Eye of the Forest

  The giant giant anaconda was caught quite unaware. The two jaguars were on the snake’s suitcase-sized head in a matter of seconds. With sharp claws bared, each big cat raked itself a firm hold of the snake’s huge body and held on tightly. But it was only now that they had the trunk in their grasp that they realized how big the snake really was. It was fifty or sixty feet long and, in the middle, perhaps two feet thick.

  John sank his fangs into the creature’s throat and fixed his jaws tight, like a dog hanging onto a blanket. But Nimrod struggled to get an equally firm bite on the head, such were its proportions. The snake hissed like a steam engine and twisted back on itself, trying to envelop the two jaguars in its massive and lethal coils, but each time Nimrod and John managed to scramble clear of the body, which threatened to squeeze them to death. Finally, Nimrod got a good grip behind the head and between the snake’s yellow-button eyes and bit as hard as he could.

  The anaconda’s huge nostrils flared as it sensed the intelligence behind the two-pronged attack, but it was hardly finished yet. Suddenly, like a crane, the snake reared twenty or thirty feet up in the air carrying the bodies of the two jaguars with him. It shook itself vigorously so that the two cats found themselves waved around like twin flags on a huge flagpole and then dove toward the forest floor as if hoping that the fall would dislodge both its attackers. The impact with the wet ground winded John but still he held on. So long as there was a breath in the snake’s huge body he had to hold on or die trying. His mouth was full of blood but he had no idea if it was his or the snake’s.

  Nimrod pressed his fangs against the creature’s head and realized that if either one of these teeth gave way before the snake’s skull was punctured, he and John would probably die. Closing his eyes he concentrated all of his strength in closing the aching muscles on either side of his lower jawbone.

  Changing tactics now, the snake pushed quickly through the thick undergrowth hoping to brush off the two cats that were affixed to its head and throat. John almost let go as he was buffeted against a tree and then dragged through a bush backward. Nimrod growled with pain as the snake’s fast-traveling weight scraped him across a sharp rock and an equally jagged log. But somehow he and John managed to hold on.

  The rain forest had seldom seen or heard anything like it: the roaring of the two jaguars, the desperate hisses of the snake, the crashing undergrowth, and the birds and bats knocked out of their nighttime roosts — it was as if a mad bull elephant had gone on the rampage.

  The minutes turned into an hour.

  John’s jaws were at breaking point. The pain went all through the top of his head, down his neck, and into his muscular shoulders. His claws felt like they were being wrenched out of their sockets. But then, detecting a change in the snake’s breathing, John tightened his bite on the snake’s throat and immediately he saw the black nostrils flare again as if the lack of air in the snake’s oil-pipeline of a body was now becoming critical.

  Nimrod saw it, too, and finding another two percent of strength somewhere in his chest muscles he made a last attempt to pierce the cranium. A second later he felt something crack in his mouth like one of Groanin’s extra-strong mints and something hot and gelatinous filled his savage mouth. It was the snake’s brain.

  The anaconda twitched for several horrible minutes until finally it lay still.

  “Is it dead?”

  “I very much hope so,” answered Nimrod.

  John opened his mouth and rolled away. To his surprise the sun was rising. It would soon be light. But it was still raining. He tried to stand and found his legs trembling underneath him. Exhausted, he dropped down on his belly again and took a long deep breath. “Are you all right?” he wondered.

  “Yes.” Nimrod’s thoughts weren’t much more than a whisper. “I think so. How are you?”

  “I feel very, very tired,” admitted John.

  “Me, too.” Nimrod limped over to where John was now stretched out and began to lick one of the larger scratches on his nephew’s side.

  John looked at the anaconda’s huge body and felt something close to shame. “What a magnificent creature,” observed John. “I almost feel sorry for it.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” Nimrod advised him. “Blame whoever put it here with the intent of killing one of us. And believe me, given the chance, it would have done.”

  “I wonder what it tastes like.”

  “That’s the jaguar in you speaking, John.” Nimrod let out a sigh. “Do you want to find out?”

  “Not particularly. I’m too tired to open my mouth. I may never eat again. I just want to sleep.”

  “There’s no time to eat and there’s no time to sleep. We should be getting back. We’ve done what we set out to do.”

  “Do we have to?” John growled irritably. “Can’t we just stay here for a while?”

  “The others will be wondering where we got to. Before long they’ll be worried. Do you want them to be worried, John?”

  “I’m too tired to care. I just want to sleep.”

  “Come on. We’ll take it slowly. A nice cool bath in the river on the way back should help to make you feel better.”

  “Sounds good.” John stood up and put one paw in front of another.

  They started to walk back, along the side of the trail. Neither was in a mood to communicate. Both were too preoccupied with their aching bodies to think very much. But after a while John felt he had to ask Nimrod if, when he left the jaguar’s body and reclaimed his own, the pain he was feeling would disappear.

  “Yes,” answered Nimrod. “It will. That’s why I’m keen to get back. I thought you knew that.”

  “I do now.”

