by Wilbur Smith
17.
As it turned out, retracing our steps through the jungle was easier than I’d expected. Innocent’s tracking skills were unnecessary; even I could spot the signs of where we’d been: machete-hacked vines, stick-swiped stems and stomped vegetation. We made faster progress in reverse, mostly because we were following a sort of path, but also because we were in a different kind of hurry, racing against nightfall. The Democratic Republic of Congo is bang on the equator; unlike at home where the sun goes down slowly, here it sets fast. And what’s more it sets at roughly the same time, 6 p.m., right through the year: there’s no putting the clocks back for winter in the tropics.
We’d split up around mid-afternoon so had just a few hours left of daylight to catch up with the poachers. Without seeming to hurry, Innocent somehow set a pace that required Caleb and I to half-trot. Though we’d cleared a bit of a path the ground was at best uneven and not long after we started I caught my foot in a tangle of creeper and fell over. Caleb relished this; I’m sure I heard him laugh. When the same thing happened to him just minutes later, I made a show of checking he was all right; people like Caleb find sympathy harder to take than ridicule.
We soon reached the spot where we’d encountered Bingo’s troupe. Innocent paused, but I would have recognised the forked tree with the ring of peeled bark anyway. The chimps were nowhere to be seen now. Innocent had told us to conserve our water. Now, from a packet he unexpectedly plucked out of his top pocket, he gave us each a boiled sweet. I hadn’t realised how thirsty I was until the sugar hit my tongue. I’ve no idea what fruit it was supposed to taste like and I didn’t care: it was the best sweet I’d ever eaten.
We were only stationary for a minute or so, and admittedly we’d turned to face each other, but when Innocent asked if we were ready to set off again Caleb said, ‘Of course,’ and started off back the way we’d come. I’ve always had a good sense of direction; his was apparently haywire. Innocent called him back. I didn’t comment.
The going got tougher from there. Though the poachers had been a bigger group, they must have been moving through the rainforest more carefully, leaving less of a trail. I was tired. Everything ached. The boiled sweet had tamed my thirst for a while, but it had also triggered my hunger. A weakness pulsed in my belly. And yet Innocent kept up the fierce pace, and Caleb kept with him, and that meant I had to keep up too. It was a struggle.
Abruptly and mercifully, just when I thought I could take it no longer, Innocent stopped. In his lilting whisper he explained, ‘Where we are, and the direction the poachers are going, they must also sleep out tonight. They’ll make camp while they have light. Good progress. Tough boys.’ Here he clenched his fist. ‘I think we’ll catch up soon. So quietly now: let’s not run into their camp by accident.’
We moved on more slowly. The whooping, chattering hum of the jungle intensified around me as I tried to make less noise myself. In fact we had to endure another half-hour of this creeping progress before Innocent stopped again, and by this time the light was already failing. High above us, the canopy had turned a purplish black and all the green beneath it was grey. He motioned for us crouch lower, stay still and keep silent. We did, but it was hard; the mosquitoes, which had dogged us all day as we moved, clouded around us more thickly when we didn’t. For many long minutes we sat there in the glowering dampness, waiting. I wondered whether Innocent had mistakenly stopped us too soon. Then the purple gloom deepened, and as night established itself I spotted the yellow dot of a flame in the darkness ahead. It danced and grew, a camp fire taking hold.
‘That’s them?’ I asked, my voice a whisper above the whining mosquitoes.
Innocent nodded. He took out his GPS and tapped its screen. Very quietly he explained, ‘We know where they stopped us and we know now where they camp. Draw a line between two coordinates and extend it: we can predict where they head for tomorrow. Et voilà, rangers can intercept.’
Caleb looked pleased with himself. ‘What did I tell you,’ he said.
‘Yes, that’s the first part done. But now we must retreat as far as possible before making our own bed for the night.’ Innocent’s face was grim. ‘No picnic.’
I turned from the distant firelight. The jungle we had to retreat through was now a dense black web. Beside me, cockiness gone, Caleb drew a nervous breath.
