by Stieve Adams
while they come to the deck and gesture and point towards land. They are getting ready to land and look for us, it seems clear.
"We must go, we have to hide," says Boy.
He does not need to say that twice. We wade up the shallow brook until we reach a high waterfall. We go landing and climbing into the jungle as soon as we can. Near the brook there are almost impermeable bushes and it is getting humid in the air. After penetrating further into the woods, we dare to stay and listen if we have any persecutors. We hear from distant loud little upset voices. Suddenly I see Boy disappearing into the woods. I dare not shout, the Asians can hear me.
We are as mentioned in Dominica. What I see from this unwelcome island is dense rainforest. It's damp in the air and it starts to shine a light rain. The rain is hot, but we get uncomfortably wet all the way to the body. We have bathing boots, t-shirts and sandals on us. The t-shirts stick to the body, in a less frustrating situation, I would have a glance at Valerie. I fiddled until I read the words on her t-shirt on Valerie's litters. It was an advertising shirt for the Pizzeria Vulcano, and what volcanoes were written off.
Boy returned silently to us.
"Where have you been," I relieved nervously
"Recognized to see what the enemy is doing"
"And what are they doing?"
"Gives a jungle expedition to chase us"
"Are you sure?"
"Yep, they are gearing up five men who are soon on our way. What should we do now?"
"We have to move on and hide until they get tired," Valerie said undoubtedly.
"I could go and ask what they want," I tried. The eyes I received from Valerie and Boy made me feel depressed in the boot. If I had only boots in this jungle, everything would feel much better.
We had landed on a very deserted part of Dominica. It was not that difficult. Most of the island is very unavailable, and it is 80,000 people living on the island, although it is the largest of the so-called Windward Islands. In the tourist brochures, it is sometimes called the garden of Eden. Here we were now three odd people, a lost scout, a puzzling woman and a boy who apparently was a burglar. At least. There could be many miles to the nearest human beings. The north-western part of the island seemed to be completely uninhabited, that was the part we were at.
It was clear that we had to move away from our pursuers, it was also clear that we should not leave the coast. From the boat we had seen high mountains and the island was a volcanic island like everyone else in these areas. Here in the rainforest it was semi-foamy and there was no possibility of orientation. Only on occasional occasions one could see a glimpse of the sun. Once we left the brook there was a lot of undergrowth, the tall dense chandeliers made it impossible for ordinary trees and shrubs to grow here. However, there were mosses and slippery stones that made it difficult to get along. And the ground ended steeply down to the left.
One thought might be to try to regain our boat. To begin with, you should find out what happened to it. We had now gone for an hour and when we listened back we could not hear our pursuers. It was just going downhill and we would come to the sea. Even though we were high above sea level, we had no view at all because of the dense vegetation. After half an hour we could hear the burns and it took us another quarter to penetrate the string nest. We saw our boat and we saw our persecutors boat.
But there ended the joy. Both boats were heading north. The question was whether we had any persecutors on shore or if they had returned on board. We received the answer quite promptly. Fortunately, the pursuers were not very silent. They had calculated that we were going to follow the coast to the north and there was a group on shore who were looking and three people in the luxury cruiser's dinghy who slowly approached us from the south.
Just moving on, starting with land, that is, climbing upwards in the slippery ground. If we were wrong, they would see our traces. Our Boy had thought about the same thing and when we returned the same way we came down, Boy last went and dragged his wet t-shirt into the track. It looked good, at least I did not see our own tracks anymore. When we met on the next stream we went to the brook a couple of hundred meters to further out any traces.