We woke up early, ate a small breakfast supplied by the villagers, thanked them profusely for their hospitality, then set out at first light. We followed three villagers through the jungle for over an hour until we came to a tree with a series of holes in the trunk.

Bullet holes.

This was as far as the villagers followed Gina and the soldiers. Now they wanted to continue with us, but Diego convinced them to go back. I thought they could help, as this was their jungle, but maybe it was one of those too-many-chefs-in-the-kitchen scenarios, or, more precisely, too many trackers in the jungle. The villagers reluctantly turned back, but not before relaying through Diego that they would pray for our protection and for Dr. Gina’s safe return.

At the front of the pack, I saw Diego slicing the eighteen-inch blade of his machete down through the heavy brush. Vern was behind Diego with his own machete, cutting away any branches that had survived Diego’s onslaught, leaving an open trail for me and my six-pound furry necklace.

It was too dangerous for Diego to carry Camila while wielding the large knife, plus he was constantly kneeling and sifting through the underbrush looking for disturbed vegetation. Both Carlos and Juan Pablo were maxed out with the addition of Diego’s pack plus the now four gallons of water, so the chore of carrying the angelic little creature fell to me.

Currently, Camila was wrapped around my neck, and I could feel the light exhalation through her nose on my skin.

“They go through here,” Diego yelled, his machete making a loud thwack as it cut down through the thick foliage.

While living in Maine and recuperating from multiple gunshot wounds, I taught an intro-level criminology class at the local university. One of the first things I taught was Locard’s exchange principle, which holds that when there is contact between two things, there will be an exchange. In forensics, this meant in the act of a crime, a perpetrator will take traces of the crime with them as well as leaving traces of their presence behind. This holds true in any environment, even in the rainforest.

Some signs of an exchange between Gina’s abductors and the jungle were obvious: tunneled vegetation, severed branches on the ground, boot impressions in the soft earth, bent branches, trampled underbrush. Conversely, there would be stretches of jungle which looked immaculately undisturbed. At least to the untrained eye.

Thankfully, Diego was one crackerjack of a jungle detective.

Many of the things Diego pointed out were undetectable to me. We would reach a section of jungle that looked pristine, but then Diego would point ahead and say, “See how those leaves up there are lighter than the ones around them? That is the underside of the leaf. The branches were twisted as the group moved past.”