The Secret Path

by Karen Swan

  It came again, from the other side of the vines, another series of cracks that pierced the drumbeat of the rain, that sense of the jungle moving and rushing. Her pulse accelerated once more and her gaze felt primed to its sharpest setting as she scanned the undergrowth with forensic scrutiny, her heart banging hard against her ribs like it wanted to be let out. She wasn’t imagining this. It wasn’t an over-reaction. There was something out there.

  The stick held like a wand, waving around warningly, she took a few steps forward, towards the knotted curtain. ‘Jed?’ she whispered, but her voice was overpowered by the rain falling like a symphony, orchestral, in the round. ‘Jed?’

  Slowly, she pushed through the vines, staring up at the path ahead. It was completely clear. Ferns nodded across the track like greedy hands, the vines hung from other branches forming rackety walls. Where was he?

  A tree had fallen thirty metres ahead – not recently – but it created a substantial obstacle to a quick getaway. Clambering over trees wasn’t the innocent activity of her childhood; out here, everything could bite, sting, elicit an allergic reaction. Surely Jed hadn’t gotten past there already? She’d stopped for all of thirty seconds.

  ‘Jed?’ She shouted his name this time, raising her voice above the rain, not caring whether the big cats heard her. He had the knife, she just had to get back to him. ‘Where are you?’

  She waited for his jocular reply.

  Nothing came.

  ‘Jed, stop messing about. This isn’t funny.’ But she knew this was no prank. They were out here trying to save his child. He wouldn’t muck about at a time like this. Neither of them was in this for fun.

  She turned a slow circle, feeling eyes perpetually upon her back, her heart pounding heavily from the uphill hike through the mud, from the dawning panic that she was alone. Her skills to survive somewhere like this were rudimentary at best. Without him, she had no shelter, no weapons, no map, just a backpack full of cheese and ham sandwiches and some mangoes.

  Then she saw it – a deep skid mark in the mud. She had been so busy looking ahead, looking out, it hadn’t occurred to her to look down. She ran up, following where it went off the animal track and deeper into the undergrowth. A branch scratched her arm as she pushed past in a rush but she barely even noticed it.

  ‘Jed?’

  Pushing back the thick bushes, she caught sight of something.

  ‘Jed!’

  He was lying on the ground, his body crumpled, his face pressed in the mud. He was motionless, his arm thrown out at a grotesque angle. Blood was oozing from a wound to his head.

  She stared in horror at the sight, hardly able to comprehend what she was seeing. In the space of mere moments, he’d gone from walking and laughing to this – broken and face-down in the mud. Who had done this to him? Or rather, what?

  It wasn’t over yet, she sensed that now, the scale of the danger dawning fully upon her. This was the jungle, no place for mercy, and a man down meant one thing: prey.

  She looked up into the undergrowth again, still able to feel the weight of a stare upon her, cold eyes blinking through the leaves. She felt her blood still in her veins. Carefully, reaching down, she unsheathed the knife from Jed’s leg holster and brandished it wildly, jabbing towards the bushes, seeing how the steel blade flashed even in the rain.

  Her rage, courage, grew with every joust. The adrenaline was beginning to pump freely now and her body was telling her to fight. Her knuckles were blanched around the handle, her own body falling into a feral mode as she scanned the bushes.

  Then it came again.

  She jerked her head up with a loud gasp as behind her the rainforest suddenly shimmied and shook. She spun round and saw a streak of something moving through the undergrowth, ten metres away. She couldn’t see what it was, only what it displaced as branches were pushed aside and snapped. But the cacophony was growing fainter, not louder . . . it was retreating. In the near distance, several howler monkeys began screaming as if tracking the predator, their shrieks carrying from the canopies across the gorge and down the jungled valley.

  The knife began to shake in her hand as she sensed the danger pass finally – she had done it! Scared it off, whatever it was! – and she slowly, slowly, let her arm drop. She looked back at Jed. He was still motionless in the mud, water running around him like he was a rock in a river.

