Oliver Strange and the Forest of Secrets. Dianne Hofmeyr

      A Tussle with Death

      The anaconda was thirty feet long. Thirty feet of terror.

      Snakes do not usually give their victims notice. And this snake was no exception. One minute you are in the water swim­ming in a dark forest pool, the next you are struggling to breathe.

      Breathing – getting air into your lungs – is what you focus on. Not the snake.

      This is how it was for Felix Ballesteros, the botany student from Popayan, Colombia. He was dying from lack of oxygen. But we didn’t know.

      “Ayúdame! Ayúdame!” he gasped.

      His twin brother thought he was fooling around and laughed.

      “Ayúdame!” Felix’s arms waved in the air. Only afterwards did Ollie work out which twin it was. He kept disappearing and then reappearing above the water, his eyes wide open, dark with fear, his mouth gasping.

      “Dad! What’s he saying?”

      Oliver’s father spun around. “He’s not fooling! Something’s got him!” His father flung himself into the water and reached him in three long strokes and wrenched his body up.

      As they surfaced, Ollie saw the coils of something thicker than the thickest swollen fire hose wrapped around the student’s chest.

      “An anaconda!” Zinzi yelled. “Quick! A knife, Ollie.”

      He felt in his pocket for his red Victorinox Swiss army penknife.

      In a flash Zinzi was at his side with a blade as long as a sword. “A penknife won’t do anything to a snake that size.”

      The truck driver came running with his AK-47. He levelled it at the struggling mass of bodies.

      “Don’t shoot! We’ll all be killed,” Oliver’s father bellowed.

      “Para! Para! Stop!” The twin brother pushed the truck driver away and grabbed the knife from Zinzi and waded in.

      “Go for the head!” His father gasped.

      Ollie tried to remember what he’d read on how to survive an anaconda attack.

      Don’t panic.

      Don’t run. An anaconda is faster than you.

      Lie very still. The anaconda will roll over you and start nudging you.

      It will swallow you, feet first. Lie still.

      Have your knife ready. Always carry a sharp knife.

      When it gets as far as your knees, go for its mouth and slit its jaws.

      What? Don’t panic? An anaconda is crawling over you and swallowing your feet – but don’t panic?

      This attack was in water. No one was lying still. Everyone was panicking. Including him.

      Was it possible for an anaconda to grab a second person? What if his father was next in line? Without thinking, Ollie was in the water as well, stabbing with his Victorinox. The water was a turmoil of arms and legs and churned up mud as everyone pulled and tussled. Patterns twisted in all directions. Muscles writhed and thrashed. Where was the head? Where was the tail?

      Ollie raised his arm high and waited for the right moment. Then he slashed. And slashed once more. Blood spurted. There was the flash of another knife alongside him. The water turned red.

      But it wasn’t over. The muscles of the half-beheaded snake went on squeezing. Felix Ballesteros was unconscious now, his head lolling, his face blue, as everyone gripped and wrenched at the coils and tried to drag him from the water. They heaved the entire mass of snake and body onto the mud bank.

      Oliver’s father dashed for his medical kit. “Wait!” He had a syringe in his hand. He jabbed a needle into the snake.

      The snake? Why the snake? Had his father had gone crazy?

      But then, just as quickly, his father jabbed another fresh syringe into the body of the student. Almost simultaneously, the anaconda’s muscles went totally slack and Felix Ballesteros took a shuddering breath. And then another.

      His father felt for the pulse. Then gave a huge sigh. “Phew! He’s okay.”

      The twin brother fell down to his knees and made a jumbled sign of the cross.

      Ollie would’ve made a sign of the cross too, except his hands were numb, his fingers frozen around his Swiss army knife. It was Zinzi who eventually took it out of his hands, wiped the blood from the blade onto her shorts, snapped it back in place, then handed the knife over to him.

      Felix Ballesteros, the botany student from Popayan, was lying to one side, doubled over, clutching his stomach, vomiting and gasping. Only minutes earlier, he had been dying. Now here he was – alive!

      It had happened too fast for Ollie to realise he’d been part of the event. He had stepped into the water with a writhing anaconda!

      How could he have?

      If there was one thing he was afraid of, it was a snake. And there was no larger snake on earth than this one. He’d had hardly put foot on Colombian soil and already he could tick off one of the most terrifying things on his list.

      An anaconda.

      The rest of the dangers on the list, that Grandma had warned of, were still to come:

      Alligators

      Piranhas

      Jaguars

      Guerrilla fighters

      Drug traffickers

      And a frog so poisonous it was capable of killing twenty people.

      That conversation in the kitchen in Tooting, London seemed as far away as another life. “It’s not just a matter of those toxic frogs that your father is going after – it’s all the other things as well.”

      “Like what, Grandma?”

      “Colombia is the drug capital of the world. It’s worse than Peru since that mould fungus wiped out all Peru’s coca crops. They plant the coca, grind the leaves and then add all sorts of chemicals to turn it into cocaine and smuggle it out through the Colombian ports or take it up through Panama into Mexico.”

      “You seem to know a lot about drugs, Grandma.”

      “I read the newspapers, Oliver.”

      “Don’t worry. We aren’t going where they grow drugs. We’re going into the forest.”

      “That’s exactly where they grow the coca. They chop down the trees deep in the forests where no one can find the crops growing – except if you happen to fly directly over them by helicopter.”

      “It’ll be fine, Grandma. We won’t be reckless and I promise to write.”

      “That’s what you said before. First when you went to the Okavango swamps to find your father. And then when you went to Madagascar where you had to escape those illegal loggers who were capturing children for slave labour. But you forgot to post your letters. And you won’t find any red postboxes in the heart of the Colombian rainforest, Oliver. What you will find is a frog so poisonous that a single drop of its poison is enough to kill up to twenty people. And you’ll find guerrilla fighters with machine guns, and drug traffickers … never mind anacondas.”

      Ollie’s friends