Die Again (Rizzoli & Isles, #11)(64)

And I am hungry.

In my knapsack I find six PowerBars, 240 calories each. I remember tucking them into my suitcase in London, just in case I couldn’t abide the food in the bush, and I remember how Richard mocked my unadventurous palate. In an instant I devour one of the PowerBars and have to force myself to leave the remaining five for later. If I stay near the river, at least I’ll have water, an endless supply of it, even though it surely carries a host of diseases I can’t even pronounce. But the water’s edge is a dangerous zone where predator and prey so often meet, where life and death converge. At my feet is an animal’s skull, bleached by the sun. Some deer-like creature that met its end here on the riverbank. A line of ripples disturbs the water, and a crocodile lifts beady eyes to the surface. This is not a good place to be. I veer away into the grass and find a pathway has already been trampled here. Tracks stomped in the dust tell me that I am following in the footsteps of elephants.

When you are afraid, everything zooms into sharp focus. You see too much, hear too much, and I’m overwhelmed by a rapid click-click of images and sounds, any one of which might be the only warning of something that will kill me. That must all be processed at once. That swaying of the grass? Merely the wind. The blur of wings swooping above the reeds? A fish eagle. The rustling in the underbrush is merely a warthog rambling by. Tawny impala and the darker shapes of Cape buffalo move along the horizon. Everywhere I see life, flying, chattering, swimming, feeding. Beautiful and hungry and dangerous. And now the mosquitoes have found me and are feasting on my blood. My precious pills are back in my tent, so add malaria to the list of ways to die, along with being mauled by a lion, trampled by a buffalo, drowned by a crocodile, and crushed by a hippo.

As the heat builds, the mosquitoes become relentless. I wave at them maniacally as I walk, but they thicken into a biting cloud that I cannot escape. In desperation, I’m driven back to the riverbank where I scoop up handfuls of mud and slather my face and neck and arms. The silt is slimy with decaying vegetation and the smell makes me gag, but I slap on thicker and thicker layers until I’m encased in it. I rise to my feet, a primeval creature emerging from the muck. Like Adam.

I continue on the elephant path. They, too, prefer to travel alongside the river, and as I walk I spot other prints that tell me this route is used by a multitude of different creatures. This is the bush equivalent of a superhighway, all of us traveling in the footsteps of elephants. If impala and kudu walk this way then surely lions do as well.

Here is yet another killing zone, where predator and prey find each other.

But the tall grass on either side of me hides just as many threats, and I don’t have the energy to thrash my own path through dense bush. I must move quickly, because somewhere behind me is Johnny, the most relentless predator of all. Why did I refuse to see it? As the others were taken down one by one, their flesh and bones fed to this hungry land, I was blind to his game. Every look Johnny gave me, every kind word, was merely a prelude to a kill.

As the sun reaches its height, I am still trudging the elephant path. The mud dries to a hard crust on my skin and clumps of it crumble into my mouth as I eat a second PowerBar, and I devour it, grit and all. I know I should conserve my food supply, but I’m already famished and the ultimate tragedy would be to collapse dead, with food still in my knapsack. The trail veers back toward the water’s edge, where I come to a lagoon so black and still that a twin sky is reflected in its waters. The heat of midday has silenced the bush; even the birds have gone quiet. At the water’s edge is a tree where dozens of strange, pendulous sacs hang like Christmas balls. In my heat-crazed exhaustion, I wonder if I’ve stumbled upon a colony of alien cocoons, left to incubate where no one will discover them. Then a bird flutters past and vanishes into one of the sacs. Weaverbird nests.

The water of the lagoon stirs, as if something has just awakened. I back away, sensing evil here, waiting to trap the unwary. I feel its chill at my back as I retreat, once again, into the grass.

THAT EVENING, I WALK straight into the elephant herd.

In bush this thick, even something as large as an elephant can take you by surprise, and as I stumble out of a stand of acacia trees, suddenly there she is in front of me. She seems just as startled as I am and gives a trumpet of alarm so loud that it seems to blast straight through me. I’m too shocked to run. I stand frozen, the acacias at my back, the elephant facing me, standing just as still. As we stare at each other, I see massive gray shapes moving all around me. A whole herd of them are rattling the branches, snapping off twigs. They know I am here, of course, and they pause in their feeding to warily eye the mud-caked intruder. How little effort it would take for any one of them to kill me. A swat of the trunk, one massive foot on my chest, would rid them of this threat. I feel them all studying me, weighing my fate. Then one elephant calmly reaches up, breaks off a twig, and slides it into her mouth. One by one, they resume feeding. They have judged me, and issued their reprieve.

Quietly I slip back into the brush and move toward the cover of a majestic tree that towers above the acacias. I clamber up the massive trunk until I’m high enough to perch safely above the herd, and I settle into the crook of a branch. Like my primate ancestors, I find safety in the trees. In the distance, hyenas cackle and lions roar, a warning of the coming battle at nightfall. From high in my perch, I watch the sun set. In the shadows below my tree, elephants continue to feed, rustling and shuffling. Reassuring sounds.