Lost in the Jungle

by Bill Nye

  Really, there was only one choice.

  I dove into the brown water.

  Bobby was already a few body lengths ahead of me, swimming freestyle and kicking like a madman. I opted for doggy paddle. Or call it the capybara crawl. I stayed low, with just my mouth above the surface, and tried not to splash. That way, maybe the piranhas would be more attracted to Bobby—and I could hurry for shore while he was fending them off.

  Something slick and rubbery brushed against my leg. Panicking, I thrashed at the water, then turned and swam backward. Whatever it was, the thing was huge. Had Bobby really hooked a legendary fish? And was it coming back for me now? I didn’t even want to think about the other possibilities. The huge otters, for one. Or the beasts of the forest. One particularly terrifying jungle dweller liked slithering into the water in search of a snack. This monster didn’t have deadly claws or teeth. Instead, it wrapped its victims in life-erasing hugs. And I really, really didn’t want to be the next meal of a giant boa constrictor. I turned back onto my stomach. Forget the capybara crawl. I needed to channel my inner Ava. I dropped my face into the water and swam as hard as possible.

  The beast bumped my legs again.

  And again.

  My heart was pumping insanely fast. I churned and swung my arms and kicked with every muscle fiber in my skinny legs. Exhausted, completely out of air, I was almost too terrified to breathe. I picked up my head and wiped my eyes. The shore wasn’t far. I could make it. I swam harder.

  My hand hit something. Not a fish, though. And not a boa constrictor, either. My fingers dug halfway down into cool silt. The river bottom. I picked up my head. The actual shore was still thirty feet away, but I’d made it to the shallows, at least. The current had slowed. I kicked forward, then pulled my knees up under me. The water was waist deep. I stood and spun around, looking for the creature that had either been testing me as a possible meal or playing some weird Amazonian version of footsie. But I couldn’t see anything through the latte-brown water. Still, there was no way I was turning around, either. Whatever it was that had bumped me was definitely coming back, and I needed to be able to see it. My heels sank into the mud as I backed up slowly, step-by-step, out of the running river.

  “Stop,” Bobby whispered behind me.

  I twisted my head around. He was only a few strides from the shore, in water up to his knees, but he was crouching, holding his hands out to his sides. He turned his head only slightly as he spoke to me, keeping his eyes trained into the jungle. “Do not . . . come . . . any closer.”

  Slowly, I turned around completely. A large cat with spotted black-and-yellow fur was stepping silently out of the brush on padded paws. This was not the kind of feline that purrs and leaps onto bookshelves or pounces on little garden mice. This was one of the most feared predators in the jungle, a cat that could crush the skull of a capybara with a single snap of its powerful jaws.

  Bobby was staring down a jaguar.

  I turned sideways, watching the water for signs of the mystery creature while glancing at the slowly approaching predator. Bobby was backing toward me. “We’re going to be okay,” he said. His voice was calm and soothing. I actually believed him. “We’re going to be fine, Jack.” The jaguar was at the edge of the water. Bobby was nearly alongside me now, and his accent had returned. “Everything is going to be fine. But you’re not in Brooklyn anymore, are you?”

  The huge cat crawled closer.

  “Are you sure we’re okay?” I whispered.

  Bobby laughed. “Yes, I’m sure. Because cats don’t swim,” he said, and he slapped his hand down across the face of the river, sending a huge splash toward the jaguar.

  The creature growled.

  Bobby pulled back his hand to splash it again, but I grabbed his forearm. “Please don’t do that, Bobby,” I said.

  “Why not? That cat’s not coming in here.”

  The jaguar stepped down into the river. “Here in the Amazon, cats swim,” I said.

  His face turned white. “Are you serious?”

  The jaguar slowly entered the water, stepping toward us.

  Bobby cursed.

  We heard the roar of an engine behind us. The Von Humboldt was cruising into view, spraying water in its wake. But neither of us moved. The river briefly became warmer. I looked at Bobby. He avoided my stare. He couldn’t have. I mean, he was an adult. They didn’t do things like that. Right?

