In the Trees

by Pauline Fisk

  Suddenly, however, the river-bed fell away from him and he found himself plunged into deep water and thrashing about. The water was clear and he could see fish darting about beneath the surface. Regaining his composure, he swam under the arch, then flipped over and floated on his back staring up at the stalactites.

  They hung above his head, great red-and-honey-coloured spikes. Beyond the arch, Kid could see the jungle alive with every shade of green from emerald to aquamarine. The sun was bright out there. He caught flashes of turquoise, yellow and red as birds dipped and skimmed across the surface of the water. So many colours in one place. So much to see. So much to drink in.

  Finally Kid flipped over and swam back into the sunlight. Here he cut through the glassy water, taking his time for once – which had to be a first for a boy like him – not acting impulsively, but taking slow, deliberate strokes, one after another, which was the best way of doing things if you wanted to keep afloat.

  12

  GOLD MINE

  Doc Rose appeared just as Kid was coming up from the water. She didn’t look old enough to be a doctor, but she certainly knew her stuff. When she’d finished examining Kid from head to toe, she explained about the side-effects of dehydration and the dangers of mixing sun, alcohol and a chronic lack of water. Then, for good measure, she sorted out Kid’s blisters, put powder between his toes and gave him a lecture on the threat of trench foot if he didn’t take better care.

  When she’d finished lecturing Kid, the two of them made their way up to a forest clearing where the group was camped for the night. A fire had been lit and people were either cooking supper, stringing up their hammocks, or lying in them, writing up their diaries. There was no sign of Jez or Candy, but Doc Rose said they were off somewhere, setting up their aerial to report back to Craig, the field manager of their organisation, about picking up a spare.

  Kid said he’d been called a few things in his life, but never a spare. ‘What’s Jez going to do about me?’ he asked.

  ‘It depends on Craig,’ Doc Rose replied. ‘My guess is that he’ll agree for you to stay with us until we reach our destination at Rio Blanco. After all, no one can be spared to trek you out before then. We’re carrying too much vital equipment for anyone to turn back. And no way could you trek out of here on your own.’

  When Jez came back, he said the same thing almost word for word. ‘Which means you’re stuck with us,’ he said to Kid. ‘At least you are for the next few days. But then we’re stuck with you as well – so I suggest you give some thought to how you can make yourself useful.’

  Over supper, Kid was officially introduced to the rest of the group – though Jez kept the personal details to himself, simply describing Kid as an example of what could happen if one entered the jungle unprepared. People stared at Kid as if he’d landed from another planet, and he stared back warily. These people weren’t figments of his imagination, after all. They were real live Jaydene Lewis rich-kid types. Up-themselves, do-good types. Gap-year volunteers.

  But, no matter what Kid thought of them, when donations were sought to provide him with a jungle kit, Kid found the group generous to a fault, handing over spare head-torches, mess tins, foot powder, iodine, penknives, Deet to keep off the mosquitoes, and a belt-kit. Someone even found a sleeping bag they didn’t want, and Candy handed over the group’s emergency spare hammock, complete with mosquito net and Basha sheet, and asked someone to help Kid put it up.

  The boy who helped Kid was the one called Hal. When anything irritated him his face went a dull red. And Kid’s inability to grasp the basics of stringing up a hammock really irritated him. ‘That’s not high enough,’ he kept saying. ‘That’s not tight enough … Those strings will come undone … You haven’t fixed the mosquito net right …’

  Kid had to start again several times over, with Hal standing over him acting the jungle expert, though really he was nothing but a fresh-faced farmer’s son from Shropshire, who’d only arrived in Belize a week or so ago. Even when the hammock was right, Hal insisted that its green nylon Basha ‘roof’ was in the wrong place, and then he complained that the mosquito net was trailing on the ground and would pick up bugs.

  When Kid had finally got everything right, Hal demonstrated how to climb into a hammock without falling straight out. He made it look easy, but when Kid attempted it, he crashed straight on to the ground. It took four times to get it right, and attracted quite an audience. Finally, though, Kid got the knack of it and wriggled down his sleeping bag – though with his mosquito net tucked round him he didn’t dare move.

