by Justin D'Ath
I remembered other bangs, too – the ones made by their pistols – and that got me thinking …
When I reached the other end of the island, my hopes of finding an escape route quickly vanished. There were no fallen trees and no stepping stones. If anything, the creek – both arms of it – was wider at this end.
Which meant, I suddenly thought, the water was probably not as deep!
If I splashed across flat out, I might get to the other side before the piranhas even knew I was coming.
For a few seconds it seemed like a workable plan. Until I glimpsed a flicker of movement beneath one of the lily pads. It was a fin. When I looked closely, I saw a big, saw-toothed fish hanging in the shadow of the lily pad. A piranha. It was watching me. Now that I knew what to look for, I spotted more of them. They lurked under every lily pad. Hundreds of piranhas. All of them were watching me. Watching and waiting. Only their fins moved as they waited for their next meal.
But I wasn’t going to be it.
Suddenly there was a flurry of movement. Piranhas zoomed left and right, leaving an empty space between two lily pads. My skin pricked as a long, greyish-green shape rose to the surface and gulped a big mouthful of air, then slowly sank back down into the shadows.
Here’s something I didn’t know – electric eels breathe.
I noticed how the piranhas had made room for it when it came up for air. That gave me an idea.
There was another stand of pink reeds growing at the edge of the jungle behind me. I found one that was half-broken near the roots. It was as thick as my finger and as tough as bamboo. As quietly as possible, I wriggled it back and forth until it came free. Then I wormed my way into the jungle, knelt down and emptied my pockets.
23
MAKE MY DAY
I crouched over the broken reed and carefully peeled the back off an adhesive dressing. Heavy footsteps came crunching along the creek bank. I paused briefly from my work, holding my breath as Henry and Bernard limped past my leafy hiding spot. A minute later they went past on the other side, going in the opposite direction.
‘The vater goes right around,’ Bernard muttered.
‘It’s an island,’ said Henry.
‘How vill ve get off?’
‘I don’t know. The creek’s teeming with piranhas. We’re trapped.’
As I listened to their footsteps move away, I wondered how long it would take the prospectors to work out that they weren’t the only ones who were trapped on the island.
I wasn’t left wondering for long.
‘TROUBLEMAKER, VERE ARE YOU?’ Bernard called from the other end of the island.
For about a minute there was silence. Then I heard a stick snap.
‘WE KNOW YOU’RE HERE SOMEWHERE!’ shouted Henry.
There was more crackling and crunching in the undergrowth. It slowly grew louder. So did Henry’s and Bernard’s voices.
‘IT’S NO USE HIDING, SAM.’
‘COME OUT, COME OUT, VEREVER YOU ARE!’
A shiver passed through me. I knew what they were doing. They were systematically searching the island from one end to the other. It was only a matter of time before they found me. Applying a final touch to my secret weapon, I wriggled out of my hiding place and ran back to the spot where I’d seen the electric eel.
But all I saw were piranhas.
I stood at the water’s edge, trying to ignore the prospectors’ taunting calls as I strained my eyes to see into the shady green water. It didn’t help that the sun was going down and daylight was rapidly fading.
I was so intent on watching the creek that I didn’t see the small brown figure emerge from the jungle on the other side.
‘Sam!’
It was Gabriel.
‘Stay out of the creek – it’s swarming with piranhas,’ I warned in a hushed voice. My eyes searched the shadowy jungle behind him. ‘Where are the others?’
Gabriel came down to the water’s edge. ‘What others?’
‘I thought you’d gone back to your village to get help.’
‘I hide from garimpeiros, then I come to find you,’ Gabriel whispered.
He needn’t have whispered, because the garimpeiros were right behind me.
‘Vot haff ve here?’ said Bernard, limping out of the shadows with his pistol drawn. ‘Both ze troublemakers.’
Henry came hobbling along behind him, holding his pistol, too. Neither man was wearing his pack.
‘Go and get help, Gabriel,’ I said.
