by Justin D'Ath
Keep a cool head, bro.
Good advice, but difficult to put into practice when you’re stuck beneath an upturned boat under a waterfall. Every fibre of your being is on the brink of panic. But if you panic, you’re dead.
‘Keep a cool head,’ I muttered to myself.
And changed my grip on the trowel.
This time, instead of trying to dig into the iron-hard riverbed beneath me, I pushed the trowel’s tip sideways into a tiny gap between the edge of the peke-peke and a big stone.
Then, using all the strength left in my body, I levered upwards.
4
DINNER TIME!
We’d studied levers at school. Mr Anderson, our science teacher, showed us how you can move something really big (like a peke-peke) if you use something small (like a trowel) as a lever.
Science rocks!
One twist of the trowel, and the peke-peke lifted. Only by a few centimetres, but enough to ease the pressure on everything sandwiched underneath. Including me. Suddenly my other arm was free. So were my legs.
I was right out of oxygen and only a matter of seconds from blacking out, but after my success with the lever, my muscles were pumped up with adrenaline. That’s the body’s last line of defence in emergency situations. Adrenaline raises the blood-sugar levels and increases the heart rate, making you faster and stronger. Sometimes it enables you to do things that are almost superhuman. Like lifting a six-metre peke-peke with an outboard motor attached and tossing it to one side.
Yaaaaaaaaaah!
Now I could breathe again, but there was another problem. Without the peke-peke above me, I was exposed to the full power of the Big Beast. It hit me with the force of a giant water cannon, slamming me back down against the rocks. Desperately, I heaved Uncle Shaun’s pack above my face for protection.
Then, straining to keep the pack in position, I struggled into a sitting position and looked around me. There wasn’t much to see. I was sitting chest-deep in the river, surrounded by a brown, liquid curtain where the waterfall came pouring down around the edges of Uncle Shaun’s pack. The pack acted like an umbrella, but it weighed a tonne – not just from all of Uncle Shaun’s gear, but from the force of the waterfall crashing down on top. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could hold it. But without protection from the Big Beast, I had no hope.
Summoning all my strength, I clambered to my feet in the knee-deep water. It took a huge effort. My legs felt like jelly. Blindly, I took a single, shaky step through the tumbling brown curtain of water.
A rock rolled under my foot. I pitched forward.
Splash!
I was underwater again. Face down on the rocky riverbed. Eyes closed, holding my breath. Exhausted. I didn’t want to come up. Didn’t want to expose myself to another pummelling from the Big Beast. I’d dropped Uncle Shaun’s pack when I fell, and I no longer had the strength to lift it again. But I needed air. Gritting my teeth, I raised my head.
Nothing happened. No water came crashing down on my head. Dazed, I took in my surroundings. Slowly, it began to make sense. I was behind the waterfall, kneeling in a small hidden lake. About thirty metres long by ten metres wide, it was surrounded on three sides by mossy rock walls. The Big Beast formed the fourth side, a foaming wall of water that cut me off completely from the outside world. A boulder the size of a house formed the ceiling. Thousands of years ago, it must have rolled over the falls and become wedged halfway down, altering the flow of the waterfall and creating an eerie green cavern underneath.
I was probably the first human being ever to be there.
But not the first living being.
Swish-slosh!
About ten metres away, a circle of ripples radiated out towards the lake’s edges. I scrambled quickly to my feet. It was dim in the cavern, but I glimpsed a flash of scales in the dark-green water.
Just a fish, I thought.
Then I remembered where I was. The Amazon. I also remembered the bite marks on the handle of Caesar’s knife.
The fish might be a piranha.
My right knee was stinging. I must have grazed it when I fell over on the rocks. A red line of blood trickled down my shin into the water. If there were piranhas in the lake, the blood was a message to them: Come and get me!
I didn’t wait for the piranhas to get their dinner invitation. In five seconds flat, I was out of the lake, crouching on a narrow mossy ledge at the back of the cavern. Safe from the threat of piranhas. But when I shuffled along the ledge looking for a way out, I discovered it stopped after only a few metres. I was trapped. The only way out of the cavern was back through the lake and under the waterfall.
