The Moth Radio Hour: Creatures Great & Small

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From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour.

I'm your host, Ray Christian.

I'm a storyteller and frequent host for the Moth's live events in Asheville, North Carolina, and the host of the podcast, What's Ray Save, where I explore my many lives as a former ghetto kid, southern black gentleman, retired Army paratrooper, and a doctor of education, connecting centuries of black history to understand my own story.

Now I've had a love of animals for as long as I can remember.

In fact, it was my earliest desire as a kid in elementary school to have a zoo in the backyard.

And in pursuit of that goal, I gathered up what animals I could.

Now space in my room was a factor, so I had to start small.

First it was the flea circus.

Can't tell you how hard they were to collect.

Later I had sea monkeys that looked nothing like they did on the back of that comic book I ordered them from.

No smiles, leather skin or nothing.

Later I moved up the rabbits, turtles, pigeons, cats and dogs.

Today I have an assortment of dogs, chickens, ducks and goats.

And it's been my experience that it's easy to see human attributes in animal behavior or fall into the tendency to give human motivation to their actions and fail in your attempts to communicate.

That's why it's important to think twice before you start imitating animal sounds, because you might not know what you're saying.

In this hour, stories of chance encounters, standoffs, and the unexpected bonds between humans and the animal kingdom.

Our first story comes from Georgia Huff.

She told this one at one of our open mic story slams in Houston at Warehouse Live where we partner with Houston Public Media.

Here's Georgia live at the mall.

When I agreed to go hiking with my friends Matt and Kellen at Glacier National Park, I didn't realize that the park is also known as grizzly bear country.

Now I'm terrified of grizzly bears.

And I think primarily the reason is because at a young age, somebody told me a story about a young woman who had been chased up a tree by a grizzly bear, and then the bear shook her out of the tree and killed her.

So it was with a great deal of apprehension that I boarded the flight to go to Montana.

And on that flight, I sat next to a man.

who had grown up in the area and he told me, first of all, that he didn't go hiking at Glacier National Park because of the grizzly bears.

And he said, but if you do, then you need to have bear spray.

So as soon as we landed, we went to Costco and got some bear spray.

And I'm looking at the package and reading the directions, and it says,

Wear this product in the holster provided on your belt.

Don't put it in your backpack because you won't have time to get it out.

It said, don't discharge this product unless a bear is charging.

Wait for the bear to get within 20 feet

and then spray the bear in the face.

And then there was a note.

And it said, use caution if spraying this product into the wind to avoid getting it in your eyes.

And I said, you know, they should have just said, note, if you are downwind of the bear, you're just shit out of luck.

But anyway, we have our bear spray, we're set, and a couple days into the trip, we decide to take this remote hike around a lake.

And we get to the trailhead, and there's a sign, and it says, danger, beware of the potential for bears in the area.

This is grizzly bear country.

And I'm thinking, oh, great, you know.

But we have a plan.

There's three of us.

We're going to stay together.

Matt is going to go first and then his wife, Kellen, and then me.

So off we go.

And right off the bat, our strategy falls apart because Matt is this tall, fit man, and he walks about four times faster than I do.

So he kept getting out of sight out there and I kept having to call him, hey man I can't see you wait up and he would cheerfully wait and let me catch up to him but that's kind of how it went on this hike.

And so we're out there and you know we've been out there for a couple hours and I'm thinking you know what would I do if I really did see a bear?

I mean maybe I need to have a game plan here.

And so I said, okay, I'm going to be calm.

I'm going to be quiet.

And I'm going to whip my bear spray out.

And I'm going to wait for it.

I'm going to wait for it.

And so I got my plan.

And you know, that's all well and good.

But the truth is, that this bear spray is in like a size of a small fire extinguisher.

And the holster they give you is like a koozie.

And it fits really tightly around this canister.

By the time you get that beer spray out of that holster, you're not going to have to wait for that bear because he's going to be there.

