The Orchid Hunter

by Sandra K. Moore

  “I’m coming down a few feet to check something out!” I called down. “I need about two inches of lift.”

  “Got it.”

  Kinkaid pulled hard on the rope to raise me, taking the pressure off the anchor line. I unclipped the anchor and let it swing.

  “Slack!” I shouted.

  Kinkaid started paying out the rope. I guess he’d taken climbing lessons somewhere, because he knew what to do without my having to tell him. I still controlled my descent, but he belayed me like a good climbing partner.

  I came even with the biomass hammock. The white stuff might be mold or high-flying mushrooms for all I knew. I pulled my machete from its holster and prodded into the mass. Plenty of material there, but where was that flower? I stuck the machete under a largish branch and shoved it to one side.

  Yellow, alien eyes speared me. Pit viper. A fer-de-lance. Its coiled brown-gray body unwound as it eased toward me, tongue flicking, its head the size of a big man’s fist.

  It struck.

  Chapter 7

  I jerked back, twisting away. The wedge-shaped head snapped past my right shoulder. My machete hand was in the wrong position to hack. I grabbed at the snake’s body with my left hand.

  And missed.

  It slithered off the hammock and fell onto my lap, its tail writhing around my dangling legs. Its head angled toward me.

  “Drop me!” I screamed to Kinkaid.

  Instantly the rope jerked into motion and I fell, crashing through air, through banana, cassava, bitterroot, palm. A branch clipped the machete, knocking it from my grip. I grabbed the viper’s warm, dry body with my good left hand and my stunned right. My fingers didn’t even begin to go around the snake, it was so huge. Its tail clung stubbornly to its death grip on my left calf, squeezing the muscle. Head reared back, it showed me its extended fangs. My heart tried to pound its way out of my chest. I had to do something.

  Then my harness jerked, biting into the backs of my thighs and throwing me forward. The fer-de-lance jolted, hissing and writhing. Please, I prayed. I slid my right hand up its body toward its massive head. I couldn’t feel my left foot anymore. But my right boot toe grazed the ground.

  I tried to pry the snake off my leg with my left hand, keeping my right arm locked straight and the snake’s head as far away as possible. It was stronger and faster than I was. Much faster. I wouldn’t avoid another strike if it broke free of my grip.

  “Cut it in half!” I shouted to Kinkaid. “Hurry!”

  He cursed, then in my periphery I saw him stoop to grab the dropped machete where it had landed, blade dug into the earth. I held the viper stretched out between my hands. Kinkaid raised the machete to swing.

  The fer-de-lance twisted from my grip and sprang at Kinkaid, sinking its fangs deep into his bare forearm.

  “Dammit!” I yelled.

  Kinkaid backed up, stumbling over tree roots and uneven ground, dragging the fer-de-lance with him. The viper released my leg. Its heavy body thumped on the forest floor but it didn’t let go of Kinkaid’s arm.

  “Stop moving!” I shouted. “If you keep moving you’ll get more venom!”

  He pushed the machete blade tip into the viper’s mouth. Abruptly the fer-de-lance broke away, slithered into the jungle underbrush, out of sight. Kinkaid panted, staring at his arm.

  My sling held me hostage, just off the ground. The rope had caught on something, dangling me. Damn my luck. “Sit down!” I called. “Sit down and don’t move!”

  I yanked on the rope above me. It didn’t budge. Dammit! With my good hand, I got a tight grip on the rope and raised myself, taking pressure off the harness carabiner. I tried to squeeze the carabiner’s lip open to release the climbing rope. My fingers were too shocked, too weak. Like in a dream, I heard myself gasping with frustrated tears. I squeezed the carabiner again. Got it. The rope slipped through and I fell hard to the ground.

  I scrambled to gain my feet. I scooped up my day pack and ran to Kinkaid where he sat against a tree, holding his forearm.

  “Let me see,” I said.

  He took his hand away. Two perfect punctures, one still filled with fang. His skin already reddened and puckered as his body responded to the venom. And, true to my luck, the viper had struck deep into the muscle, which would carry the neurotoxin through his system faster than a hit into fat.

