The Explorer

by Katherine Rundell

  The sun beat down on the river, sending up green and silver light in their eyes. Fred followed the current downstream. They came to a fork in the river. ‘Someone will have to remember which way we’ve come,’ he said, ‘or we’ll get lost.’

  There was a pause. Then Con said, ‘I’ll remember, if you like.’

  Fred looked round, surprised. Con hadn’t struck him as the volunteering sort.

  ‘I’ve got – I’ve got a photographic memory, actually,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ asked Lila, fascinated. ‘You mean, you see pictures? Do you remember everything that way, or only some things?’

  ‘Mostly just maps, and formulae, and blueprints for things. I used to like taking them out to look at, during lunch break in school. In my head, I mean. The others thought I was weird.’

  ‘In that case they’re stupid,’ said Lila bluntly. ‘I’d love to be able to do that.’

  The raft swept round a corner with Fred poling hard.

  ‘We turned left coming out, so the final turn home will be right,’ said Lila.

  ‘Right: right,’ said Con. She grinned. Her smile changed the whole shape of her face: her cheeks rose and pushed her eyes into little squints, and her mouth stretched up and out to her earlobes. Her touch-me-not look vanished. ‘If you shout out the directions, we could do it together. If you want.’

  Fred kept poling. The branch was giving him new, shilling-sized blisters on the pads of his hands, but he didn’t slow down. There was a twist, he found, that he could give the pole that made them speed faster. It blew Max’s snot in a high ribbon up his face. The sun was hot and sharp out here. The air tasted brand new.

  ‘Faster!’ shouted Max. He rocked backwards and forwards on his haunches.

  They hadn’t gone far before there was another fork; one looked choked with weeds, so Fred chose the other. ‘Left!’ called Lila.

  ‘Left,’ Con echoed and nodded.

  The left bend took them into a narrower river, winding slowly among close-set trees. Fred pulled up his pole and they drifted, staring down into the water. A shoal of fish swam helter-skelter under the raft. Max leant dangerously over the edge, dangling his fingers in the water.

  Suddenly Con jumped. The hairs on her arms rose up in a blonde wave. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘Something down there. Silver. Down there! A piranha!’ Con’s voice came out thin and high. ‘Max, get your hands out of the water!’

  They all peered down into the water. There was something small and silver, trapped among the weeds. ‘It’s not moving,’ said Fred.

  ‘What is it?’ said Con.

  ‘It’s … I think it’s not alive,’ said Lila.

  ‘A dead piranha?’ said Con.

  ‘It’s … a silver box?’ said Lila. ‘It’s hard to tell. It’s probably just a trick of the light.’

  ‘I’m going to jump in and see,’ said Fred. ‘Just quickly.’

  ‘No you’re not!’ said Con.

  Lila, very softly, took hold of his wrist. ‘Don’t,’ she whispered. ‘It wouldn’t be clever.’

  ‘But it could be a knife!’ said Fred. ‘It looks man-made. Please. You keep the raft close by. I need to see. I’ll be in and out: it’s simple.’

  ‘Fred!’ said Con.

  He pulled off his shirt, evaded Max, who tried to grab his ankle, and jumped over the edge of the raft.

  The water was calm here without the current and cool against his skin. Fred kicked downwards. Weeds wrapped themselves around his ankle as he went deeper. His lungs began shrieking at him. The silver something was just a little further – he brushed it with his fingertips, kicked desperately, and snatched it. It was sharp against his fingers.

  He shot to the surface. ‘Got it!’ He held his fist up to show them, treading water.

  But the two girls weren’t looking at him. They were staring into the water a few metres from the raft.

  ‘What’s that?’ whispered Lila.

  Fred glanced down. There was something black, undulating through the water towards him.

  Fred gasped, swallowed a mouthful of water and began to choke.

  ‘An eel!’ said Max brightly.

  ‘An electric eel!’ said Lila.

  ‘Swim!’ screamed Con. She snatched the pole and tried to steer towards Fred, jabbing the branch into the water. Lila held out her hand over the edge of the raft.

  Fred swam the distance to the raft faster than he had ever moved in his life. He launched himself on to it. The raft tipped drunkenly under his weight. Con threw herself to the opposite end to stop it overturning, and Lila’s hands grabbed at him; they were small but surprisingly strong as they hauled him up.

