“It’s beautiful.” Kat looked as though the long hike as a jaguar hadn’t bothered her in the least as she peered down at the water.
The jungle and whitewashed cliffs surrounded the river, boulders rising high above where the group climbed before removing their outer clothing and shoving it into packs. They each grabbed an inner tube and tossed it into the placid water. Then one after another, they jumped in to join their tubes. Each also had a life jacket and a headlamp to use in the darker parts of the cave.
The melodious mix of bugs chattered, mosquitoes buzzed, monkeys howled, and colorful birds of paradise sang, while gray doves cooed.
“Ahh,” Maya said, as she settled into the tube and paddled over to where Kat was sitting in her own tube, a big grin on her face. “This feel so good. How are you doing?”
“Wonderfully,” Kat said. “I couldn’t be better.”
“No sign of anyone?” Maya asked.
“No. We didn’t smell any other jaguars in the area.”
“Good.”
They floated with the others into the cave. Water dripped from stalactites hanging down from the cave ceiling, and stalagmites poked out of the water at intervals. Sometimes the water flowed and they didn’t need to paddle. At other times, it was still as glass.
Francisco pointed out stones that appeared to be in the shape of animals and humans. “The Visual Serpent,” he said at one point. “The Celestial Bird,” he remarked later. “And there, pottery shards from ancient civilizations. Do not touch. It is against the law. They are considered national treasures.”
Natural windows carved into the rock allowed sunlight to pour into the cave, penetrating through the wet mist in the air. The tourists continued their way down the river until they reached a waterfall.
Here, everyone played in the waterfall, splashing and having the time of their lives, and then they continued into the crystal cave, where the walls glittered like diamonds.
A small colony of bats clung to the ceiling high above, twittering a little when the people’s voices echoed off the cave walls, and a woman gasped.
“They eat fruit and insects,” Francisco assured the group. “They’re not vampire bats.”
Maya caught sight of a spider crawling across the cavern wall and crustaceans feeding nearby, while catfish swam in a pool of water.
“Jaguars sometimes come in here to drink the cool water rising from underground springs or to hunt a gibnut, a nocturnal rodent,” the guide said.
Maya looked at Connor. He was frowning. Would Lion Mane have come here in search of a jaguar? Certainly not during the day, because jaguars wouldn’t hunt in the cave while people were around. She relaxed. She hated that the shifter had turned against their jaguar cousins and that he might make Kat and Connor worry during their otherwise enjoyable outing.
The group spent the rest of the afternoon exploring and floating on the inner tubes until they had to make the long hike back.
The guide spoke privately with Connor, glanced at Kat and Maya, then nodded at Connor. Francisco didn’t seem really happy, but Connor had paid for their special accommodations. Connor and Kat headed into the jungle with his backpack, just beyond the tourists’ and the guide’s view. Then while everyone finished turning in their life preservers and tubes, Maya hurried off to grab Connor’s bag and return to the group.
Maya was torn between wanting Connor to take care of Lion Mane, should he come after her, and craving one last quiet jungle hike, though she would have preferred touring the jungle as a cat, not stumbling over tree roots and vines as a human.
Wade and David had never arrived, at least that she knew of, and that made her worry even more.
Ever vigilant, she remained at the tail end of the group, watching for any signs of danger.
With the weight of Kat’s and Connor’s clothes and especially his big sneakers stuffed inside, the pack felt fuller and heavier, Maya thought, particularly after the day of exercise. She was unintentionally falling behind.
They still had another half hour or so to go when someone shouted, “Jaguar!”
“Stay together,” Francisco told them. “Don’t run. Just stay together. They don’t go after humans.”
Maya was looking around, trying to see if another cat was in the area besides her brother or sister-in-law—an all-jaguar cat or Lion Mane.
Her heart was already pumping hard from the exertion, but she felt a little hope that the jaguar might be Wade or David.
The pink ribbon of sky peeking through the thick canopy had all but faded, leaving a dark blue ceiling sprinkled with the Milky Way. It was getting darker, and they still had a long way to go, so most of the people were turning on their headlamps.
“Keep talking. Make a lot of noise,” the guide told them. “The cat will stay away. Just don’t run.”
They should stand still if approached by a jaguar. The tour guide opted for getting them back to the resort before the jungle became inky black like the cave had been in sections.
Maya wanted to tell them to be quiet so she could hear where the jaguar was and ensure it was one of her own family that had spooked everyone. But the tourists tromped through the jungle with so much noise that holding their tongues wouldn’t have mattered. She assumed the jaguar had to be a shifter. No all-jaguar cat would come this close to a bunch of noisy humans.
She tried to listen for sounds of a jaguar moving about in the brush that only her jaguar hearing would pick up.
She lifted her chin and smelled the breezeless air, noticing that the temperature was dropping with the coming of night. Nothing but the smell of wet earth, of leafy plants and fragrant flowers, of…
She turned her head just as a woman screamed several yards ahead of her.
People raced along the path far in front of her. She’d fallen behind again.
“Walk!” Francisco commanded them. “Don’t run. If you do, the jaguar will chase you.”
It was too late. Everyone was running to avoid the imminent attack of the jaguar. No one wanted to be the last one trailing behind, the weakest link ripe for the predator’s picking.
Except for Maya. She couldn’t run after them, not with the heavy pack on her back. She wouldn’t run, knowing that was the worst thing anyone could do. Cats loved to chase. And pounce. Then bite. And she was the last one left behind. Easy prey.
A hiss and a growl emanated from somewhere in the jungle, but she couldn’t see what was going on. She stood still, alone now, heart pounding, her blood rushing through her veins.
The guide would get the panicked people back to the resort, hopefully not losing anyone else in the process but her.
She wanted to ditch the backpack and shift. As a jaguar, she would feel a whole lot less threatened.
People were still making a full-scale ruckus as they fled north of where she was, screaming, wailing, and stomping the ground.
“This way!” the guide yelled as some of the panicked people ran in the wrong direction in the dense jungle. She could imagine them being lost forever.
She barely breathed, concentrating on the world close to her, the knocking sound of a frog on a leaf nearby, something scurrying around on the rainforest floor near her foot, something slithering on a branch near her head. She moved then, walking in the direction of the cottage.
She walked slowly. She would not run; she knew better.
Another hiss. A low, growling rumble off to her left. She wanted to stop. She wanted to go. She wanted to shift, feel her balance with the jungle, and be part of it, not stand out like a human did.
A figure moved out of the leaves as if it had been part of the vegetation. “Kat,” she breathed, feeling relief at once to see her sister jaguar, to smell her scent.
Kat grabbed at the backpack strap dangling in front of Maya’s waist with her jaguar teeth and gave a pull. Her urgency made Maya walk quickly with her toward the cottages.