by Andy Lucas
‘What, no collapsible bridge?’
‘Looks like we’re going up into the trees,’ grinned Ruby.
‘My mother always said I was a monkey,’ said Hammond.
‘Looks like she was right after all,’ she added.
‘We must climb into the canopy,’ deduced Cosmos slowly, cutting in on their banter, ‘and tie a stretch of rope to this side. Somehow we have to take the other end across to a tree on the other side of the water and tie it on also? Everyone then climbs up this side, goes across the rope and climbs down to get their marker? Is this making any sense?’
‘Once the rope is tied, yep, I see what you mean,’ agreed Attia.
‘The second trail to the road is only a few feet into the trees,’ said Ruby, checking her map device quickly. ‘It’s on this side, so you’re right Cosmos. We each have to go over, then come back again.’
‘There and back,’ echoed Hammond. He was in his glory and eager to start, all discomfort from his swollen ankle suddenly forgotten.
‘Seems simple enough,’ Pace ventured, ‘but how do we get across the water with the rope in the first place? How do we bridge such a wide gap?’ There were no obvious limbs sticking out from trees on the other side, so a cowboy-style lasso wouldn’t work and the turtle log was unlikely to support the weight of a person, even if they could rope it.
‘Somebody will have to climb high into the canopy,’ answered Ruby, eyeing the treetops carefully. ‘They’ll need to go high enough until they can move across some of the upper branches that join those of trees on the other side.’ Ruby scanned as she spoke and all eyes followed her gaze.
The water was wide enough to keep the trees almost totally apart from each other but there looked to be some thin foliage stretching out over the water, towards the tree canopy opposite, in a couple of places. Pace swallowed uneasily. The limbs looked frail and were very high up, perhaps one hundred and twenty feet from the ground. From down on the forest floor, Pace couldn’t be sure they touched at all, though they looked like they did – just. Whoever went first might even have to make some kind of jump.
Being an experienced pilot, he had never had a problem with heights but the sense of sheer scale and exposure tingled up and down his spine, stiffening the hairs on the nape of his neck.
‘Who’s the best climber?’ asked Cosmos rhetorically. They all knew it was Ruby. ‘My weight makes it impossible for me to try, so I am in luck,’ he grinned. ‘Small and light would have the best chance.’
‘As the professional climber of the group, and the lightest, I’ll go of course.’ There was no trace of emotion in Ruby’s voice. Without another word she started sorting through the equipment supply, choosing carefully before moving around to choose the best tree. Then again, if you were used to hanging thousands of feet up a sheer cliff-face, one hundred and twenty feet was child’s play.
As Pace watched her prepare to get started, he remembered the fact that most creatures, including those with bites deadly to humans, were arboreal. It wasn’t only the height she was risking. To add to the tension, in the fifteen minutes she took to get herself ready, the strip of grey sky grew darker as the sun dipped towards an unseen horizon. Her climb would soon be in the dark, guided only by torch light. It was a journey fraught with danger and he said so.
‘Do you have any better suggestions?’
‘Not one,’ he replied truthfully.
‘I appreciate your concern, honestly,’ she smiled, ‘but I’ll be up and over before anyone knows it. If I get going now I should be able to get the tricky bit done before the light goes completely. I don’t plan on hanging around long enough to annoy any of the locals either.’
‘James is right, of course,’ agreed Hammond. ‘You will have to be very careful but you know that. Bailey’s team aren’t here so they obviously made it across and back somehow. Maybe they found a better way but I can’t think what it would’ve been.’
‘The equipment is for climbing, you’ve done enough yourself to know that.’ Hammond conceded a nodding shrug. ‘There’s no time to waste thinking about it. I’d be very happy if the bag held James’s collapsible bridge, but it doesn’t. Anyway, wish me luck.’
Ruby strapped a set of spikes around her running boots, shunning the handspikes in favour of her own fingers. It would be quicker, she explained. Then she selected a nearby tree that reached high into the edge of the canopy and quickly shook out her muscles. Its lowest limbs didn’t sprout from the trunk for a massive forty feet above their heads and the trunk itself was gigantic, measuring at least twenty feet across.
‘About thirty-five, maybe forty feet to the first limb, then I can speed up,’ she echoed their thoughts perfectly, looping a long coil of rope and the thinner nylon safety over one shoulder. ‘I will tie on when I hit the first limb so the rest of you should be able to cross with only a forty foot drop to the net. As soon as the rope is tied I’ll head on up, over and down, tying off at the lowest limb over there. I should be able to tie on at about the same height.’
Pace piped up. ‘Now get going before all my film gets used up.’ She gave him a rude finger-sign.
‘They’ll just cut that out,’ Pace shook his head reprovingly behind the eyepiece. ‘I don’t know, the young women of today…’ She gave him another sign for good measure but then smiled sweetly and blew an exaggerated kiss into the lens.
‘Everyone okay with this?’ asked Hammond, using some bandages from Attia’s medical kit to fashion a makeshift torch mount for Ruby’s head. It wasn’t pretty but he managed to tie his smallest torch onto the top of her head, giving her light for as long as the batteries held out. ‘Any last questions? No? Okay then, off you go and good luck.’