  They walked on with Nimrod leading the way as before. But a tired animal is like a human in that it makes mistakes. No fully fit and well-rested jaguar would have walked into a man-made trap, even a trap made by local Indians. One minute John and Nimrod were moving in single file along the side of the trail, and the next a large net carrying Nimrod was flying up into the air above John’s head.

  John turned to flee and sprinted toward some undergrowth, straight into another net attached to a tree sapling that catapulted him off his feet. For a moment he hung there, swinging like a bag of coconuts. Then, a half-naked man wearing a white mask with a big red grin on it ran toward him, shouting loudly and gesticulating wildly. A second man appeared at his side. This one was dressed in the skin of a jaguar, wearing the jaguar’s head like a kind of hat. This did not bode well. John growled at both men fiercely and lashed out with his claws. The man wearing the white mask waved a club in the air. The club was black and shaped like a piranha. The man held it by the tail. The head was fatter than the tail and full of small sharp teeth. The club disappeared behind the man’s head and then reappeared suddenly again. John felt a sharp blow on his head that left him stunned. The white mask came closer now and the big red grin painted on it seemed to defy all John’s earlier resistance. Behind the mask there was loud and mocking laughter. John closed his eyes and then all was black and silent.

  When John recovered consciousness, he found himself upside down with all four of his paws tied to a length of wood and being carried through the jungle by two Indians. He was sensible enough to play dead. This wasn’t so difficult since there was a pain in his head that made him think it might be better if they didn’t hit him with that club again. So he let his long tail and his head hang loose and tried to make a plan about what to do. Did they think that they had killed him? And if so, did that mean they had killed Nimrod? It was hard to understand very much at all when his world view was upside down and the language around him was one he had never heard before. But at last it had stopped raining.

  As they reached the Indian village, he arrived at some idea of what his next course of action might be. And letting his djinn spirit slip out of the jaguar’s body he floated invisibly at one side of the trail and took stock of their situation. The other jaguar that was Nimrod was similarly trussed and insensible
and being carried on the pole behind. John slid into the second jaguar’s body and was relieved to find his uncle alive but still unconscious. He was enormously relieved because his first thought had been that Nimrod was dead.

  Finding that there was nothing he could do for him, John lifted his disembodied form out of the other jaguar and, having made a careful note of where the village was located, he retraced his spiritual steps to the place in the forest where he had been captured. From there he quickly found his way back to the tree where Nimrod had left his travel lamp.

  The moment John was possessed of his own atoms again he transubstantiated himself and, with Nimrod’s lamp now safely in his hands, he returned to the camp where they had left the others, to get some help in mounting a rescue. He was sure Mr. Vodyannoy would know exactly what to do, and that Sicky would know who these Indians were.

  Muddy’s dog, Hector, stepped out of the bushes where he had been hiding and, whimpering piteously, came up to John and licked his hand. But of Philippa and the others there was no sign. The backpacks were still there but the fire was quite cold and the tents showed signs of having been attacked by some kind of wild animal. There was no blood, however, and no other signs of an attack.

  “What happened here, boy?” John asked, folding the dog’s ears affectionately.

  Hector looked around and barked.

  “What was it this time? A giant sloth? A giant alligator, perhaps?”

  And then he saw them.

  In a shallow grave, covered with tree branches and leaves, as if someone had tried to bury them in a hurry, lay three stone statues of Indians. John realized first that these were different, rather fiercer-looking Indians than the ones who had captured Nimrod and himself; then he realized that the most probable cause of how three stone statues came to be there at all was the tattoo on Sicky’s stomach. John thought that Sicky must have tried to defend the others against an attack. The question was, had Sicky done enough to drive them off? And if so, where were the others now?

  “Did they run away?” John asked Hector. “Did they get away in the boats? Let’s go and look.”

  John walked down to the riverbank and found the boats remained beached and quite undamaged, and with all of the equipment and gear still in camp it was clear to John that the rest of the party must have been taken prisoner. He would have shouted out to them but for the fact that he didn’t want to get captured again, and by a different tribe of Indians. Obviously, he was going to have to mount some kind of rescue. But who was he going to rescue first? Nimrod? Or his sister and the others?

  “What am I going to do?” he asked Hector anxiously.

  Hector whined and licked John’s face encouragingly.

  Sick with worry, John pushed Hector away and tried to concentrate his thoughts in case djinn power presented some obvious solution. It didn’t. But the still-vivid memory of the fact that one of the Indians who had captured his uncle had been wearing the skin of a jaguar helped John to decide the matter. He would try to rescue Nimrod first. After all, John could hardly be sure that Nimrod might not be skinned himself. Perhaps his uncle would revive and slip out of the jaguar as John had done, but the boy djinn decided he could not afford to wait and take that chance.

  And a plan presented itself in his mind. Looking at Hector, he saw how a dog — even a dog carrying a magic lamp in its mouth — might walk around the Indian village unnoticed, at least for as long as it took to work out exactly how to rescue Nimrod. Becoming a dog so soon after he had been a jaguar was not an attractive proposition. He was tired of being an animal. His mouth still tasted horribly of raw turtle and snake’s blood. But he could see no alternative.

