Deep In The Jungle Read online

  33

  It was late afternoon and they’d been sitting on the bank for almost two hours waiting for Murilo to show up. Certainly, he must have noticed their absence from the resort.

  Macky was running out of interesting fish facts to amuse Dillon. He told Dillon there were over 2,200 species of fish in the Amazon region—and had even gone down an extensive list—but Dillon’s attention span was very limited. He told the boy about the needle gar, the Amazon’s freshwater version of the barracuda, and there were actual vampire fish with long fangs, but it was obvious the boy wasn’t listening.

  When Macky mentioned there were even sharks in the river, Dillon’s ears perked up. “You mean like in Jaws?”

  “Well, not as big as a great white,” Macky had to confess.

  “Does Murilo even know where we went?” Ally asked, interrupting their little tutorial and giving Macky an appreciated reprieve.

  Macky was silent for a moment.

  “You didn’t tell him?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t think we were going to get stranded out here. He was busy.”

  “I’m hot. Can’t I take this stupid thing off?” Dillon said, tugging at his life vest.

  “No,” Ally said firmly. “Not while we’re near the water.”

  “I’m hungry,” Dillon whined.

  “Sure you are. We all are.”

  “We should just head back on our own,” Macky said.

  “You mean, hike through the jungle. It must be a least five miles back to the resort.”

  “Don’t worry, we won’t get lost. If we keep to the shoreline we’ll find our way back before it gets dark.”

  “You really don’t think he’s coming?” Ally asked, not sure she wanted to walk all that way; especially knowing Dillon wouldn’t be keen to traipsing through the jungle.

  “It doesn’t appear so.”

  “Okay.” Ally looked over at Dillon. “Looks like we’re going on a little hike.”

  Dillon made a face but didn’t say anything.

  At first it was easy to keep to the shoreline and follow the river, but it wasn’t long before the bank was entangled with thick vines and buttress roots too tall to climb over, which forced them to detour inland.

  After weaving through a dense patch of jungle, they came upon an open area of sand near a lagoon and a stream funneling down a rocky slope.

  It was picturesque with the sunlight filtering through the trees.

  “Too bad this isn’t part of the tour,” Macky said, gazing around at the splendorous setting.

  “This would make the perfect postcard,” Ally said.

  Dillon started to walk across the sand when suddenly he stepped on something that cracked.

  “What was that?” Ally said.

  Macky and Ally walked over to Dillon.

  “Lift your foot,” Macky said.

  Dillon raised his shoe revealing something smashed in the sand.

  “What is that?” Ally asked.

  Macky knelt on one knee and shoved the fractured eggshell around with his finger. “I don’t think we should be here,” he warned.

  They heard another cracking sound and turned as a tiny head popped out of the sand. The creature cried out weakly with its first breath. Another infant broke out of its shell. Soon half a dozen newborn crocs were screeching as they clambered out of their cracked birthing incubators and onto the sand.

  “Look, Ally! Baby alligators,” Dillon shouted and ran to pick one up.

  “We have to get out of here, and right now,” Macky said.

  Ally turned and saw the worried look on Macky’s face. “What is it?”

  “We’re in the middle of a caiman nesting ground.”

  Dillon was holding a baby caiman.

  The tiny croc was instinctually nipping at his fingers, thinking it was food.

  A twelve-foot black caiman charged out of the brush. Two more came out from behind the trees.

  The surface of the lagoon rippled. Four reptiles slowly appeared; the large eyes and their snouts then the bony ridges of their long bodies emerging as they swam for the beach.

  Ally dashed over to Dillon. “Put that down!” She snatched the baby alligator out of Dillon’s hand and placed it on the sand.

  “Hey! That’s mine,” Dillon protested.

  “Oh, yeah. Then tell that to its mother,” Ally said and grabbed his hand.

  Three caimans scrambled out of the water, propelling themselves across the sand with their powerful horn-ribbed tails. The crocodilians were over twelve feet long.

  They crawled across the sand toward Dillon and Ally.

  A caiman that had just swaggered out of the brush raised it upper jaw, revealing teeth as big as railroad spikes.

  Another alligator hissed.

  Macky looked for an opening.

  The caimans were closing in.

  “Run!” he yelled and scooped up Dillon.

  Ally dashed after him, running through the gauntlet of fierce reptiles.

  34

  The warrior pigmies had formed a tight circle around Ben, and he knew at any moment they would attack. He was easily outnumbered twenty-to-one, and that wasn’t taking into account how many were hiding out of sight, waiting for the signal to charge.

  But then the mood of the Indians took a surprising turn.

  They were grinning at him like he was the funniest thing they had ever seen.

  The bow hunters unstrung their arrows and put them back in their quivers while the pigmies with the spears held their shafts upright, no longer in a threatening manner.

  A few of the bolder pigmies came up to him and tugged at his shirt to see if it was his actual skin. They were laughing and jabbering in their native tongue, a dialect Ben was not familiar.

  A gregarious warrior approached and offered to carry Ben’s rucksack. At first he was apprehensive and didn’t want to part with it, but after seeing how the pigmies were suddenly treating him so kindly, he didn’t want to offend them and handed the pack over.

