Though to be honest, unlike the rest of the expedition team, who had formed a semicircle around Roth and appeared to be hanging onto his every word, Andy found himself only half-listening. Even four hours after his rescue, most of his synapses were dedicated to reliving the incident over and over again.

After Andy blew his whistle in a frenzied panic, it was unimaginable how quickly Rix had come barreling through the brush. Rix had his machete in one hand and a gun in the other. He was prepared to fight off whatever it was that caused a member of the team to blow their whistle this early in the expedition.

But from the look on Rix’s face—like he’d bitten into a rotten sunflower seed—what the ex–special forces soldier was not prepared to find was a thirty-two-year-old man on his hands and knees with tears dripping from his eyes.

“What happened?” Rix asked.

In hindsight, Andy should have lied. He could have said a spider the size of a grapefruit jumped onto his shoulder. Or that he saw a jaguar. No, a family of jaguars! Yes, if Andy had access to a time machine, he would go back and say anything else besides, “Oh, uh, I got turned around a little bit, and then I guess I had a little bit of a panic attack.”

Andy expected Rix to be sympathetic, that he would tell him to shake it off, tell him that getting lost in the jungle was nothing to be ashamed about. But the easygoing “give me some knuckles” guy who’d helped Andy with his campsite was long gone. Rix shook his head with disgust and said, “You got to jungle up, mate.”

Andy assumed Jungle up was brother to Cowboy up and cousin to Toughen up and lived just down the street from Quit being such a pussy.

Rix’s words were blunt, but Andy had heard far worse from his own father and brothers growing up. It was what followed that would be paying for his therapist’s new Lexus.

It turned out that Andy had been just ten meters—yes, ten meters—from the main camp when he had blown his whistle. As Andy was pushing himself to his feet, Roth, Buxton, Holland, and Sean—and Sean’s video camera—emerged from the brush.

“What happened?” Holland asked.

Andy had cut his eyes at Rix, silently willing him to cover for him, but Rix told Holland the truth: “He got turned around, and then he had a bloody panic attack.”

Andy was surprised when Roth grinned and said, “Oh, we have to get this on film. Can you reenact it?”

Andy wasn’t sure why he agreed to do it. It would have been so easy to say no. And had it been any other documentarian, perhaps Andy would have. But it was Jonathan Roth.