  Everybody laughed at him lying there like that, strung up between trees, unable to make himself comfortable. Even Hal couldn’t help but laugh. Snow was there, and Fritz the joker of the group, who later turned Kid’s efforts into a funny song. There was a boy wearing a Star Wars T-shirt, whose name was Al, and the black-haired boy who Kid nicknamed Jack-the-Goth.

  Kid reckoned he liked Snow, but wasn’t sure about the rest. She was Dutch, although her English was perfect. Joanne – the girl who’d stood behind Kid on the trek – came from Cardiff in Wales. Fritz was a boarding-school boy, who said he didn’t come from anywhere, whatever that meant. And Hal was a country boy, as he kept telling everyone, having grown up on what he called ‘God’s own earth’.

  Some of the group were on their gap year between school and university. Most of them had never left home before. All of them – including Hal, in Kid’s estimation – were clueless about how to look after themselves out in the real world.

  That night, Kid lay awake wondering how he was going to survive these people for another day. He thought about his father up at Gold Mine, and pulled out his mystery note to read it again. He had a head-torch to read with, but he could have done it anyway because the moon was so bright, shining down upon the camp.

  Kid pulled his newly acquired sleeping bag round him. He felt safe in the trees, swinging gently in his hammock, strung up between the branches where nothing could get him. Safer – if he was honest with himself – than he’d felt back in London with police sirens going off every few minutes and all Nadine’s locks and chains on the front door.

  Diamonds of light looked down at Kid from the trees all around the clearing as hidden creatures watched him. Did his eyes sparkle back, he wondered? And what did those creatures make of him? Distantly he heard howler monkeys roaring and remembered mistaking the sound for the roar of jaguars. So much had happened since then. After what he’d been through, Kid felt like a different person.

  The roaring grew closer until it reached the camp, its calls echoing from one side to the other, high up in the trees. Kid lay in his hammock, eyes wide open, hoping that he’d see something. For a few moments the unforgettable, full-throated roars of howler monkeys hurtled at each other from the trees on one side of the camp to the trees on the other. Then the roars started fading, and slowly the performance drew to a close. The howlers faded into the night, leaving behind not a swaying branch or a rustling leaf.

  Next morning, Kid found himself on the rota to help to cook porridge for more people than he could count. Afterwards he bathed in the river along with everybody else, dressed, packed his hammock and Basha kit and prepared to set off. Everything seemed easier this time round. The rucksack full of foodstuff that Kid had been put in charge of felt lighter, the mud seemed easier and the breaks seemed to come more frequently.

  ‘Are you all right?’ people kept asking, but they needn’t have worried. Despite his expectations, Kid was beginning to enjoy himself. None of his research on Belize had prepared him for how beautiful it would be, nor how good it would feel to be so far away from cars, roads, pavements, shops, office blocks and all other signs of civilisation, including even burger bars. Snow walked in front of him, and she was beginning to feel like a friend. She didn’t fuss over him like everybody else, but she did what no one else thought to do – which was fill him in on their project.

  ‘We’re going to build a bunkhouse for forest rangers up a
t Rio Blanco, on the Guatemalan border,’ she said, ‘so that the whole region can be patrolled to keep xateros at bay. Some of us will live there in our base camp, and do the building work, but the rest of us will spend our time trekking along the border, cutting a path and hanging up notices warning that this is a protected region, not to be entered without permission.’

  ‘And you really think that dangerous, cut-throat bandits are going to bother with a notice like that?’ Kid said, thinking of some of the villains he’d known back at home, and what they’d have made of it.

  Snow shrugged. ‘At least they won’t be able to claim that they didn’t know where the boundary was when the rangers catch them,’ she said. ‘But something’s got to be done because they’re moving through the forest, stripping it of everything from the plants on the forest floor – which end up in florist shop windows, would you believe – to monkeys, scarlet macaws and the last few jaguars to still live and breed out here in the wild.’