But anyway, I keep going and I come across some beer poop.

And I'm no bear poop expert, but you know, there's beeries in it and it's big.

Hey, Matt, I see some beer poop down here, but I don't see you.

But I keep going.

And then it happens.

I hear this rustling in the bushes.

My heart is beating so fast and so loud, I don't know how I can hear anything else.

I've forgotten all about the bear spray.

I hear the rustling again,

Matt!

Matt, where are you?

And then it's gone.

And I'm okay.

I might have peed a little, but I'm okay.

And as I reflected later on my trip, I thought about how much I really loved hiking and I loved being out in nature.

And, you know, bears are part of nature.

And I wasn't going to let my fear of grizzlies keep me from doing what I love.

And even though I didn't face down a grizzly, I did face down my fear.

That was Georgia Huff.

Georgia is a retired engineer, and yes, she loves to hike.

To see a photo of Georgia, go to themoth.org.

Up next is Randy Horick.

Randy told this story at a Story Slam in Nashville at the basement east where we partnered with public radio station WPLN.

Fittingly, the theme of the evening was animals.

Here's Randy.

Every time there's an execution in Tennessee, I think of an experience I had with songbirds.

It started a few years ago on a night when an execution was scheduled at River Bend State Prison and I decided to go for a vigil that they were having before the execution was supposed to begin at midnight.

I've always been against the death penalty and even after my wife's parents were homicide victims I actually became more against the death penalty and I figured this was something I needed to go to.

So after the kids had gone to bed and my wife had gone to bed I drove out to Riverbend.

You get on Centennial Boulevard and you go all the way basically until the road ends at a bend bend in the river.

And it was surreal

because as soon as I turned onto Centennial Boulevard, the whole road was lined with police cars.

Banks of three or four of them in a row about every hundred yards.

I realized if you ever wanted to rob a bank in Nashville, the time to do it would be the night they had an execution because half the cops are on Centennial Boulevard.

But it only got more surreal as I got to the grassy parking area they have outside the prison.

and after they searched me and they searched my car and they searched my trunk, and you start walking up a hill toward this big fenced-off area that they have where people can gather for vigils.

And as I walked up the hill, I noticed there were mounted state troopers up on the levee by the river.

I don't know what they thought they were doing.

I don't know what they thought there was going to be a jail break or something.

but they were there and it was eerie.

And as I walked up the hill, I noticed the moon was rising over the trees and it was a full moon and it was blood-red.

Of all the nights, maybe once a year when we have a blood-red moon, it was that night.

I got up to the hill and the trooper asked me which gate I wanted to go in.

They had a separate gate for people that were in favor of the execution and one for people who were against the execution.

There was nobody on the side in favor of the execution.

It was an empty field.

So I went into the area they had marked off for us.

It was about 100 yards from the actual prison, the maximum security prison.

And there were maybe

about half as many people as there are in this room, 50, 75 people.

And it was eerily quiet.

It was a cold spring night.

People were kind of huddled together.

Nobody was much saying anything.

Some people had gone off to one corner, one empty place to pray, it looked like.

Some people were just sitting quietly.

They were looking at their cell phones to see if there were updates.

This had been a case that had drawn a lot of attention because there were real questions about

the man being innocent and whether he was eligible for capital punishment.

And there was also evidence that the prosecutor in Memphis and the medical examiner had withheld evidence.

from the defense

team that might have made him ineligible for the death penalty.

So, a lot of people had been examining this case, and people had petitioned the governor to grant clemency.

People were waiting and watching their cell phones to see what kind of news there would be.

Maybe the court would grant a last-minute stay.

And people were kind of sitting quietly like that.

And I looked over and I saw Steve Earle was there.

This is one of those things, I guess, that can only happen in Nashville.

He pulled out a guitar.

And only in Nashville can you stand next to

Steve Earle and sing,

I shall be released.

And after he, but he wasn't the most memorable singer of the evening, because about the time he quit, about 11 p.m.,

everybody heard this songbird.