  ‘Jed, talk to me!’ she panted, getting down on her knees in the mud and putting her face near his. She felt his breath on her skin; he was breathing. She took his pulse. ‘Jed, can you hear me? Wake up!’

  There was a long silence; he was still out cold.

  ‘Jed, what happened? Can you talk to me?’

  He didn’t respond, but on the ground beside him, she saw a large club. Like an old-fashioned policeman’s truncheon, it had been carved from a single piece of wood. He had been hit with that? A weapon?

  Who . . .? Who . . .? She looked around them desperately again. Had it been a man she had seen running away? Were there more? Others, watching her, even now?

  There was no possible way of knowing. She just knew she had to get him to wake up, to move out of this wet mud, get away from the rain. She looked desperately around them. His forearm was broken, she could see that just from the angle of it. His shoulder looked dislocated too. Once he regained consciousness, she wouldn’t be able to move him in this condition. He wouldn’t even be able to sit up with these injuries. He’d pass out from the pain.

  She felt her brain slide into autopilot . . .

  She looked around her again. There was a bamboo plant a few metres away, its shoots straight and strong, and she went over and after a few clumsy hacks, cut down the straightest length she could see. Then she cut it in half.

  Raindrops dripped from the tip of her nose as she kneeled beside Jed again, trying to keep quiet, wanting now not to wake him. His eyelids fluttered vaguely, too heavy to lift and she knew his semi-conscious state would be a blessing for the next few moments at least. Carefully, she lifted the broken arm and began palpating gently. She could discern two fractures to the radius. The shoulder was definitely out of place. Defence injuries.

  She remembered she’d brought her small doctor’s kit with her and she shrugged off the rucksack, scrabbling to find it at the bottom, beneath their food. It didn’t have what she really wanted – which was a tank of morphine – but she had some basics that would help. Finding the strip bandage rolls, she placed the two bamboo lengths either side of the wrist and bound them to one another, splinting the arm. Then carefully, supporting the weight of the splinted arm, she slowly levered it to a ninety-degree angle.

  Jed groaned, more alert this time, and she knew she had to act quickly. He was coming round. With the forearm now supported, she rolled him carefully onto his back, then placed her hands either side of his upper arm, above the elbow. She put one of her feet gently against his ribs and with a steady pressure, pulled.

  She felt the joint click as Jed’s eyes opened and a cry of pain left him like an exhale, his face pale with sweat, pain and fear. ‘What . . .?’ He stared up at the sky, rain pelting his face, his reactions too slow.

  ‘Don’t move.’ She scrambled back onto her knees so that he could see her. ‘You’ve got a broken arm.’

  He groaned in reply, disoriented and concussed.

  Moving quickly, she stripped down to her bra and knotting her shirt in one corner, created a roughly triangular shape that would serve as a sling. Lifting his head, she knotted it behind his neck so that the arm was now splinted and strapped across his chest.

  She needed something else though . . . saw his belt. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, as she pulled it from the loops of his trousers and carefully fastened it around his torso, going above the right arm rather than under it. It meant the injured limb was pinned down and would help immobilize the shoulder too.

  ‘What . . . T-t?’ He was coming round quickly now.

  ‘Jed, can you sit up for me? I’ll need to help you.’


  He looked bewildered and, without free use of his arms, she had to get behind him to help push him up. His backpack had been torn off in the struggle, the strap ripped from the seams. She pushed it up behind him, as a lumbar support. He gasped with every movement, looking like he might be sick as he came to an upright position and she knew it was the head injury. ‘Don’t move. Take it slowly. Just breathe,’ she said calmly, watching as his head hung, his eyes opening and closing drowsily.

  ‘Do you know what happened?’ she asked after a few moments, when it became clear he could cope with gravity, he wasn’t going to pass out.

  He gave a grunt that seemed to be an affirmation.

