Lost in the Jungle

by Bill Nye

  Alicia was walking toward a dense thicket of wide, green, waxy leaves. I checked behind me for botos. Alicia said they often visited humans in the middle of the night, and I really wasn’t up for marrying a dolphin. The thick jungle in front of us didn’t exactly look welcoming, either. “What about jaguars?”

  “The cats will not want to bother us,” said Pepedro. “We are too many.”

  “What about snakes?” Matt asked.

  Ava scanned the trees. “Or vampire bats?”

  Part of me was glad to hear the geniuses were nervous, too. But our guides didn’t exactly swat our fears away. They didn’t say anything at all. Alicia reached forward and pushed aside the wide leaves. Following a step behind her, Matt slipped on the muddy riverbank. He reached up and grabbed a branch to stop himself from falling. The rain and dew on all the leaves flooded down, dousing him. Normally I would’ve laughed. Instead I grabbed him by the elbow. He nodded, thanking me, and followed Alicia into the brush.

  “You might want to duck,” she warned.

  We did, but it barely helped. The leaves slapped against our faces and swept across our backs, soaking us through our clothes. Ever wonder what it would be like to walk through one of those automatic car washes? Now I think I know.

  There was a tiny clearing a few paces ahead. The space was barely large enough to fit the five of us. “This is it,” Alicia said. “Are we ready?”

  We tightened our backpacks.

  “This is the trail?” Matt asked.

  He stood up straight and bumped his head on a branch. Wet, waxy leaves pushed into the side of my face like the hands of some creepy jungle monster. Something screeched so loud it felt like the creature was yelling directly into my brain. Crickets or cicadas buzzed like a million violinists playing busted instruments. A distant roar rolled through the jungle and shook me to my bones. Hank had gotten us into a Coldplay concert once. We’d stood near a Matt-size set of speakers. After that night, my ears rang for two days. But the concert was nothing compared to the jungle. The rainforest was easily the loudest place I’d ever been in my life.

  My brother slapped himself in the face. “Ow!” Matt shouted. “Something just bit me!”

  “Get used it,” Pepedro replied. “And be quiet. We’re still close to the boat.”

  Alicia laughed and pushed ahead. “Follow me.”

  “Where?” Ava asked. “I don’t even see a path!”

  “There is a kind of path,” Pepedro replied. “Welcome to a Trilha da Dor.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “I don’t actually know,” Ava admitted.

  “A Trilha da Dor,” Pepedro explained, “means the Trail of Pain.”

  10

  THE TRAIL OF PAIN

  When I scrape or cut my leg, someone else usually notices first. I rarely cry at the dentist. Needles? I don’t even flinch. One time someone threw a football at me so hard that it knocked my finger out of joint, and I barely cried when my foster dad popped it back into place. Generally, I consider myself to be pretty tough.

  Then I discovered the Trail of Pain.

  Forget the car wash comparison. Walking through the rainforest at night combined about seventeen different kinds of torture. Leaves and branches and thorny limbs snapped against my face, chest, and arms. I stepped on a rotten log and a horde of ants crawled over my shoe. In a rush I swept them away, but a dozen of them still clamped their tiny little jaws into my skin, biting me through my socks, and it felt like a hundred wasps were stinging me at once. Invisible flies dug into my neck and ankles. Even the supposedly protected spots were open to their attacks. Yep: something bit me on the butt. How does that even happen? Great question. It’s not like I was walking around mooning the monkeys.

  Oh, and speaking of monkeys—they were beyond loud. According to Matt, the howlers were the loudest land animals on the planet. They typically swung around in groups of fifteen or twenty monkeys, too, so their roars sounded like armies stampeding toward us through the jungle.

  My sneakers were soaked through. My socks were like warm, wet washcloths, and even though it was the middle of the night, I was sweating. Plus our two guides weren’t even using their ridiculously cool machetes. They hadn’t hacked away a single leaf, and I had to walk with my arms out in front of me, blocking branches like a karate master fending off kicks. Once or twice I might have added a quiet little “Hi-yah!”

