wasn’t about to take any of his bullshit. “Were you as near to pasture as you insist, I doubt you’d have joined this little expedition.”
“This is hardly the place to which an uncle willingly sends his niece without a chaperone?”
“Seems Teddy is bodyguard enough.”
Charles snorted. “Teddy might protect her from Gordon Wentlock, but who, besides me, protects her from Teddy Rhingold? You?”
“Is anyone hungry but me?” Melanie changed the subject.
“You’re hungry, even knowing as you do that Felix is in charge of the chow?” Carolyne’s insinuation was that their cook-of-the-day wasn’t likely to relieve any pangs of starvation: an anomaly when hours of traipsing the tangles left everyone famished at meal times.
“He’s promised to follow package instructions, this time: ‘put plastic bag in boiling water,’” Melanie reminded. It had been a promise forced from him after his last ill-fated Julia Child in the wild improvisation.
Not from Missouri, but California, Carolyne had to see to believe. “I guess it’s chow time, nonetheless!” She wasn’t enthused.
The three turned in unison and formed a line, Carolyne in the lead, Charles in the rear. Between each of them was space enough to avoid the constant whiplash from flora shifted forward and released.
Melanie relied upon Carolyne’s sense of direction and focused her own concentration on pondering, once again, the absence of wildlife. Her father’s journals were filled with tapir, jaguar, cavy, armadillo, sloth, peccary, anteater, and monkey. So far, Melanie had spotted none of the above, nor any anacondas which she’d once believed hung, like Christmas icicles, from every Amazon Basin tree. “I haven’t even seen one snake,” she commented aloud.
“Blame the tramp, tramp, tramp of many feet,” said Carolyne. “Most of the indigenous animals have headed for deeper pockets.”
Melanie found that answer insufficient. After all, this jungle was as wild and as greenery choked as any imagined. Surely, tramp, tramp, tramping human feet hadn’t been nearly enough to stampede the whole indigenous wildlife population.
Carolyne was happy to elucidate. “Prospectors and geologists, like Roy Lendum, looking for gold, oil, emeralds, copper, iron, platinum, whatever.” She was invisible except for the waves she made in the greenery that allowed Melanie to follow in her wake. “Hunters, museum people, zoologists, ornithologists, looking for animals and birds. Lepidopterists looking for butterflies. Tourists looking for the Great Adventure.”
“I can’t imagine even the most foolhardy tourist this far off the beaten path.” Charles, too, had become just one more disembodied voice somewhere within the shifted shrubbery.
“Nonsense!” Carolyne was a teacher chiding a recalcitrant student who failed to see the obvious. “This isn’t so far out of the way, so far removed from civilization, once you consider how few days of slash-and-burn remain between the Georni Ranch and here. How much of this forest, after all, is consumed daily by flames designed to ‘reclaim the land’ for crops and pasture?”
Charles should have known better than to disagree with Carolyne. She had a way, which he never liked, of making him feel he’d not done his homework; no matter that he could match her find for find, expedition for expedition, award for award, recognition for recognition, at least since she’d ended her professional association with his brother.
Carolyne droned on: “Come back next year if we don’t luck out with our illusive Lygodium cornelius; I’ll bet all you’ll find, right here, where we now walk, is pasture with Kyle Georni’s fat cattle grazing.” Even Carolyne would have found such a prediction harder to believe if she hadn’t seen, first-hand, plant-hunted jungles, just like this one, which once thrived, full and verdant, become open pastureland, almost overnight, stocked with Georni beef destined for world markets. All those short hours they’d jeeped from the ranch house to the edge of this jungle had once taken days of machete-cutting to maneuver on foot.
Charles slapped at a bug landed on one of his sweaty cheeks; he complained the mosquitoes hadn’t been scared off by any tramp, tramp, tramp.
“You’re getting soft!” Carolyne said but knew better.
Melanie expected to hear Teddy at any minute; he was assigned the section between hers and the campsite. To see him would be another matter; the choke of flora often made it impossible to see one’s hand in front of one’s face. She preferred stretches wherein giant trees, like supports for massive circus tents, suspended their high canopies of interlocked limbs and leaves, nothing below but groundcover clogged with decay and no sunlight. This was claustrophobic by comparison. Only her clothes kept the plants from flaying her alive; evidence was scratches on every part of her unprotected body.
“I need a rest,” Charles complained; Melanie loved her uncle, but sometimes even she tired of his insistence that he wasn’t up to the task. Excerpts from Cornelius Ditherson’s journals, written during expeditions that his brother had accompanied, indicated just as many complaints from a Charles in his prime.
Carolyne stopped suddenly, which caused a pileup.
“Sorry,” Melanie apologized for back-ending Carolyne, echoed by Charles who, by then, had stepped on his niece’s left heel.
“Do you smell food?” Carolyne sniffed the air like a carnivore for rotting carrion.
“Vacuum-sealed food packets, my dear,” Charles reminded. “Gone with the wind are the days of smelling the aroma of freshly killed game roasting over an open fire.”
“Felix!” Carolyne called.
“Please, don’t tell us you’ve lost the way,” Charles punctuated. “I’ve counted upon you to eye spot reference points. Not professional of me, I admit, but my mind does tend to wander some with encroaching old age.
Carolyne’s dilated nostrils, mere appendages of her intuition, “smelled” something wrong.
Melanie inhaled deeply, too, but took in only the usual combination of heat, humidity, fecundity, and decay.
“Likely, Felix has taken a few z’s,” Charles analyzed. “Far healthier for us than were he to subject us to whatever his latest concoction in the communal pot might be.”
“I’ve a sixth sense for things not right,” Carolyne bragged. “Or have you, Charles, forgotten how right I was in Chile?”
“I still believe I would have survived quite nicely without you having thrown me that rope, thank-you.” It was a sore point with Charles that this wasn’t the first time she’d brought it up to play one-upmanship. Charles wished for a jaguar so he might return the favor by yanking Carolyne out of harm’s way, to brag about it until the grim reaper finally cut him down; then again, he doubted he had the strength to save even himself. This expedition had genuinely tired him out.
“See if I give you any assist next time,” Carolyne threatened. “Then, we’ll count the years it’ll take you to extract yourself.”
Melanie had previously been subjected to enough of her uncle and Carolyne’s banter to ignore it now; no indication of Teddy’s presence was her more immediate concern. “I’m surprised we haven’t found Teddy.”
“Teddy!”
