by Zach Neal
With face reddening, blinking rapidly and trying not to stare, Uncle Harry turned for the breakfast table. This was set up in a shady corner where their native friends had hacked and cut and taken out some big roots to level the ground.
According to all calculations, they were within five or ten miles of their supposed temple. If so, this was about as good a camp as they were likely to find. There was good water coming down in a foaming white cataract from the highlands above them to the northeast.
So far, it was all speculation.
“Good morning, sir.” Mister Day was already at it, stuffing tinned steak-and-kidney pie into a maw that was looking particularly voracious this morning.
It would be fairer to say that hacking away at virgin growth with machete and axe was hard work and it certainly built an appetite.
Kevin was there and Mister Syrmes. Mister O’Dell had gone off for a walk, as he put it, after giving his oblivious wife a rather dark look and some cryptically-snippy remarks. He might be gone for a while, but they never seemed to get moving much before nine-thirty or ten anyways.
He might have just been tired of sitting in a boat.
If they were fighting, they must have been doing it in low tones. The thin walls of a tent didn’t hold too many secrets. Jeremy and the other bachelors were in the tent right next to them.
Jeremy eased himself out of his own wood and canvas deck chair, where he had been enjoying the view of Mrs. O’Dell. There was no harm in looking after all, and he took his place at the table, looking very crisp and fresh in its white linen.
Paolo had turned out to be an excellent cook, unfamiliar as he had initially been with the portable stove hauled along aboard the boat and ultimately, on people’s backs. Up the hill and down the dale, over the hills and through the woods—losing blood every step of the way.
Their native party had their own tents and cooking fire, built on the ground in the more usual fashion. They seemed to cook in two ways, one was a big iron pot hung on a tripod. The other way was either in or under the coals. It was very quiet from over there. They were prone to siestas in the hottest part of the day and a good expedition leader took that into account. Also, there wasn’t very much for them to do. The tents had been pitched, the shelters had been built and the latrines had been dug. They were probably just sleeping-in. Jeremy was learning a lot, how much good it might do him in the long run was another question.
It was all right, he supposed, and yet he had to admit that the sort of scientific curiosity exhibited by his Uncle and one or two of the others—Mister Day and Mister O’Dell for example, was somehow lacking.
Mister Smith didn’t seem to care one way or another, and neither did Mrs. O’Dell. Mr. Syrmes was positively delighted to collect specimens and photographs on the side, as he said.
It had nothing to do with the expedition, but he didn’t seem to be able to quit.
Half the species they’d seen so far, plant, animal, fungus, were completely unknown. Jeremy supposed that was remarkable. No one could say they weren’t educated and they had all the books and catalogues. Mister Syrmes’ drawings were beautiful, and yet still scientifically meticulous. There was real talent there, in Jeremy’s opinion.
The insect life, bird-eating spiders, giant butterflies, big walking sticks and such, was fascinating, the monkeys and the birds were all right—insofar as that went. Jeremy had been putting some thought into his future. In that sense, perhaps something had been sparked into life within him.
It really was that kind of a world—a lost world, full of secrets waiting to be unraveled and exciting mysteries yet to be revealed.
His own ignorance had been revealed to him.
And now he wanted to know more—
Perhaps that was it.
It was just a weird kind of feeling he’d had.
***
They were doing compass marches, watching time, keeping notes, making drawings when applicable and just trying to map their way around what had to be a pretty small patch of jungle. Working in pairs, Jeremy had been teamed up with Mister O’Dell. The gentleman knew what he was doing, at least to hear him tell it. There were two other parties of two men each. Theoretically, they were separated by about two hundred metres, running on parallel tracks. How long that might have lasted, was anybody’s guess. They hadn’t heard a thing from the other parties all day.
While they all knew what they were supposed to do, the maps were useless this far upriver.
After a while, the arms ached from chopping brush…every so often the jungle thinned out and it was pure, heavenly relief that never lasted quite long enough.
Jeremy and Mister O’Dell had gone a hundred yards south of camp and then turned east. Smith and Paolo had done the opposite. Two hundred yards north, and then turn east. They were due north, and his Uncle and Mister Day were supposed to be two hundred yards further north…theoretically.
Setting off shortly after breakfast, that was hours ago now. They’d sat down on a log about noon and had their sandwiches, bully beef and mustard. A pickle, a piece of cheese and one bottle of beer each.
It was like if you ate it, you didn’t have to carry it.
The real problem was when they became separated. It was hard to say just how that had happened. O’Dell had been right there only a moment before. Jeremy had stepped into the bushes to relieve his bowels, something hard to get used to and always a vulnerable feeling. He couldn’t have gotten too far, and yet the man didn’t answer when Jeremey called. He was shouting at the top of his lungs and straining his voice in the ever-deepening gloom.
It seemed like he’d been thrashing around in the underbrush for hours, yet it was probably no more than half an hour.
Night was falling and he was hungry and it was time to go home, hence his rapidly-increasing impatience.
