Lost in the Jungle (29 page)

The sunlight faded, and dusk began to envelop me when I became aware of a distant drone. A plane, I thought, but forced myself to stop. It was almost nightfall, and I was fed up with imaginary airplanes and helicopters. But the drone grew louder.

It wasn’t a plane. In fact, it sounded more like a bee, and it got louder and louder. I covered myself up with the mosquito net, but the buzz was so loud, I thought a bee had gotten through a hole in the net and was inside, right by my ear. Please, no, anything but to get stung on my face. I had enough problems without that. The noise engulfed me, and I got up with a start. I threw the net aside, but there wasn’t any bee. The noise was loud and real. I looked out over to the river and gasped.

My God, dear God, there are people out there!

I dimly made out four figures disembarking from a canoe. I raced toward the water’s edge, not feeling any pain, my chest bursting with joy and excitement.

‘Hello! Hello!’ I tried to call, but nothing came out.

A tall, curly-haired fellow was standing next to the canoe. He looked up at me, gaped, stunned for a moment, and then called out, ‘Don’t move, Yossi! Stay where you are. I’m coming!’ It was Kevin. He ran frantically to me and threw his arms about me. We stood there for a long while, embracing each other, murmuring unintelligibly.

For the first time I wept. Nothing could have held back the flood of large, warm tears that streamed down my cheeks. I was holding on to Kevin – this was not a dream. I was safe now; someone did watch over me after all. The tears kept pouring down. Kevin was also in tears. We held each other tightly, almost unable to let go.

Three other men had come in the canoe with Kevin. Two stood a short distance away, staring at me curiously, obviously moved. The third, a short, stocky fellow, approached us.

‘Are you all right, young man?’ he inquired.

I nodded my head.

‘I don’t suppose you’re hungry?’ he asked with a smile, and took a sack containing three bread rolls out of his pocket and handed it to me. I devoured them ravenously, scarcely bothering to chew.

‘Take it easy, young fellow. There’s more where that came from.’

The man took a can of tuna fish out of his other pocket and opened it. It took me only a few seconds to finish it off.

‘Get the bananas,’ he instructed one of the others.

I tossed down five sweet bananas and still contemplated him hungrily.

‘We’d better get going now, before dark. This isn’t a good place to beach the canoe.’

Kevin carried me over to the narrow craft and gently sat me down inside it. Then he ran back to gather up my belongings. He shoved them into the pack, which he tossed into the canoe.

‘Wait a minute, Kevin. I left the poncho over there on the rocks. I want it.’

Kevin came running back with the poncho, and then we were on our way.

My eyes were still brimming with tears as we progressed downriver. I couldn’t stop weeping quietly, offering prayers of thanks to God. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that it was really happening, that it was all over. I hadn’t been expecting it, hadn’t even dreamed of being saved today. It had never occurred to me that anyone would come for me by river. He had saved my life. Kevin had saved my life. I wept with joy.

The river was turbulent, and Tico, the owner of the canoe, wouldn’t let us sit side by side, so I sat behind Kevin, wrapped in an army blanket. A dead fawn lay on the bottom of the canoe.

Tico found a good place to beach the canoe and with his companions set up camp. It wasn’t necessary to erect a shelter. They simply spread sheets of nylon on the ground. It wouldn’t rain tonight.

Kevin lay me down on the beach and propped my head against a log. He gently washed and dried my feet and then with the tender hands of a skilled nurse rubbed them with an oily, white cream. That done, he carefully put a pair of clean socks on them while I bit my lip in pain.

‘I had the same thing,’ he told me. ‘The doctor told me it’s some kind of fungus. This cream works wonders. Your feet will be all right in just a few days.’

They cleaned the fawn and skewered pieces of it. A large pot of rice was already simmering over the fire. Tico came over holding a cup. He had made some lemonade for me. I drank it down gratefully. Then he and his crew went into the jungle to hunt. Kevin covered me with a blanket and then lay down next to me. We stared up at the sky and smoked. He listened attentively while I told him what I had been through.

‘I knew that you’d make it. I just knew that you would hold out,’ he said. ‘I was positive that as long as nothing had happened to you in the river, I would surely find you. That’s what I told your embassy too. They didn’t believe me. No one did, but I just knew. There’s one thing that I don’t understand, though. How come almost all of the rice and beans are left? It looks like you ate hardly any at all.’