  Bobby started moving around me, walking up the river. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m swimming back out,” he said. “They won’t be able to get in this close, and we need to put as much water between us and that cat as possible.”

  “But there’s something else out there,” I warned him.

  Bobby didn’t listen. He ran upriver in the waist-deep water, plunged out into the current, and started swimming.

  Now I was the jaguar’s only prey.

  I backed out into deeper water.

  The creature was only fifteen feet away and inching closer.

  Then it leaped up out of the water and splashed down only a few feet away. A wave of water rushed past me, knocking me onto my back. The river was swirling between me and the jaguar, as if we were suddenly caught in some kind of busted wave pool. Two strange pink forms cut through the surface. But they weren’t snakes. The creatures had weird, ridged fins on their backs. The jaguar could still stand in the water, but it was slapping at the surface with its claws. The predator was panicking.

  One of the enormous pink fish swung wide, kicked hard beneath the surface, charging the jaguar, and rammed it like some kind of underwater rhinoceros. The cat snarled. The second creature charged from the other side, slamming into the jaguar again. I kept backing into deeper and deeper water. The cat was almost out of the river now, growling back at the mysterious creatures hiding in the murk. The beast wasn’t even looking at me anymore. I could hear Matt and Ava calling to me. If I was going to try to make it out to the boat, this was my chance. I turned and swam blindly, furiously. When I finally looked up, the Von Humboldt wasn’t far away. I buried my head and charged forward until I slammed my hand into its side.

  Matt and Bobby pulled me, gasping, from the river, and I flopped onto one of the cushioned benches at the back, coughing out a gallon of water. My sister grabbed me by the arm and helped me up. “You’re okay,” she said. “You’re okay.”

  I breathed. Bobby had already gone below. I stared back at the shore. The jaguar was slinking back into the brush. The strange pair of fish that had fought the creature had disappeared into the muddy water.

  “You are okay, right?” Alicia asked.

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “What were those things?”

  “Botos,” Pepedro said with a smile. “You are very lucky. Not every tourist gets to see a boto. Not every fisherman gets rescued by one, either.”

  “What’s a boto?” I asked.

  “They’re the pink dolphins,” Ava explained.

  “Not exactly,” Alicia said. “They are maybe a different species.” She held up her free hand. “They are very unique creatures. Some people believe they are magical creatures, citizens of the Encante, an underwater city beneath the river more beautiful than any kingdom on Earth. When people disappear in the river, they believe the botos have taken them to the Encante.”

  “Myths,” Ava said. “People invent those stories to make themselves feel better when someone dies. They’d be better off accepting their deaths.”

  I’d heard Hank say something similar once. And I wondered if Ava really believed it.

  “They also say that the botos can transform themselves into human form and make men and women fall in love with them. Maybe one of these botos liked you, Jack,” Alicia added with a smile. “Maybe you’d like to marry one?”

  Bobby climbed up from his cabin wearing a dry T-shirt and a new pair of purple lacrosse shorts. He tossed me a towel. He had another one wrapped around his neck. “Whoa! That was something, wasn’t it, Jack?”


  The lilt in his voice had returned; his accent was back. And I remembered that something else had been bothering me when we were facing the jaguar. But what?

  “Are you serious?” Ava asked. “That was totally reckless. You both could have been killed.”

  “You didn’t catch a fish, either,” Pepedro added.

  “I would have if little Jack here hadn’t cut the line.”

  Little Jack? I was a few inches over five feet tall, thank you very much. That was thoroughly average for a kid my age.

  “Besides,” Bobby continued, “the important thing is that we survived because I was brave enough to swim away and force that jaguar to lose interest.”

  “But I—”

  “Thank you,” Bobby said. “That’s all you have to say.”

  An army of intelligent robots with laser guns aimed at my chest couldn’t have forced me to say those words. I stared at my sister. Subtly, she shook her head and mouthed the words “Let it go.”