There may have been some element of panic in there as well. When he cast his mind back, they had followed a more-or-less straight course, crossing several clear, shallow streams and what they thought was the Cuao again, deep, black and winding through the gloomy dark trees.
They had climbed one or two precipitous little hills along the way, volcanic plugs isolated by swamps, and then come back down to the level again.
The other thing that was that Mister O’Dell had the compass. Mister O’Dell also had a long-barreled revolver hanging on his hip and a few loose rounds in his pocket.
Jeremy had a half a pint of water, a few biscuits, some raisins and a flashlight, and thank God for that. The bug juice, which wasn’t all that good to begin with, had pretty much worn off. He was tired, hungry, thirsty, stinky and had just about had enough of floundering around in jungles.
Every so often, he would stop to check for leeches. As often as not, he would find another one, and he was running low on matches.
“Mister O’Dell!” He bellowed one last time into the unresponsive forest, vast, magnificent, and ultimately indifferent.
Craning his ears, heart thudding in his chest, there was nothing.
Just nothing.
Damn that man.
***
Checking his watch, and trying desperately to remember just how to tell direction with it, (he’d read an article in The Boy’s Own Paper, yet it also involved the northern hemisphere, which somehow complicated matters), he noted it was terribly early to be getting so dark. If he was lucky enough to get out of this, he’d read it again.
An unfamiliar cold breeze touched his cheek.
Right about then, the treetops began thrashing, the wind whistled, it got darker still and the whole heavens opened up. Torrents of rain slashed at his skin as he plunged into the heavy trees, desperately seeking some form of shelter. No other place was any better…there was no place to go.
It got darker and darker. Thorn-laden branches whipped at his face. He was already soaked. It was madness to run. There was no-place to go, nowhere to get to. He ran hard into a wall of wood, a big old mahogany of a thousand years, for all he knew.
Stepping over the flying buttresses that were the base of the trunk, something big crashed to the ground off to his left. The ground, where it could be seen when the lightning flashed, was littered with deadfall. Only now did its significance become clear. It was all coming down at once. On the far side there was shelter of a kind. The wind was hard from the northwest. Turning on the light, he looked about, finding not much but a few slabs of bark…there. Leaves, and a small, immature hardwood tree that he might be able to uproot. It was a plan. Thunder cracked and the place lit up and he could do nothing but flinch in reflex.
He might have said a few bad words…
One could only pray that the storm would be over soon, and that the light would come back again.
With the rattle of hail all around him, the air was deucedly chilly and it was all he could do not to scream, to shout, and stamp his feet like a child.
This was definitely serious.
Damn you, Uncle Harry!
***
Finally, the storm abated and it was merely rain.
At some point, he thought he would go mad.
At some point, about nine-thirty p.m., the wind dropped off, the sky cleared, and there were even stars visible in the thin gaps in the branches above. A dim blue glow indicated that the moon must be up.
It appeared that he hadn’t been paying enough attention. But the moon had definitely been up the night before.
It was terribly cold and he shivered in the wet clothes.
When he had the light on, the forest floor was a creeping, crawling barrage of insect life. There was a constant background whirr, and things snapped and whisped and thudded, all around him. At some point he determined that it was just nuts, or seeds, some kind of fruit dropping from above. To turn the light off and conserve batteries was worse, so much worse, as every little rolling ball of cold sweat turned itself into an army ant, marching on their stomachs and consuming all before.
Every little itch, every little tickle, turned itself into the first touch of an anaconda about to swallow his next lunch. Every little noise translated itself into his imminent demise.
It was true—your hair really could stand up on end.
To lay down was unthinkable, although he perched awkwardly from time to time on the lower bit of exposed root or trunk.
The only thing that saved him was the light and his watch. After a while the bulb seemed dimmer, and so he kept it off for longer and longer periods.
After a time, he concluded that all he had to do was make it through until morning. Surely they would come looking. He’d been awake all night once or twice, and he’d made it through the day.
Surely he could find his way back—if only he could see what he was doing. If he got close enough, surely he would hear them, or smell the wood-smoke.
At some point, something nipped him on the lower calf muscle.
At that point, Jeremy really did scream, to no avail of course, but it was just some damned jungle cat. He had no choice but to use the yellowing light.
The animal was as cute as a button and showing a strange sort of affection in the only way it knew how: by chewing on things, just as it would on a recent kill, its mother or its siblings.
“Bugger. What in the hell are you doing here.”
This would pretty much have to be an ocelot, going by description alone. He’d never actually seen one. Considering the circumstances, he was damned grateful for the company. The creature had to be a good twenty pounds and very fit.
“Who’s a good boy?”
Purr-purr-purr.
What a crazy little bugger.
Tears welled up and he let them flow in a kind of objectivity.