‘Hand on my shoulder, and his on yours,’ Innocent told him. We did as we were told, making a little human chain behind the guide. How he could see the way I’ve no idea. We didn’t rush, that’s for sure: at a glacial pace, step by step, doing everything we could to stay concealed, we inched away.
18.
When I was eleven I caught chickenpox. That’s quite late to have it: everyone assumed I was already immune. I only got a few scabs, they didn’t itch that badly, and aside from one spot high on my forehead they didn’t scar. But for three days I had a blisteringly high temperature. I became delirious. At its worst I was convinced that my bedsheets, knotted about me, were an octopus’s tentacles. Mum put a fan next to my bed: the sound of it was wave-roar. Apparently I started shouting all sorts of nonsense about drowning. That’s because I thought I was! It was terrifying.
And yet it was nothing compared to the night we spent in the rainforest. Having crept along behind Innocent and Caleb for what seemed hours, with the more or less invisible jungle dragging at my ankles, thighs, face, I was relieved when we finally stopped in – apparently – a tiny clearing. But that relief didn’t last long. Innocent told us to put on our waterproofs, unfurled a poncho-type sheet of plastic from his own pack and tied it between two nearby trees. Then he told us to crawl under it with him and go to sleep.
This crude shelter was supposed to do two things. First, the obvious: keep us dry if it rained. Second, and more importantly: catch that rain so we could drink it. That’s why he weighted down the middle of our roof with a stone. But – just our luck – it rained nothing but mosquitoes all night long. Their whining was a horrible white-noise accompaniment to all the other chirping, whooping, clicking, barking sounds that cut through it. Though the soundtrack had been a pleasant enough distraction in the day, its night-time counterpart was sinister.
What was out there?
What wasn’t?
I imagined green mambas climbing the vines, warthogs rooting through the leaves, leopards in the trees. Innocent had said we would detour to a nearby river for water in the morning: what if a crocodile was doing its own detouring towards us now? Even if nothing big got us, something small might have a go. Scuttling sounds nearby were undoubtedly hungry rats. And the constant drone of insects made my skin – where it wasn’t already itching – crawl. We’d been issued malaria tablets in London, and I’d been taking them regularly, but right now they seemed a laughably weak defence. Enveloped in darkness, with the jungle alive around me and a plastic poncho for a roof, I’d never felt more exposed.
At one point, despite there being no rain, lightning split the sky. Everything jumped bright for a nanosecond. Then it happened again, and again, and again, each burst like an X-ray of the canopy, the twine Innocent had used to rig up the poncho, the dead leaves spread out around us, the swirling mosquitoes, and Caleb beside me, the thunder rolling through us, his eyes as wide and terrified as mine.
19.
I didn’t sleep that night. Though I was exhausted beyond belief, the best I could manage was a flickering semi-consciousness. Every time I thought I was drifting off I was pricked awake again, either by something actually pricking me, or plain old fear. Innocent’s stillness suggested he didn’t have the same problem, but I’m pretty sure Caleb, like me, just lay there through the night, willing it to end. Dawn couldn’t come too soon.
As it was, Innocent got up when it was still dark, just. I don’t know how he judged it so well, but by the time we’d bustled ourselves ready the first bluish hint of morning was filtering down to us. I was famished and parched and my feet were sore in my boots when we set off downhill in search of the river. In
nocent explained as we walked that countless streams and rivers criss-cross the jungle, thousands of strands of water weaving into tributaries that eventually knit into the mighty Congo itself. We would pick one up nearby, drink, and follow it north; apparently this stream cut quite close to our base camp in the end. He was trying to take our minds off the pain of getting going again, I know. I did the same by imagining the statistics – rainfall measurements, humidity levels, that sort of thing – Amelia would no doubt have contributed if she’d been with us. I hoped she and the others had made it back to camp OK and slept better than us.
We reached the river soon enough. It was more of a stream really, not more than ten feet wide. The ground either side of it was boggy, stabbed full of reeds, and the water itself was brown as tea, but I was so thirsty I didn’t care. Scrabbling for my empty water bottle, I started to wade in. Innocent stopped me.
‘We need to purify it first.’