  My clothes were soaked, and I smelled like dirty river water and fish scales. Down below, I washed my hands and face. While I was changing into dry clothes, a little clap of mental thunder rolled through my brain. Bobby’s words on the shore came back to me.

  But you’re not in Brooklyn anymore, are you?

  He knew we lived in Brooklyn, a detail we hadn’t even shared with Dona Maria. He’d been faking his accent this whole time. He got the name of the boat wrong. He barely knew anything about the Amazon River. Or the rainforest. The guy didn’t even know that jaguars could swim. And sure, this could have been a random coincidence, but given his lacrosse shorts, he seemed to like the color purple.

  Bobby wasn’t a captain.

  He wasn’t a river guide.

  He was an impostor and a thief.

  We had traveled all the way to Brazil to warn Hank about the crook who’d broken into his lab to steal his ideas. Now we were leading that man right to him.

  9

  DITCHING THE CAPTAIN

  My siblings didn’t need to be convinced. Bobby’s accent had been grating on Ava; the idea that he’d been faking it made perfect sense to her. Matt wondered how he’d discovered our plans, and I reminded him of the limo. The driver’s phone was on speaker the whole time, and we’d discussed just about everything. Bobby had probably hired us the limo, then listened to our whole conversation. Ava guessed he’d been following us the whole time we were in Brazil.

  “Do you think he got those kids to steal our phones?” my sister asked.

  “No, they probably just stole them,” Pepedro said.

  Our supposed captain had gone below, and the Brazilians were checking occasionally to make sure he was still in his cabin. “We have to ditch him,” Ava decided.

  “Sure, but how?” I asked.

  Matt was shaking his head. “We should’ve known! That first day, he didn’t even ask our names.”

  “That’s because we’d already met in Hank’s lab,” I said. “He knew all about us when he came looking for the drive.”

  Alicia signaled us to lower our voices.

  “Okay,” Ava said, “so what do we do now?”

  Pepedro began juggling again, tapping the ball from one foot to the other, applying a little backspin with each flick. Without looking at us, he asked, “You think Bobby is traveling into the jungle just to get this drive?”

  I shrugged. “It can’t be a coincidence.”

  “Do you know if Hank still has it with him?” Pepedro asked.

  “No, but he’d been carrying it everywhere,” Matt said.

  “In his little fanny pack, right?” Alicia asked. “I love this fanny pack. So American. But I still don’t understand. Why so much trouble over some ideas?”

  “Those ideas could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” I explained.

  “Oh,” Alicia answered. “Then I would protect them, too. But maybe in something a little stronger than a fanny pack.”

  We heard Bobby’s cabin door open, and Pepedro smothered the ball on the deck with the bottom of his foot.

  “So then the proton replied, ‘I’m positive,’” Matt said.

  Ava fake-laughed and elbowed me. I forced a chuckle, then whispered to our confused Brazilian friends. “Science joke.”

  “Is it really this funny?”

  “To them,” I said.

  Bobby smiled at us and returned to his perch at the bow. Ava switched on the stereo and turned up the volume. He turned around and gave us a thumbs-up.

  “Can we hike from here?” Ava asked. “What if we leave tonight?”

  “No,” Alicia said. “We’re not even close. We need to motor for at least two more days.”

  “So what do we do until then?”

  “I don’t know. Enjoy the Amazon?”

  This was impossible. The river terrified me now. At night, the noises were only getting louder. I kept seeing the red eyes of caimans on the shore and imagining piranhas swimming beneath us and river otters sneaking onto the deck at night while we were in bed, then wriggling down to our bunks and tickling our faces with their huge, wet whiskers. I had a nightmare about marrying a boto. In the dream, my tuxedo was pretty sweet, but the sight of the dolphinlike creature in the white dress and veil shocked me awake, and I slammed my head on the bottom of Pepedro’s bunk.

  The rain was almost constant now, and Bobby became horribly bored. And when Bobby was bored, he liked simple card games best. The morning after our stare-down with the jaguar I played crazy eights with him for three hours.