  Meanwhile, Alicia was humming, Pepedro whistling. Both of them said a few times how it felt so good to be back. I was just ahead of Pepedro, and we’d been hiking for hours when I finally gave up. I swatted at least seven flies on my neck and ankles, leaned forward for a breath, and crouched. “We need to stop.”

  The boy with the million dollar foot patted me on the back. “We’ve only been walking for an hour, Jack.”

  “Seriously?” my brother asked.

  At least he was exhausted, too.

  “I’m fine,” Ava said.

  Of course she was.

  Alicia tapped her watch. The face glowed green. “We have not been walking for an hour, either. It has only been sixteen minutes,” she said. “We need to put as many kilometers between us and the boat as possible. Our friend Bobby could catch us if we’re too slow.”

  “Could you at least use your machetes?” I asked.

  “No,” Pepedro replied.

  “You can’t leave a trail, right?” Ava guessed.

  “That’s right,” Alicia said. “He could track us.”

  “Maybe you could ease up on the whistling?” Matt suggested. “I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s kind of annoying.”

  “You don’t want me to stop whistling,” Pepedro said.

  “No?”

  “You’re not the only one who doesn’t like that sound,” Alicia said. “It keeps certain creatures away.”

  All three of us started whistling right along with them. As we trudged through the jungle, Pepedro would occasionally grab a handful of leaves or break off a branch, then reach over his shoulder and stuff them into his backpack. I tried to stay focused on what was right in front of me: the ground; the branches snapping back from the person ahead. When Pepedro pointed out an interesting creature or plant, I’d jot down a few facts in my notebook. The pages were damp from the mist, the ink was running, and there was barely enough light to see my pen on the page. But if I didn’t write these things down, I might never remember them.

  The bugs and biting flies were cosmically annoying, but I couldn’t help thinking about how they were just a few of the creepy, crawling, stalking dangers of the jungle. That jaguar, for instance. Maybe she really had followed us up the river. A golden lancehead snake, one of the fastest and deadliest in the world, could’ve been slithering nearby. At any second, a herd of furious peccaries could have stampeded through, goring us with their tusks. Maybe a really angry toucan wanted to peck us with his giant beak. Or an anteater. Their claws were so sharp, and their arms so strong, they could rip open a jaguar’s stomach.

  Every few minutes I shook my head, trying to clear out all these thoughts. And we kept walking. The next few hours felt like a few days. My eyes stung from the mix of sweat and bug spray dripping down from my brow. The whistling became as familiar as my breathing. As we walked and crawled and climbed over wet tree limbs and fallen, decaying branches and trunks, pushing away thick leaves, swatting constantly, blocking limbs that recoiled like slingshots when the person in front of you let go, my brother and sister were using their laser pointers to highlight cool bugs and creatures. Every so often, Pepedro stopped us, too. Once, he pointed to these weird, Hershey’s Kiss–shaped growths all around the trunk of a giant tree. Matt leaned forward to touch one, but Pepedro grabbed his hand. “Careful,” he warned. “They sting.”

  “Even the trees sting?” Ava asked.

  “Here in the jungle, almost everything stings,” Pepedro said. “But the jungle provides for you, too, if you know her secrets.” He raised his eyebrows at a vine dangling off to m
y right. He grabbed it with two hands, then snapped it. A thin stream of clear liquid rushed out. Pepedro leaned over, tilted his head, and drank. Then he passed me the vine. “Go ahead,” he said. “It’s just water.”

  Maybe that was true, but it was warm and tasted like bark. I sipped, then passed it to Matt. “Try some. It’s delicious.”

  As I hurried ahead to catch Pepedro and Alicia, I heard Matt spitting it out. Soon my thoughts started following another weird current. Normally, I tried to set limits to my mind drifts, like hooking your dog to a long leash in the backyard. But now I let the random thoughts roll and started wondering what sort of creature I’d want to be in the rainforest. A vampire bat? A boa constrictor? The howler monkeys had amazing beards. It would be fun to yell all the time, too. Being small, like a fly, would be cool. But then you’d have so many annoying brothers and sisters. And you’d only live for a few days at most. Or what if I were a Brazilian free-tailed bat? On the plane, I’d read that they were the fastest fliers in the world.