The stream of leaf-cutting ants across this little patch of litter seemed to have abated. They probably weren’t interesting in him, but having them crawl all over him wasn’t too good either…
Gratefully lowering himself to the ground, he batted the persistent creature as it nuzzled in close and then took another experimental nip at an exposed flank.
“Hey! Hey, you little bastard. Lay off with the teeth, already.”
Rolling over on its back, the light snapped on again for further examination, the animal rumbled and purred.
It seemed Jeremy had made a friend.
He rubbed its belly, tried to avoid those sharp teeth and even sharper claws, and prayed for all he was worth.
***
Somehow he must have slept. The way he knew that was simple enough, his knees were screaming under bending and compression. He’d been standing again, then having leaned up against the tree and fallen asleep.
He had gradually buckled and slid down, lower and lower. The other thing was the dreams.
Dreams indicated sleep, and yet Jeremy ached. There was a hint of light now. Locating east would be damned difficult. The light was filtered and vague, with mist and steam still hanging in the understory.
At this latitude, there was little seasonal variation in the length of the day. The sun went north in so-called winter and south in so-called summer. In the equatorial regions, it went just as many degrees, but it didn’t seem to make much difference in the heat of the day. Theoretically, the sun went so many degrees right and left, up and down.
The ocelot was gone, thankfully. Its only way of expressing affection or anything really, was to kill it, eat it, chew on it, (or spray it, maybe), and Jeremy had already been nipped too many times by the thing. Those claws were very sharp, but then they had to be. Sad as it was to see it leave, it was better for all concerned. He wished it all the luck in the world.
With the heavy rains of the night, there wasn’t much hope of finding his back-trail.
He had run about fifty yards, from somewhere over there.
A hundred yards beyond that, should be the most recent creek that they had crossed. O’Dell had definitely been with him then.
Ergo, he must have disappeared somewhere between here and there. With water all around there, it couldn’t be a very big piece of land at all.
Assuming he’d fully circled the tree, the other side of it must be west. Bird life was waking up, with calls, screeches and squawks coming from all around. The mosquitoes never seemed to let up, and he itched all over from their attentions. Monkeys were getting ready to chuck things down at him, judging by their excited calls.
Slapping one more mosquito, finding a good gob of blood on his fingers, he took one last look around and then went for it.
“Mister O’Dell! Mister O’Dell.” Jeremy picked his way through the underbrush, sensing that they really couldn’t be all that far apart.
O’Dell had to be around there somewhere and his entire body just ached.
His clothes were slowly drying but the underbrush was still wet and this was going to take awhile.
***
He’d been standing right about here, wondering where O’Dell went, when the storm came up.
He hadn’t been being very observant, but the configuration of a clump of hanging vines did seem rather familiar. The trouble was they all looked familiar. Everything looked the same in the jungle.
They’d been following along a ridge line, with the occasional outcrop of stone and moss the only relief from underbrush, dense, thick and full of every sort of plant, insect, reptile, and fungus inimical to man or beast. There were man-eating trees, or so he had been told…Lord.
“Mister O’Dell!” Nothing, but the sound of a cataract rising in the background off to his right spurred him forward.
There was a waterfall near camp, but they were right close to the fall-line, as Mister Smith had called it. There was an escarpment, and then higher ground. What with wind, and birds, he hadn’t noticed it the day before. Maybe he really was lost.
It was a horrible thought. The place did look familiar.
Just on the verge of the real foothills, the valley bottom was riven by hundreds of creeks, sloughs and bayous, mostly parallel in spite of winding back and forth in lazy curlicues. The jungle just oozed wa
ter. That was the thing. It made its own weather.
There was an actual clearing on the bank. It was so unique, they’d remarked upon it at the time. There were some faint and ambiguous scuff-marks in the dirt. This had to be their clearing.
He was hoping for tracks, of which they’d seen a few, possibly deer, (they were indistinct and hard to identify), peccary, small mammals, birds and squirrels and the like.
Predictably, the ground was beaten flat and pockmarked by the rain. It was still damp and steaming in the erratic beams of sunlight coming in from above, or rather, behind. The great forest gently swayed in what sounded like a light breeze up above and glistening drops fell from the wet treetops. He couldn’t say for sure if anyone had ever been there or not. It was best to try and be objective. The water before him was black. They’d followed the bank on the other side and crossed on a dead tree that must have been a couple of feet thick and sturdy. Crossing on a tree was always chancy. The tree had fallen for a reason and some of them were pretty rotten. They could break under your weight and the further you fell, the worse it was going to be. He’d already skinned his shins more than once and the pain was a good reminder. Your shoes were always going to be wet.
It should be off to his left, less than thirty yards…the wall of green on the side of his little clearing was uninviting. He couldn’t stay there all day, either. His stomach alone would see to that, and he only had a couple of swallows of water left. Parting the first fronds of tall grass and weeds, he was rewarded with the sight of a depression in the soft turf.
He almost remembered making that step—
Jeremy opened his mouth to call again, when there came the sound of a distant gunshot, half a mile or more to the west.
***
