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jaguar came into the open behind him, belly touching the grass, tail snaking from side to side. She covered twenty yards, and then went into a crouch, her shoulders shoved forward. The huge muscles of her hind legs tensed for the spring; I could see them shifting beneath her skin. The deer had only to turn his head to see her, but the sharp, fierce stink of the cat reached him first. He took off in a vertical leap, all four hooves clear of the ground, and spun around — all in one frantic movement. Before he touched the grass again, the cat had completed her first enormous bound, and her hind legs were swinging forward to launch her into the next. The deer twisted and leaped again, in high wild arcs toward the goalmouth. And then he seemed to understand what the net was, and that he had to escape it. He leaned to change the direction of his next leap, but the jaguar was almost upon him now, and she had known that he would do this. She made her final spring. I could see clearly what was going to happen: the arc of the jaguar and the arc of the deer would meet; she would take him in mid-flight.
    But then the deer did something incredible. He turned, in the air, onto his back, and arched himself, switching the direction of his flight, and for just a fraction of a second he was clear of the cat, and she was passing beneath him. What happened next took place in the flicker of an eye, but I saw it in dreamy slow motion. The jaguar seemed to hang in the air, as if gravity had stopped working on her. She rolled, and turned her head and shoulders back so that she was bent almost double. Her heavy right paw swung up at the deer. And she reached him, just. Her claws snagged and tore the muscle of the deer’s hind leg. I saw blood in the air, droplets of blood like a string of red beads.
    Then the laws of gravity and normal time were switched back on. The stricken deer fell, landing on his side, legs flailing. The jaguar landed on her feet two paces from her prey. There seemed no time at all between her landing and her going in for the kill; the actions flowed together.
    I steeled myself to watch. I expected ripping and tearing, but it didn’t happen. The jaguar pressed one heavy foreleg across the struggling deer and, almost gently, took his throat in her jaws and clamped them shut, closing his windpipe. She throttled him. When the wild jerking of his legs stopped, she released his throat and lowered herself onto the grass. She lay there, panting, for a minute, then walked cautiously around the corpse. Twice, she pulled and poked at it with a forepaw. Eventually, she took the deer’s neck in her mouth and dragged the corpse beyond the ancient goalmouth into the darkness of the forest.
    The Keeper did not speak, so after some moments I turned to look at him.
    ‘So,’ I said, ‘what am I? The jaguar or the deer?’
    It was meant to be a joke — the kind of joke seriously nervous people make. The Keeper gave no sign that he had heard me.
    ‘Did you see what I wanted you to see?’ he asked me.
    ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘But I could not do what she did. I am human. It is not possible.’
    The Keeper walked a few paces from me, faced me, and said, ‘Are you saying that it is
im
possible?’
    I chose to say nothing.
    He said, ‘You are still very young. What do you know about what is possible or impossible? I tell you this: you will do things that now seem impossible. They seem impossible now only because you cannot imagine them. Because you do not believe in them. But you will do them, and afterward you will be amazed that you ever doubted yourself. Now, let me ask
you
that question. Which are you? Are you the jaguar or the deer?’
    ‘The jaguar,’ I said. What else could I say?”

 
    “I HAD MY fifteenth birthday two weeks before Easter, and when the holiday came, I left school and did not go back. A week after the fiesta, while the little kids were still finding burnt-out rockets from the fireworks display, I climbed