  Other pigmies came out of the jungle to join in the celebration, doting over him like parishioners idolizing a god.

  They grouped merrily around him, and before he knew it, he was in the middle of a precession marching through the jungle.

  After an hour of parading through the rainforest, Ben was escorted into a large clearing and the pigmies’ village, which comprised of a perimeter of a dozen thatched huts surrounding a longhouse, a common community dwelling arrangement used by most South American tribes.

  Naked women and children scampered over and milled around Ben. Everyone was chanting and carrying on, so excited to have a guest in their village.

  A few of the pigmy men ushered Ben toward the longhouse entrance. He had to duck his head as he went inside. The narrow room was gloomy so it was hard to see. A man ahead motioned for Ben to follow as they went into another portion of the structure.

  Ben passed through what he thought to be a doorway. It was pitch dark as he came into the next room. He felt something brush past him.

  A door closed shut.

  Ben turned and reached out, touching a wooden barrier. He shoved but it was solid and wouldn’t budge.

  “Hey, let me out of here!”

  He could hear voices and footfalls outside the longhouse.

  Ben couldn’t believe in a matter of seconds, his status had drastically changed from god to prisoner.

  It was stifling in the enclosed room and the air smelt stale and pungent like something had been there for some time and had slowly rotted.

  Ben took a few blind steps in the dark and hit an object with the toe of his boot.

  He reached in his pants pocket and took out his waterproof matches. He flicked the phosphorus head of a match with his thumbnail.

  The flame illuminated a small portion of the room, but it was enough for him to see what he had kicked on the ground.

  It was a human skull.

  Ben turned slowly and looked about the room. He was standing in the mi
ddle of a ring of thirty four-foot tall posts. At the base of each post was a skull, most likely of a defeated enemy.

  The flame was getting down to almost burning his hand.

  He gazed up at the top of a post and saw a small dark face with black hair and stitched up lips...

  A shrunken head.

  35

  Even though they were hopelessly lost and had no idea where they were going, Ryan had to admit he liked the sense of adventure. He tried to imagine what it must have been like to be one of those early explorers of the New World he had often read about. Brave men who’d traveled afar to strange lands in hopes of discovering wealth beyond imagination so they could appease their king or queen, only to end up being killed in a strange land by a bunch of savages.

  Striding through the jungle and carrying a spear, Ryan felt like a character straight out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel. Especially whenever he would glance over at Jackie and see her wielding her own spear, and her lusty appearance with her damp hair and smudged face.

  They’d covered a considerable amount of ground and seen many different aspects of the rainforest. The early morning mist had given the jungle a mystical look. As the day progressed, they crossed streambeds and saw different arrays of fauna, some parts too dense, other areas open and inviting.

  The lush green was always in abundance, the moss-covered trees looming overhead like an emerald cathedral ceiling. They found migratory paths left by big animals and followed them until they petered out.

  Early afternoon, they reached a lagoon under a waterfall. After a refreshing swim, they laid out on a rock to dry. Ryan tried his hand at spear fishing but hadn’t quite got the knack. Jackie found some berries and they ate those instead.

  They were hiking through a glen bordered by tall palms and buttress trees that had grown askew and looked like they were about to uproot and fall over when Jackie grabbed Ryan by the arm.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked and stopped walking.

  “There’s something up ahead.”

  Ryan looked at the foliage in front of them. He saw broad leaves and plenty of ferns and more greenery in the trees, but nothing he hadn’t seen countless times before. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Keep looking,” Jackie insisted.

  Ryan gazed at the foliage. He was about to break his concentration and tell Jackie she was seeing things when he saw it, too.

  Two bulbous eyes with black pinpricked pupils; but nothing else.

  It had been like staring intently at that test image of the white vase on a black background and then the brain suddenly recognizing the picture of two people facing each other.

  “I see it,” Ryan said in a low voice. “What do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ryan raised his spear. He took a step closer, hoping to get a better look and identify whatever it was but all he could make out were the creepy eyes, which were looking right at him.

  Jackie pointed her spear forward.

  “Let’s just try and get around it, whatever the hell it is,” Ryan said.

  They had only taken a couple steps when the thing stepped out from the vegetation. Until it had actually moved, the camouflaged creature had blended in perfectly, invisible to the naked eye.

  “Oh my God!” Jackie gasped.

  “You got to be kidding me.”

  The giant praying mantis was as tall as Ryan.

  When Ryan moved slightly, the large, triangular-shaped head swiveled in his direction. Standing on four legs, the mantis stood erect with its raptorial forelegs bent at the elbows, its wings tucked back against its stick-like body.

  Ryan couldn’t take his eyes off of the spines on the femurs and the huge two-toed claws.

  “Be careful,” Jackie warned. “Mantises are sexual cannibals.”

  “What?”

  “The females bite the heads off the males after sex.”

  “I don’t think I have to worry about that,” Ryan said.

  “That’s also how they normally kill their prey.”

  “Here I thought you were trying to be funny.”

