A female whitelipped peccary walks in front of the herd, she is alert, she has been here before, she recognizes the space. It is a place that doesn't bring back good memories, in fact quite the opposite, it awakens fears that the vicissitudes of everyday life make her forget. When she thinks all is well, she gives the signal, the group advances through what seems to be a different place than the one they had visited ten years ago. Now the pastures where the dense jungle once ended have the shape of African palm plantations, no problem, there is food for everyone.

Another one of the leaders of the herd hits his jaw strongly to warn about what seems to be an ocelot lowering the palm fruits while its young receive them below. The female leader realizes that there are many peccaries, more than fifty, so she feels reassured, the ocelot does not represent a danger, it would be the end of it if it tries to attack them. Thus, the herd continues on its way, while the smell emanating from the thick and elongated hair of the ungulates spreads along the trails leading to Cerro Brujo. There walks a man and his daughter, little by little they perceive the strong scent of the fearful animals.

The man knows them very well, he knows about their routes, he understands that they travel in groups, that they can be aggressive if they feel a threat, so he looks for a place where he and his daughter can take refuge. The herd can be perceived nearby, the smell is stronger, its sound is heard approaching: leaves, branches, the beating of the jaws of the peccary leaders... All of this alerts the girl, who stands on a fallen log. Her father taught her that she only needs a meter of height to be safe, although she has also seen them on two legs eating palm fruits, even so, she knows that it is not an animal that seeks to attack, rather it tries to avoid confrontation, in any case it almost always loses.

The female peccary leader is still suspicious of the place, here many of her family members died at the hands of hunters and she, in particular, suffered an injury to one of her legs and has been limping ever since. She remembers the last time ten years ago, on that occasion so many of them died that they decided not to return there again. They took refuge further south. Immersed in the jungle for years, they met other herds and the family grew again. In the south there is never a lack of food, there is water, and of course, there are also dangers, the main one being the jaguar, which always takes the last one of the herd. However, their instinct is always to be on the move, and there are ancestral routes that their ancestors walked and that they recognize today, as a kind of dejavu. That is why, without realizing it, they were in that hostile place, now with more humans than before.

The man sees them approaching, he is also perched on a fallen log from where he can see his daughter. The limping peccary and other leading peccaries are the first to spot the two humans. The rest of the herd is alerted by the sound of the pounding jaws that gets louder. The intense volume does not seem to intimidate the man and the girl, they have been in that situation before, at least the man, on many occasions. They remain calm. The limping peccary knows there is no other passage but the one in front of them, the herd is in a mountain range, there is a precipice on both sides. They have to pass through where the humans are.

As she approaches, the limping peccary realizes that she has seen that man before. She looks him in the eye, the man also seems to recognize a being with whom he has crossed paths before. There is tension. After several long seconds, the peccary realizes that the man's behavior is different from the last time she saw him. He has no weapons, no hunting dogs and she finds it strange to see a girl with him. Slowly she approaches, advancing towards the path between the two humans.

Bravely, the limping peccary, without losing sight of the man, crosses the path and sends the signal to the other leaders for the herd to continue on its way. The peccary doesn’t understand what is happening, the man who previously would have shot and thrown the dogs on her, now counts the number of pigs while explaining to his daughter the behavior and morphology of these ungulates.

The girl, Yolanda, was nine years old when she arrived in Rancho Quemado, a settlement between Rincón and Drake. She remembers how normal the shootings were and seeing people with peccary carcasses hanging from the back of their horses. Her family, and the other families that founded the settlement more than forty years ago, subsisted off the forest. She herself learned to hunt and tasted all kinds of bush meat. But one day her father said "no more", and stopped hunting. By that time there were already several supermarkets in nearby communities to which he could travel and the conditions that forced them to extract from the forest were no longer there. His father's decision was embraced by the whole family and other hunters in the community also decided to follow his example. Although this paradigm shift was not going to completely halt hunting, it did have an impact on Yolanda. She discovered a possibility that to some extent had always been within her, but that her father helped to unearth.