No way, Jose!
But I had to get out. Uncle Shaun and Caesar would never find me if I stayed where I was.
Thinking about Uncle Shaun drew my eyes to his pack. It lay partially submerged in the lake about eight metres away. Uncle Shaun’s boots were inside it. They were made of heavy leather, with high canvas gaiters for leg protection against leeches and prickly vines. They might work against piranhas, too.
But I’d have to wade through the lake to get them.
I looked at my grazed knee. The trickle of blood had made it all the way down to my ankle. It gave me an idea.
Ripping a big wad of moss off the rock wall behind me, I mopped up the blood. Then I waited a few minutes for more blood to appear and mopped that up, too. After the second time, the graze stopped bleeding. Hoping there was enough blood, I stood up and hurled the soggy lump of moss down the other end of the lake.
‘Dinner time!’ I yelled as it splashed into the water.
The result was disappointing. Instead of the piranha feeding frenzy I’d expected, the moss sank out of view with hardly a ripple.
So much for my decoy.
Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps the scales I’d glimpsed belonged to another kind of fish. It might be okay to go back into the lake.
Swish-slosh!
Another circle of ripples spread across the lake’s dark surface. It was nowhere near the place where the moss had landed. Straining my eyes, I caught a fleeting glimpse of a large underwater shadow that quickly vanished in the soupy green water. Whatever kind of fish it was, it had looked much bigger than a piranha. Could it be a giant Amazonian catfish? Caesar said they grew up to two metres long.
Suddenly I stopped thinking about fish. Something glinted in the rock where I’d torn off the wad of moss. It looked like yellow tinfoil. Or like …
Next moment I was down on my hands and knees, tearing off big handfuls of moss to expose what was hidden behind it.
I could hardly believe my eyes.
Holy guacamole! I’d discovered gold!
5
AMBUSH
There was heaps of it! The more moss I tore off, the more gold I exposed. A ten-centimetre-wide strip of the precious yellow metal ran right across the shelf and up the rock wall as high as I could reach.
With shaking hands, I cleared away more moss further along the wall and found a second strip of gold. Then another one after that. Wherever I tore away moss, there was gold underneath. My mouth went dry. The entire rear wall of the cavern was a single, enormous gold nugget! It was bigger than a house.
One gram of gold is worth hundreds of dollars. This nugget must have weighed tonnes.
I was going be the richest person on earth!
Gold fever does strange things to you. Without giving another thought to piranhas or giant catfish, I waded boldly into the lake and fetched Uncle Shaun’s pack.
Most of his equipment was for measuring how global warming is changing the Amazon rainforest. But there was a small tomahawk, too. It had a stainless steel blade. Stainless steel is much harder than gold. Working like a madman, I hacked out three jagged lumps of gold from the wall. The largest one was roughly the size of a Mars Bar and must have weighed about a kilogram. When I hefted it in my hand, I had a sudden reality check.
How can I carry all this?
Good question. I didn’t e
ven know how I was going to get myself out of the cave, much less a stack of gold.
It was time to think about priorities. Top of the list was survival. I was trapped behind a waterfall three hundred kilometres up a remote tributary of the Amazon River. It didn’t matter that I’d just made the biggest gold discovery of all time; if I couldn’t get out and find Uncle Shaun and Caesar, I was history.
There was only one way out – through the Big Beast. I could see a pale glow of daylight on the other side. The wall of water couldn’t have been more than two metres thick. That mightn’t sound like much, but imagine a line of giant fire hoses, each with a nozzle two metres wide, blasting straight down. No way would I get through without the protection of Uncle Shaun’s pack.
I would need his boots and gaiters, too, in case there were piranhas. The boots were huge – size twelve – so I wore all three pairs of Uncle Shaun’s thick woollen socks. Then I emptied everything else out of his pack and left it on the rock shelf with my sandals.
