Phylogenesis - Alan Dean Foster [64]
Detecting the release of alarm pheromones from their smashed colleague, a subsection of the living brown stream detached and attacked. Flailing wildly as if afflicted with some aberrant disorder of the nervous system, Cheelo hopped and stumbled out of the tent and the trees, across the open, intervening beach, and into the river. Even submerged, the ants hung on tenaciously. Since it was not the dry season and ample customary prey was available, the resident piranhas ignored this violent intrusion into their world. The four-meter long black caiman on the far bank did not, slipping silently into the water, its dragon’s tail cleaving the rippling, mirrored surface as it sinuously advanced to investigate. By the time it arrived, a fully awake and much chastened Montoya had slogged back onto the beach. Disappointed, the caiman sank back beneath the surface, its intended quarry as ignorant as ever of its majestic, carnivorous presence.
Muttering a steady stream of gutter curses, Cheelo made his way back to his tent. Reaching inside, he checked his pack carefully before picking it up. A pouch within yielded ointment to treat the red welts left behind by the jaws of the soldiers. A pair of tweezers were necessary to remove the mandibles and attached heads of those ants that had refused to release their grip, even after having been drowned and dismembered.
There was not much he could do then except wait for the column to finish moving through. Fortunately, all of his foodstuffs and concentrates were vacuum sealed. This was critical not only to prevent spoilage in the dank depths of the rain forest but to keep edibles from detection by marauding scavengers no matter what their size.
It was late afternoon before the rear guard moved through the hole in his tent and out the other side. After carrying out a visual inspection to ensure that no stragglers remained, he broke down the shelter and its contents and placed them once more in the boat. Normally before loading his gear he would have first checked everything for those dangerous lovers of dark places who inhabited the rain forest: scorpions, spiders, kissing bugs, and their ilk. Subsequent to the column’s passage he knew that would not be necessary. As efficiently as if they had intentionally been making amends, the ants would have scoured clean his tent and belongings. In the wake of their passage, nothing lived.
He vowed that from now on he would be more careful in his choice of campsites. In the rain forest no locality was perfect, however. Bushes concealed dangers of their own; trees were home to voracious insects of other species; and sleeping in the boat, where he could not erect his tent, would expose him to predation by mosquitoes and worse, such as disgusting parasites like the human botfly. Despite his unfortunate experience, he continued to favor open ground within the forest itself for sleeping. He carried a patch kit for the tent, and the holes the insectile multitude had gnawed could be repaired.
Perversely, he was grateful for the presence of everything that stung, bit, chewed, or parasitized. All contributed to conditions the average tourist found uninviting. The worse the climate, the more rapacious the fauna, the less likelihood there was of him running into a tour supervised by a querulous escort. Despite the area’s isolation, a guide or even a tourist equipped with a communicator could quickly call a skimmer full of rangers down on him. With the unfortunate encounter in distant San José still a recent item on police call sheets throughout the hemisphere, that was a confrontation Cheelo desired devoutly to avoid. By the time he was ready to return to Golfito, the furor surrounding his unfortunate