I don't know whether it was a whipperwill or a mockingbird.

He was far in the distance because there weren't any trees in this field.

But he was as loud as if he was in the back of the room.

And he was singing furiously with a full throat.

I'd always heard that expression singing furiously

but I had a new appreciation for it after that because it was like with the moon and with this bird all of nature was somehow in rebellion against what was happening.

Like he was saying don't do this don't do this don't kill don't kill and he kept it up for an hour.

And everybody who people were talking about it on social media the next morning, everybody who was there heard this bird and he didn't stop until right about midnight when the execution was supposed to begin.

And we waited and we waited, and finally, about 12:30, the news came, somebody had their cell phone, they had carried out the execution.

And so the police ushered us out, and we went back down the hill and past the mounted troopers and got in our cars and drove home.

And when I got home,

I went up to my front porch and I stopped because there in front of the front door, right on the welcome mat,

was a dead songbird.

And I just stopped and I thought, I grieved silently for this bird for several minutes.

Even in death, it was perfect, it was still, it was beautiful.

And I thought, why?

Did God go to sleep too?

The governor was asleep.

Why did this happen?

And I just sat there and instead of going in the house, I went around to the back and I got a hand trail and I went out and I made a space in our garden.

And now I don't think about that night very often, but I thought about it last week because we executed another person last week in the state.

And every time that happens, I think of that bird that sang, and I think of the bird that died.

And sometimes late at night on those nights after everybody's gone to bed, I go out to that little grave in our flower bed and I say a little prayer.

Thank you.

That was Randy Horig.

Randy is a writer living in Nashville with his wife, Grace, his dog, Wallace, and a varying number of rescued cats.

During his career, he has been a sports writer, a speech writer, a corporate writer, and a writer in almost every category except the one people in Nashville think of when they hear the word writer: songs.

When asked what it was like sharing his story, he said that afterwards, a young man came up to him and said that that story had changed his life.

No one had ever told him anything like that before.

In a moment, running rams and mysterious cats.

That's coming up on the Moth Radio Hour.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX.

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This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX.

I'm Ray Christian, and this hour is all about animals.

Our next story was told by Michelle Woods, who at the time was raising sheep in Scotland with her shepherd husband.

Now I'm more of a goat man myself, but what sheep and goats have in common is they seem to always be hungry and have an intense need to graze for several hours a day and nothing will keep them away from it.

Michelle told this story at an Open Mic Story Slam competition in Sydney, Australia, where we partnered with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ABCRA.

Here's Michelle.

It's 2008 and I'm married to a shepherd and I'm living in a little island off the west coast of Scotland.

It's staggeringly beautiful.

Only one problem is the locals.

I was under a lot of pressure to fit in and be accepted and not seen as some Aussie Irish Aussie blowing.

But I digress.

I had a very important job to do that day.

My husband was away on the mainland at the dentist.

And I had one job to do that day.

We'd managed to flog Froek, our rampaging ram, for the princely sum of 300 quid to Donald MacDonald on the neighbouring island.

True, it's all true.

And

all I had to do was

just hand over Froek.

He'd be contained in his little franc in the front garden and I had to hand over the ram, take the money.

What could possibly go wrong?

So flushed with confidence, popped down the village to buy a pint of milk to go with the scones I'd made to impress Donald with my croft wife skills.

And as I pulled into the top of the driveway, just taking in the scene, my heart stopped.

What did I see but Frog gambling, yes, gambling like a spring lamb in the huge front macquar, instead of safely contained in the little vank in the little front garden all ready for Donald MacDonald.

30 minutes, 30 minutes I had.

So I sped down the driveway, ditched the car, ran into the bar, grabbed a bucket of feed.

Now, if there's one thing Frog cannot resist, it's molasses-covered nuts.

He will flatten anyone and anything to get to those nuts, including me.

So I thought, no, no, big time to just, you know, knuckle under, you can do this, you can do this.