That quantum leap of her father's changed the way she perceived her surroundings. It transformed her notion of the forest from a place of extraction to a place in need of repair. Since then, she has kept a very precise record, with techniques such as tracking and checkpoints, of the various herds that pass through Rancho Quemado and the surrounding communities. The herd that in 2019 had 50 individuals has grown to two herds that today total 140 individuals. Patrolling and monitoring efforts indicate that its population is almost triple what it was.

Yolanda and most of the members of the wildlife monitoring group are former hunters, so they have a great knowledge of the forest and know about the behavior and strategies of the “huntsmen”; they know about the animals and their routes; they know about the flowering and harvesting seasons of the trees, besides, they also like to be there.

It is easy for Yolanda to empathize with hunters, as she was originally in the same position, but she is aware that "with greater knowledge comes greater responsibility". In the past she didn't hunt for fun or to test the accuracy of a new gun, as some still do. She hunted to subsist. Families took what they needed, and the knowledge they applied to hunt these animals is now one of the reasons for the success of Rancho Quemado's Biological Monitoring program. Still, she feels a personal urge to seek solutions for the preservation of the whitelipped peccaries, she feels responsible perhaps, and her love for the place translates into her commitment to take care of it.

The herd of peccaries advances.. They arrive at a bathing place, they stop for a bath in the mud. A tapir gives them space, it is the dry season, there are not many bathing places available. The bath gives them energy to continue their journey through the forest. Later, they stop to move the ground, which is what they do best. Their noses break up the topsoil and they pull out buried seeds with their teeth, some they eat, others they scatter. All the peccaries in the herd repeat this process over and over again. The forest breathes, the soil is oxygenated, the vegetation is renewed, the balance is maintained.

At that same moment, in another part of the forest, Champion finds hoofprints characteristic of the peccaries.Trotamundos, perhaps? He knows very well that it could be any of the six herds he has managed to identify in Corcovado National Park, all of them have a name, all of them have a story. He takes out the plaster and makes a copy of the footprint, puts it in his backpack and follows the trail of the herd.

For Champion to follow the trail of a wild animal is natural, he knows this forest. He was born in Osa Peninsula, he was a gold digger for twenty years and therefore had to hunt to survive. He understood the balance we are part of, now he dedicates his life to take care of the forest. This time he sees them before he smells them. The peccaries are not tense, their odor is not so strong, the sounds are minimal. Champion approaches them cautiously, he knows that what bothers them most is to have their space invaded. Silently, he counts them one by one.

The herd perceives a threat, chaos all around, the leader peccaries, worried about their relatives, give the indication and everyone runs. The jaguar is near. They run knowing that one member will succumb, what they don't know is which one. When they feel safe, they stop, regroup, and yes: now there are fewer of them. There is no suffering involved, they know in advance the outcome of these encounters, they usually take the slowest, the sickest, the weakest. Natural selection? Interspecies collaboration? What else would the greatest and most endangered feline in America eat otherwise? They continue their journey.

After fifteen days immersed in the forest, collecting the contents of the many camera traps scattered throughout the terrain, Champion knows that on his days off he will spend many hours observing thousands of photographs and videos. What's the point of protecting if we don't know what we are protecting?—he asks himself for motivation. The results of the monitoring indicate that in the last five years the number of peccaries has increased and that there are currently sixteen jaguars in Corcovado. Both species once inhabited almost the entire territory of Costa Rica, today they are relegated, due to hunting and habitat loss, to only protected areas.

It is not raining today, patrolling may be more bearable, yesterday everyone worked on their various ventures: Evaristo was guiding tourists through the forest, Maria was taking handicrafts to hotels and Rebeca was cleaning her cabins at Drake for the next visitor. It is Tuesday. The cab picks us up early and we head towards a sector where hunter activity has been reported.

After a couple of hours of walking, Evaristo makes a signal with his fist, we all stop, we keep quiet. Two heliconia leaves placed in juxtaposition are an indicator that someone used them as a seat while shining a spotlight for their dogs to attack a prey. It's last night's activity, says Evaristo. We continue walking. It's barely 8 a.m., but it feels like we've been walking through the jungle for a long time, often there's no marked trail, the rubber boots are uncomfortable, but the heavy weather doesn't seem to affect the group of volunteer rangers of Drake.