  After dinner that night, Matt and Ava were in the galley washing the dishes when I caught Alicia focusing on the shore. Bobby stood beside me, squinting in the same direction. “What are you looking at?” he asked her.

  She coughed and smiled. “I thought I saw a jaguar, but it was nothing.”

  Later, at the door to our bunks, I caught up to her and whispered. “There was no jaguar, right?”

  “There was no jaguar,” she replied, her voice hushed. “We’re here.”

  “Here? What do you mean? It has only been a day.”

  “There’s another trail. But we have to leave tonight. Here, even when he finds us missing in the morning, the jungle will be too thick for him to track us.”

  After I passed along the message to my siblings, we quietly packed, then waited. Every fifteen minutes, Pepedro would creep out to see if Bobby was still awake. But he just wouldn’t tire. At midnight he was still doing push-ups on the bridge. Not until one o’clock in the morning did we hear the door to his cabin click closed. We waited, and then Pepedro snuck into our rooms and told us it was time to leave.

  On deck, the two Brazilians opened the plastic locker at the stern and pulled out two gleaming machetes. One more remained. I went to grab one. “No, no,” Alicia said. “Not you.”

  “Why not?”

  “You will accidentally chop off your hand.”

  “And you won’t?”

  “We were given machetes when we were six years old. We know how to use them.”

  “So do I,” I said. I held out my hand and motioned for her to give it to me anyway. She passed me one of the blades. I swung it once and lost my grip. The blade flew across the deck and speared a life preserver.

  If it were possible for one person to incinerate another with his eyes, Matt would have done so right then and there. For a moment we were silent, and I worried that I’d ruined everything. We listened. Thankfully, Bobby didn’t stir. But I ruled out a possible career as a spy. Or a ninja.

  Alicia quietly pulled the blade out of the life preserver and returned it to the locker. “No machete for you.”

  “Let’s go before Jack wakes up the whole jungle,” Ava suggested.

  I swung my backpack up onto my shoulders. Ava did, too, and hers looked twice as stuffed. “Don’t tell me you’re bringing Betsy.”

  She shrugged. “I’m not leaving her here.”

  “Both of you will drop half that gear by tomorrow,” Alicia predicted. “This is too mu
ch to carry through the Amazon.”

  She didn’t know my sister.

  Pepedro pointed to my high-tops. “You don’t have boots?”

  “He doesn’t like boots,” Ava said.

  And she was right. “I’ll be fine.”

  “You’ll be wet,” Alicia said.

  After we’d checked and double-checked to make sure we had everything, Matt insisted on spraying Ava and me with some kind of organic insect repellent. A cloud of the stuff settled over us; I tasted it on my tongue and nearly vomited trying to keep down a cough. We climbed down onto the platform at the stern. The water was swirling behind the boat. Busted tree branches and dead leaves floated past in the current. Alicia leaned over and grabbed a stick the length of a baseball bat and broke off a few thin offshoots. She quietly lowered herself into the river and held her backpack on one shoulder. The water was stomach deep. As she walked, she poked at the river bottom with the stick.

  My brother followed her. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Sometimes there are sting rays in the sand,” Pepedro explained. “They leave you sore for a week.”

  “Get me a stick,” Ava said. “Please.”

  The water was warm, and we copied Alicia, holding our bags out of the river. The music of the jungle was getting louder with each step. The bugs and birds and maddening monkeys buzzed and shrieked and blared. Thick clouds blocked the moonlight. The shore was only twenty paces away. “Where’s the path?” I asked.

  Ava told me to be quiet.

  My high-tops were squelching into the silt. Was it a good idea to insist on wearing basketball sneakers instead of hiking boots? No, probably not. I definitely wasn’t going to win a Nobel Prize for the decision. But I was committed now.

  “We should have taken our shoes off first,” Matt said.

  “There’s no use,” Pepedro said. “This is the Amazon rainforest. Your shoes will be wet every minute of every day.”