So my evil plan is to scatter, like Hansel and Gretel, a little trail of sheep nuts from the big field through the little cottage gate into the little cottage garden, where then Donald MacDonald and I will be able to catch him a bit easier.

I thought, you know, this is going to happen, scattered the nuts, and then I opened the gate and I squatted down behind the gate to hide and I left the bucket there.

And my cunning plan was to have a munch his way up, come through the gate.

Once the head's in the bucket, I'll kick the gate shut and there we'll be.

So I'm crouched behind the gate and thinking,

I'm university educated, this dumb ram's no match for me.

I'll show these villagers.

And yeah, hear him crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.

And he's just about to come through the gate when I happen to glance up to my right and I notice I've left the big gate open that goes up the driveway and down to the village.

Change of plan, I kick the gate shut and slam and suddenly Froke looks up and realises there's now a gate between him and the hallowed big bucket of nuts.

He's raging.

He starts scraping the ground with his hoof.

I think I can see steam coming out of his nostrils.

And I fancy I can hear him say, Well, girly girl, you think you're going to take me on?

I get up off my knees to go walk to shut the big gate, and I think, Christ, I've got to get to the mainland more often.

And as I turn round to saunter to the gate, out of the corner of my eye, that's when I see him launch his 100-kilogram carcass over the gate and over me.

And it all happens in slow motion.

First of all, the little hairy front hoofs go past my ears

and then his oily undercarriage

through my hair.

And then the sun is blotted out

as these two enormous both come towards me, but I whip my face to the side like that.

And then reflexively, I grab onto those two rapidly disappearing ankles.

I don't know why, but I just did the pressure.

And then womph, we cut back to real time and slap.

I did that on purpose.

We land on the front lawn.

And that's, ladies and gentlemen, is when he starts to run.

He starts running and I'm being towed behind like a rag dog.

He takes me over grassy tussocks, rabbit holes, scattered sheep shit, you name it, he does it.

And I think, I'm not letting go.

And that's when I see the gravel drive come into vision.

And I realise I'm about to have a very permanent, very painful breast reduction.

And as I'm trying to lift myself up, I glance under my armpit, I look out across the sound and I see a little orange boat going by.

And it can only mean one damning thing.

It is the orange rubber speedboat of Donald MacDonald zipping down the sound, meaning he'll be up on the borough quad bike and trailer to collect his ram in five minutes.

And I'm just beside myself.

I've got to do something.

And that's when all my film watching comes back to me and saves me.

I have a flash of Crocodile Dundee's seminal death roll with that crocodile

and I go, well, and so I fling myself to the right and we roll over and over and over like I saw him do to that crocodile.

And the look on Frog's face is priceless.

The little shit is winded and it's the only gap I need.

So I leap on him.

Straddle him, pin him down on the ground by his horns and I look into his roomy yellow eyes and I go, I may only be an incomer, but you today, Frog, you're an outgoer.

And at that precise moment, in buzzes Donna McDonald on his quad bike.

And I look up and go, Ah, hello, Donald, you're here.

I thought I'd just get Frog out the thank for you so we'd have time to go in for a cuppa and some scones before you head back.

That was Michelle Woods.

Michelle parted ways with her shepherd, but she started over and now lives on a small farm in the great southern region of Western Australia, where she battles ravenous mice, mobs of kangaroos, and lethal tiger snakes.

I asked her why she chose sheep over goats, and she told me that it was simply because the black Hebridean sheep is indigenous to the west of Scotland.

Michelle said she kind of forgave him.

He was only trying to get that feed bucket of molasses-coated nuts.

Of course he was.

Our next story comes from Fran Krass, who told it at an event at the Promontory in Chicago, which was supported by public radio station WBZ.

Here's Fran, live at the moth.

So when I was in my mid-40s, I gave up my city life and bought a five-acre farm in rural Indiana.

It was pure joy.

It was the farm I'd always dreamed of since I was a kid.

