Phylogenesis - Alan Dean Foster [68]
After making a careful check for ants, he settled down between the buttress roots of a sprawling tree and prepared to spend the night. His tent was still on the boat, but his pack yielded a light, strong emergency blanket. One root curved sideways and out, creating a swooping overhang that when combined with the blanket served to protect him from the evening rain. It was a good thing he had not come in the wet season, he mused. Without his boat he would be helpless, trapped by flooded rivers and lakes, unable to cross ground churned to mud. That he was going to get wet despite the lightweight raincoat he could extract from the pack was a fact he could not avoid: He was, after all, deliberately lost in Earth’s greatest rain forest. But he would not drown and, so long as he could fish, he would not starve. He did not care to think what he would have done had the folding fishing kit been lost along with the boat.
He had no difficulty the following morning pulling several small fish from a sizable pond. Using his belt knife, he gutted and filleted them. His camp stove was on the wayward boat, and making a fire was out of the question. Even if he could find sufficiently dry wood in the waterlogged forest, it would most likely be too soft to burn for long, or already so rotted it would fall apart in his hands. Nor could he risk giving away his location by producing smoke.
As he ate the fish raw he wished for a few limes or lemons. They were not available, so the tang of ceviche would have to wait until he found himself once more in a town. But the fish would give him strength. With the small remaining stock of supplements contained in the pack’s emergency kit, he ought to be able to keep going for some time. At least, he thought with a grim smile, he would not be slowed down by the weight of supplies.
Settling the pack on his shoulders and back, he struck off into the trees, keeping to the highest ground that presented itself. His feet stayed warm and dry, as the surrounding mud and muck was repelled by the permanent static charge in his jungle boots. He was glad that when he had made his purchases he had not stinted on appropriate clothing. It would have been nice, however, to have the tent.
On the other hand, he might have grabbed something besides the pack when tumbling out of the boat. He did not care to think about what his situation might be like without it. He would have had no choice but to risk rescue by the Reserva rangers and to hope that no one connected his face to the one that was by now no doubt splashed across police wanted files all across the planet.
The repeller in the pack kept the swarms of ravenous insects at bay. He could see them, could hear them humming and clicking and chittering as they flew and crawled all around, unable to enter the restricted sphere of electronic dislocation that had at its core a warm, pulsating, blood-filled figure. They wanted to nibble on his flesh and drink his blood. Mosquitoes and flies, beetles and ants, all gave way as the precisely modulated stridulations of the repeller urged them aside like a drifting iceberg parting the sea. Without the compact device, he knew, his skin would by now have taken on the reddened, uneven contours of a strenuously abused golf ball.
The birds kept him company, and the monkeys. While easy to hear, the latter were difficult to see. The natives who had once inhabited this region had been fond of monkey, but the thought of consuming a simian was not one that appealed to Cheelo. Anyway, he had only a single-bladed knife and could not have used a bow and arrow had heaven provided them.
The following morning a skimmer flashed by overhead, traveling slowly at treetop level. Alerted to its approach by the startled screeches of a family of squirrel monkeys, he had taken shelter beneath a dense cluster of dieffenbachia. Thick, spatulate leaves shielded him completely from above. Peeping out as the skimmer thrummed past, he saw that it was camouflaged visually as well as aurally.