‘With that get up, you look like you’ve already fallen off a high tree,’ said Attia and it did look like Ruby had suffered a serious accident, with the swathes of bandages Hammond had wrapped around her head.
‘I haven’t used the small torch much so you should have good batteries in that one. There aren’t any spares for it, so when it packs up, that’s it.’
‘No time to waste then.’
‘One last thing,’ said Cosmos seriously, his tone low and instantly commanding attention. All eyes twitched across to him. ‘Remember not to put any weight on any epiphytes.’
‘I hadn’t planned to,’ answered Ruby, ‘but thanks for the reminder.’
‘Epiphytes?’ queried Pace, immediately aware of his lack of knowledge.
‘Epiphyte is a generic term for many species of the plants and flowers that grow in any rain forest. It refers to any plant that grows out of the trees; sucker plants of you like.’ Hammond filled him in easily.
‘A lot of seed never gets to the forest floor,’ explained Cosmos. ‘They get lodged in cracks of bark or the joints of tree limbs, where they happily grow. There’s so much humidity all the time they can survive quite happily.’
‘Okay, I guess they aren’t too strong then?’
‘No, they’re mainly flowering orchids or fungi. Some can look really tough but they won’t hold your weight.’ He spoke directly to Ruby now. ‘Just use your spikes and stick to grabbing solid tree when you climb.’
‘Okay, enough lecturing,’ said Hammond. ‘It will be dark any minute, so get going.’
Everyone wished her well and stood back to watch. The vibrant Canadian sucked in a concentrating breath, reached up and started her ascent. She moved purposefully, digging her feet into the bark and sliding up. She stretched her arms as far around the trunk as possible before pulling her feet free, one at a time, and stabbing the spikes back into the flesh of the trunk a foot or so further up.
Ruby reached the first limb without incident. She pulled off the rope coil, unwound the tie and let the bulk fall away to the ground, keeping a firm grip on the free end. Tying it tightly to the limb she pulled up the rope, coiling it as she went but in a much looser way. She then tied off the safety line and smiled down at them. She waved before heading up into the foliage.
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Soon after, the first drops of heavier rain began to fall against the lens of the big camera. Very quickly, Ruby’s diminutive frame was lost from sight by a deluge that closed down visibility to about thirty feet; enough to blur even the lower limb into an indistinct echo of itself. Unusually, a slight wind drove the rain in underneath the trees and all they could do was bury themselves deeper into the waterproof clothing and wait.
Pace quickly packed the expensive camera away and continued filming with the MicroCam because he had more faith in its waterproof qualities.
Pace kept the tripod out and screwed the little camcorder to it instead. Several torches were being shone upwards from the ground but the falling darkness and downpour made it pointless; so they were switched off. The camcorder’s night vision managed to pick out Ruby’s hazy form and he was the only one able to see her for the next ten minutes until she completely vanished from view; any light diffused and reflected back by a thousand slanting raindrops.
Pace had no idea how she would cope with the bad weather. If only the rain had held off for one hour longer. The situation was tense but he was quietly confident Ruby would make it, which she did eventually.
An hour passed before Pace caught sight of her again. The rain continued to pour down all that time and he couldn’t see anything until a regular check through the viewfinder picked her out just as she climbed back down from the obscured limb above their heads and into plain sight. She resembled a drowned rat but the smile of achievement she wore burned itself into his memory.
All of their full running suits looked grimy and soiled and hers was no exception. Her climb had pulled at her bottoms a little and the material was torn in a couple of places where she’d snagged herself on sharp points, a couple even spotted with fresh blood where thorns had gouged at her flesh. Ruby pulled out a small red plastic card, with a flourish, from the waistband of her partially exposed underwear before readjusting herself. The beaming grin never left her otherwise exhausted face and all of them got a hug.
For her, the challenge was over and she demanded to take over the camera for him, listening to his run down of the basic controls in between gulps of bottled water. Pace had decided to go first, or second technically, just to get it over with.
Admittedly, she didn’t have time to fill him in on the entire climb but she’d managed to cross a few upper tree limbs, clamber down and tie the rope off to a branch on the far side. Then she’d hauled herself back across the river using it. Pace donned his spikes, including the hand ones. He didn’t trust himself to look back at the team and threw himself determinedly up the tree. His technique was bloody awful but he got the knack fairly quickly.
Water not only fell into his eyes, blinding him for the most part, but it also ran in streams down the trunk itself, bringing with it swarms of disgruntled, partially drowned insects. Pace jammed his head back and kept his eyes partially closed against the rain and concentrated on his goal.
‘You’re doing fine,’ called Hammond. ‘Just remember to breathe.’
It was good advice and Pace forced his lungs to work more sedately. Moving upwards steadily, the limb slowly solidified through the driving rain. He reached it without incident and soon stood on it, gripping the rope that stretched out, he knew, across to the other side of the water. He turned the handspikes around to the backs of the hand so he could manage the traverse and sucked in a deep breath.
Gripping the wet rope tightly with both hands, he stepped off of the limb. Just as the rain had shielded the limb from below, it prevented him seeing anything below him at all, except his own legs as they dangled beneath him.