  John was on the very point of transubstantiating and then slipping inside Hector when something flew through the air and landed on Zadie’s backpack. It was Zotz, her adopted pet bat and, noticing something shiny around Zotz’s leg, he went over to take a closer look at it. But when he tried to pick up the bat to see what this might be, the bat took to the air and circled the camp for a minute or two before landing once again. This happened several times before John hit on the idea of feeding it some banana and, in this way, he was at last able to take hold of the creature and remove the metallic object from its leg.

  It was a tube, in diameter about as big as a nickel, and in length about as long as a paper clip. Inside was a piece of rolled-up paper. John slid the paper out.

  “I’ve heard of homing pigeons,” he told the bat as he placed it back onto Zadie’s pack. “But never a homing bat.”

  The message, addressed to Zadie, left the boy djinn feeling utterly astonished.

  John learned nothing about what had happened to his friends from being inside Hector — only that it was Muddy’s dog himself who was responsible for chewing the tents, and that following a beating from his master when this had been discovered, he’d run off before the second tribe of Indians had turned up.

  Carrying Nimrod’s travel lamp partly hidden in his mouth, John followed the trail all the way back through the jungle to the Indian village where he had left Nimrod. There he walked almost invisibly among the local people. As he had suspected, no one paid much attention to yet another stray dog.

  The village was — most of it — a series of longhouses built on stilts, and occupied a clearing in the forest on the edge of a fast-moving river. Some of the Indians lived here, but others lived in the wreck of an old steamship that was located halfway up a hillside, as if stranded there by some freak storm. Two stories tall and about sixty feet in length, it was the kind of vessel that belonged properly on the Mississippi River but, overgrown with creepers and overrun with children and chickens, it looked as if it had been there for a very long time.

  Much more recent was the presence of the dead body of the giant anaconda. This had been carried into the village by other members of the tribe and was now laid out lengthwise alongside the steamship, which gave a better idea of its size.

  Seeing the snake in daylight, John wondered just how he and Nimrod had ever contemplated fighting such an enormous creature. The snake was slightly longer than the ship and as thick as a tree trunk. The Indians also seemed properly impressed by the snake but even more so by the two otorongos that, they surmised, must somehow have killed it. It seemed these were being held in a small stockade in the center of the village and treated as something holy. Led by the man wearing the jaguar skin, who appeared to be some kind of witch doctor, a group of warriors were kneeling around the stockade and, as far as John could tell, they were now worshipping the two jaguars.

  John went over to take a closer look and was horrified to discover that only one of the jaguars was standing up and walking around; the other one — the one that contained Nimrod — was already dead. Its pink tongue lolling out of its mouth, the jaguar lay on the ground with a rigidity that was all too eloquent. John swallowed a large lump of emotion. If the jaguar was dead, did that mean Nimrod was dead, too? John recognized that he was going to have to enter the stockade and find out for sure.

  Almost as bad was the realization that their ceremony of worship now completed, the Indians seemed to be getting ready to kill the second jaguar. They were fitting arrows to their bowstrings as if preparing to sacrifice the big cat to whatever god it was they believed in.

  Someone threw a stone at Hector to drive him off, but realizing that there was no time to lose, John ignored the pain and stood his ground. There wasn’t going to be any time to be subtle about this manifestation of djinn power, he told himself. He was just going to have to do what he had to do regardless of the superstitions and beliefs of the Indians. The Indians, he felt, were about to get a probably well-deserved fright.

  John dropped the travel lamp onto the ground and, lifting his spirit out of the dog, reentered the lamp to pick up the atoms he needed to effect transubstantiation. It was impossible to tell from the parts of himself that Nimrod had left behind if he was alive or not. He looked like a very lifelike statue. John stared at his uncle for a moment, as
if reminding himself of how important he was to him, and then hurried out of the bottle in an extra-large cloud of smoke. It was extra-large because he wanted to make quite sure it drove away all of the Indians from the stockade. Even as he was still making himself flesh, he could tell that he had succeeded. Shouting loudly and gesticulating wildly, the Indians were already running away to what they considered to be a safe distance. Only Hector stayed put. Recognizing John, the dog licked his hand fondly before staring crossly at the Indians. Most of these were now hiding underneath the longhouses or on the upper tier of the steamboat, and pointing excitedly at John.

  John picked up the travel lamp and was about to jump into the stockade when a voice said, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. That’s a jaguar in there. And they’re none too friendly when they’re being held prisoner.”

  “Nimrod?” John grinned with relief and glanced around. Seeing nothing, he guessed that Nimrod was still in his spiritual form. “Is that really you?”

  “Who do you think it is? A ghost? I saw your smoke and guessed you must be here with the lamp. And not a moment too soon.”

  “I was worried when I saw that dead jaguar.”

  “Yes. One of those chaps hit the poor beast a little too hard. Pity, really. He was a fine fellow. Anyway, I got inside the other jaguar and, finding you weren’t there, reasoned you must have gone back for the lamp. I was just about to skedaddle out of him, too, when you turned up.”