  ‘Who did this to you?’ He had no scratches, no puncture wounds. The wooden club clearly signified it had been a human attack and not animal. She remembered the streak she had seen through the trees and looked around again, just as another sound of twigs snapping came to her ears. She saw the knife she had left lying on the ground as she triaged him, and picked it up again, on high alert. She stared hard into the undergrowth again, knowing countless eyes were staring back at her. But the man, or men, who had done this – she didn’t know how many there were, or why they’d done this, or what they wanted – were they still here, watching them?

  For several minutes she scarcely dared breathe, the tip of the knife pointed towards every bush, every tree as Jed sat slumped, scarcely conscious. They couldn’t stay here. A broken arm in the jungle was as dangerous as a broken leg in the Alps.

  The rainforest pulsated and scratched loosely around them, with none of the quivering tension during the initial attack. Slowly, her grip began to loosen on the knife. Her nerves were frayed but her gut told her whoever had done this had gone.

  Jed was beginning to come round, his head nodding as he tried to look up.

  ‘Jed, listen to me – we can’t leave you sitting in the wet mud. You’ll get hypothermia in these conditions and that will leave you vulnerable. We’ve got to get you somewhere warm and dry.’ But it was a laughable notion. Nowhere was warm and dry in the Costa Rican jungle, everyone knew that.

  ‘Jed, the rangers’ station. Where is it?’ She supported his head with her hand, getting him to look at her, to focus. ‘Where, Jed?’

  He tried to look at her, but his eyes kept crossing.

  ‘Where is the rangers’ station?’ she asked slowly. It couldn’t be far surely? They’d been walking for a couple of hours already and it was supposed to be a ‘base’ station in the mountainous national park.

  He stared back at her, both of them soaked in the pummelling rain. ‘. . . Map.’

  Map. Of course.

  She reached around him for his rucksack, holding his weight against her momentarily as she scrabbled for the map, drawn in a green dye on the scrap of cloth.

  ‘Here.’

  She replaced the bag and brought the map over, opened it up. There was little more than a few scratchings to go by, symbols that might mean something to him, but nothing at all to her.

  He stared at it for several long moments, then with effort, with his good arm, he pointed to a space below a simply sketched mountain peak – halfway down. ‘Us.’

  Every word was a trial, he was blanched with pain.

  He moved his good arm slowly, carefully, to a point only just above where he had said they were. ‘Ranger.’

  ‘Rangers’ station?’ she repeated. ‘Above us? Here?’

  She looked up but they were shielded by the sprawling bush that had blocked him from sight from the path – and now blocked her view again too. ‘Jed, don’t move. Just wait here. I’m going to look and try to see where we are.’

  He didn’t protest, just closed his eyes again, his head hanging. She scrambled back to the path and looked up the banking. Hectares of knobbled green stretched above and all around. The uniformity of it was dizzying, like looking into the deep blue when she’d gone scuba diving with Miles and her father in Belize. All scale was lost, nothing emerged from the all-encompassing black and green landscape.

  Except . . .

  She squinted, training her gaze hard on a single tiny, bright dot, several hundred metres up and along the path from here. It was nothing really, snagging the eye as just a break in the trees perhaps – a singular tree that had fallen. Or a building. It could be the roof of a building.

  She kept staring. If that was the rangers’ station . . . if it was . . . it was still a long way from here. She didn’t think he could get that far. He’d taken a bad beating and she didn’t know yet how many other injuries he might have.

  But to leave him here and get help was a risk too. Big cats prowled these territories. There was nothing hypothetical about an ocelot or puma or jaguar chancing upon him, injured and defenceless. This was their territory. It was she and Jed who were the visitors.

  She ran her hands down her face, hardly able to believe this was happening. This time yesterday she’d been swimming in waterfalls, enjoying a picnic with her friends. How had everything gone so wrong in the space of a few minutes?

  She tried to think clearly. Empty her mind of emotion and pretend she was in theatre . . .

  She would leave him with the knife, something to defend himself with. She would find herself a better stick and go to the rangers’ station and bring help down to him here. The rangers would know the terrain, they’d be able to get back here to him in half the time it would take her to get there. The sooner she went, the sooner they’d have help.

