The DMZ

  “And what guarantee do we have that any Indian tribes we come across won’t be headhunters—or at least harbor a grudge against invaders in their territory? And if we do by some miracle make it through to some outpost of civilization, the colonized areas south of here are major strongholds of drug trafficking as well as guerrilla and paramilitary fighting. We could be walking from one cooking pot straight into another.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” Julie demanded. “It beats wandering around in circles until we give up and die! As for your headhunting Indians, that’s more Hollywood than anything. Even out here, there aren’t many Indian groups who haven’t had some contact with the outside world—indigenous rights activists and anthropologists if not missionaries. Or Spanish traders. My parents had contacts with some of the tribes in these jungles. I’m not saying they’re ‘civilized’ the way we would term it. But most of them are pretty peaceful anymore. The guerrillas and drug dealers are a whole lot more likely than the Indians to shoot first and ask questions later. As for starving to death—here, give me your knife.”

  Rick raised his eyebrow again, but without further argument, he slipped the heavy combat knife from its sheath and handed it to her. Sliding down off the stump, Julie walked over to a stand of saplings that had sprung up among its roots. Few would mature much further, but the death of the parent tree had allowed a gap in the ecosystem that might allow one at least to take its place.

  But not the one that came first to Julie’s hand. She sliced off a length as tall as herself, discovering with approval that Rick kept his blade razor-sharp, and with a few quick strokes sharpened one end of the sapling into a point. He followed silently on her heels as she carried the makeshift spear down to the stream bed. A quick glance located the barely perceptible curve of the mound she had stepped over earlier. The smallest indentation on top of the mound was an airhole. With a sharp thrust, Julie speared the center of the mound. Reaching down to dig into the mud, she pulled out a large toad and handed the limp carcass to Rick. Two more quick thrusts into nearby mounds netted her another pair.

  For the first time in weeks, she felt like laughing as she caught the expression on Rick’s face. “Just don’t try this if you don’t know what you’re doing. Some of these are poisonous. By the way, you do have matches, I hope!”

  * * *

  A half-hour later, Rick looked at Julie across the small campfire he’d built at the base of the old stump. “Like chicken, right?” he said ironically.

  Julie dropped a thigh bone to the ground beside her. It felt good to have a full stomach, however unorthodox the fare. “That’s what gringos always say. Iguana, crocodile, just about anything you catch out here—it all tastes like chicken. Personally, I think it tastes like toad, but that’s me!”

  Tossing his own bones aside, Rick pulled the matchbook he’d used to light the fire from his shirt pocket, frowning at the scant two-dozen matches it contained. “This isn’t going to last us too many days, even if we’re careful.”

  “And I thought you Special Forces types were supposed to be prepared for everything,” Julie retorted. Her glance across the campfire was challenging. However valid his excuses, she hadn’t totally forgiven him for the deceit of the last weeks nor the cool impatience of his attitude toward her.

  Rick’s eyes were hooded as they met her challenge. “I wasn’t counting on spending a month in the woods. And if we ‘Special Forces types’”—he emphasized the title she’d given him—“believe in being prepared for any emergency, the guerrillas don’t! Taking along the usual seventy-pound pack complete with MRE rations, first-aid kit, and a full checklist of field equipment would have been difficult to explain to the FARC. Even an extra canteen on a hunting expedition would have raised eyebrows. So we’re just going to have to go with what we’ve got.

  “However …”—Rick dug a Bic lighter from another vest pocket—“the guerrillas do smoke like chimneys. And since I don’t, this one is still full. Even so, we’re going to have to be careful. In fact, we’re going to have to ration everything we’ve got, from soap to toothpaste to those medical supplies I noticed you’re carrying in your backpack there. We don’t know how long we’re going to be out here.”

  Julie had no retort to that. She nodded soberly. Rick was right. They would have to treat every possession they had as gold. The emergency items she packed so casually for every trip and so seldom used might now make the difference in their very survival.