  Fred lay on his stomach, gasping for breath, staring into the water.

  The eel was immense. It looked like a deep-grey snake, as long as a grown man, winding in and out of the weeds.

  Lila sucked in breath, and some of her own hair. ‘Oh, wow,’ she breathed. It wasn’t just fear in her voice; it was fascination too.

  ‘Are eels dangerous?’ asked Con.

  ‘I don’t know, but if you call someone an eel –’ gasped Fred, coughing. His heart was trying to break out from his chest. He swallowed: ‘It’s not a compliment. So maybe.’

  ‘They are. Very,’ said Lila. ‘They pass an electric current through the water to shock their prey, and then eat them. They probably wouldn’t be able to kill something Fred’s size, but for Max it would be different.’ She was shaking. She picked up the pole and, very slowly, so as not to risk tipping them all in, began to guide them away – away from the eel, and away from the canopy of trees.

  ‘What was it, down there?’ asked Con.

  ‘Here.’ Fred opened his fist. It was a rusty rectangle, made of tin, coloured silver, with blue swirly writing.

  ‘It’s an empty sardine tin!’ said Con, her voice full of disgusted disappointment. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fred. He rubbed at the rust on the tin and closed his fingers tightly around its jagged edge. A sardine tin in the wildest place in the world. ‘That’s all.’

  It took longer to coax the raft back upstream. Lila steered them close to the bank, and they hauled their way along on overhanging branches when the pole wasn’t enough. The branches hung low, and all four were covered in ants and spiderwebs by the time they reached their home stretch of river, with fresh scratches on their hands.

  ‘It was here,’ said Con. ‘I recognise the way those vines wrapped around that branch.’

  The branch stuck out conveniently over the river. It was perfectly placed to act as a mooring branch; it jutted out at the ideal angle, right above a bank of black Amazon soil.

  Fred stood, wobbling hard, on the raft.

  ‘Watch it!’ said Con.

  The branch was just over his head; it was covered in tendrils where it met the tree, and shone green in the sunlight. He grabbed hold of it, tied a loop in the end of his liana rope and hung it over the branch.

  ‘That’s perfect!’ said Lila. ‘Like a coat hook for our boat.’

  ‘It is perfect.’ Fred stayed standing, looking up at the branch in his hand. He peered closer. ‘It’s perfect because someone made it perfect.’

  There was a beat of silence.

  Then: ‘What do you mean?’ asked Con. She spoke very quietly.

  Fred didn’t answer. He moved the branch to and fro under its covering of vines. It creaked backwards and forwards under his hand. The vines wound like a rope around it in a figure of eight, repeated over and over.

  ‘It didn’t grow here. It’s been tied on.’

  Max was staring open-mouthed. ‘Who did it? Did you?’

  ‘No, Maxie,’ said Lila quietly. ‘Not him. Somebody else.’

  Fred looked behind him. A gust of wind caught a pile of fallen leaves and spun them across the forest floor. The back of his neck prickled.

  He reminded himself again that trees do not keep secrets.

  They
walked back to the clearing in single file. Fred came last. He turned to look backwards at every step. The rustling in the bushes seemed to follow them; but it was just the wind, he told himself.

  Wind is a trickster. It plays havoc with your courage.

  The fire still had hot embers at its heart, and Fred lay down on his stomach in the grass and earth, blowing at it like a bellows, his chin inches from the fire. His eyes were red and smoky by the time it was rekindled, but the roar of it sent a wave of relief through his chest. The fire was the closest thing they had to a weapon, and its warmth felt like safety.

  Lila was arranging their shoes, which had been soaked on the raft, in a circle around the ashes. ‘Can I see the thing you found in the water?’ she asked.

  Fred held it out. Most of the writing was covered in rust, but he could see, written on its base, the ingredients. ‘Look at the bottom,’ he said. ‘It says, “Canned in Plymouth”.’

  Lila looked blank.

  ‘Plymouth is in England,’ said Fred. ‘Down by the sea.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had fish in England!’ said Max.

  ‘Of course we have fish; what do you think we eat?’ said Con.

  ‘Crumpets,’ said Max. ‘And cigars.’

