Oliver Strange and the Forest of Secrets. Dianne Hofmeyr
Feast
“He needs immobilising in case he has serious spine injuries. Tear up some strips of cloth and soak them in mud. Find some strong strips of bark, Zinzi. Cut down some long tree vines, Ollie. We’ll wrap him in the mud-soaked cloths and bark and tie them on, like the locals do. The mud dries and makes a basic cast.”
Ollie fingered his knife. Zinzi had done a good job of cleaning it. But still it was odd knowing his favourite blade had last been stuck into the flesh of an anaconda. He chose the second blade, rather, to cut the lengths of vine.
After he was wrapped up with mud, bark and vine leaves, Felix himself looked like a strange, fat and sluggish snake.
Rodrigo got down to skinning the anaconda. He started by slitting the belly and slithering his knife beneath the snake’s skin. Ollie couldn’t watch. Even with the skin half off, it was still too much like a real anaconda. When it was done and the skin stretched out and nailed to a tree to dry, his father said, “Come, Ollie! I need a picture.”
Ollie posed with his back to it. Grandma and his friends at school in Tooting would never believe this was him – Oliver Strange – standing in front of an anaconda.
That night they ate roasted anaconda – all except him.
Zinzi held some out on the tip of her knife. “Try it. It tastes like a combo of chicken and tuna.”
But Ollie could only think of those tight coils.
Later, still awake in his hammock, he took out his Slimlite torch and searched the branches of the tree above. Did anacondas travel in pairs?
The forest was full of noises. Whispers and chirrups. Whistles and grunts. He lay, trying to pick up the sounds. Sometime in the night, he was woken by something against his arm. His body froze as he waited for the slither of a coil across his chest.
“Ollie?”
He jumped upright so fast he almost toppled out of the hammock. “Zinzi? What are you doing?”
“I thought you were awake.”
“Well, I wasn’t.”
“I wanted to talk to you about El Dorado, the city of gold.”
Ollie groaned. “It doesn’t exist, Zinzi. Go back to your own hammock. I’m trying to sleep.”
In the morning, the mist turned everyone into ghosts as they drifted around the camp stoking up the fire and rummaging about to find a kettle and mugs for coffee. Even in the misty darkness Rodrigo was wearing his mirror sunglasses as he poked about under the bonnet of the truck. A strong smell of diesel wafted across as he tipped a plastic drum against a funnel balanced in the fuel tank’s opening.
Ollie slurped up the last of his cornmeal porridge.
“Why were you so grumpy last night?” Zinzi was dunking a corn biscuit into a mug of coffee.
“We’re on the trail of frogs, not gold. If no one else has found the city of gold in five hundred years, we’re not going to suddenly discover it in a few weeks.”
“We might be lucky.”
“We might also get our heads chopped off by a sharp machete.”
Felix sat down carefully next to him. Ollie knew it was Felix, as there were distinct purple welts all over his body and bits of mud still stuck to his skin. Ollie eyed him. He was clutching his side. He didn’t look too comfortable. “You okay?” He tried out some Spanish. “Está bien?”
Felix smiled. “Sí. Enérgico!”
Zinzi laughed. “You have to be enérgico to fight a snake that size.”
Oliver’s father spoke to him in rapid Spanish.
Felix nodded. “Sí. Muchas gracias.”
“There’s not much you can do about a broken rib. Broken ribs have to mend themselves.”
Ollie smiled. “So, you’re a medical doctor now, Dad. Not just a frog doctor.”
His father pretended to look serious. “I prefer the word herpetologist to frog doctor, Oliver.”
“So, what now?”
“We’re off to find a super frog the size of a paperclip. Rodrigo will take us to a place where we’ll hire a motorboat. Further up the river, where it gets shallow, we’ll meet some Embera guides. They’ll take us by canoe to their village where we’ll get their permission to look for the frogs.”
“What about guerrilla fighters?”
“Right now the area is calm. We have to trust Rodrigo.”
Ollie eyed Rodrigo. He wasn’t so sure about trusting him. What was going on behind those mirror glasses?
The forest was dense on both sides and with the mist gone, Ollie could see exactly how tall the trees were. Thick bands of creepers wound through the foliage like snakes searching for light with flashes of brilliant orchids here and there, which had Felix and Alonso pointing in all directions and snapping photographs.
The engine of the truck drowned out any proper conversation. If there were guerrilla fighters out there, they were getting good warning of their arrival. Ollie found himself peering into the gloom for the glint of a machine gun. But the shadows might have been palms or ferns as easily as men dressed in camouflage.
They rumbled and growled on and on, up rough tracks more winding than a boa constrictor. Finally they dropped into a deep gorge where the air was clammy with heat and moisture. He breathed in the damp, earthy, slightly rotting smell. Somewhere down at the bottom of the gorge, a motorboat was waiting to take them deeper into the forest.
He hoped that was all that was waiting for them.
4
Tarantulas
The motorboat was there. But it looked as if it hadn’t been used in years. It was tied to a tree stump and covered in leaves and debris that had been lying there so long that birds had nested in it and fingers of creepers looked as if they were trying to claw it back into the forest.
Ollie glanced at Zinzi. “Forget finding your city of gold. If a boat can disappear so quickly, imagine what the forest can do to a city over a few hundred years.”
Rodrigo’s brother-in-law, who was the owner of the boat, was nowhere to be seen. Rodrigo shrugged. “Está bien. Está bien.”
Oliver’s father stood with his hands on his hips and shook his head. “It’s not okay. We paid money to hire this boat. How are we going to get anywhere in it? And we don’t even have fuel.”
Rodrigo flashed him a smile and indicated the large plastic bottle he was carrying. “Sí. Sí. Fuel.”
His father shrugged and looked around at everyone. “Let’s see if we can locate the engine.”
The professor nodded, “Bueno.”
Oliver’s father handed out some gloves. “You never know what’s under all that. A golden dart frog would be a terrific find but it might just kill us all in the process. Never mind about tarantulas. At least their bite’s not fatal. ”
“Tarantulas …?” Ollie realised his voice had come out strange. He hoped no one had noticed.
Zinzi grinned. “Great! I love tarantulas. The hairier, the better. If we find any, can we keep them?”
Ollie shuddered. Perhaps he’d just stick to collecting golden dart frogs, even if they were the deadliest of creatures on the planet.
When the boat was finally cleared of the mess, they found the engine, covered by a piece of woven matting that was starting to rot but had given it some protection. A troop of monkeys watched from the