Bernard pointed his pistol across the creek. ‘Stay right vere you are, little boy.’
I was ninety-nine percent sure his pistol wasn’t loaded. I’d counted the shots. Both men had revolvers – six-shooters – and twelve shots had been fired that afternoon.
But what if I was wrong? I might have miscounted. Or the prospectors might have reloaded their pistols after crossing the creek. I couldn’t gamble with Gabriel’s life.
Here goes nothing, I thought. And darted straight towards Bernard and Henry.
It was the last thing they expected. They both swung their pistols around, trying to keep me in their sights, as I ran right between them.
Click! Click!
Luckily for the prospectors, I’d counted correctly. If their pistols had been loaded, they probably would have missed me and shot each other!
‘Get help, Gabriel!’ I yelled over my shoulder, as I ran flat out around the edge of the island.
I had a head start on Henry and Bernard, and both prospectors were limping badly from their piranha bites. Sticking to the shoreline, where there was no jungle to slow me down, I sprinted around the edge of the island. Just as I’d hoped, the prospectors’ packs lay on the creek bank where I’d last seen them. I picked one up and heaved it as far as I could out over the piranha-infested water.
But just as I lifted the second one, Bernard came crashing through the ferns and grabbed the other end of it.
‘Let it go!’ he snarled, trying to pull it away from me.
For a few seconds we had a tug of war. Bernard was bigger than me and much stronger. He turned me in a circle, then started pushing me backwards towards the creek.
‘Now I give you a taste of your own medicine, troublemaker!’ He grimaced.
The grimace was his downfall. Because it reminded me of his weakness. I lashed out with one foot. Thump! Uncle Shaun’s big, heavy boot hit him squarely on one of his patchwork-quilt legs. Bernard’s eyes nearly doubled in size and he let out a howl of pain. Before he could recover, I wrenched the pack out of his hands and twisted away from him. The pack swung in a big circle. I twirled it three times, like a hammer-thrower at the Olympics, then let fly.
It sailed across the creek and splashed into the water only a metre from the other shore.
‘I vill kill you!’ Bernard muttered, drawing his pistol from its holster.
But he wasn’t going to kill anyone. Because a pistol without ammunition is useless. The spare bullets – if there were any – were in one of the packs. And I’d got rid of the packs.
Realising I’d outsmarted him, Bernard swung his pistol like a club. I jumped out of the way. He came lurching after me, his breath heaving, his face contorted in rage. But his injuries made him slow. It was easy to stay out of reach. I led him in circles. Finally, in frustration, Bernard hurled the pistol at me. I ducked. It flew over my head and landed with a splash in the creek behind me.
Henry arrived moments later, hobbling like a hundred-year-old man. When he saw me, he raised his pistol and pulled the trigger.
Click!
His face turned bright red. He turned to Bernard. ‘Where are the bullets?’
Bernard didn’t say anything. He simply pointed at the two packs lying in the shallow water on the other side of the creek.
When Henry saw what I’d done, he dropped his pistol and hobbled towards me with his hands balled into fists. Bernard came limping from the other direction.
I picked up a broken branch and held it out in front of me w
ith two hands, like it was a ju-jitsu fighting stick. ‘If either of you come close,’ I warned, ‘I’ll whack you on the legs.’
Both men stopped in their tracks. Bernard looked down at his legs. Fresh blood was seeping through the bandages. Without a word, he turned and sat down on a log.
Henry’s eyes were narrowed to slits. If looks could kill, I’d be dead. But I met his chilling stare with a glare of my own.
A glare that said, Go ahead, make my day!
And I waved the stick at him.
Henry slowly lowered his arms. His fists unclenched. Then he sank down on the log next to Bernard.
‘You win, Sam Fox,’ he muttered.
That was when we heard Gabriel scream.
24
ZAP!
I don’t remember running back to the other end of the island. I just remember getting there. And seeing Gabriel dangling over the creek. He clung to a skinny green vine. Below him, the water boiled and splashed with a thousand blood-crazed piranhas.