  Kid’s mind drifted off. It was interesting at first, but not when Snow went on and on. She was harping on now about decisions people would have to make about which team to join. Kid really didn’t care. Nothing really mattered after Gold Mine, he reckoned, when he’d fall into his father’s arms and these gap-year volunteers and their poxy project would become a thing of the past.

  Lunch was taken beside a shallow stream where everybody tipped water over their heads and refilled their bottles. It was good to lie in the shade eating tinned fish mashed up with baked beans, followed by peanuts and custard-cream biscuits. Someone took a photograph of a blue morpho butterfly, its wings glistening like jewelled enamel. Someone else found what they called ‘this really cool bug’ and everybody clustered round.

  Kid didn’t care about the bugs and butterflies. All he cared about was getting to Gold Mine. He thought of little else. The afternoon was dominated by mud, but it didn’t distract his thoughts one iota. Kid hauled his mud-clogged boots across a stream, stumbled along a sunlit track, crossed the stream again, as it looped back on itself, and came out into the open to find himself standing on the edge of an enormous clearing.

  This was it, apparently. Gold Mine, at last. Everybody started cheering. Around the clearing grew the tallest trees Kid had ever seen. Their roots alone looked taller than a man, their trunks shone in the sunlight like silver, and they rose in massive columns to be crowned with foliage, like kings of the forest.

  These were ceiba trees, Jez said. Holy trees, symbolising life itself. And Kid could quite see why. He started walking across the clearing. Beyond it stood a range of high green hills, but the clearing itself was anything but green – razed to sand and gravel by the mining company, which had rights here in this forest, according to Jez, that no amount of protection could legally prevent.

  Kid passed great hulking lumps of machinery parked beside a tarpaulin camp where the miners lived. A table had been set up in front of the tarpaulins and on it were a clutter of things from another world – coffee cups, a bag of sugar, a portable radio covered in fine dust, somebody’s knickers, a battered old paperback, somebody else’s old socks.

  A couple of miners sat at a bench in front of the table. It was evening now, the sun setting and their working day over. Someone in the background was cooking over a double-burner gas stove. Someone else was lying on a bunk bed behind a tarpaulin. All of them stared with undisguised curiosity as their visitors approached.

  Jez went up to them and started talking in a mixture of Spanish and English. It was obvious that they knew each other. Even the miners’ dog jumped round Jez’s feet as if he was an old friend. Kid wondered if he did this all the time – trekked gap-year volunteers out here for projects in the forest. What a life, he thought. It certainly beat working in a burger bar.

  Leaving Jez deep in conversation about pony trains and transporting equipment over the hills, Candy led the others down to the river to take off their boots and bathe their feet. The sky was darkening by now, and the moon rising above the tall green hills. Everybody looked up at it, marvelling at how huge it seemed, and how clear too. Some of them went off to find suitable trees for stringing up hammocks, but Kid returned to the camp where Jez seemed to have disappeared and the miners were sitting round their table eating supper.

  They all looked up as Kid approached. Nervously he cleared his throat, sensing what the answer was likely to be before he even asked it. ‘I’m looking for a man called Marcus Aurelius Cato,’ he said. ‘You don’t know him, do you?’

  The men stared blankly. A couple of them shook their heads. Kid pulled out his father’s photograph as if to double-check.

  ‘This isn’t the owner of your mine, is it?’ he said.

  ‘El propietario de esta mina no es Kriol, como este hombre. Es Americano,’ one of the miners said.

  ‘Not a Creole, like this man,’ translated another – though it wasn’t necessary; Kid had got the general drift.

  He went and sat with his back against a ceiba tree. So at least he knew that his father was a Creole now. Not that he was ever likely to need that particular piece of information. For, when it came to finding his father, he would always draw a blank. This thing was too big for him. He never should have taken it on.

  Supper appeared, and Kid ate along with everybody else, though he didn’t taste a thing. His mind was somewhere else. All this while, he’d been imagining arriving in Gold Mine and travelling no further. But his time with these gap-year volunteers wasn’t over yet. He was stuck with them for a few more days.