‘It’s hard to explain,’ I answered. ‘It was raining most of the time, so I couldn’t light a fire. Anyway, I thought I should save it. I didn’t know how long I’d be stuck here. Now you tell me what happened to you.’

Kevin agreed to telling me his story only after he had heard every detail of what I had been through.

‘Compared to you, I was on a Boy Scout field trip.’ Then he began his tale.

‘I’ll start from the moment I jumped off the raft into the river. The undertow was much stronger than I had expected, and I was completely helpless. Luckily for me, the current swept me over to the right bank. I climbed out of the water and immediately noticed that the raft was about to slip back into the river. All I could think was,
Good Lord, here I am barefoot
, so I called to you to throw me my shoes and then the machete. You yelled something like, “Don’t leave me,” and I thought,
What the hell? Who’s leaving who?
And then you went over the falls. I thanked God when I saw you bob up a long way downriver, still clinging to the raft. I quickly put my shoes on, picked up the machete, and started walking along the rocky shore. I was sure that I’d catch up with you that day or the day after.

‘You know how hard it is to walk along the riverbank, and I had no choice but to see if the going would be any better on the other side, where the bank didn’t look as steep. That river is a real bitch, but I finally managed to swim across.

‘I was very worried about you and didn’t know what to think. The river was so treacherous – white water, jagged rocks, sharp bends – and you had no experience and were on your own. You might have fallen into the water and drowned or broken a bone.

‘The next day I walked along the river, and when I ran out of bank, I slipped into the water, after stuffing my shirt full of dry wood to help make me buoyant. I had taken off my shoes and filled them with wood chips and tied them to my belt. The river was extremely hazardous, and whenever I came to a section where it was possible to walk on dry ground, I got the hell out of it.

‘After a few hours I came to a place where the sides of the river were sheer rock faces and the water was frothy. It looked terribly dangerous, so I decided to climb. I had spent about two hours working my way up the cliff when I came upon a heap of feathers next to a large dead parrot. I touched it; it was still warm. It had been killed just that moment, and I wondered if I could bring myself to eat it raw. I tied it to my belt and started walking. Suddenly an enormous falcon rose up off a nearby boulder and took flight. We looked right at each other. It was angry that I had stolen its prey.

“‘Thanks for the meal, pal. I may be a thief, but I need it more than you do.”

‘Every time I came to a brook that trickled down to the river, I followed it to see if there was any sign of you. Then I had another surprise: four dry balsa logs. I still hadn’t seen the island and the little shore that Karl had told us about, however, so I didn’t think there was any point in building a raft, since I must still be upriver from the
mal paso
.

‘I stopped for lunch at noon. I chopped off the parrot’s head with the machete, tore its beak out, and took a bite. I cracked its skull open and sucked out its brains, knowing that they contained a great deal of protein.

‘I kept on walking, though my feet were damp and my shoes were full of holes. They were full of sand and pebbles, too, which tore the skin off my feet. It was terribly painful, but I was sure that I wasn’t far from Curiplaya.

‘On the third day after losing you, Yossi, I awoke at dawn, painfully aware of my feet. I knew that if I went on walking, they would only get worse, but like I said, I was sure that I wasn’t far from Curiplaya. I cut a branch from one of the trees to use as a walking stick. I put all of my weight on it as I walked. I kept looking for the landmarks Karl had described but saw no sign of them. Suddenly I realised that I didn’t have the machete with me. I wondered how I would get along without it. I remember that when I had broken off my walking stick, I had stuck it in the mud. I must have forgotten it there. I decided not to go back for it. My feet hurt so badly that retracing my own footsteps for hours seemed absurd.

‘On the fourth day I couldn’t stand on my feet anyway, so I just lay where I was. I got to wondering if I was ever going to see you again. I was certain that if you were alive, you would be waiting for me in Curiplaya. Then I remembered Marcus and the way I had been treating him lately. I felt guilty for having made light of the pain he was in and not believing how much agony his feet were causing him.
Now I was getting what I had coming to me
, I thought. When I got back to La Paz, I would have to apologise to him.