  “It stings,” he remarked calmly.

  “I’m going to take this fang out and then give you the antivenin.”

  “Okay.”

  “Keep your forearm below your heart.” I dug through the day pack for the antivenin kit. Thank God I’d bought a fresh one before flying down. But I had to hurry. The sun was fading and I was losing the good light.

  My hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t hold the tweezers steady to pluck out the fang.

  “Jessie. Jessie.” Kinkaid’s deep voice swept over me in a soothing wave.

  I grabbed a fistful of his sleeve and held on, not meeting his gaze. If I did that I’d burst into tears right here. I was freakin’ useless. “Okay,” I said after a moment, steeling myself. “I’m ready.”

  This time my hands were calm enough to snag the fang with the tweezers. I put the fang into a small specimen jar. “For a souvenir,” I told him as I screwed the cap on.

  “If I last that long.”

  “Shut up. You’ll last.” He had to. That snake was meant for me, not him. I tore open the antivenin kit. “Are you allergic to horse serum?”

  “I don’t know.” Sweat glistened on his forehead.

  “How do you feel?” I asked. “Dizzy? Faint?”

  “A little nauseated.”

  I nodded as if that were routine. In reality, the venom was working much faster than it should. The viper must have pumped a lot of poison into him. “I’m going to use the extractor to try to remove some of the venom,” I said as casually as I could. I still sounded terrified.

  The Sawyer extraction syringe sucked out a few cc’s of blood along with some clear venom. But the fact Kinkaid was already nauseated suggested he was extremely susceptible to the poison. I kept up the extractor for a few minutes until messy fluid soaked the washcloth I was using. I didn’t get anything significant and the wound was starting to swell.

  On to the big guns. “Let’s give you the serum sensitivity test.”

  He leaned his head back against the tree, watching me. “The station is a long way to hike.”

  “Yeah, it is. Hold still.” I scraped his unbitten arm with the kit’s test pad.

  The station was so far away, in fact, that if Kinkaid turned out to be allergic to the antivenin, given his sensitivity to the venom, he didn’t stand a chance. To get him to the station, we’d have to violate the first rule of snakebite: don’t move. This wasn’t an outing to Camp Okefenokee. No road. No telephone. No life flight choppers. No cavalry riding over the ridge. No help anywhere except what I could give. And I couldn’t carry him the seven miles over rugged terrain. In the coming dark.

  But if it came to it, I’d try. My teeth clenched against tears. This was my fault, my snake. He was a good guy and he wouldn’t die on my watch if I could help it.

  “That was a potent thought you just had,” he remarked. “You tensed up pretty hard.”

  “Thinking about strategy.” I tossed him a quick smile that felt like it didn’t go anywhere.

  He nodded. “When will this test be done?”

  I glanced at the watch I’d clipped to the day pack’s strap. “Another five minutes.”

  “It’s itching.”

  “The scrape or the wound?”

  “The wound’s just numb. The scrape itches.”

  “Let’s give the test its five minutes.” I swallowed hard, knowing it was useless.

  He was allergic to the horse serum.

  He was going to die.

  I turned away and started shifting stuff around in my packs. Everything nonessential went into the duffel. Water and food went into the day pack. After a moment’s hard thought,
the vial of morphine—seventy milligrams, more than enough to shut down a grown man’s nervous system—went in as well.

  Kinkaid’s good arm looked like road rash. He wasn’t just a little allergic to the serum. I cut a thin strip of climbing rope to tie snugly around his upper forearm, then made sure I could slide a finger under it. Tourniquets for snakebite had fallen out of favor years ago.

  “Okay,” I said, strapping on my day pack, “here’s what we’ll do.” I knelt next to him. His eyes, steady behind the lenses, were calm and still. Trusting. “We’ll hike for an hour and rest for ten minutes. We’ve still got plenty of water, so we can keep you hydrated.”

  “How long?”

  I slid my machete into its holster on my back. “We should reach Ixpachia by—”

  “No. How long do I have?”