Pace hauled his legs up and hooked them over the rope as well, with his head facing in the direction of the opposite bank, which he could not see. He wasn’t stupid enough to try a purely hand-over-hand crossing, instead opting for slow, steady progress across the slick rope.
‘Go on, James. You are doing very well.’ He knew whoever had spoken couldn’t really see him unless they snatched a glance through the camera but he appreciated the encouragement.
Moving across the rope turned out to be far easier than he’d imagined. Hand, hand, then slide feet together. He repeated the mantra to himself as his body dragged itself across the hidden water some three storeys below. The opposite tree banged into his head surprisingly quickly and he then managed a fairly competent climb down to the opposite bank.
A bag, neatly marked for the team, was propped against the base of the tree and in no time at all he was back up the trunk, over the rope and standing again on the limb of the starting tree. He didn’t falter on the last leg and felt very pleased with myself as his feet pressed into the soft ground. He hadn’t slipped, fallen, or screwed it up at all, which was brilliant.
Swallowing some offered water, Pace took back the camera, checked it was still running sweetly, and recorded the others as they each overcame the task in turn. He panned, zoomed and tracked some really wonderful shots with the night vision switched on. Nobody fell and, in the end, the first challenge proved a little anti-climactic. An hour after his triumphant crossing, they were all making their way back up the second track. Nobody wanted to walk the track at night but they couldn’t hang around. Everyone had managed to rest when it wasn’t their turn to climb; drinking and eating some fruit and energy biscuits so they wasted no time in pushing on again.
With Cosmos in the lead, the team wound its way back inside the insidious, dark maw of choking forest. To cope with the darkness they adopted a system of the leader and the vanguard both carrying one of the large torches. This gave just enough light to follow the trail and nearly enough to keep unseen demons at bay.
17
They were on a high from their success and all ignored their fatigue. At one point they even broke into an enthusiastic rendition of Heard it through the Grapevine, though the maestro himself would have turned in his grave to hear them murder his tune.
In time, Hammond took his turn up at the front. The rain slammed down onto the canopy with a continued ferocity and weight. Thunder raged alongside the torrent of fairly cold water but any lightning was hidden by the dense foliage.
Water still found its way through the gaps and down the trunks with enough force to start some serious flooding and their ragged line moved ever more slowly until progress was barely more than a trudge through increasingly deep and slippery mud.
Pace definitely needed something to take his mind off being wet and surprisingly cold. His eyes were heavy and fatigue was beginning to eat away at him. As his chest strained under the constant exertion, he fought away the fear as needles of hot pain prickled around his edges of his wound.
No, he thought firmly, just ignore it and it will go away. He still walked at the back of the line, with Cosmos in front of him. He asked the cheery Kenyan how long he had been running. It had been written down on the summary sheet he’d received about each of the competitors but his addled brain couldn’t remember.
‘I’ve been running for all of my life,’ came the reply, with a brief crackle of interference.
Pace’s eyes were rooted between the man’s broad back and the intercom meant Cosmos didn’t have to take his eyes off his footing to look around at his questioner. ‘It is a wise man who learns to be quick. In Kenya, especially back when I was a small boy, danger looked for you everywhere. You had to be swift on your feet just to stay alive.’
‘Hard on a child,’ Pace said softly.
‘That’s just how it was, and still is in a lot of my country.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. When I was barely a teenager I witnessed a massacre.’ He spoke in an emotionless tone, his unseen eyes taking on a faraway glaze although his feet never erred along the squelching track. ‘Even at such a young age, I’d already seen a lot of killing. The only difference was that these were white people, not native Kenyans. They had run an eye clinic just outside my village since I was a little boy. Just a tent and some basic equipment but the doctors be
came part of our village; of our family. It wasn’t planned, the killing I mean. Strangers came and their anger turned to murder.’
‘I really don’t know what to say,’ Pace admitted, turning sharply to avoid a sharp root sticking out across the track. Cosmos had seen it and instinctively stepped over it, waving his hand to point it out to Pace. Nobody up in front had called out a warning, which was a worry. Tiredness was taking its toll on concentration obviously. Pace called out to Hammond and warned him to pay more attention. An apology came back over his headset, alongside a promise to look harder.
‘They butchered everyone,’ Cosmos continued. ‘Doctors, nurses, local volunteers…everybody.’
‘And you witnessed it all?’ Pace wasn’t sure where it was going but was intrigued to hear the giant speak of his past.
‘The gang didn’t know about the medical team that had left four days before; heading for a village thirty miles away. There were three nurses and two native guides who went out on a six-monthly visit. I knew they would be on their way back and they would have walked into certain death. I decided to get away and warn them. Nobody spotted me because I’d hidden myself well. After dark, when the killers were all drunk and sleeping, I ran to tell them.’
‘You must have cared a great deal to risk your life for them.’
‘One of the guides was my brother, Kaur. The nurses were always kind to us. For years the hospital had been helping the people from all the local villages. It was my duty to try.’
Pace barely remembered to move his feet, so enthralled was he becoming. ‘Did you…find them?’ He mentally crossed his fingers.