‘I rested all that day and night. Once, I awoke to the sound of an approaching animal. I had no flashlight or machete. What could I do? I gripped my walking stick and went back to sleep.

‘The next morning I felt a little better. My feet had dried and scabbed over, but when I tried to stand up, I discovered that they were worse than they appeared to be, and the sores split open. I couldn’t take a single step. It was horrible. I slid along on my backside and the heels of my feet, inching toward the river. My mind was made up, though: I was going into the water, even though Curiplaya must be near. The cool water felt good.

‘I looked around for a log to hang on to and found only a small stump, about three feet long. I drifted in the river for about twenty minutes, clinging to the log. The current swept me along swiftly, and my main concern was what might await me around each bend. But it wasn’t so bad. After a short while I noticed that steep cliffs loomed on both sides of the river, and I thought that I must be approaching the pass. I let go of the log and swam frantically for the right bank, where I climbed up the cliff. I was surprised that my feet no longer hurt as much as they had before and I walked for more than half an hour. Finally I climbed back down to the water’s edge at a place where there was a small shore with a lot of logs scattered about. The water was placid, and I decided that this couldn’t be the pass after all.

‘The sight of all those logs made me think about putting a raft together. I set about that task quickly and just as swiftly gave up on it. The logs were so big and heavy that I couldn’t budge them. Some of them were stuck deep in the sand, and others were rotten. Only one big, sturdy one was of any use. I dragged it into the water and straddled it with both legs.

‘The current carried me downriver. Once, the river broadened and became so shallow that my feet stubbed against the rocks on the bottom, and another time I was washed up against a rock and took a good hard knock. Another time I got caught in a whirlpool, but finally the log got free, taking me with it.

‘I floated on with the log, and after a few hours I saw a shore with two thatched huts on it. I started calling out, “Yossi! Yossi! Yossi!” but there wasn’t any answer. The place looked deserted, and I knew that it must be Curiplaya, and that the village of San José must be only thirty miles farther on. I didn’t expect to find you on my way; I thought that you must already be there.

‘The river grew quite calm. I drifted along. I may even have dozed. I dipped my face in the water, struggling to stay awake. Then suddenly I noticed two men walking through a stream that fed into the right bank of the river. I called out frantically, “
¡Ayuda! Ayuda
(help)! I can’t walk. I’m lost.” The current was strong, and I couldn’t make it out of the river. To my great relief, they heard me. They gestured, “Downriver. Go farther downriver,” and I could see a small beach downstream. I let go of the log and swam to shore.

‘I waited there for almost an hour, wondering what was taking them so long. Maybe they had no intention of coming after me. Maybe they had meant to tell me that there were other people farther downriver. Then I saw them coming on a balsa raft and knew that I was saved.

‘I told them what had happened and asked if they had seen any sign of you or the raft, but they hadn’t seen a thing. They were hunters and had been deep in the jungle for five days. “You’re a lucky guy,” they told me. They only came hunting that far upriver twice a year, so I really had been incredibly lucky. Somehow, deep inside, I was sure that it had been more than simple luck or circumstance.

‘Four hours later we arrived on the outskirts of San José, where Fausto, the hunter, and his son lived. They brought me to their ranch on the riverbank and lay me down under a thatched roof. They promised that the next day they would send someone on horseback to take me up to the village, which was still nearly an hour and a half away up the river.

‘Late the next morning a guy named Pablo turned up and took me to San José on horseback. I asked him how I could get to Rurrenabaque, and he told me I had two choices. One was to make a six-hour ride and then a three-hour walk to the town of Tumupasa, and from there go on by truck. I wrote off that possibility: I couldn’t walk. The other way was to take a balsa raft downriver.

‘Pablo took me to a man who was the mayor of the village. I told him my story and asked him to arrange for a raft that could take me to Rurrenabaque, and he promised to see to it.

‘From there Pablo took me back to Fausto’s. I lay there on a hammock, and one of the women treated my feet. She smeared an oily cream over them, which took the burn out of the sores, and I felt much better. A few of the villagers came over for a curious peek at me. They tried to console me but said they hadn’t heard a thing about you and that “the river is bad, very bad. It’s hard to believe that your friend could still be alive.”