  “Every case is different,” I began, but something in his warm, brown eyes stopped me. He deserved what truth I could give him, even if I didn’t want to give it and he didn’t want to receive it. “I’m not sure, but you seem pretty sensitive to the poison. I’m guessing four hours.”

  “So if we averaged two miles an hour, we’d make it back. That’s just a walk.”

  A walk through jungle doesn’t equal a walk in the park and he knew it. “The faster we go, the faster the poison works through your system.” My throat tried to close up, but I said, “I’ll get you back. The station plane can fly you to Boa Vista in no time.”

  “Can you give me the serum anyway?”

  “You’d go into shock, then cardiac arrest.”

  He took off his glasses with his good hand and wiped his face with his sleeve. When he looked at me again, his eyes were soft. “My brother Jake lives in Australia, in the west country. Will you get a message to him for me?” He paused, studying me, and the masculine strength in his cheekbones and dark eyes caught me off guard again. “Or if you don’t want to do it, will you tell Yagoda and have him contact Jake?”

  “I won’t let you die,” I said gruffly, thinking about the morphine overdose in my pack. Men in the final throes of fer-de-lance venom screamed in agony, begging to die. I wouldn’t let Kinkaid suffer that death. Not while there was a single damned thing I could do about it. “If it looks like you’re going to pop off, you can give me your message then. Let’s get going.”

  He put his glasses on and nodded. He stood, steady on his feet but sweating more in the past ten minutes than I’d seen in the past two days of hard work.

  “Here.” I handed him a bottled water, which he started sucking down greedily. “Are you good to walk for a while?”

  He nodded underneath the bottle. Then he lowered the water and stood perfectly still, looking over my right shoulder. My hand itched for the machete.

  “Is it a snake?” I asked softly.

  “It’s a boy.”

  I turned. A Yanomamo boy, the one I’d seen at the mining pit three days ago shooting toads, stood a good distance away, watching us with unfathomably deep black eyes. He wore only a string tied around his waist, the traditional bowl-cut hair—and the dead fer-de-lance around his neck. Both ends of the snake touched the ground.

  He picked up the snake’s huge head in both hands and shook it at us. Then he dropped it to the ground and beckoned.

  “He wants us to go with him,” Kinkaid said.

  “We don’t have time to come out and play,” I snapped. “We have to go.”

  Then Kinkaid shot off a few words I’d never heard before. The boy shot back at least two paragraphs. It suddenly dawned on me Kinkaid had been in this part of Brazil before, and for some time. Nobody picks up Yanoman by listening to Learn Yanoman in 30 Minutes a Day! tapes.

  “He’ll take us to the shaman,” Kinkaid explained. “His village isn’t very far away, and the shaman is an extremely wise man.”

  “Right,” I said, “and Santa Claus lives at the North Pole.”

  “It’s worth a try, Jessie.”

  “Is the village on the way to the station?”

  Kinkaid spoke briefly with the boy.

  “No, it’s back toward the mine,” he said to me.

  “Forget it. If the shaman doesn’t kill you, the time we lose getting you to civilization will. Let’s go.”

  I turned away but stopped when Kinkaid said, “I’m going with him.”

  The words knifed through me. I was responsible. I was the best hope Kinkaid had to survive, and he wanted to go traipsing through the jungle to a witch doctor? His life was at stake. The only word that would get past my tight throat was, “Why?”

  “These people live here,” he said evenly. “They have their own medicine.”

  “That’s crazy!” I said, suddenly angry. “You want to go drink some herbal tea and then writhe on the floor bleeding from every pore? Because that’s what the fer-de-lance poison does. It’s a screaming, bloody, agonizing death. Is that what you want?”

  “Hey. Hey.” When Kinkaid took my hand, the tears stinging the backs of my eyes squeezed out and fell down my cheek.

  “I can get you to the station,” I retorted, blinking hard.

  Kinkaid stepped closer and dropped my hand to grip my shoulder. “You don’t have to save me,” he said in a low voice.

  “That snake was meant for me.”

  He frowned. “I don’t follow that, but let’s not get into it. Marcello says the village is close.”

  I opened my mouth but Kinkaid cut me off.