They all put their time and forest knowledge to conscientize some and scare others. It's risky work, they don't carry guns, they know that some hunters are violent. Still, they know that putting their bodies on the ground is the only way to protect the forest against the blatant extraction unleashed by the pandemic in their community. Hunting tours, logging, lack of local authorities. Although these problems existed before, it is possible that the lack of work and the mandatory confinements at the beginning of the pandemic made them more evident.

Rebeca remembers when she first came to Osa Peninsula, more than fifteen years ago. For a biologist, it was like arriving in paradise. Protecting what has given her so much—a job, a family, a home and entrepreneurships—is a pact between her and the forest. Being in a place as intense as this, the altruistic instinct of our species is stimulated by our senses. It is easy to understand that here not everything is a competition for survival, some relationships remind us that taking care of each other allows life. Maybe all those hours walking through the forest as a naturalist guide have made her understand the function of care and reciprocity in ecosystems, maybe that awakened her need to take care and to motivate others to do so.

We stop under some palms of yolillo, the peccaries were here. Rebeca records the coordinates of the place, takes photos of the tracks with her cell phone. They are not close, it seems that the trail is from a couple of days ago. We leave the forest around noon, we find ourselves on the road, some tourists pass by and stare at us in confusion. Somewhere else on the Peninsula, several herds of peccaries continue on their routes.

I have given up going on a trip for a while now, at least a long one. Whenever we had a plan ready to go somewhere, something happened. The first time was when, during a trip to Colombia, my father's health deteriorated due to a very severe cancer he was suffering from. So we returned, and our dream of a South American trip with no return date ended. My father's fate, like that of the last peccary of the herd, was inevitable. To pretend that everything was going to be all right was to deceive myself, I took refuge in being, with my body, next to him, during his last moments of life. Thus, the sense of touch is the last thing that vanished from my father.

The resilience of people like Rebeca, Yolanda and Champion, and their intention to selflessly care for others reminds me of that time in my life. There is no rational logic, the results are often not positive, in fact, they almost never are. There are no quantifiable incentives other than the satisfaction of caring for those in need. The society in which we live often keeps us wrapped up in our individual wellbeing. As biologist John Stanley and writer David R. Loy state: 'By glorifying self-concern as never before, consumerism generates a mental environment of endless competition.'

This eliminates any other possibility of relationship such as cooperation, where qualities such as empathy and altruism lie. If we explain all our actions under the capitalist and extractive logic, it is difficult to understand why people risk their lives, putting their bodies on the line, to take care of the forest.

The second occasion was relatively recent. We were all set for another trip with no return, but this time our plans were put on hold by the pandemic. We could have postponed it and traveled later, but months later we were going to have to take care of my nephew, who, for two years, was under our foster care. Again, care was asking us to stay in the same place. The beginning of the pandemic, a strange time of much death and collective fear, reminded me that we have to take care of each other, but it also made me wonder if what is natural for all beings is to live in caring relationships. The growing sense of belonging to the place where I live, inadvertently, has made me more aware of that place and I have developed a need to take care of it. Perhaps it was this sense of belonging to a place what inspired the change in Yolanda's father's relationship with nature.

To imagine a world governed solely by the idea of competition seems delusional to me. Within the chaos originated by life, I am sure that care among species plays a key role in the circle of life and death of which we are a part. The place where we are at the moment and our sense of belonging to it makes us aware of what we have to take care of.

When we were trying to make sense of the strange force that kept us in this territory, I once heard my wife say that we are where we are for a reason.The peccaries move the soil bringing life to the forest that gives them sustenance, at the same time they destroy seeds, kill the life of plants and in that same forest is where they will die at the hands of a feline or a human. The circle is completed without ever knowing where it originated, benefiting in its trace many other species. The work of the peccaries becomes one more piece in the complex network of relationships of which we are all a part, a work that they perform regardless of its outcome. Perhaps our labor in this existence is to take care selflessly of what we have in front of us, without looking for positive results, or solutions to everything, accepting that someday the jaguar will eat us.

Caring just for the sake of caring.