And along with it came

a whole host of challenges, but

it has also come with many, many joyful things, the most of which is the herd of critters I've accumulated, which now is a senior horse, a miniature donkey, two llamas, assorted cats, the occasional dog, and a husband.

But one of the most interesting critters that we had along the way was a cat that appeared the very first night that I slept there.

Well, actually, we slept there.

My now husband and then boyfriend brought sleeping bags and slept in the den in front of the glass, sliding glass doors.

And along nightfall, a little face appeared at this door, a very handsome-looking cat,

kind of brown with white features, but also carrying, I guess, a housewarming present, a little dead thing that he proceeded to wipe all over this door.

Which I was sort of, sat up in my sleeping bag a little stunned, and my then boyfriend says to me, well, welcome to the Franny farm.

So this cat decided that he lived there and proceeded to move into our window box.

He was beautiful, big and stout, and he was kind of a brown tiger with white features, a white bib and white paws and a white chin.

And he had a kind of a brown head and a chin strap that went under his white chin that looked like the leather cap that a flying, a pilot might wear.

So I called him Ace.

And Ace was spectacular.

He was the barn cat I dreamed of.

He was a spectacular hunter.

He took care of all the mice in the barn, yay, because hello,

I moved to the country and was scared of mice.

And he was just, he was wonderful.

He would, he was there every day when I did chores.

He came and went, had adventures I did not know anything about.

Sometimes he was gone for days, sometimes months.

And he would reappear just as if nothing had changed.

And I would always be so happy to see him.

One day we were leaving the farm actually to go to a birthday, my birthday party, and we pulled out of the driveway and on the road was Ace dead.

in the middle.

Needless to say, this was not joyful.

I was hysterical with grief.

And I told my husband, we had to, or then boyfriend, but had to go home and get something to wrap him in and give him a proper burial.

So we did that.

We went home, we got my favorite sweatshirt, wrapped him up, dug a hole, and my husband put him in there.

And I asked him to turn him over so I could pet him, but I did not want to see his beautiful, damaged face.

And I petted him, and we buried him.

And I said, let's go to the party, but don't tell anyone because I don't want to discuss this.

And so we did.

The Sunday following this tragedy, I was out doing my usual chores, and my husband, a very large African-American gentleman, appears looking quite pale.

And I'm like, what's wrong?

And he said, guess who's come to dinner?

And I was like, who comes to dinner in the middle of nowhere, Indiana on a Sunday night?

And he says, ace.

Well, in a matter of seconds, I'm having a Stephen King nightmare flash before my eyes.

And I think, oh my God, you know, vet bills, are we going to have to go through this death all over again?

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

And I look outside and here's this beautiful cat sitting there looking as majestic as ever.

He hadn't always been so open to having me hug him and stuff, but I picked him up, gave him a big hug, cried, laughed.

I couldn't believe it.

There was not a hair on his head that had been damaged.

It was on, it was a miracle.

So during the following week, we talked about this kind of incessantly: I can't believe this cat, you know, how could this possibly be?

I touched this cat, I put it in the ground, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I got really silent, and I said to my husband, I said,

You know, I did something odd today.

And he said, What was that?

And I said, Well,

I I checked the grave

and he said what did you find I said nothing it was undisturbed and he said well to be honest I checked it too

and like you we laughed and laughed and laughed So that became just a wonderful part of this story of this farm.

And from then on, we called this cat Ace Not in the Hole and the one that we buried

and the one that we buried, we called Deadbringer.

That was Fran Kress.

Fran lives on five acres in northwest Indiana.

She shares it with one dog, three cats, two donkeys, a llama named Obama, and her husband, Harold.

In a moment, a man finds comfort in his connection to a wild cat when the moth radio hour continues.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX.

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You're listening to the Moth Radio Hour from PRX.

I'm Ray Christian.

In this this episode, we're exploring stories about all creatures, great and small.

Our final story is told by Alan Rabinowitz.