Lifting the empty pack over my head like an umbrella, I stepped into the lake and started wading towards the waterfall.
Then I stopped.
Swish-slosh!
This time the swirl was close. Only a few metres away. A long, scaly shadow came sliding through the water towards me. There were light scales and dark scales, arranged in a diamond pattern that kept repeating itself, over and over, like the windows of a speeding train.
Shishkebab!
Suddenly the lake’s surface broke open and a big, ugly dinosaur-like head rose out of the water. And it kept rising, up and up and up, until it towered over me.
It was a green anaconda. I’d seen them in wildlife documentaries. They’re the biggest snakes in the world. This one didn’t look pleased to see me. Or perhaps it was pleased. Because a snake that size has an appetite to match.
Of all the giant snakes, the green anaconda is the most dangerous. It does nearly all of its hunting underwater. It will lie just below the surface, a few metres off shore, coiled like a huge underwater spring, waiting for its next meal – a capybara, a deer, a human – to come within range.
I’d walked into an anaconda ambush.
Anacondas are constrictors. They wrap themselves around their prey and squeeze until it suffocates. But first they strike like any other snake, and grab hold with their jaws.
The last thing I saw was the inside of the anaconda’s wide-open mouth. Coming straight at me.
WHACK!
6
BULL KILLER
I was holding Uncle Shaun’s pack above my head when the anaconda ambushed me. There was just time to swing it forward in a partial block. Straight into the anaconda’s jaws.
WHACK!
Uncle Shaun’s pack absorbed most of the shock, but not all of it. It felt like I’d run into a brick wall. Or the wall had run into me! The snake was huge. As thick as a tree trunk and who knows how long. Pushing and chewing on the pack, it began driving me backwards. One step, two steps, three, four, five. I had to stay on my feet. If I tripped or lost my balance, it would be all over red rover. The anaconda knew it, too. Raising itself out of the water in a series of loops like giant tractor tyres, it corkscrewed sideways, twisting the pack out of my hands. In a last desperate attempt to escape, I threw myself backwards. But my foot slipped and I went under.
I thought I was dead. Water is an anaconda’s natural element. In a couple of heartbeats, it would wind me up in its deadly coils and start to squeeze. But nothing happened. I scrambled upright, blinking water from my eyes. The giant snake was nowhere near me. It was halfway across the lake, wrapped around Uncle Shaun’s pack in a huge, squirming knot that rolled over and over in the water in an anaconda’s version of a death spiral.
Uncle Shaun’s pack was the perfect decoy. The snake must have thought it was me – or part of me – and it was so busy trying to crush the life out of it that it didn’t notice when I climbed back onto the rock shelf at the rear of the cave.
I was out of the water, but I was far from safe. The ledge was only a metre high. The enormous anaconda wouldn’t even have to leave the water to get me. It could simply stretch its head up, grab me by a foot, a leg or an arm, and drag me in.
But I wouldn’t make things easy for it. The contents of Uncle Shaun’s pack lay strewn across the ledge where I’d dropped them.
My eyes fell on the tomahawk.
But there was something even better: a little crossbow that Uncle Shaun used to shoot down leaves that grew high in the forest canopy. He’d dismantled it to fit in the pack. My hands were trembling, but it only took a minute to fit the curved fibreglass bow to the short, rifle-shaped firing mechanism and tighten the two wing nuts that held it together. I drew the string back and clipped it into the trigger assembly, then fitted an arrow into place. The arrows had bright-orange feathers and wide stainless-steel tips especially designed for cutting though the stems of leaves. They were razor sharp. At close range, they could do a lot of damage to a snake. Even a giant one.
Out in the lake, everything was still. The top of Uncle Shaun’s pack, looking as wrecked as a scrunched-up chip packet, poked out of the water a couple of metres from the Big Beast. But there was no sign of the other big beast – the one that gave the Rio Matatoro its name. On our first day on the river Caesar told me that matatoro was Brazilian for anaconda. It means ‘bull killer’. A giant anaconda is big enough, and strong enough, to kill and swallow a bull. Whole! Or so legend has it.
