Lost in the Jungle

He stopped, looked around, and started to cry. For the first time in 23 years, since he was five years old, he cried and he did it without shame. What did it matter, he thought to himself. There was no one around to see him or to hear him. He cried great heartwrenching sobs that wracked his whole body. He wanted to stop after a few minutes but his body wouldn't let him. He had been keeping everything inside for so long and now that he had given and inch it felt like the whole dam had burst and it just kept coming and coming and wouldn't let up. He dropped to the ground and laid flat on his back and just sobbed. He just felt so sorry for himself and all the bad things that kept happening to him and he couldn't stand it anymore. Why? He kept repeating it over and over and the more he said it the louder that it got until he was actually screaming at the top of his voice. Why is this happening? He screamed it until his voice was hoarse and almost gone. He didn’t care, he just needed to have a release.

He had just taken a breath and was screaming again when he heard another scream that was louder then his. He instantly stopped his screaming and his crying and pulled himself into a sitting position. He instantly regretted his tantrum that he had just thrown because he valued life and he might just lose his because of all the noise he was making. He tried to breathe normal so he could listen for sounds around him but all he could hear was his own breathing. He could only breathe through his mouth because his nose was all plugged up from crying like he had. He didn’t dare make any noise now and with his nose all plugged up it was really hard to resist sniffing to try to clear his nose, so he continued to breathe through his mouth and silently berated himself for not only a loss of discipline but for a complete breakdown. Great job, he silently congratulated himself.

He heard another primal scream coming from the jungle behind him and a wave of sheer terror passed right through his body and he involuntarily shuddered as he was frantically crabwalking himself to get behind the nearest tree. He had a flashback as he heard the scream. An image came into his mind of seeing something huge come crashing through the brush, taking a giant leap in which it easily cleared thirty feet and landed on Johnathan, his best friend, who had been standing right next to him. He was paralyzed with fear for about two seconds which was all it took for the creature to kill his friend. Suddenly he snapped out of it and started running. He had been running for two days long, tortuous days now. He had repeatedly castigated himself for leaving his friend behind and had experience guilt beyond anything he had ever known in his life.

Now he was afraid that it was all over. The monster, whatever it was it was clearly monstrous, had found him again after two days and he could already feel the claws digging into his body. He had tried every trick that he could think of to lose the thing but apparently it had a few more tricks then him because here it was again. There was no mistaking that primal scream that it let out. No two creatures in this jungle could make such a sound. He was racking his brain for a way to get away, to escape this jungle that he had gotten lost in, to see his family again. How would anybody know what ever happened to him or to Jonathan again if he died here.

He heard the scream again and this time it was so close that it actually hurt his ears because it was so loud. It must have been right behind his tree. He jumped up and took off running again because he couldn’t think of anything better. He had no weapon, and even if he did he doubted that anything less then an elephant gun would stop it, he had no way to defend himself or to stop if it leaped on top of him like it had with Jonathan. What could he do besides running? He could hear the panting behind him and he imagined he could feel the hot breath on his neck while the fangs were getting ready to sink into his skin. He ran as hard as he could which wasn’t very fast since he had already been running for two days and his legs hurt so bad that he could hardly stand up.

Just as he burst through some underbrush he heard a grunt behind him and he turned his head to look and saw that the monster had leaped into the air and was getting ready to come down on top of him. He tried to run faster but his body was spent and nothing more came out. He looked ahead again expecting to feel a hard weight land on his back any second. Just as he looked ahead he suddenly screamed with a new kind of terror as his feet came out from under him and he shot off a cliff. He had just enough time to reach out and grab a vine that was hanging from a tree with branches over the cliff. He grabbed the vine and swung out over the dropoff just enough that he saw the monster come down past the lip of the cliff and keep going down. It reached out and snagged his shoe with a claw and almost pulled him off of the vine but he tightened his grip and his shoe gave out before he did. The monster, whatever it was, fell plummeting down hundreds of feet to land on the rocks below.

He almost started crying again in sheer relief but this time he held it in and realized that he was still in a bad situation here. He was hanging over a five hundred foot drop and he was slipping because his hands were tired. He remembered reading the Edgar Rice Burroughs books about Tarzan and how he would wrap his leg in the vine to swing through the jungle. He thought that if he were Tarzan he would be in trouble right now at all and his friend might still be alive. He tried wrapping his foot in the vine. He twisted it around his ankle three times and relaxed his grip a little to see if it would hold. Ectasty filled him as the weight transferred to his foot and it didn’t slip. He relaxed his grip enough that he could rest his tired arms for a minute. He slowly started swinging back and forth until the got enough arc that he was able to jump from the vine and land on the ground again.

He just laid there with wonder in his mind. He had prepared himself to die and he was still alive. He still had to get out of the jungle and find his way home but at least now he could tell Jonathan’s family that he hadn’t died in vain. They had found the lost mine and it was full of diamonds like he had been told. He vowed to himself that Jonathan’s family would get half of every dollar that he gained from now until the day he died.