  ‘But if the tin comes from England –’ began Lila.

  ‘Then it must have come with whoever made the camp,’ said Fred. ‘An explorer, maybe.’

  ‘Who goes exploring with sardines?’ asked Con.

  ‘People used to come out here with all sorts of things. Pianos, and china ornaments. Sardines seem normal, in comparison,’ said Fred. He felt a hot surge rising in his chest. If the person who made the camp had been English, he might have been one of the explorers from the newspapers Fred had read: one of the explorers who never returned – Percy Fawcett, Simon Murphy, Christopher Maclaren.

  ‘I had a book,’ said Fred, ‘about a man called Hiram Bingham. He was climbing and he came across a whole city, built by the Incas. It wasn’t exactly discovering, because some of the Peruvians knew about it – but nobody else did. Can you imagine? It would be like suddenly finding the ruins of Birmingham in a thousand years’ time.’

  Lila moved closer. Her eyes were set far apart in her face; eyes that could look full of many different things at once. Now they radiated curiosity. ‘I’ve heard about it – it’s called Machu Picchu.’

  ‘Yes! That was the name. Usually, though, the men just go missing.’

  ‘Like us?’ said Max.

  ‘Sort of,’ said Fred. ‘Except usually it’s because they’re dead. Which we’re not.’

  ‘Yet,’ said Con ominously.

  Fred ignored that. ‘And there was this man called Percy Fawcett – he was looking for a ruined city. He called it the City of Z. And then not that long ago – it was in 1925, I think – he just disappeared. And another man, Christopher Maclaren, he went on an expedition to find out if Fawcett’s dream was real. He was my favourite; he wrote letters about waking up to find maggots growing in the crook of his elbow.’

  ‘How lovely,’ said Con. ‘Did the maggots get him?’

  ‘Nobody knows. He sent a telegram, and then he disappeared.’ Fred hesitated. ‘I memorised it, actually.’

  ‘How does it go?’ asked Lila.

  Fred cleared his throat. ‘“Just a line from this last outpost of civilisation to advise you that I am about to go out of communication. I am well and fit, and there is every hope of a successful issue to the expedition, risky as it is in some ways.”’

  Con raised both eyebrows. ‘He sounds fun.’

  ‘Newspapers want people to sound like that. As if they have very clean shoes. But I know he wasn’t like that. The other men said he was the maddest and bravest of a mad brave generation.’

  ‘Why did you memorise it, though?’

  Fred blew on the fire again, so they wouldn’t see his face reddening. ‘I just liked the idea that there’s still things that we don’t know. At school, it’s the same thing, every day. I liked that it might be all right to believe in large, mad, wild things.’

  The journey on the raft had taken up the whole morning, but still the afternoon stretched ahead of them, thick and green and vibrating with heat.

  ‘We need more wood,’ said Fred. They would burn through what they had by the time dark came. They needed so many things, he thought: food, and a plan or a map or a passing ship – but at least wood was something he knew where to find.

  His vision swam as he stood; he was growing weaker, and the blood in his veins felt thinner.

  At first, Fred went fast, his head down, marking the trees with an X scratched in the bark, watching his feet among the roots and fallen branches.

  But soon he began to slow. There was so much to look at; so much that was strange; so much that was new and vast and so very palpably alive.

  The trees dipped down their branches, laden with leaves broad enough to sew into trousers. He passed a tree with a vast termite nest, as big as a bathtub, growing around it. He gave it a wide berth.

  The greenness, which had seemed such a forbidding wall of colour, was not, up close, green at all, Fred thought. It was a thousand different colours; lime and emerald and moss and jade and a deep dark almost black green that made him think of sunken ships.

  Fred breathed in the smell. He’d been wrong to think it was thick, he thought; it was detailed. It was a tapestry of air.

  The trees clustered more closely together the further he walked. The light grew dimmer, though he was sure it was still mid-afternoon, a deep green filtering down through a roof of leaves and vines. He heard something move in one of the green bushes that clustered around his feet.

  ‘Hello?’ he called. He stepped backwards. ‘Hi?’

  As he called something sharp scraped against his arm.

  He jumped and leapt away, swearing, and felt his mouth fill with the taste of fear: bile and tin. But it wasn’t a snake, or even a spider.