The thought of waiting while we built a fire – out of what, damp sticks? – and boiled water – in what? we hadn’t brought a pan – to purify it nearly made me snap, but he smilingly held up a hand, rooted in his pack, and produced a little plastic tube.
‘Clever tablets,’ he said.
Clever, but slow: once added to our refilled water bottles the tablets took thirty agonising minutes to work, and that half an hour waiting for the water to be safe to drink was an eternity. Being as parched as that made me realise I’d never actually experienced proper thirst before. Even when I’d thought I was thirsty after sport, say, I wasn’t really: my entire life, when I’ve wanted water to drink, I’ve been able to turn on a tap within minutes. I’d only gone, what, twelve hours without a drink now, but I’d been sweating in the humidity and the thirst I battled as I sat waiting for that tablet to work tasted like ash and headaches, sawdust and scabs. Innocent himself seemed perfectly content to wait, but I could tell Caleb was hurting too. Though he didn’t say so, I saw him looking at his watch and he caught me looking at mine. Perversely, when the thirty minutes were up, I held back from taking the top off my bottle. So did Caleb. Innocent took a sip from his own flask but we both waited. I didn’t fully understand why to begin with, though it was perfectly obvious. Neither of us wanted to crack first. As soon as I spelled that stupidity out to myself I said, ‘Ridiculous,’ unscrewed the lid, and drank half the bottle in one go. I’m pretty sure I caught Caleb smiling before he followed suit.
Purification tablets make water taste of chlorine, like a swimming pool, and there was grit in my bottle, and the water was lukewarm, but just as Innocent’s boiled sweet had been the best I’d ever eaten, that was the most welcome drink of my life. Everything – even my sore feet – felt better after it. The water evidently rebooted Caleb too. ‘Come on then, we should make tracks,’ he said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. This show of readiness was unnecessary as Innocent and I were already primed to go. But Caleb obviously wanted to assert that he was in charge, so not content with having chivvied us pointlessly, he set off into the jungle, swinging his machete this way and that, a self-appointed expedition leader.
The only trouble was that he’d started out in the wrong direction again. It’s hard to navigate in the jungle, I know, but we were supposed to follow the stream north, meaning the morning sun would be coming from our right, and Caleb had set off with the sun to our left. After he’d taken a few steps I glanced at Innocent, first to make sure I hadn’t gone mad, and second because I didn’t want to be the one to correct him. I’m pretty sure Innocent shot me a smile.
‘Mr Caleb!’ he sang.
Caleb, who was thirty metres upstream and already just about out of sight, shouted, ‘What are you waiting for?’
Innocent took a deep breath to tell him, but before he could there was a rush of leaves and a yelp-scream and what we could see of Caleb through the foliage suddenly changed shape. Both of us sprinted towards him. On arrival, it seemed as if he’d collapsed mid-cartwheel. One of his green boots was wrenched awkwardly above his head, still firmly attached to his foot, beneath which the rest of him was writhing on the ground. He’d stepped in a snare. I was surprised to find myself genuinely worried he’d been hurt. But his ‘Get me down!’ was angry rather than agonised.
Caleb’s machete was on the ground in front of me. The snare was made out of a loop of paracord rigged to a log, itself cantilevered over a bent tree. I couldn’t quite work out the mechanics of the thing, but if how to set Caleb free? was the question, sever the rope had to be the answer. I fired off a quick photo for the record while Caleb was looking towards Innocent, then picked up the big knife and swung it at the knot: the log thumped to the ground, the treetop snapped upright and Caleb’s leg joined the swearing rest of him on the floor.
‘You OK?’ Innocent sounded concerned: did he think Caleb was about to blame him?
‘Of course I’m OK.’ Caleb brushed himself down. ‘I just …’ He trailed off. For a half-beat I thought he might be about to laugh: since he wasn’t injured, surely he could see the funny side? But his face hardened and aside from muttering a brusque, ‘Thanks,’ as I handed him back his knife it was pretty clear ‘funny’ wasn’t on his radar.
‘Dangerous, horrible,’ said Innocent, holding up the snare. ‘Many animals die this way. They do not have a friend to cut them down.’