  Julie looked up at Rick, who had gotten to his feet and was already dousing the fire, dumping the toad bones and skins on top, and burying the whole thing under dirt and brush as she’d seen the guerrillas wipe out traces of their camps before moving on. Whatever her lingering resentments against this man and whatever sentiments he might harbor against her, they had both better put them aside until they were back in civilization. She needed Rick, and he needed her, however reluctant he might be to admit it, if they were ever to walk out of this rainforest alive.

  Rick had been right. However lightly Julie might have touched on the obstacles ahead, she was well aware of them. The Indian tribes might roam these woods freely. But they were a larger population group, and even with their expertise, death struck them on a regular basis. A snake bite. An unwary misstep along the caiman-infested riverbanks. A predator hungry enough to overcome its distaste for human flesh. A tropical fever. If she or Rick got sick out here, the limited supply of over-the-counter remedies she was carrying wasn’t going to do much good.

  Retrieving her knapsack from the stump, Julie swung it to her shoulder. Rick walked down to the stream to fill his canteen, then gave their campsite a final cursory glance. “Are you ready? Fine, let’s head out. We’ll try it your way—downstream.”

  Julie fell into step behind him. The trick was to not think beyond the present. Just take one day at a time. One hour. The next step. Looking further ahead only meant a quick descent into fear and madness.

  They were an hour into the day’s trek when the stream petered out, disappearing into a gully that must have caved in on itself at some point. Both gully and stream were swallowed up in a jumble of earth and rocks and an overgrowth of vines and ferns. Julie braced herself for some reproach from Rick. But after studying the cave-in, he simply skirted the patch of green and continued straight ahead. A quarter-hour later, they picked up the stream again, bubbling out of the ground in a trickle of wet that gradually became a full-fledged brook.

  Rick was no more communicative than the day before, striding along with his AK-47 cradled in his hands, his head turning constantly to search the woods around them. He hardly seemed to notice Julie at his heels, but she had only to stumble or lag behind a few steps to find him back at her side.

  Julie left their safety from either human or animal predators to Rick, keeping her eyes open for anything edible. Those toad legs, palatable though she personally found them, wouldn’t carry them far, and the same factors that allowed for easy passage also made foraging difficult because any smaller fruit-bearing trees were choked out by the giant hardwoods overhead. Even the toads that had burrowed into the bank at night had hopped into the water by the time morning wore on.

  By early afternoon, as she had predicted, the brook tumbled into a wider stream, not quite wide enough to classify as a river, but wide enough to allow sunlight to pierce through the jungle canopy. The result was an explosion of vegetation, and Rick had to unsheathe his machete to chop a path along the stream bank.

  Julie recognized edible plants and fruit, though few would be identified as such by a North American grocer. She stopped under a branch that hung thick with brown globules no larger than a Ping-Pong ball. Picking one, she cracked the thin shell and handed it to Rick.

  “Mamones. They called them ‘snot balls’ at boarding school.”

  Rick eyed the translucent flesh inside with distaste. “I can see why!”

  The edible membrane was wrapped around a large seed. Each globule offered little more than a taste, and though vag
uely sweet, it left a dry, puckering taste in the mouth. Still, it was food, and Rick and Julie worked their way through a dozen before piling all they could easily reach into Julie’s knapsack.

  Further downstream, Julie stopped to pick some foot-long pods that held a white cottony fluff wrapped around shiny black seeds. Dried out, they were used as a rattle by I’paa dancers, but the fluff was edible too. Later in the afternoon, she directed Rick in chopping down a small palm. There were countless varieties of palms in the jungle, but only a few were edible, and these had been over-harvested in colonized areas to the point where environmentalists were mounting a campaign against their continued appearance on the menu of gourmet restaurants around the world. But her colleagues’ opinions on her intended diet were the last concern on Julie’s mind now. This was about survival, not environmental policy. Wrapping the palm’s edible core in one of its fronds, she added it to her collection.

  Though supper was now assured, Julie saw none of the game she’d hoped for along the banks, not even caimans, since this stream was too shallow and swift running to offer the reptiles a comfortable habitat. She and Rick would need protein. The problem wasn’t a lack of game. It was that jungle creatures had good ears and didn’t hang around for the bumbling intruders in their territory to stumble over them.

