style="font-size:15px;"> Which means you have very little to fear when walking through the bush of Madagascar.
Hah! Little to fear? And as an afterthought the article had said:
It’s remarkable to find boas in Madagascar, seeing that the closest relatives live so far away in the forests of the Amazon.
He didn’t care. A boa was a boa – whether it lived in the Amazon or Madagascar. It was still a constrictor. And constrictors strangled their prey.
As if to prove it, under the article was a picture of a man who’d been swallowed in the Amazon. The gross, hugely swollen boa had been cut open. The man’s head and half his body were still inside the snake while his bottom half protruded through the slit. There wasn’t even a rip in his shorts and his boots were still on the end of his legs. But the man was dead. Dead as can be.
Ollie felt something against his arm. Two white, tube-like, squishy things were crawling and looping over his skin.
He flicked at them but one had already attached itself to him. “What are these?”
“Leeches. You’ll get used to them.”
“Yrggh!” he shuddered and swiped the other one away before it could take hold.
His father laughed. “It’s a good sign, Ollie. It shows there are warm-blooded creatures in the forest. Zinzi’s mum will be happy. She’s looking for lemurs. If there are no blood suckers, there are no warm-blooded mammals.”
He tripped across a root and reached out to steady himself on a branch. There was something squelchy under his hand. He pulled back and found a bright green-and-orange creature staring back at him – a tiny, tailless, horned dragon-creature. Frog? Chameleon? Gecko? He wasn’t sure.
His father peered over his shoulder. “Have you ever seen such a colour? It’s a green climbing mantella. Mantella laevigata.”
But Ollie was unimpressed. Even if frogs were quite startling with their jewel colours as toxic as their poisons, blowing and ballooning as they breathed, making tink tink tink sounds like elfin silversmiths beating against anvils, he still didn’t care.
The frog perched for a moment on the tip of his father’s finger, then leapt away – as luminous green as a highlighter pen. “That little fellow is not what I’m after. We won’t find the golden mantella as easily as this. It’s too endangered.” He glanced up from his binoculars. There was a leech attached to his eyeball.
“Dad! Quick! Get the tweezers. You’re about to lose your eyeball to a leech! It must’ve been on the lens of your binoculars.”
Malingu shrugged. “Tweezers are hopeless. If you try to pull, the head will stay behind and cause an infection. You have to rinse it out.”
“Don’t worry. I’m used to this.” His father grabbed a salt solution from the first aid kit and began rinsing his eye. “Done this before.”
Finally the leech let go and fell out, fat, squashy and sluggish, onto his cheek.
Now he knew why his friends back in London hadn’t been encouraging when he told them he was going to Madagascar.
“What? The movie?”
“No. The country!”
“You’ll get eaten by a crocodile.”
“Or sucked in by a meat-eating plant.”
“Or die of malaria.”
No one had mentioned leeches but grandma had said there were cannibals. “They still do voodoo stuff. People disappear, Ollie!”
Great! So here he was standing in the forest and it was already dark. Too dark to see. Too dark to find the camp.
He switched on his head torch. Bugs and moths swarmed by the hundred towards the light and batted his face and scratched across his eyelids and cheeks. He switched it off again.
In front of him his father and Malingu were swinging their torch beams like miners looking for gold. Shadows leapt forward, then shrunk back. Creepers turned into writhing snakes, then became creepers again. Glossy wet leaves bounced back light and made the shadows seem blacker. Sudden pinpoints of light flashed back orange and green fire. Then they were swallowed again by darkness as whatever it was slunk silently away.
They were not alone.
The darkness breathed hot air down his back. He switched on his torch again and swung around quickly. There was nothing. Yet as he turned forward, he felt as if something was creeping up behind again.
The hairs on his neck prickled. The ghosts of Madagascar were watching.
And then he saw it. The biggest snake he’d ever seen in his life. He caught it in the beam of his torch, its green-grey coils going on and on forever in a tangled clump as it wrapped itself around a branch. Its head poised, stretching straight into the air, looking down at him. It was a monster.
“Ahhh …” no other sound got past his lips.
His father swung around. “Lucky find, Ollie! A Madagascan tree boa! Well spotted! A really big one. Must be at least nine feet of it in those tangles. This guy’s just waking up for his night prowl.”
Lucky! He didn’t feel at all lucky. Lucky was being as far from a tree boa as he could imagine.
At last Malingu pointed and smiled triumphantly. “We’re on track!”
Far in the distance through the trees Ollie saw a light flicker. Then a glow. He smelt wood smoke. Human sounds drifted through the dark. People laughing. Pots banging.
He let out a deep lungful of air.
The camp lay ahead, glowing in lamplight between the trees. He felt he was walking towards something out of Pirates of the Caribbean or Robinson Crusoe. It wasn’t a single tree house, but a series of tree houses all linked by bridges and platforms that seemed to float above the ground, with a myriad details that were too much for him to take in.
Zinzi was standing in a clearing ahead with the lamplight flickering across her face and laughing.
“You look a sight, Ollie. What took you so long?”
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