Pumas at the end of the world: Birth

Quando vemos um documentário de vida animal não estamos à espera de poesia. Esta é a história de quatro crias de puma que perdem a mãe numa avalanche traiçoeira. Mas o que põe lágrimas nos olhos é a escrita, os presságios aqui e ali, as verdades que nos tocam a nós também. Transcrevi as partes mais importantes mas aconselho fortemente o visionamento do filme.
Muitos parabéns a quem compôs estas linhas:
Escrito por Dereck Joubert
National Geographic Wild 2020

There is a place near the end of the world, in the shadow of the ice mountains, where an ancient heartbeat seems to whisper its secrets. Ghostly tails, part seem part imagined, swirl through the snow like cries from the mountains. There are listeners and there are the watchers. A place to confound the senses, lost in the confusion between sky and ice. This is where the South American big cats roam, merging like spirits in and out of the landscape. Those that live here must be highly adapted to the harshness, the wind, the cold, the loneliness that comes from the endless struggle to survive. The wind carries rumours of ambushes waiting to turn your bones into frozen dust. But though the whispered warnings may be imagined, the footprints in the snow are very real, and these cats have a story of their own. They’re pumas at the end of the world.
Ancient legends tell us that here, beneath these eerie Patagonian mountains, the pumas are sacred. (…) The ancients also talk of the messengers to the gods: condors. So many of their stories tell of that connection between heaven and earth. (…)
Torres del Paine, the towering mountains of blue ice. And it’s here that our story begins. A mother puma has brought her kittens out into the world for the first time (…) We’ll call her Solitaria, a solitary mother and an expert huntress. Pumas like her have been wandering these hills for two million years (…) Solitaria is having to find food for five. And the cubs’ incessant energy makes that job so much harder (…) These precious little months as a family make all the difference to a puma’s survival.
But the voices of the ice mountains are not silent for long. Change happens here in a wink of an eye, and all species, especially the more delicate, must be attuned to what’s coming. Solitaria has tucked her cubs away in a cave and watches the change, looking down into the valley for opportunity (…) The wind from the southern ice fields adds to the recipe, as it buffets against the mountains and freezes the air. Everything moves as if on fragile glass and crystallizes everything into immobility. (…)
The condors of Torres del Paine will watch the development of this family from their lofty perch. Down below the puma cubs bundle up, expand their fur to capture heat and steal what they can from Solitaria. Patagonia is not for the weak.
But the full brunt of winter is yet to arrive. (…) The time to take extra care here is in late September, the Patagonian thaw, when the wind chills below freezing and yet the sun starts to melt the snow and ice. It’s misleading. Benign looking ice mutates into the fangs of foreboding. (…) But change is always dangerous and unsettling in a land where even lakes become hidden demons, trapped in time and restless for their freedom (…)
Up in the mountains, there’s a different, more violent process going on. Each drop adds to the warmth, and ever more rapidly raises the temperature of the streams and lakes. (…)
Hunting is a challenge when tumbling scree can give you away. Without the deadening effect of the snow, Solitaria is forced to range further and further down the valley, following the ebb and flow of the guanaco herds.
It’s Spring. (…) The warmer air currents of the mountains lift the condors and increase their range as they glide higher and higher with their 3 metre wing span. But when the wind picks up from the ice fields, quite suddenly all changes, as the bad weather strips the last snow from the mountain tops, lashing the residents, and bringing instability back to the valleys.
It catches the cubs out, down at the lake, where the wind comes hurling through the valley. It’s a nasty surprise but after all these are pumas of the ice mountains. The snow will hide their scent, even from Solitaria, so they’ll have to behave and stay exactly where she left them. She’ll find them, if they don’t stray. (…) Eventually, the storm becoming too much for them, the cubs began drifting away to find cover.
But the problem is bigger than their survival in the late snow storm. They wait, huddled together, listening to the voices in the wind.
Solitaria has moved into the next valley, travelling from crack to crack, searching for food, focused on her hunts, and perhaps unaware of the unstable conditions erupting all around.

[som de avalanche; todas as crias levantam a cabeça]

Melting snow, piled on the ledges, begins a slide that erupts into explosive avalanches. The violence released is a reminder that the ice mountain is almost a living being, a force never to be trusted.
The voice of the blue mountains that day was a roar. But their [the cubs’] only defence if they’re to obey instructions to stay, is to huddle together for warmth and security, as they listen to the exploding ice falls.
And when it’s over, the condors take to the sky to scout the damages. Down valley, they will find a few carcasses that mark the limit of the avalanche, a few battered victims discarded at the end of its run. (…)
Condors are often considered bad omens here. There are moments when they seem to hover, waiting, as if knowing that something has or is about to change. Something in the omen’s clouds.(…)

[as crias esperam]

There are some silences you remember forever. The quiet that fills the void where a mother puma’s call should reverberate off the mountains. (…)
There’s a kind of nothingness when a mother’s scent begins to fade. (…) Nothing to do but fill your days with nothing but time, watching and listening to and for something carried on the wind.
Some say there are ghosts here, their breath coming from their laughter at any sentiment of emotion of loss.