodyguard due to threats on his life from south of the border.
He wrote with great passion about the exodus of migrant workers from Mexico and Central
America into the U.S. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, he spent 3 years as a crime reporter in Tucson covering mostly sex crimes. He chain smoked and drank red wine. He was a devout bird watcher. He said in an interview that none of his books made much money and that each one was about his curiosity and his curiosity was about one thing: how to live a moral life in the 2nd half of the 20th century, or, like he said in an interview, finding something to do or write that is, to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “commensurate with your capacity for wonder.”
Here is the basic script: You get off a bus you have ridden for days from the Mexican interior, increasingly from the largely Indian states far to the south. This is the end of your security. On the bus, you had a seat, your own space. Now you enter a feral zone. With money, you can buy space in a flop ($3 a night) and get a meal of chicken, rice, beans, and tortillas (about $2.50). You stare out on an empty desert unlike any ground you have ever seen. Men with quick eyes look you over, the employees of coyotes, people smugglers. On the bus, you were a man or a woman or a child. Now you are a pollo, a chicken, and you need a pollero, a chicken herder.
You will never be safe, but for the next week or so, you will be in real peril. If you sleep in the plaza to save money, thugs will rob you in the night or, if you are a woman, have their way with you. If you cut a deal with a coyote’s representative (and 80 to 90 percent do), you still must buy all that black clothing and gear, house and feed yourself. Then one day, when you are told to move, you’ll get in a van with 20 to 40 other pollos and ride 60 miles of bumps and dust to la línea. Each passenger pays $25. The vans do not move with fewer than 17, prefer at least 20, and do, at a minimum, three trips a day. A friend of mine recently did the ride and counted 58 vans moving out in two hours…In this sector of the line, the 262-mile-long Tucson Sector, a few hundred will officially die each year. Others will die and rot in the desert and go uncounted. A year ago, a woman from Zacatecas disappeared in late June. Her father came up and searched for weeks to find her body in the desert, a valley of several hundred square miles. He stumbled on three other corpses before finding the remains of his own child.
Bowden writes of this peril for what it is: an alternate burning reality. Moreover, snakes, whales, drugs, thugs, bats, hummingbirds, the desert, dying Indian friends, sex, photography and crime make up some of the livelier topics that preoccupied Bowden on this earth. Several of his concerns some of us are better off not considering too deeply. You could say he’s the progeny of at least one school of American reportage: from the Hemingway/Michael Herr school of fearless word-slinging, terse exposition and a novelist’s eye, where the writer plunges pen first into his subject with a spiritual zeal not otherwise found in American journalism, at least not prior to the 1970’s. Herr’s Dispatches comes to mind. He was our surrogate trekking deep into the heart of the heart of forbidden territories and coming back bruised, pricked but buoyant, packing a wallop of words. Bowden may or may not have read Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Terry Southern, Joan Didion or Ken Kesey. Ed Abbey, a friend and mentor, most certainly. (His “memoir” on Ed, The Red Caddy, was published by University of Texas Press in 2018.) He was a fan of Luis Alberto Urrea’s book on the border, Devil’s Highway.
Bowden walked across the border and back many times and for many miles to witness up
close what this vast movement of humanity really endured. He was on a Greenpeace ship
documenting that environmental organization’s struggle to save whales from the Japanese
whalers. He not only reported on the cartel sicarios, the assassins, he interviewed one willing to talk, at length and on film. He wrote a loose trilogy of books that focus a great deal on the natural world: Blood Orchid, Blues for Cannibals and Some of the Dead are Still Breathing. These, along with the final three compose his “Unnatural History of America” sextet.
I first met Chuck at a 2008 photography exhibit and panel discussion with photographers Julian Cardona and Michael Berman in Santa Fe. We talked mostly about the militarization of Organ Pipe Cactus Natl. Monument, on the Arizona border with Mexico. (The situation has changed for the better, the park is almost 100% open to the public.) I will always admire Chuck’s writing as possessing, for me, the trifecta of professional characteristics: the passionate observations of the naturalist, the objective eye of the reporter and the audacity of the poet. After all, friends, fellow writers and collaborators like artist Alice Leora Briggs, Michael P. Berman, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jim Harrison, Luis Alberto Urrea and others, all paid tribute to him in the 2019 book, America’s Most Alarming Writer.
Chuck crossed the border many times so the rest of us wouldn’t have to. There’s no evidence that the northern jaguar followed his tracks. Maybe he heard their lonely roar once or twice during all those years of wilderness trekking and camping. Yes, the jaguar is a symbol of that freedom, that camaraderie with ephemeral streams, remote tapestry walls and deserted, starlight-bewitched spaces. Somehow, somewhere under the night sky, they are kin. What Bowden brought back from his forays into the blue desert is spread out over 19 or so books while much of what the jaguar can teach us is still a mystery⸺ I can imagine discoveries abound in those 56,000 acres of pristine wilderness in northern Mexico⸺ perhaps some of what we’ll find is what Bowden referred to as: “memories of the future.”
Perhaps he is speaking for the northern jaguar when he writes:
“I stare up, the stars are everywhere, there is no city on the horizon, the cold seeks my
bones and no moon rises . . .”
For more information: http://www.northernjaguarproject.com
About the Author: Poet, playwright and essayist John Macker grew up in Colorado (Denver and Glenwood Springs) and has lived in northern New Mexico for over 25 years. He attended the Univ. of Missouri and The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute. He has published 14 full-length books and chapbooks of poetry, 2 audio recordings, an anthology of fiction and essays, and several broadsides over 35 years. His most recent are Belated Mornings, Atlas of Wolves, The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away, Selected Poems 1983-2018, (a 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards finalist), Desert Threnody, essays and short fiction, (winner of the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards fiction anthology prize) and Chaco Sojourn, short stories, (illustrated by Leon Loughridge and published in limited edition by Dry Creek Art Press.) For several years, he was contributor to Albuquerque’s Malpais Review. His one-act play, “Coyote Acid” was produced by Teatro Paraguas in Santa Fe in early 2022. His trilogy of one-acts, Black Range, was produced by Teatro Paraguas in 2023. He lives in Santa Fe with his artist wife, Anne and two rescue mutts.
Image Credit: Public domain image originally from Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. London: Academic Press, [etc.],1833-1965. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
As It Ought To Be 