Omar never once looked back.

FIFTEEN

A breathless panic overcame me. I began to pace up and down the bank like a madwoman, from one wall of jungle to the other, all the way to the far east end of the village where the manioc fields stretched back to the barn and the leper family’s hut, then the other way, past the Anaconda Bar, finding myself practically to the Tortoise Beach before stopping and gazing off into the wall of green beyond. Mosquitos followed me, circling my head, their shrill drone grinding into my brain.

The river, the color of dark mustard, flowed with its own unknowable intentions, turning and folding into itself. Ancient trees towered, trunks like columns, their intertwined crowns disappearing in vaporous clouds. Beneath the canopy seethed a boiling mess of understory vegetation. Vines hung down in coils, motionless in the still, hot air. The jungle held the village in a stranglehold on three sides; the river sealed it in. I wasn’t going anywhere.

I slipped off my backpack—suddenly sick of its sweaty weight—and threw it down on the sand in a huff, stamping my feet like a frustrated child. Disturbed from their hidey-holes, hundreds of tiny, nearly transparent spiders bloomed out from the grains of sand, darted along the shore, and stepped out onto the river, skimming along the surface of the water.

I’d barely recovered from the sight when the air shattered with the screams of howler monkeys. Half a dozen big tawny ones leapt from branch to branch a hundred feet above me, freeing nuts and branches that drubbed down on my head and shoulders. I turned to run, but one of them dropped down to the earth with a thump, landing between me and the village.

Man-sized—part lion, part great ape—it came running at me, its mouth a dish-sized pink oval open in a never-ending roar. In terror, I fell back on my ass and scuttled away like a crab. So this was how I was going to die, not by the hand of some group-home skank cutting my throat, not in a plane crash, not by a jaguar lurking under our hut. A monkey’s face would be the last I saw.

The creature stopped next to my pack, just a yard from me, still blaring through the echo chamber of its cavernous head; its wet fur stinking like rotted wool. Bellowing constantly, he fixed me to my spot with hooded black eyes, nostrils empty holes on his long, hairless face ringed by a thick ruff of fur. He stood up on his hind legs, his white balls pendulous between his bowlegged gait, his prehensile tail curling up and twisting crazily, as if it had a mind of its own.

The creature slipped one long arm under a strap of my backpack and lifted it up, dangling it in front of his face for long, strange seconds. Was that what it wanted, my bag? I scuttled back a few more feet; he paid no attention. Encouraged by the roars of his gang that swung and looped in the green chaos above us, he bugled even louder, jumping up and down, spinning the bag in the air by one strap like a lasso he was about to let fly, before bashing it over and over onto the dirt as if to kill it.