ABSTRACT
On a recent trip to the Pantanal, the largest and best-preserved wetland ecosystem in the world, I heard our Brazilian guide say, “Wait, the jaguar will come out into the open.” The jaguar’s entry and Tito’s remark made real in an immediate and palpable way the theory I had read and its applicability to the interactions between human and nonhuman animals when species meet. The closest any of us spending several days and nights at the Jaguar Camp could come to interacting with the big cats was to view them from flat-bottomed speedboats in their daily activities, which ranged from sleeping in trees to swimming across the river to playing and mating on the sandy beach; and without the guides to help us understand them and their ways, we spectators would have been at a loss even to begin to meet the jaguars in the open. To say that my limited interaction with the jaguars and the guides who know them so well was a life-altering experience is almost axiomatic. But even that controlled interaction deepened and solidified my connection to and appreciation for numerous others—for the land and the flora and fauna that inhabit it, for the humans who touch it in the deepest sense so that it and they live intertwined lives which are fully acknowledged as such.