  “Jack,” Ava whispered. “Pepedro’s talking to you.”

  Our guide pointed to something clinging to a nearby tree limb. I figured he was pointing out another strange plant. Then I realized what was lurking behind the leaves in front of me. A hairy, glorious, and completely mellow sloth. I could barely see the little guy in the moonless dark. He was leaning away from the tree, slowly turning his gaze our way, and I loved him immediately. A bunch of weird humans were stomping through his neighborhood and he barely bothered to look. Nothing was going to stress out a sloth. Let everyone else in the jungle slither and swing, scream and roar. This dude just chillaxed.

  Forget the bat. If I had to choose, I’d be a sloth.

  Matt stopped between Ava and me. “Do you know that as many as a thousand beetles can live in a sloth’s fur?”

  “That’s gross,” I said.

  “I think it’s cool,” Ava said. “What’s it doing?”

  “Going to his bathroom,” Matt guessed. “Once a week, the sloth comes down to the ground, digs a little hole, relieves itself of the week’s food, and climbs back up again.”

  Ava thought that was fascinating. And sure, I still worshipped the creature. Even with all the beetles in its hair. But I didn’t need to watch it make a jungle toilet. “Let’s go,” I said. “Alicia’s still moving.”

  When we finally reached our first campsite, my hopes soared, then belly flopped. A tree with a base as wide as a car rose up in the center of the small clearing. The space was only about ten giant steps across. “I was expecting . . .”

  “Tents?” Alicia asked with a smile. “Maybe little barbecues?”

  “A shelter would have been nice,” Ava said.

  “The jungle would swallow it in two weeks,” Alicia said. “Even the trail and this clearing are little miracles. Our parents used to walk this path once a month.”

  “They hiked the Trail of Pain every month?” I asked.

  “For them, it was not painful,” Alicia said. “For them, it was fun.”

  She stared at the jungle floor. After a moment, Pepedro put his arm around his sister’s shoulders, and we knew enough to be quiet and wait.

  Alicia wiped her eyes. “Okay, let’s set up.”

  I looked around at the weeds and vines, then up at the towering tree. “Where do we even lie down?”

  “We don’t lie down,” Alicia said. “We go up.”

  She removed a rope hammock from her backpack, climbed the tree, then strung the woven bed along a limb as thick as a softball and tied several complex knots. Hank was weirdly obsessed with knots, and he’d tried to teach me a few of them. “Is that a timber hitch?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s a knot.”

  She draped a mosquito net over the limb so it hung down over the hammock, then climbed around the trunk to the next strong limb. Pepedro scaled the tree on the opposite side and started stringing up another makeshift bed. Alicia called for our hammocks.

  “Tonight we’ll help you because we have only a few hours until sunrise and we have to move fast,” she said. “Tomorrow night you can make your own bed.”

  They advised us to tie our backpacks up in the tree, too. Otherwise they’d be covered with bugs in the morning. Once her hammock was set up, Ava climbed the tree, squeezed in, and wished everyone a good night.

  “Should we set an alarm?” Matt asked.

  “You will not need an alarm,” Pepedro said with a laugh.

  The hammock was actually comfortable, even though a hundred thin ropes were digging into my back. By the time I settled into my swinging bed and pulled the thin mosquito net around me, Ava was snoring. But Matt was strangely chatty. The tree canopy formed a leafy ceiling that blocked our view, and he was saying how weird it was to sleep outside and not see the sky or stars. I’ve been trying to cut back on my Star Wars references, since Hank is more of a Star Trek guy, but sleeping up in that tree, I kind of felt like an Ewok. Only not quite so furry. And with better teeth.

  My brother was droning on about the different stars in the Southern Hemisphere when I remembered the earplugs the guy had given me on the plane. My backpack was hanging within arm’s reach. I found them in a side pocket and popped them in. Matt’s lecture faded to a whisper, and morning arrived about five minutes later, as I awoke to the growls and roars of distant howler monkeys. Apparently, the earplugs weren’t totally jungle proof. I removed them and shoved them in my pocket. Matt was already in the middle of a new lecture. Either that, or the one from the night before had never stopped. This time, though, he was talking about the monkeys, and how their morning shouts were a way of declaring their territory. I stretched.