  Just as the narrow band of sky overhead was fading to green, the stream began to spread out and slow down. At the same time, the tumbling waters began to fall away from the bank along which they were hiking, or else the embankment began to grow. Ten minutes later, a final swing of Rick’s machete brought them out onto a high promontory formed by the joining of the stream bed down which they had climbed all afternoon, with a real jungle river.

  There were rivers in the Amazon Basin that were more than a mile wide. The Amazon itself was two miles across in parts, more like a great inland sea to the human eye than a river. With the difficulties of building roads through dense jungle and the prohibitive expense of air travel for most of the area’s scant population, the riverways had early on become the veins of transportation and trade that connected the vast and still largely untouched rainforest banding South America’s equator from southern Colombia and Venezuela through much of Brazil all the way to northern Bolivia and Peru.

  This particular river was by no means a large one. Even in the growing dusk, Julie could easily make out the opposite bank. But it was several times as wide as the stream they’d swum across the day before, its muddy, placid flow amply deep for canoes and the flat-bottomed river barges. It was, in fact, precisely the sort of major tributary Julie had hoped they would eventually stumble across, and to come upon it so early into their trek was encouraging. Surely there would be Indians, if not colonists, living somewhere along its length.

  Julie stepped up to the edge of the promontory and looked down. The embankment rose several times a man’s height above the water level, and across the river Julie could make out a similar bluff, showing just how high the waters could rise in full flood season.

  But at this season the waters had receded to leave a wide, rock-strewn beach on either side, and with a shudder Julie realized they wouldn’t be fording this river, at least not without some kind of raft or boat. Long, ugly shapes stretched out along the far bank and downstream on their own side as well. Even as Julie watched, one of the caimans moved, its triangular-shaped snout swinging from side to side as it shuffled down to the water and slid smoothly under the surface.

  Julie raised her head. Though she knew they were deep into the rainforest, there was an openness here that made her feel she was free from the jungle for the first time in weeks. Behind them, the sun had dropped below the tree line, and its setting rays reflecting off the river had transmuted the water’s muddy surface to a deep, glorious gold.

  From the far bank, a flock of fruit bats rose with a flutter of wings and wheeled out over the water, their outstretched wings black aerodynamic shapes against the fantastic color palette of the evening sky. Below them Julie spotted the first star springing out just above the ragged line of the jungle canopy.

  In the midst of the ugliness of the last days and the uncertainty of the next, it was all so unexpectedly lovely that Julie gasped in delight. Rick stepped to her side, his head turning to make a careful survey of the panorama spread out beneath them.

  “Pretty, isn’t it? When I come across a piece of God’s creation that man hasn’t had a chance to screw up yet, it makes me feel there really is something still worth fighting for in this crazy world.”

  Julie looked up at him in surprise. “You sound like an environmentalist. I never thought I’d hear a soldier on the tree-hugger side of the fence.”

  Rick dropped his gaze to her, a wry twist touching the corner of his firm mouth. “Is that some kind of slam? Well, don’t confuse me with any of your ‘save the whales over starving street kids’ pals, like that C-PAP bunch. But I figure, if God gave us a world this grand to live in, we should take care of it.”

  He nodded toward her knapsack. “Might as well rest that load. We won’t find a better place to camp before dark.”

  The promontory on which they had emerged formed a small triangular-shaped peninsula, jutting out above the junction of the waterways. It was covered with the same heavy brush through which Rick had chopped a path most of the afternoon. Rick used the machete to gesture around him. “I’ll clear us a campsite if you’ll get a fire started.”

  He tossed Julie the matches, adding with distaste as she unloaded the frond-wrapped package of palm heart, “I hope you know how to cook that. If we’ve been reduced to eating tree trunks, I won’t kick up a fuss. But I’d rather not try it raw.”

  “Oh, I’ve got more than tree trunk on the menu. Now that we’ve found that.” Julie nodded toward the river. “It won’t be pretty, but it’ll be meat.”