He told this at a main stage event way back in 2005 at the New York Public Library.

Here's Alan.

I was five years old.

standing in the old great cat house at the Bronx Zoo,

staring into the face of an old female jaguar.

I remember looking at the bare walls and the bare ceiling, wondering what the animal had done to get itself there.

I leaned in a little towards the cage and started whispering something to the jaguar.

But my father came over quickly and asked, what are you doing?

I turned to him to try to explain, but my mouth froze, as I knew it would.

Because everything about my young childhood at that time was characterized by the inability to speak.

From the earliest time that I tried to speak, I was handicapped with a severe, severe stutter.

Not the normal kind of repetitious bu-ba-ba kinds of stutter that many stutterers have or many children go through.

but the complete blockage of airflow,

where if I try to push words out, my head would spasm and my body would spasm.

Nobody knew what to do with me.

At the time, there were very few books written about stuttering.

There was no computer, no internet.

The reaction of the New York City public school system

was to put me in a class for disturbed children.

I remember my parents trying to fight it, telling them he's not disturbed.

But the teachers said,

we're sorry.

Whenever he tries to speak, it disrupts everything and everybody.

So I spent my youth wondering why adults couldn't see into me, why they couldn't see I was normal and all the words were inside of me,

but they just

wouldn't come out.

Fortunately, at a very young age, I learned what most stutterers learn at some point.

You can do two things without stuttering, at least two things.

One of them is sing, and I couldn't sing.

The other is you can talk to animals and not stutter.

So every day I would come home from the special class, which all the other kids called the retarded class, and I'd go straight to my room.

And I'd go to a closet in my room, and I had a little dark corner of that closet.

And I'd go into the the closet and I'd close the door, and I'd bring my pets, New York-style pets, hamster, gerbil, green turtle, a chameleon, occasionally a garter snake.

And I would talk to them.

I would talk fluently to them.

I would tell them my hopes and my dreams.

I would tell them how people were stupid because they thought I was stupid.

And the animals listened.

They felt it.

And I realized very early that they felt it because they were like me.

The animals, they had feelings too.

They were trying to

transmit things also,

but they had no human voice.

So people ignored them, or they misunderstood them,

or they hurt them, or sometimes they killed them.

I swore to the animals when I was young that if I could ever find my voice,

I would would try to be their voice.

But I didn't know if that would happen because I realized that I lived in two worlds.

One world was the world where I was normal with animals.

I could speak.

The other world was the world of human beings where I couldn't.

My parents didn't know what to do.

They tried everything.

They tried hypnotherapy, they tried drug therapy, they sent me to many kinds of psychologists, but

nothing really worked.

I got through school, through grade school, junior high school, high school, and eventually college,

by learning tricks, stutters learn, learning when to not speak, learning to avoid situations, learning just to not be around people.

When I did have to speak, then I would prove to people that I was not only like them, but I was better than they were.

In the academics, I excelled.

I got straight A's in everything.

In sports, I joined the wrestling team and the boxing team in high school and college, and I took all my teams or helped take them to the state championships.

Everybody always said I was an up-and-coming athlete, and I wasn't.

I didn't even like it.

I was just a very, very frustrated young man who had to find an outlet for his anger.

But by the time I was a senior in college, I had never been out on a date with a girl.

I had never kissed a girl, except for my mother,

and I had never spoken a completely fluent sentence out loud to another human being.

About midway through my senior year in college, my parents learned of an experimental new program upstate New York in Genesio

where it was very intense.

They had to send me away and I was essentially locked away for two months.

It was working with severe, severe stutterers, but it was very expensive.

But they would do anything for me.

So my father sold something very dear to him in order to send me there.

That clinic changed my life.

It taught me two very important things.

One of them was that I was a stutterer and I was always going to be a stutterer.

There was no magic pill and I was not going to wake up one morning as I had always dreamt and be a fluent speaker.

