Temple of the Jaguar God (3 page)

They had
climbed one or two precipitous little hills along the way, volcanic
plugs isolated by swamps, and then come back down to the level
again.

The
other thing that was that Mister O’Dell had the compass. Mister
O’Dell also had a long-barreled revolver hanging on his hip and a
few loose rounds in his pocket.

Jeremy
had a half a pint of water, a few biscuits, some raisins and a
flashlight, and thank God for that. The bug juice, which wasn’t all
that good to begin with, had pretty much worn off. He was tired,
hungry, thirsty, stinky and had just about had enough of
floundering around in jungles.

Every so
often, he would stop to check for leeches. As often as not, he
would find another one, and he was running low on
matches.

“
Mister O’Dell!” He bellowed one last time into the
unresponsive forest, vast, magnificent, and ultimately
indifferent.

Craning
his ears, heart thudding in his chest, there was
nothing.

Just
nothing.

Damn that man
.

***

Checking his watch, and trying desperately to remember just
how to tell direction with it, (he’d read an article in
The Boy’s Own Paper,
yet
it also involved the northern hemisphere, which somehow complicated
matters), he noted it was terribly early to be getting so dark. If
he was lucky enough to get out of this, he’d read it
again.

An
unfamiliar cold breeze touched his cheek.

Right
about then, the treetops began thrashing, the wind whistled, it got
darker still and the whole heavens opened up. Torrents of rain
slashed at his skin as he plunged into the heavy trees, desperately
seeking some form of shelter. No other place was any better…there
was no place to go.

It got
darker and darker. Thorn-laden branches whipped at his face. He was
already soaked. It was madness to run. There was no-place to go,
nowhere to get to. He ran hard into a wall of wood, a big old
mahogany of a thousand years, for all he knew.

Stepping
over the flying buttresses that were the base of the trunk,
something big crashed to the ground off to his left. The ground,
where it could be seen when the lightning flashed, was littered
with deadfall. Only now did its significance become clear. It was
all coming down at once. On the far side there was shelter of a
kind. The wind was hard from the northwest. Turning on the light,
he looked about, finding not much but a few slabs of bark…there.
Leaves, and a small, immature hardwood tree that he might be able
to uproot. It was a plan. Thunder cracked and the place lit up and
he could do nothing but flinch in reflex.

He might
have said a few bad words…

One
could only pray that the storm would be over soon, and that the
light would come back again.

With the
rattle of hail all around him, the air was deucedly chilly and it
was all he could do not to scream, to shout, and stamp his feet
like a child.

This was
definitely serious.

Damn you, Uncle Harry!

***

Finally,
the storm abated and it was merely rain.

At some
point, he thought he would go mad.

At some
point, about nine-thirty p.m., the wind dropped off, the sky
cleared, and there were even stars visible in the thin gaps in the
branches above. A dim blue glow indicated that the moon must be
up.

It
appeared that he hadn’t been paying enough attention. But the moon
had definitely been up the night before.

It was
terribly cold and he shivered in the wet clothes.

When he had the light on, the forest floor was a creeping,
crawling barrage of insect life. There was a constant background
whirr, and things snapped and whisped and
thudded,
all around him. At some
point he determined that it was just nuts, or seeds, some kind of
fruit dropping from above. To turn the light off and conserve
batteries was worse, so much worse, as every little rolling ball of
cold sweat turned itself into an army ant, marching on their
stomachs and consuming all before.

Every
little itch, every little tickle, turned itself into the first
touch of an anaconda about to swallow his next lunch. Every little
noise translated itself into his imminent demise.

It was true—your hair really
could
stand up on end.

To lay
down was unthinkable, although he perched awkwardly from time to
time on the lower bit of exposed root or trunk.

The only
thing that saved him was the light and his watch. After a while the
bulb seemed dimmer, and so he kept it off for longer and longer
periods.

After a
time, he concluded that all he had to do was make it through until
morning. Surely they would come looking. He’d been awake all night
once or twice, and he’d made it through the day.

Surely
he could find his way back—if only he could see what he was doing.
If he got close enough, surely he would hear them, or smell the
wood-smoke.

At some
point, something nipped him on the lower calf muscle.

At
that
point, Jeremy really did scream, to no avail of course, but it
was just some damned jungle cat. He had no choice but to use the
yellowing light.

The
animal was as cute as a button and showing a strange sort of
affection in the only way it knew how: by chewing on things, just
as it would on a recent kill, its mother or its
siblings.

“
Bugger.
What in the hell are you
doing here.”

This
would pretty much have to be an ocelot, going by description alone.
He’d never actually seen one. Considering the circumstances, he was
damned grateful for the company. The creature had to be a good
twenty pounds and very fit.

“
Who’s a good boy?”

Purr-purr-purr.

What a
crazy little bugger.

Tears
welled up and he let them flow in a kind of objectivity.

The
stream of leaf-cutting ants across this little patch of litter
seemed to have abated. They probably weren’t interesting in him,
but having them crawl all over him wasn’t too good
either…

Gratefully lowering himself to the ground, he batted the
persistent creature as it nuzzled in close and then took another
experimental nip at an exposed flank.

“
Hey! Hey, you little bastard. Lay off with the teeth,
already.”