  Jez started talking about what they’d be facing tomorrow and, realising he’d be facing it as well, Kid started listening in. The worst of it all was going to be three steep, green, jungle-clad hills which they’d have to get over in order to reach their base camp on the other side.

  ‘It’s going to be a long day,’ Jez warned them all.

  ‘And a hot one,’ Candy added. ‘Which is why we need to be off at first light while the air’s still cool.’

  That night Kid lay awake, nursing his disappointed hopes. But morning, when it came, was beautiful, mist rising from the forest like an unravelling skein of silk and the first blush of gold breaking in the sky. Kid was up first, his Basha kit all packed up before anyone else awoke.

  The group, when it set off, was swollen to include a pony train carrying building equipment, and a small contingent of soldiers which appeared out of nowhere, seemingly, and would be with them, Jez explained, from now on. A shiver ran through the group as they started off all together. The soldiers carried sub-machine guns slung over their shoulders. Their leader was a massive man who looked like Rambo, only black. His name was Hubert and he led the way with a ferocious-looking machete, cutting a path for them to follow as they left the clearing and headed uphill.

  What were they in for? What lay ahead? Kid looked up a wall of green with no apparent end in sight. All around him people were looking up it too, their faces grim. The pony train went up first because it was fastest. It was followed by the soldiers with their machetes, and then the rest of them trudged along behind, a grim realisation dawning on them of what exactly they were in for.

  A few people, determined to prove how tough they were, tried rushing ahead with the soldiers. And a few trailed behind, moaning at every step. But Kid steered a middle course between the two groups. No way was he going to show off like Hal and a big boy called Wallace and that joker, Fritz, who was already complaining that his shoes were rubbing, but refused to stop to find out why. But then no way was he grumbling either, like the rest of them.

  Even so, Kid was relieved every time Jez or Candy called for a break. It took two breaks, an hour apart, to reach the top of the hill, then another hour’s walking to come down the other side to the river. Jez told them they’d done fantastically well, but none of them were listening. They were too busy filling their hats with water which they then slammed on to their heads, filling their bottles, even lying down and letting the river flow over them.

  For the f
irst time since discovering that his father wasn’t going to be at Gold Mine, Kid felt his spirits rise. People slapped him on the back as if he was one of them and not a stranger. He’d been through what they had, and they no longer treated him as if he’d come from another planet. And perhaps they weren’t so different from him in return. Maybe they weren’t just boring do-good geeks.

  All around Kid, people lay about in a state of collapse. Nobody wanted to move, not even the soldiers. But the day was hot by now, the sun was high in the sky and according to Jez they still had a long way to go.

  ‘The next hill will be easier,’ he said.

  ‘But de hill after dat,’ Hubert said, ‘maan, he’s gonna be a killah.’

  Kid struggled back into his rucksack. No matter how refreshed he felt, after a few minutes up the next hill, his time in the river might never have been. The air was so close that Kid felt physically crushed by it. Sweat poured off him in steady streams. Even walking in the shade didn’t ease things.

  Kid’s back ached from the weight he was carrying. His legs felt like buckling and there was the terrible knowledge, courtesy of a grinning Hubert, that the third hill was going to be the worst.

  And it was too. Hubert was right. Kid thought the second hill was difficult, but the third was cunning as well as steep. The third played games with them.

  Every time they thought they’d made it to the top, there was always another incline waiting hidden up ahead. And when they thought they’d started down the other side, suddenly they’d find themselves heading back up again.

  Hardly surprisingly, after hours of trekking, people started cracking. They’d had enough. Jack-the-Goth turned white with breathlessness. Star Wars Al panicked and said he was going to pass out. A couple of soft-skinned girls called Laydee and Tilda ended up in tears. Fritz’s jokes dried up. A lad called Benji who’d been going on the entire trip about how much he loved snakes, saw one and nearly died of shock. Another lad called Jim said he wanted to go home. Later, he said he hadn’t meant it, but he’d sounded as if he meant it to Kid.