‘Help me!’ he cried.
The vine was too thin and slippery to climb. It hung from a tree that sloped out from the other bank. Gabriel must have tried to swing across to the island but he’d misjudged the distance.
‘Hold on,’ I said.
My secret weapon lay where I’d dropped it when Henry and Bernard had tried to shoot me with their empty pistols. I picked it up and peered into the water.
‘I going to fall,’ Gabriel whimpered.
He was losing his grip. His small, knotted hands started sliding slowly down the vine. The piranhas saw him getting closer and went into a frenzy of excitement. They began leaping into the air, jaws snapping like rattraps as they tried to latch onto his dangling bare feet.
‘Pull your feet up,’ I said, still watching the water.
Gabriel drew his legs up out of the way. But his hands were still slipping. Centimetre by centimetre, he was getting closer to the piranhas’ snapping jaws.
‘Help me, Sam!’
‘I will help you,’ I promised. In my raised right hand, I held the two-metre-long reed I’d fashioned into a spear. Taped to its business end with adhesive dressings was my EpiPen. ‘Hang in there for a few more seconds, Gabriel.’
I’d seen what I was waiting for. Rising to the surface at the edge of the piranha frenzy was a smooth, greyish-green head.
‘Can’t hang on!’ shrieked Gabriel.
With a final, despairing scream, he let go.
And I hurled my spear.
Bullseye!
An EpiPen is like a hypodermic needle. It contains adrenalin. The electric eel got a full dose. It went hyper. And turned on the power. Six hundred volts.
ZAP!
It was like an underwater bomb going off. A circular ripple fizzed out across the surface and about a thousand piranhas leapt out of the water, all at the same time. Some landed on giant lily pads and lay there with their ugly mouths wide-open. Others splashed back into the water and went belly-up. I had never seen so many dead or stunned fish.
But it was Gabriel I was worried about. He’d hit the water about half a second after the power surge, and disappeared beneath the dark surface.
My rescue attempt had backfired. Instead of saving him, I’d got him electrocuted.
Throwing all caution to the wind, I waded out through the lifeless, floating piranhas, feeling like a murderer.
I’d killed Gabriel!
The water bubbled, a lily pad flopped to one side, and up bobbed a little brown figure. It was Gabriel. He was alive! But he looked terrified. When I tried to put my arms around him, he climbed me like a tree.
‘It’s okay, Gabriel,’ I said, hugging his small, shivering body. He was no bigger than Harry and Jordan, my five-year-old twin brothers. ‘The piranhas are all dead.’
I was wrong. No sooner had I spoken, than a wave of fins came weaving towards us through the lifeless, floating bodies of their fellow fish. The piranhas that were too far away to be killed by the electric eel’s shock wave were coming to clean up the dead. And us, too, if we didn’t get out of the creek in a hurry.
With Gabriel clutched in my arms, I waded across to the far shore. We made it just before the new wave of piranhas arrived. One latched onto the heel of my boot as I staggered out of the creek. It didn’t let go until I was halfway up the bank. I kicked it back into the water and lowered Gabriel to the ground.
He looked up at me and smiled. ‘You are very brave warrior, Sam.’
I didn’t feel brave, I felt scared. It was nearly dark and we were surrounded by jungle. Amazon jungle. Not a good place to be in the night-time.
I led Gabriel along the creek bank until we were opposite the two prospectors. They hadn’t moved since I’d last seen them. They still sat on the log, hugging their legs and looking sorry for themselves.
‘How did you get across the creek?’ Henry asked.
‘That would be telling,’ I said.
Their packs bobbed in the water only a metre or two from our shore. Gabriel and I used sticks to drag them up onto the bank. I rummaged through them until I found the stolen diamond, and gave it to Gabriel to take back to the old man. I found my lump of gold, too, and slipped it into my pocket.
‘Can ve have some vater?’ Bernard asked.