  ‘Being stupid,’ muttered Fred. It was just a bush.

  Or perhaps it wasn’t even a bush. He leant closer. It was a clump of spiky fruit.

  ‘A pineapple,’ he whispered aloud.

  Fred felt his fingertips prickle, shot through with the spark of discovery. This, he thought, must be what Columbus had felt like.

  He reached out to pull the fruit from its throne of leaves – and then snatched his hand back, watching blood swell from a serrated gash in his thumb. ‘Ach,’ he whispered.

  He braced himself, wrenched up five of the biggest pineapples and set off at a run – a slightly jolting run, checking every few trees for the X and doubling back three times. At last he burst through the trees at the edge of the clearing.

  He was met by a scream. ‘Get back!’

  Lila was standing in front of Max, one arm pushing him behind her, a stick pointed in the direction of Fred’s throat. Con stood behind her, fists raised.

  ‘I brought some pineapples!’ panted Fred. Then, slowly, he took in the scene. He grinned. ‘Were you planning to kill me?’

  ‘We thought you were a wild animal,’ Con said, flushing deep red. ‘Call out, next time you come charging straight at us!’

  It was Max who saw the pineapples in his arms. He gave a roar of joy that shook the fire and sat down, his teeth bared ready. He held out both hands. ‘Mine mine mine!’ he said.

  Fred turned the pineapple in his hands, looking for a way in. Gingerly, he bit into the side of the fruit. A spike got up his nose, and another into his gum, but the juice was the most spectacular thing he had ever tasted. It was sweet and warm and it sparked on his tongue.

  ‘It’s amazing!’ he said. ‘It’s like eating electricity.’

  Con took a bite of hers. ‘It’s more like waging a war than seems fair, for dessert,’ she said.

  Fred used his nails to scrape away the skin, and dug out a handful of flesh. He held it out to Max. ‘Here. You’ll like it.’

  Lila was bent over her fruit, her plaits hanging over her lap. Now she looked u
p and grinned. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like a flint?’ she said. She’d cut into her pineapple with one of the arrowhead flints and carved out rough palm-sized chunks. She laid them out in a row.

  ‘Oh. That might be an improvement,’ said Fred. Somehow, he had pineapple juice in his ear. Con laughed. Lila hacked the fifth pineapple into quarters. ‘For breakfast,’ she said. She wrapped each piece in a large leaf and stacked them outside the den.

  The next morning, Fred startled awake with a handful of grass and moss in each hand. The nightmares were getting worse. He blinked, looking around. He wasn’t in the den but lying in the clearing near the pool. He had dreamt he heard his father weeping, which was ridiculous; his father had never cried in his life. He had dreamt he was running home. Deep asleep, he must have heaved his body across the clearing. There were patches torn out of the grass around him.

  He brushed the mud from his face, and crawled over to the den. Lila and Con lay asleep, their hair tangled together. But the pineapple wasn’t there. Nor was Max.

  It took a moment for Fred to be sure he wasn’t still asleep. Then he jumped to his feet, whispering, ‘Please, no. No, no, no.’

  But there were no bones, no blood. Surely a jaguar would have left bones?

  Fred shook Lila awake. ‘Max is missing!’

  ‘Whatyouwant?’ she muttered. She tucked her knees up to her chin and batted him away. ‘’M’sleeping.’

  ‘Max isn’t here!’

  ‘What?’ Lila sat bolt upright. Her eyes still had sleep in the corners, and they were wild.

  ‘Max?’ she called. She jumped to her feet, scrambling out of the den, tearing her skin on the thorns. ‘Max!’ She stared around the clearing. Her voice rose to a roar. ‘Maxie! Where are you?’

  Con came barrelling out of the den. ‘What’s happening? Are you all right?’ She took one look at Lila’s stricken face. ‘Max!’ she called. ‘Stupid idiot boy! What if something’s eaten –’

  ‘Don’t!’ said Lila, rounding on her. ‘Don’t you dare!’ And then, louder, her voice scraping at the air, ‘Max! MAX!’

  ‘He might be by the river?’ said Fred.

  ‘We’ll split up,’ said Lila. ‘If I go down to the river, will you go back towards the plane?’ She stumbled forward, dizzy with panic. ‘Max!’