But the other thing it taught me, the more important thing, was that if I did what they were teaching me at this clinic, which was give me the tools, the mechanics, to mechanically control my mouth, the airflow.

If I worked hard, I could be a completely fluent stutterer.

And I worked hard.

And it was unbelievable.

For the first time in 20 years, I could speak.

I could speak.

In 20 years, I had never been able to voice everything inside of me.

Now I could.

It took a lot of work because while I was speaking, I had to be thinking about hard contacts, airflow, this and that.

But it didn't matter.

None of it mattered.

I was a fluent speaker now.

Life would be different.

I would go back to school and they would accept me.

I returned to finish the last half of my college year

and things were different on the outside.

I could speak,

but nothing had changed on the inside.

Too much had happened for that.

I was still the stuttering, broken child.

inside.

Throughout my academic years, I had focused on science.

I loved science because science to me was the study of truths apart from the world of human beings.

And when I got to college, I decided to channel that science into medicine, brain medicine, thinking that maybe if I become a doctor, people will like me.

People will accept me.

But I never liked working with people.

And when I got back from the clinic, I realized I can't be doing this.

I hate being in labs.

And worse than that, I hated.

I was tortured by feeling the frustration and the pain of the lab animals in the little cages spinning in those little wheels.

So I applied to graduate school at the University of Tennessee in wildlife biology and zoology.

And I got accepted.

And that first year, I was down in Tennessee in the Great Smoky Mountains studying black bears.

When I was in the forest with the animals,

I was at home.

This was what I was meant to be doing.

Being in the forest alone with the animals was my real-world closet.

This is what made me feel good.

And I came to realize what I'd always known in my heart, but never been able to put it into words.

And that's that the truths

of the world, the reality, is not defined by the spoken word.

In fact, it's not even speakable.

And I knew that this was how I had to live my life somehow.

Fortunately, right before I got my PhD,

I met

the preeminent wildlife biologist in my field, Dr.

George Schaler.

He and I spent the day together following bears in the Smoky Mountains, and at the end of the day, George said to me,

Alan, how would you like to go to Belize and be the first one to try to study jaguars in the jungle?

The very first thought in my mind, I remembered so clearly, was, where the hell is Belize?

But the very first words out of my mouth, not 30 seconds after he had asked me that, was, of course, I'll go.

Of course.

Within two months, I had bought an old Ford pickup truck, packed everything I owned in the back, which didn't even take up half of it, and I drove from New York to Central America.

Those last few miles,

that's a separate story, those last few miles of driving into that jungle where I would set up base camp for the next two years

was just unbelievable to me.

Driving by the Mayan Indians gawking at me, I was entering the jungle to catch jaguars, which nobody knew how to, and put radio collars on them and get data that nobody had ever gotten before.

This was what my life was all about.

This was where it had to take me.

For the next year, I did just what I set out to do.

I learned from hunters.

I learned how to capture jaguars.

I captured them.

I followed them.

Many things tried to stop me from my goal.

There was a plane crash where I almost died.

There was one of my men got bitten by a Ferdilance, a poisonous snake, and unfortunately he died.

Many diseases.

And those changed me, and I had to really look upon things differently.

But this was my life.

This was where I knew I could stay forever and be happy and be comfortable.

But I couldn't.

Because I also realized that as fast as I was catching jaguars and gathering information about them, they were being killed in front of me.

My jaguars were being killed, the outside jaguars out of my study area were being killed, that they're all being wiped out.

Yes, I could sit in that jungle, but then I wouldn't be true to myself.

And more important, I wouldn't be true to the promise I made to the animals in the closet that I would be their voice.

And I had the voice now if I wanted to use it.

So I realized I had to leave it.

I had to come back into the world of people and try to fight with the world of people to save the animals and these jaguars in particular.

But ironically,

I realized that if I was going to save these jaguars, not only did I have to enter the world of people again,

but I had to go to the highest levels of government.

I had to talk to the prime minister.