‘I’d have freed myself eventually,’ Caleb muttered.
He might well have done so – the machete was probably within his reach – yet his lack of gratitude was irritating. I tried not to respond. But once he’d picked the leaves out of his hair and was ready to go again, I couldn’t help pointing back downstream and saying, ‘Right then, shall we head in the actual direction of the others this time?’ with a fake lightness in my voice. I wish with all my heart that I’d held my tongue; if I’d stopped myself from goading him, we might have avoided the awfulness of what happened later.
20.
As it was, we made it back to the others in good time. There was no chat on the way. Silent endurance felt both right and odd at the same time. When we’d reunited with Amelia and Xander things were a little more normal, though somehow there was no way I could tell them about what had happened to Caleb. Not out of solidarity, and not because I was in his thrall. It was more that his inability to take the joke meant that telling it would be cruel. However, the strange thing was that not taking the mick out of him, far from making him grateful, seemed to do the opposite. He bristled, ignored me, gave the others short shrift. The more nobody commented, the more het up he became. Mid-afternoon, when Xander, Amelia and I were on our camp beds playing cards, I heard a whacking, chopping sound outside and went to investigate. Caleb had cut a bough from a nearby tree with his machete and was hacking at the wood as if it was his mortal enemy. A relative of the tree used to spring the snare perhaps? I was about to leave him to it when Innocent also poked his head out of his tent to see what was going on.
‘Are you OK, Mr Caleb?’ he asked.
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ Caleb took another swing at the branch and a yellow bite mark appeared in it.
‘Sharp knife,’ said Innocent. ‘Take care.’
‘I know what I’m doing,’ said Caleb, sending another chipping into the air.
Innocent smiled at him and was retreating, his arm affectionately around Patience’s shoulders, when Caleb abruptly stopped chopping and said, ‘Hang on a minute.’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s with all this sitting around? When do we set off?’
‘We rest here today and head home tomorrow.’ Innocent’s gentle voice made this sound more like a suggestion than a statement.
Caleb rounded on it immediately, ‘I didn’t mean when do we go home, I meant when do we see the gorillas?’
‘The gorillas,’ said Innocent.
‘Yeah.’
‘After the scare of yesterday and last night’s difficulty, I think we take everyone back to Kinshasa, for safety. It’s best,’ he said quietly.
‘No chance!�
� There was an edge to Caleb’s laughter. ‘I didn’t come all this way not to see gorillas, Innocent. Creep back home? You’re going to have to do better than that.’
Hearing the commotion, Xander and Amelia joined us.
‘Another time maybe,’ said Innocent. Smiling at Patience he went on, ‘Everyone tired, I think.’
Xander nodded but Amelia, failing to read the situation, said, ‘Actually I slept very well, thank you.’
‘Good girl,’ said Caleb. ‘I knew you’d be up for it.’
If I’d ever called Amelia a ‘good girl’, she’d have ripped my arm off and beaten me to death with the bloody end of it, but unbelievably she let this go with, ‘All I meant was that I’m not sleepy.’
‘And you want to see the gorillas, yes?’ Caleb asked.
‘Gorillas, yes. But not guerrillas. Primates not poachers.’
‘Of course,’ said Caleb. ‘But we pinpointed yesterday’s poachers for the rangers –’ he made it sound like he’d done it himself – ‘so they’ll be out of the equation, and anyway the mountain gorillas are in a completely different part of the national park. The chances of coming across two sets of poachers in one trip has to be infinitesimal.’
‘That’s not actually the way statistics work in this context,’ Amelia couldn’t help explaining. That was more like it! But annoyingly she went on, ‘It doesn’t matter though. I’d still like to see them.’
A scraggy-necked chicken, which had been pecking at the dirt a few metres off, now wandered in among us. Caleb addressed Innocent: ‘We signed up for chimpanzees and mountain gorillas. You’re not going to let a minor scare like yesterday derail things, are you?’
While Innocent searched for a way to answer him Caleb waved at the chicken with the flat of his machete blade. Dust rose from the bird’s wings as it flapped-skittered away.