There was a big water bottle attached to each pack. I kept one for Gabriel and me, then walked down to the edge of the creek.
‘I’ll do a swap,’ I said. I had found a box of bullets in one of the packs. ‘This bottle of water for Henry’s pistol.’
The prospectors had no choice but to agree. They needed water, and drinking from the creek was out of the question. As soon as we had made the exchange, I loaded the big pistol and pointed it up into the air.
BANG!
‘Why you do that?’ Gabriel asked.
I felt embarrassed. ‘To scare away jaguars,’ I said.
So much for being a brave warrior.
It was fully dark now and we didn’t have torches to find our way back to the track. Gabriel and I would have to stay where we were until daylight, or risk getting hopelessly lost. We could have spent the night in a tree, but it was too dark to find one that I could climb – anyway, jaguars and pumas can climb trees. Instead, we wrapped ourselves in a groundsheet from one of the packs and made ourselves comfortable with our backs to a wall of small palms.
BANG!
A pistol shot every so often would frighten anything away. I had lots of bullets.
The last thing I expected was to attract something with the pistol. But that’s what happened.
After my third or fourth shot, I heard a rustling noise, then the snap of a stick breaking. Gabriel gripped my arm.
‘Something coming!’ he whispered.
Hooley dooly! We stood up, letting the groundsheet fall to the ground as we backed down to the water’s edge. I pointed the loaded pistol away from me and peered into the inky blackness.
Then there was another rustling sound, closer this time.
‘Wh-who’s there?’ I stammered.
Suddenly I was blinded by torchlight.
‘Sam?’
‘Uncle Shaun?!’
25
LUNGS OF THE WORLD
Here’s what had happened. After I got swept away in the peke-peke, Uncle Shaun and Caesar made it ashore and set off after me along the riverbank. But the jungle was very thick and it took them nearly two hours to reach the Big Beast. When they found the capsized peke-peke caught in a snag about fifty metres below the waterfall, they feared the worst – either I’d drowned in the river, or been killed when I went over the falls. But then something weird happened. An arrow fell out of the sky and plopped into the river not ten metres from where they were standing. Uncle Shaun recognised the orange feathers. It was one of his crossbow arrows (the one Gabriel’s father shot at the rat-like animal) and it seemed to have come from the other side of the river.
Was I alive, after all?
It was no use shouting because the waterfall was
so loud, so Uncle Shaun and Caesar set about crossing the river to look for me. First they had to free the peke-peke from the snag and repair a big hole at the back where the outboard motor had been ripped off. It took nearly an hour. While they were doing it, Henry and Bernard came puttering along the other side of the river in their own peke-peke. Uncle Shaun and Caesar tried to attract their attention, but again the waterfall made shouting useless and the overhanging trees largely hid them from the prospectors’ view.
By the time Uncle Shaun and Caesar had repaired their peke-peke and crossed the river, the prospectors had dragged their own canoe up the bank and disappeared into the jungle. Uncle Shaun wasn’t sure whether to follow them or not. He thought I’d be more likely to stay near the river than go traipsing off into the jungle. Then Caesar thought he heard a gunshot (probably Bernard trying to scare the puma). A while later there was a whole volley of shots (when the prospectors were crossing the creek) and this time Uncle Shaun heard them, too.
‘I’ll bet Sam’s got something to do with that,’ he said.
The afternoon was well advanced by then, so they borrowed a torch from the bundle of supplies left in the prospectors’ peke-peke and set off into the jungle to investigate. It grew dark and they were about to abandon their search, when there was another gunshot, much louder than the earlier ones (me trying to scare away jaguars). It was followed at ten minute intervals by a series of gunshots that eventually led Uncle Shaun and Caesar right to me.
But that wasn’t the end of my Amazon adventure.
The following day I was made an honorary member of the Yanomami tribe. Gabriel’s great uncle, the old man who owned the diamond, was also the village leader. He placed a string of red feathers around my neck and gave me a new name, Nabebe.