Well, it took some doing, but within six months, I was standing in the capital city outside the office of the Prime Minister.

He had given me an appointment with the cabinet.

They had given me 15 minutes, had no idea what I was going to say to them.

Frankly, I'm sure they gave me the appointment because they just wanted to meet this crazy foreigner who was in the jungle catching jaguars.

I had 15 minutes.

I couldn't stutter.

I couldn't stutter.

I couldn't distract them from the point

of trying to save jaguars.

I I had to use everything I had learned and be a completely fluent speaker and convince one of the poorest countries in Central America, no protected areas in the entire country at the time, a place where tourism wasn't even of economic benefit, ecotourism wasn't even a term at the time, that they had to save jaguars.

An hour and a half later,

I came out of there amidst laughter, backslaps.

The Prime Minister and the cabinet had voted

to set up the world's first and only jaguar preserve.

And I promised them I would make it work.

I promised them I would show them it could be of economic benefit.

A month later,

I was in the jungle following my jaguars.

You never see jaguars.

If you see them, they'll be killed.

So

the most prominent evidence of jaguars are their tracks.

I knew all my jaguars in the study area from their tracks.

But this one day when I was in there trying to see where they were all going and what they were all doing, I crossed a completely new track.

It was the biggest male jaguar I had ever seen in my life, the biggest track.

I knew I had to follow him, hoping I could catch a glimpse, but at least finding out what he was doing in here,

Whether he had come in from the outside, was he passing through?

I followed him for hours, glued on those tracks, until I realized it was getting dark, and I didn't want to be caught in the jungle at night without a flashlight.

So I turned around to go back to camp.

As soon as I turned around,

there he was,

not 15 feet in back of me.

That jaguar,

which I had been following, had circled around and was following me as I was following him.

He could have killed me at any time.

He could have gotten me at any time.

I didn't even hear him.

I knew I should feel frightened, but I didn't.

Instinctively, I just squatted down, and the jaguar sat.

And I looked into this jaguar's eyes, and I was so clearly reminded

of the little boy looking into the sad old female at the Bronx Zoo.

But this animal wasn't sad.

In this animal's eyes, there was strength and power and suredness of purpose.

And I also realized as I was looking into his eyes that what I was seeing was a reflection of the way I was feeling too.

That little broken boy and that old broken jaguar were now this.

Suddenly I felt scared.

I knew I should be scared.

And I stood up and took a step back.

The jaguar stood up too,

turned and started to walk off into the forest.

After about 10 feet, it stopped.

and turned to look back at me.

I looked at the Jaguar

and I leaned a little towards it, the way I had at the Bronx Zoo so many years before,

and I whispered to it:

It's okay now.

It's all going to be okay.

And the Jaguar turned and was gone.

Thank you.

That was Alan Rabinowitz.

Dr.

Rabinowitz was one of the world's leading big cat experts and was called the Indiana Jones of Wildlife Conservation by Time magazine.

He was a longtime CEO of Panthera, an international non-profit organization dedicated to saving the world's wildcat species.

He died in 2018, but his work continues on in the legions of students he mentored and the wildlife advocates he inspired with his relentless and fearless advocacy for wild cats and their wild places.

To see photos of Alan, go to them.org.

That's it for this episode of the Moth Radio Hour.

We hope you'll join us next week, and that's the story from the Moth.

This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, Suzanne Rust, and Ray Christian, who hosted the show.

Ray is also the host of the podcast, What's Ray Saying?, which you can find in all the familiar places.

Our co-producer is Vicki Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch.

The stories were directed by Catherine Burns.

The rest of the Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Janess, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Marina Cluche, Leanne Gulley, Brandon Grant, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Aldi Casa.

Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers.

Our theme music is by the drift.

Other music in this hour from Regina Carter, Julian Lodge, and Chris Eldridge, Cowboy Junkies, Goat Rodeo Session, Bill Frizzell, and Carmix.

We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX.

For more about our podcast, for information on pitching this, your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.

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