The Jaguar Hunter by Lucius Shepard
"The Jaguar Hunter" is a collection of short stories that explore themes of identity, disconnection, and the impact of modern society on traditional lives. The central narrative follows Esteban Caax, a man struggling to find his place in Puerto Morada as he grapples with personal failures and societal pressures. Faced with the task of killing a black jaguar to facilitate modern development, Esteban encounters a mysterious woman who embodies the jaguar, prompting him to reconsider his actions and seek a deeper connection to his heritage and the natural world.
The collection also features stories of soldiers dealing with the psychological scars of war, illustrating the complexities of their experiences and the intertwining of personal and collective trauma. Characters such as Dantzler, a soldier haunted by his past, and Phelan, a Vietnam veteran entangled in horrors linked to historical atrocities, reflect on the long-lasting effects of conflict. Overall, "The Jaguar Hunter" presents a rich tapestry of narratives that highlight the struggles of individuals attempting to navigate the tensions between modernity and tradition, as well as the lasting impacts of war on the human psyche.
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The Jaguar Hunter
First published: 1987
Type of work: Stories
Type of plot: Science fiction—Magical Realism
Time of work: Primarily contemporary or recent past
Locale: Earth, generally exotic areas not yet fully exploited by modern society
The Plot
Although the plots of these stories vary, certain themes recur. In the title story, Esteban Caax, a lifelong resident of Puerto Morada, is failing in his attempts to assimilate himself into modern society. His marriage gives him no pleasure, his farm teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, and the television set—a luxury he bought for his “modern” wife—forces him to attempt to kill a black jaguar so that a local man can build a shopping center. He agrees to the hunt despite his late fathers warning that black jaguars “have other forms and magical purposes with which we must not interfere.” Esteban encounters a mysterious woman whom he perceives to be a soulmate. He is brought inexorably to realize that she and the black jaguar are one and the same, and he vows not to kill her. Other men from Puerto Morada appear, but Esteban keeps them from killing the jaguar. The tale ends as he pursues the jaguar, again in her female form, to a portal beneath the river, where they will presumably escape the modern world.
Several of the stories feature disenfranchised men seeking to reconnect with their souls (such as Meric Cattanny in “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule”), men whose relationships lead them into dangerous situations (such as Peter Ramey in “How the Wind Spoke at Mandaket”), or both, such as Eliot Blackford in “The Night of White Bhairab.” The other major type of story in this collection involves soldiers and their reactions to war. “Salvador” is a third-person narrative in which a soldier named Dantzler has several bizarre experiences, including seeing one of his cohorts shove a Star Trek-loving national from a plane, calling out “Space! The Final Frontier!” On returning to the United States, Dantzler decides to give his old friends a taste of Salvador with his survival knife. Lucius Shepards soldiers are neither unaffected by war nor prone to celebrate it; if post-traumatic stress syndrome did not exist, Shepard would have invented it. His Nebula-winning story in this volume, “R & R,” later became the opening chapters of his novel Life During Wartime (1987).
Not only those directly affected by a war can be warped by it in Shepards cosmos. “Mengele” features a Vietnam veteran named Phelan whose failure at other postwar efforts has led him to running an air cargo service with a policy of not asking questions about the contents of packages; he appears otherwise relatively unaffected. His life is changed when his plane crashes in Paraguay and he encounters a man claiming to be Josef Mengele. Phelan is quick to declare that, being a non-Jew born in 1948, “Mengeles hideous pseudoscientific experiments . . . had the reality of vampire movies for me.” Phelan is nevertheless drawn into the horror. When he attempts to bring Mengele to justice, though, he is rebuffed—the man he met is not Mengele but one of his more successful experiments. By the denouement, Phelan has concluded that “a draining of spirit and vitality has affected humanity,” such that he has now “acknowledged . . . and sensed [the] inevitability of Mengele’s principl” that “l[g]ood was eroding into evil.”