Rolling
over on its back, the light snapped on again for further
examination, the animal rumbled and purred.

It
seemed Jeremy had made a friend.

He
rubbed its belly, tried to avoid those sharp teeth and even sharper
claws, and prayed for all he was worth.

***

Somehow
he must have slept. The way he knew that was simple enough, his
knees were screaming under bending and compression. He’d been
standing again, then having leaned up against the tree and fallen
asleep.

He had
gradually buckled and slid down, lower and lower. The other thing
was the dreams.

Dreams
indicated sleep, and yet Jeremy ached. There was a hint of light
now. Locating east would be damned difficult. The light was
filtered and vague, with mist and steam still hanging in the
understory.

At this
latitude, there was little seasonal variation in the length of the
day. The sun went north in so-called winter and south in so-called
summer. In the equatorial regions, it went just as many degrees,
but it didn’t seem to make much difference in the heat of the day.
Theoretically, the sun went so many degrees right and left, up and
down.

The
ocelot was gone, thankfully. Its only way of expressing affection
or anything really, was to kill it, eat it, chew on it, (or spray
it, maybe), and Jeremy had already been nipped too many times by
the thing. Those claws were very sharp, but then they had to be.
Sad as it was to see it leave, it was better for all concerned. He
wished it all the luck in the world.

With the
heavy rains of the night, there wasn’t much hope of finding his
back-trail.

He had
run about fifty yards, from somewhere over there.

A
hundred yards beyond that, should be the most recent creek that
they had crossed. O’Dell had definitely been with him
then.

Ergo,
he must have disappeared
somewhere between here and there. With water all around there, it
couldn’t be a very big piece of land at all.

Assuming
he’d fully circled the tree, the other side of it must be west.
Bird life was waking up, with calls, screeches and squawks coming
from all around. The mosquitoes never seemed to let up, and he
itched all over from their attentions. Monkeys were getting ready
to chuck things down at him, judging by their excited
calls.

Slapping
one more mosquito, finding a good gob of blood on his fingers, he
took one last look around and then went for it.

“
Mister O’Dell! Mister O’Dell.” Jeremy picked his way through
the underbrush, sensing that they really couldn’t be all that far
apart.

O’Dell had to be around there
somewhere
and his entire body just
ached.

His
clothes were slowly drying but the underbrush was still wet and
this was going to take awhile.

***

He’d been standing right about
here,
wondering where O’Dell went,
when the storm came up.

He
hadn’t been being very observant, but the configuration of a clump
of hanging vines did seem rather familiar. The trouble was they all
looked familiar. Everything looked the same in the
jungle.

They’d been following along a ridge line, with the occasional
outcrop of stone and moss the only relief from underbrush, dense,
thick and full of every sort of plant, insect, reptile, and fungus
inimical to man or beast. There were man-eating trees, or so he had
been told…
Lord.

“
Mister O’Dell!” Nothing, but the sound of a cataract rising in
the background off to his right spurred him forward.

There was a waterfall near camp, but they were right close to
the fall-line, as Mister Smith had called it. There was an
escarpment, and then higher ground. What with wind, and birds, he
hadn’t noticed it the day before. Maybe he really
was
lost.

It was a
horrible thought. The place did look familiar.

Just on
the verge of the real foothills, the valley bottom was riven by
hundreds of creeks, sloughs and bayous, mostly parallel in spite of
winding back and forth in lazy curlicues. The jungle just oozed
water. That was the thing. It made its own weather.

There
was an actual clearing on the bank. It was so unique, they’d
remarked upon it at the time. There were some faint and ambiguous
scuff-marks in the dirt. This had to be their clearing.

He was
hoping for tracks, of which they’d seen a few, possibly deer, (they
were indistinct and hard to identify), peccary, small mammals,
birds and squirrels and the like.

Predictably, the ground was beaten flat and pockmarked by the
rain. It was still damp and steaming in the erratic beams of
sunlight coming in from above, or rather, behind. The great forest
gently swayed in what sounded like a light breeze up above and
glistening drops fell from the wet treetops. He couldn’t say for
sure if anyone had ever been there or not. It was best to try and
be objective. The water before him was black. They’d followed the
bank on the other side and crossed on a dead tree that must have
been a couple of feet thick and sturdy. Crossing on a tree was
always chancy. The tree had fallen for a reason and some of them
were pretty rotten. They could break under your weight and the
further you fell, the worse it was going to be. He’d already
skinned his shins more than once and the pain was a good reminder.
Your shoes were always going to be wet.

It
should be off to his left, less than thirty yards…the wall of green
on the side of his little clearing was uninviting. He couldn’t stay
there all day, either. His stomach alone would see to that, and he
only had a couple of swallows of water left. Parting the first
fronds of tall grass and weeds, he was rewarded with the sight of a
depression in the soft turf.

He
almost remembered making that step—

Jeremy
opened his mouth to call again, when there came the sound of a
distant gunshot, half a mile or more to the west.

***

Twenty-five or thirty yards. It had to be there, but it
wasn’t. Stomach rumbling, tired, exhausted, thirsty and ready to
scream, Jeremy backtracked to his little clear spot on the
bank.

There
had to be a log across the stream right about there, and there
wasn’t. He could see quite a ways down the creek, and there was no
log there.