  “It’s my choice,” he said firmly. “My life.” His fingers felt hot, feverish on my neck. “My choice,” he repeated. “I’m going to the shaman.”

  “Fine. Go to the shaman,” I said, throwing up my hands. “But you’re not going without me.”

  We followed the kid’s winding path through the darkening jungle, Kinkaid first, then me humping all our gear. At least from the back I could keep an eye on Kinkaid’s condition, how he walked, whether he stumbled or swayed.

  I fumed with every step. Kinkaid was making exactly the cock-eyed choice Scooter had made over this herbal crap. And just like Scooter, he didn’t listen to reason. The old man I could understand—he’d been raised on old wives’ tales and granny witches and rabbits’ feet—but Kinkaid was a freakin’ scientist. He ought to know better. Sure, I was a botanist and knew that sometimes native medicine could do the trick. But what about when the patient was as sensitive to the neurotoxin as Kinkaid? Where were the documented cases of success and failure? There were none, because there’s no one around keeping count.

  Dammit, he was as good as committing suicide. If we’d tried hiking to the station, I could have pretended, at least for a couple of miles, that he’d make it.

  Now he’d die for sure.

  My throat started to ache again.

  Just like Scooter, it was my fault. My snake, my curse. Rick was a bystander who happened to get in the way, like the wrong man in the wrong doorway of a drive-by.

  What’s up with that? I prayed irreverently. Why him?

  Kinkaid had said we’d find what we were meant to find, and now I wanted to know what the hell he was meant to find in this situation.

  We walked into the Yanomamo village just as all light receded. A small group of men wearing only strings around their waists met us at the perimeter holding torches, raised bows and machetes, but the moment they saw the kid, they parted to let us into the clearing. The kid spoke to them for a few minutes while what looked to be his proud father stroked the fer-de-lance hanging around his neck. One of the adults took off into the jungle, presumably to get the shaman.

  Then the father beckoned us to the shapono, a large circular hut that was basically a tall, inward-leaning wall around an open dirt courtyard. The entire village lived under the wall, each family grouped together and having its own cook fire. He pointed to a low-strung hammock where Kinkaid lay down shakily, his face white beneath his tan.

  Kids clustered around him, trying to touch his glasses and his watch. I put my gear down. Shooing the brats away did no good whatsoever. I ignored
them and got busy stringing mosquito netting from the palm branch rafters. After a couple of minutes, a bare-breasted woman I took to be the kid’s mother helped secure the netting over Kinkaid. Then she went back to her cook fire and quickly coaxed it from embers into flame.

  I ducked into the mosquito tent. At least the annoying kiddiewinks were out there and not in here. I settled cross-legged at Kinkaid’s hip. “How are you feeling?”

  “Okay, I guess. A little dizzy.”

  I nodded. Dizziness meant the venom was racing through his body. “How about your face?” I asked. “Anything feel weird?”

  “My cheeks are numb.”

  I fished a clean cloth out of his pack and wiped his face with it. “Are you thirsty?”

  He shook his head. He raised his good hand to loosen his shirt at the neck, but his fingers didn’t want to work. I unbuttoned his shirt and opened it up. In the dim light, his skin glistened with sweat even though the temperature had dropped with the sun.

  “You’d better tell me what you want me to tell your brother.”

  His shadowed gaze locked on mine. Still no fear. Just a calm acceptance, like he always knew he’d die this way, in the wild, among strangers. So damned Hemingway.

  “Tell him I finally understand. And give him this.” He dug a chain from around his neck and slipped it off. It had a single gold pendant, small, flat, round, with writing on it I couldn’t read in the dimness. “It’s not important,” he said, sounding apologetic. “But it means something.”

  “Then it’s important.” I took the chain from him and put it around my neck, tucking the pendant under my shirt.

  Rick looked like he wanted to say something else, but the kids outside the net parted like the sea for a man headed our way.

  The native wore nothing but a string around his waist that was tied to an elaborate, feathery penis-covering. Rather than a bowl-cut, his hair fell to his shoulders except for the short bangs cut straight across his forehead. A red braided cord was tied around his left bicep and its ends held beads that clicked faintly when he moved.