  She heard a sound behind her – the cracking of twigs again – and she spun round, startled, her eyes white with fear. She was jumpy and agitated.

  Jed stood there, swaying and pale. Somehow he had managed to get himself to standing. The map was crushed in his good hand, which was also somehow holding the bag. He looked like he was going to either pass out or throw up. She stared at him in disbelief.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said finally, putting one foot forward. Then another.

  ‘Hello? Help!’ she called, her voice ragged with breathlessness as Jed leaned on her. He had one arm over her shoulder and was doing his best to support himself as they staggered in pitifully small steps over the rough ground, but he was fighting against recurring loss of consciousness and three times he had collapsed, bringing her along with him, her knees buckling from the weight of him as he went down. She would remember his howls of pain, as he landed on his fractured arm, for a long time to come.

  It had taken them almost two hours to get here, the rain like an enemy pushing against them – stinging their faces, making their feet slip – but as they placed their muddied feet on the deck of the rangers’ station, Tara felt a euphoric rush of relief. They had done it! Found refuge! Here, they could get help, get back.

  ‘Hello! Is anybody here?’ she called again as they staggered up the steps, leading Jed haltingly towards the low bleached timber building. It had several peaked roofs, covered in the traditional style with rushes, and woven window hatches pulled up against the rainstorm.

  The station looked closed and worryingly uninhabited. She could feel its emptiness, the quality of silence and stillness upon it. She felt a stab of alarm. They couldn’t have come all this way, only for nothing. Limping over, Jed’s head hanging again, she tried the first door they reached. It was locked.

  No. No, no. They had to get in. She would break in if necessary. Turning back wasn’t an option. They went slowly around to the other side, Jed’s weight becoming heavier with every step – he had depleted himself fully to get this far – and she was grateful for the firmness underfoot of the decking after endlessly slipping through the mud. She tried each window, seeing if she could get her fingers between the hatch and the walls, whether she could force them open; but they were securely fastened. They reached another door and she went for the door handle.

  It turned. Unlocked. As simple as that.

  ‘Yes!’ she cried, wanting to weep with gratitude. She pushed it open and peered into the space. ‘Hello?’ She felt her voice sink into the wal
ls of the office, swallowed into the silence. They were in, but still alone.

  She scanned the room, looking for signs of how it could help them – two desks were covered with paperwork towers, a water cooler in one corner, several boxes stacked against one wall. She clocked a printer, posters of insects, mammals and birds on the walls, a phone—

  A phone!

  ‘Jed, come and sit down,’ she said, guiding him carefully through the door. There was a chair where he could rest, finally, while she called for help; she could get them both some fluids, clean him up, find some dry clothes they could both change into; staying in wet clothes was one of the biggest risks right now. At the very least, there had to be towels. There would be a bathroom here, surely?

  The outside door slammed shut behind them on a gust of wind, making her jump. ‘Dammit,’ she muttered, her nerves still frayed from the attack as she half-led, half-dragged Jed towards the chair behind the desk. Water was still running off her hair, down the bare skin of her shoulders, back and chest. She was smeared with mud, sweating and her skin was red and sore from where he was leaning on her. There were scratches on her thighs and countless bites.

  ‘Okay, we’re going to sit you down here,’ she panted, trying to push the chair back from the desk with her foot for him, just as a sound outside came to her ear. She paused and looked up, still on high alert. The sound had a static quality, like the air was crackling, voices carrying as if on a tide. Radio?

  She heard heavy footsteps come close across the deck, but then stop. She held her breath, aware every muscle in her body was tense as she stood hunched behind the desk, still supporting Jed’s weight. The feet began to tread again, pacing now, a male voice drifting in and out of earshot – making no attempts not to be heard – the low timbre winking through the timber boards.

  She breathed again, looking up at Jed with joy. ‘The ranger’s here!’ she beamed. ‘He’s back!’

  Jed looked back at her with an unfocused gaze. Her smile faltered. He was in a bad way. ‘You hear me, Jed? Help’s here. You’re going to be okay. The hard part’s done.’