  Apparently, I wasn’t the only one bored with Matt’s chatter. A large, gray monkey was perched on a branch high above him. I thought he was just watching us. Matt probably did, too. He was pointing at the hairy dude. But the monkey wasn’t observing us, exactly. He had other plans. A stream of liquid flowed down and splashed off the trunk near my brother. Matt lost it. He screamed, then drew his legs in close to avoid getting sprayed.

  His hammock swung, and my brother fell out. He grabbed his rope bed before he hit the ground, then hung there for a second before dropping the last few feet.

  A few last bursts splashed off the tree.

  Then the monkey was done.

  My brother was safe.

  And I was ready to give in to what was going to be one of the greatest laughing fits of my life. But then I turned to the opposite side of my hammock and froze.

  A scaled, bright green snake was wrapped around the limb to my right. Its body was as thick as my leg, and it was coiled several times around the branch. The creature had to be at least ten feet long. Slowly, it slid along and extended its head toward me. The white patches on its skin looked like computer pixels. The dark vertical slits in the snake’s cold gray eyes were staring right at me. But I couldn’t remember what kind of snake it was and whether it was deadly. “Matt,” I whispered. “Enough about the monkeys. We have a problem.”

  “What’s the . . . whoa! Don’t move, Jack!”

  “I wasn’t planning on it. Maybe you could lower your voice a little?”

  The snake moved its head right, then left, like it was studying me from different angles. Sometimes I did the same thing with cheeseburgers. Was I this creature’s next meal?

  “You’re fine,” Ava said from below. “That’s an emerald tree boa. They’re not venomous.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Alicia was standing below me now. “Stay still, Jack.”

  “But it’s not dangerous, right?”

  She didn’t answer.

  The snake extended itself, closing the space between us. I was close enough to tickle the thing. Then its jaws opened wide, revealing a set of teeth that made a piranha’s choppers look as harmless as a plastic comb. I screamed.

  The creature’s head fell. Its body untangled from the limb, and it dropped toward the forest floor, right onto
Pepedro’s shoulders. Alicia grabbed the other end of the snake, and the two of them carefully lowered it to the ground.

  “What happened?” Ava asked.

  For a second I wondered if my scream had paralyzed the monster. Did I have a hidden superpower?

  Pepedro held up a thin wooden blowgun. “Just knocked her out,” he said.

  “Where did you get that thing?” Matt asked.

  “I carry it with me,” Pepedro said with a shrug.

  “Enough about the blowgun,” I said. “Ava, you told me they weren’t dangerous!”

  “I said they weren’t venomous,” she explained. “Those teeth looked pretty serious, though.”

  Pepedro laid the snake in the cover of a bush and backed away. “You would have been fine,” he said. “These snakes eat fat little rodents, not skinny Americans.”

  My hand was shaking as I reached to grab the limb above me. I crawled out of my hammock, stood on the limb below, and untied my hanging bed. Then I grabbed my pack and scurried down the tree. The snake hadn’t moved. But when that thing awoke, I was sure he was going to come for me. Maybe the piranhas would join him, along with a couple of otters and a boto in a wedding dress. “Let’s get going,” I said.

  “Are you okay?” Pepedro asked. “You’re itchy?”

  Without realizing it, I was furiously scratching my shoulder. My forearms were covered with welts, and my ankles itched so badly I wanted to chop them off. I crouched and dug my nails into the skin. Pepedro told me to stop, then he ripped a thick leaf from a small tree a few steps away. He snapped the leaf in half, revealing a sticky, oozing goo. “Hold out your hands,” he said. I did, and he squeezed a huge clump of the goo into my palms. “Rub that on the bumps.”

  The stuff looked like alien mucous, but I was desperate. I slathered it all over my ankles, my wrists, the back of my neck. Then I smeared some straight across the top of my forehead. The goo dried quickly. My skin felt like it was covered with a thin layer of paper. But the itch . . . the itch was completely gone.

  “It’s okay?” Pepedro asked.