  Ryan sized up the mantis. Even though they were the same height, the giant bug was probably half his weight as its legs and body were spindly.

  “Did you know they got this big?” Ryan said

  “This has to be some kind of mutation,” Jackie said.

  “My stepfather, Frank, always boasts everything is bigger in the Amazon. I guess he wasn’t kidding.”

  The mantis suddenly fanned out its wings, which made it looked twice as big. It stepped toward Ryan.

  Ryan didn’t back down and thrust his spear at the elongated body.

  Jackie swung her spear like a baseball bat and clipped one of the mantis’s stick legs. The giant bug’s head pivoted on its long neck and it glared at Jackie.

  “Get out of here!” Ryan yelled.

  The praying mantis hissed, and in a grand display, fluttered its wings like an enormous dragonfly and took off.

  Ryan and Jackie ducked as the giant insect flew over their heads.

  “Wow, that was really something,” Ryan said as he watched the mantis disappear into the trees.

  “I’ll say.”

  “Let’s just pray there aren’t any more of them,” Ryan said with a grin.

  Jackie smirked and shook her head. “Now, who’s trying to be funny?”

  36

  Frank heard the faint shrill of the rescue boat’s siren. They were so far away it was difficult to judge the true direction, but he was glad Enzo was still sounding the alarm at four-hour intervals.

  “Let me know when you want to rest,” he called over his shoulder.

  “I’m fine, though a shower would be great,” Wanda said, walking a few steps behind.

  James and Kathy were talking amongst themselves while Ignacio trudged after them with his shotgun ready, always vigilant of their surroundings.

  Frank put his hand up for everyone to stop.

  “What is it?” Wanda asked.

  “There’s something moving over there in the grass.” Frank motioned for Ignacio to come join him. Ignacio rushed up.

  “Maybe a boa,” Frank said, and Ignacio nodded.

  The two men waded through the grass then froze when they saw the long creature, not slithering like a snake, but marching on hundreds of legs.

  “It’s an enormous centipede,” Frank said, loud enough so the others could hear.

  “Are you serious?” Wanda said.

  “Look for yourself.”

  Wanda approached warily and stood next to Frank. “Oh my God. It has to be over eight feet long.”

  James and Kathy hurried over to take a look.

  “That must be a Guinness record,” James said.

  “What about those gigantic centipedes they discovered on that island in the Philippines last year?” Kathy said. “Weren’t they even bigger?”

  “Who knows?” James said. “After they evacuated everyone off the island, the U.S. Air Force came in and incinerated the entire island with napalm.”

  They watched awestruck as the enormous centipede weaved through the grass and scuttled into the underbrush.

  “That’s got to be the biggest centipede ever, eh Frank?” James said.

  “Could very well be, but you never know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ever hear of Raymond Trodderman?”

  “Sure, he was an entomologist, such as yourself. Didn’t he die in an airplane crash?”

  “That’s right. He had a journal. In it, he had recorded finding a species like you just saw, only much bigger, in the Amazon.”

  “And you think that might be here?”

  “Could be.”

  “And where’s this journal now?” James asked.

  “Unfortunately, it was destroyed.”

  “That’s a shame,” Kathy said. “I’ll bet there were some great discoveries in that journal.”

  “There were,” Frank said.

/>   “What, you got to read it?” James asked.

  “Parts, not all. But he did mention finding a plant.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “I don’t know as there weren’t any pictures. The only thing he noted was that it was so magnificent, that if you saw it, you’d know you found it.”

  “So what was so special about this mysterious plant?”

  “He had a notion that it was the cure,” Frank said.

  “Cure for what?” James asked.

  “The big C. Cancer.”

  James’s eyes lit up like someone had just handed him a billion dollars.

  37

  Ben felt around in the dark. He tore a leafy stalk from the thatched ceiling and balled up the end. He lit another match and touched the flame to his improvised torch, which burned brightly.

  He took a closer look at the shrunken head on top of the post to appraise the craftsmanship. The head was the size of a big navel orange. He could make out the facial features of the closed eyelids and the flat nose and the lips of the mouth sewn together with twine.

  It was terrifying to think in the very near future his head would be on one of these posts.

  He felt sick to his stomach, especially when he thought back to an article he had read about the process. After the decapitation, his skin would be sliced from his skull and boiled in a pot with different plants to make the skin shrink. Afterward it would be left to dry, then stuffed with hot stones to further shrink his head and then stitched up.

  Small cords would be sewn on the top of his miniaturized head so it could be worn around someone’s waist.

  Ben wondered which of the pigmies would be the honored warrior performing a ritual dance, dangling the white man’s head.

  The only tribes in the Amazon in the habit of shrinking the heads of their enemy were the Jivaro, and as far as he knew, they were not pigmies. Which could mean only one thing. His captors were of an indigenous tribe unknown to the civilized world.

  Ever since he began studying anthropology, his biggest dream was to document a new culture of people; and here he was, a captive guest in their village.

  If only there was a way he could convince them he was a great warrior to be revered rather than a mere fool they had easily tricked.