I aimed the crossbow at the water below me.
‘Bring it on, Matatoro!’ I muttered.
I didn’t mean it. It was a warning – I was telling the snake not to come after me. I didn’t want either of us to get hurt.
But I wasn’t going to get my wish.
7
DRACULA
‘Ouch!’
I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there, aiming the crossbow at the dark-green water, waiting for the anaconda to appear and hoping it wouldn’t, when something jabbed me on my right calf. It felt like a needle prick. I took one hand off the crossbow and slapped at my leg, expecting it to be a mosquito or one of the annoying biting flies that are so common in the Amazon. But my hand hit something furry. Something with teeth.
Ooooooow!
I jerked my hand away but the teeth didn’t let go. A small greyish-brown animal dangled from my hand. It looked like a mouse except it had a flat, pig-like nose, large pink ears and long leathery wings. It was a bat. And its teeth were buried in the soft flap of skin between my right thumb and forefinger.
I tried shaking it off, but the evil-looking creature held on. Only when I dropped the crossbow and grabbed the bat with my other hand did it let go. I flung it away from me in revulsion. Towards the lake. A snack for the anaconda. But as it tumbled through the air, the bat unfurled its wings and went flapping away across the water towards the far end of the lake. It circled a couple of times, then flew into a crack in the mossy rock wall and disappeared.
I looked at my hand, at the two bleeding incisions made by the bat’s teeth. My leg was bleeding, too – just above the gaiter at the top of my right boot. The bat had crept up and bitten me while my attention was on the water. Neither bite hurt very much, but there was a churning feeling in my stomach as I remembered something I’d read in a travel guide to the Amazon.
In the section entitled Animal Hazards. About vampire bats.
I’d read it on the flight from Australia and it had surprised me. I hadn’t realised that vampires were real.
They are real. And now I’d been bitten by one!
Swish-slosh!
I grabbed the crossbow, all thoughts of vampires gone from my head. My mouth felt dry again and my heart pounded as I searched for the anaconda. It wasn’t hard to find. A circle of ripples radiated out across the lake. At its centre, a scaly pair of nostrils poked above the surface.
The rest of the reptile was concealed by the soupy green water. I couldn’t see its eyes but I could feel them w
atching me. Sizing me up. To a giant anaconda living in a secret lake with just bats and maybe a few fish to snack on, I must have looked like a pretty good meal.
But I had news for the anaconda: I wasn’t on the menu. Rising slowly to my feet, I aimed the crossbow just behind the two black pits of its nostrils and curled my finger around the trigger.
Slosh!
The nostrils disappeared. There was just an empty circle of ripples in the middle of the lake. Slowly easing the pressure on the trigger, I kept the crossbow pointed at the spot. But the seconds ticked past and there was no sign of the anaconda. I looked at my watch. It was one-thirty in the afternoon. More than half the day was gone already. In a few hours it would start growing dark. The thought of spending the night in the cavern sent a shiver down my spine.
‘UNCLE SHAUN!’ I yelled. ‘CAESAAAAAAR!’
I could have saved my breath. They’d never hear me, even if they were just on the other side of the waterfall. The roar of the Big Beast was too loud.
But bats’ ears are better than humans’. My shouting woke up two more vampire bats. They went fluttering silently overhead, doing long loops around the cavern from one end to the other. I kept a nervous eye on them. But it was hard watching the bats and watching the water at the same time. I was glad when they finally disappeared into the crack where the first bat had gone.
‘Don’t come back,’ I muttered, raising one hand to wipe the sweat off my forehead.
Then I froze.
My hand, wrist and forearm were red with blood. It was dribbling down from the two tiny incisions where the first bat had bitten me.
The bite on my calf was bleeding, too.
A shudder passed through me. Now I remembered what I’d read about vampire bats in the Amazon travel guide. Their saliva contains a substance called draculin that stops the blood from clotting. If you get bitten, you keep bleeding.