  “Is that so? And what, exactly, do you have in mind?” Rick lowered the machete to watch as Julie dug into her knapsack. She’d used her one dress and slip with Carlos. It would have to be the sweatshirt.

  “You’ll see. May I borrow your knife?”

  Rick eyed Julie suspiciously as he unsheathed his combat knife and passed it to her. “I don’t know what you’re planning on doing with that thing, but I’ll tell you right up front that I draw the line at insects, high protein or not.”

  As he caught her next move, he sprang forward and grabbed her wrist. “Are you crazy? What do you think you’re doing?”

  Julie widened the gash on the back of her hand before Rick could wrest the combat knife away from her. “Getting us some supper,” she told Rick calmly, twisting her wrist free from his strong fingers. “That palm heart isn’t going to keep us on our feet, and I haven’t seen any other meat all day. Trust me—unless you want to try for one of those crocodiles out there.”

  Picking up the sweatshirt, she wiped one sleeve over the blood tricking down the back of her hand. A finger would have bled more easily, but she didn’t want to risk reducing the use of her hands. Rick, thrusting the combat knife back into its sheath, watched her grimly. He’s trying to decide whether to throw me in the loony bin or have me court-martialed for insubordination, Julie thought, with an impulse to giggle.

  Wrapping the blood-stained material around her hand, she walked over to the embankment. The caimans didn’t seem to like the rushing water of the stream tumbling into the river because there were none on the beach below them—the only reason she was trying this stunt. Rick followed right on her heels as she scrambled down the steep bank, his AK-47 off his shoulder and balanced in his hands and his narrowed gaze on the caimans sleeping peacefully downstream.

  His expression lightened somewhat as Julie walked down to the water’s edge, unwrapping the sweatshirt from her arm as she did so. “Okay, I get what you’re trying to do. Here, let me have that. If anyone’s going to try a crazy stunt like this, I’ll do it.”

  The forbidding set of his jaw didn’t allow for argument, and Julie didn’t even consider offering one. She watche
d as Rick flicked the blood-stained sleeve of the sweatshirt as far out into the water as he could reach. For a long moment, nothing happened.

  Then Julie saw a bubbling under the muddy water that grew almost immediately to a rapid boil as the smooth surface of the river was broken with a roiling, churning mass of slippery, twisting forms so violent it threatened to pull the sweatshirt from Rick’s grasp.

  With a startled yelp, Rick yanked the sweatshirt from the water and flung it up onto the beach. Clinging to the material were half-a-dozen fish. They weren’t large, no more than a foot long. At least a third of their length was head, dominated by a mouth that clung to the thick cloth with vicious-looking, razor-sharp teeth. Snatching up a rock, Julie dispatched the piranha with a blow to each head.

  “Where’d you learn that trick?” Rick demanded some time later.

  It was now full night. While Julie had worked on supper, Rick had chopped back the brush to make a large enough circle that neither snake nor larger animal could creep up without being seen. He had even stripped down saplings and some nearby palms to build a caleta, though—Julie slapped at a buzz near her ear—without the mosquito netting or mattress pad of the guerrilla camp. He’d had Julie build the campfire between the jungle and the caleta, which he had placed so that the steep embankment offered added protection at the back, and now he was hunkered down beside the fire, balancing easily on his heels. He had the jungle on one side of him and the caleta and embankment on the other, as though he never for an instant lost sight of the need to stay on guard.

  “The I’paa,” Julie answered Rick.

  Balancing the palm frond she was using as a plate, she sandwiched a piece of piranha with a chunk of palm heart and popped them into her mouth. She had cooked both fish and palm heart wrapped in more palm fronds, cutting off the heads and splitting the rest of the piranha open into halves before burying the entire meal in the coals. Without salt or seasoning to moderate the strong flavor of the piranha, the meal would hardly make its way into the annals of high cuisine. But hunger was its own seasoning, and Julie, popping in another bite, was pleased to see Rick eating with a relish to match her own.