I was cooking dinner when I heard what I thought was a knock on the door. We live in Gamboa, a small town in the Panama Canal watershed, in a raised wooden house classic of the area.
It’s the kind of house where you hear everything – rain on the roof, anteaters rooting about in the termite nest, iguanas scuttling across the driveway awning, geckos clicking through the night. A knock should be unmistakable. But this one was so faint I wasn’t sure if I’d heard it at all.
- ‘The leopard was crouched 3m away, its golden eyes locked on mine. What happened next is still a blur’
- “Within seconds of our dog’s yelp, we heard the sound of hooves pounding up the trail behind us”
I peered through the window, but couldn’t see anyone. I returned to the stove and flipped my patacones. These are double-fried green plantains, crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, that I have been perfecting since I moved from England to Panama 20 years ago.
My son, Lorenzo, wandered in. I asked him if he’d been knocking. He often is – he has fidgety hands and a wicked sense of rhythm. Yet Lorenzo staunchly denied any percussive behaviour.
Then, we both heard it. We looked at each other, opened the front door, and glanced down.
Standing on the top step was a coati. I hadn’t spotted him through the window because I wasn’t expecting our visitor to be a 50cm-tall member of the raccoon family. He held his slender, ringed tail bolt upright like an antenna, and wielded his long, flexible snout like a fifth limb.
He looked at us and hesitated briefly, as though weighing the social risk. Then he hobbled in, his long claws clattering loosely on the wooden floor like someone walking in oversized heels. Coatis are clever, and this one appeared convinced that everything in the house was his for the taking.
We did what any reasonable host would do. We offered him a banana. A small, stubby guineo from the bunch that grows in the garden. Peeled, naturally. The coati took it, but he wasn’t satisfied.
His snout swivelled and probed the air like a periscope, sniffing out what else might be available. He seemed to be signalling that we could, perchance, do better.
I opened the fridge and pulled out an apple. A Cosmic Crisp – my favourite. Then it was me who hesitated. These are not easy to come by in Panama. Is a coati worth a Cosmic Crisp?
I cut a testing chunk for him, a large one for me and a mid-sized one for Lorenzo (which he declined). The coati stood on his hind legs, grabbed the morsel with remarkable dexterity and took a bite.
He then dropped it almost immediately, as if I’d offered him something from a vegetable stall at the end of a very hot day. I threw the wasted Crisp outside for the agoutis.
“What about a pear?” said Lorenzo.
I cut a piece, and the coati gobbled it up with enthusiasm. We were on to something.
Then Lorenzo – a boy raised in the jungle and confident with everything from snakes to crazed white-faced capuchin monkeys – sat cross-legged on the floor beside him and stroked his back. The coati snuggled against his leg. It was, for a brief moment, very sweet.
It was only then that the smell hit us. A thick, musky, goat-adjacent funk that filled the room and clung naturally to the Emberá baskets hanging on the wall. Lorenzo, though, didn’t flinch until the coati eventually got up and trundled out of the house.
A couple of weeks later, the coati returned. This time, he met my daughter, Mila. She and Lorenzo christened him Baron Von Bullfrogen.
That was four years ago, and since then, the Baron has popped in on a monthly basis for a fruity fix. He knocks very quietly, presumably using that agile snozzle snout, and now we know to look down when we open the door.
The routine is always the same. He waltzes in without invitation, eats a pear and then falls asleep next to Lorenzo. He has, against all reason and hygiene, become part of the family.
