Learning to Listen

On the second morning Kai made a plan.

His plan had three parts. Part one was water. He had been so thirsty through the night that his throat felt like sandpaper. Part two was food. The chocolate was gone and he needed to find something to eat. Part three was signals. He needed to find a way to show his parents or any search team where he was.

The water part turned out to be easier than he expected. He followed the sound of a small stream that fed into the main river and found a place where it bubbled over clean rocks. He had no way to boil it but his dad had once told him that moving water over rocks was usually safer than still water. He drank from it cupping his hands, drinking slowly the way you were supposed to.

The food part was harder.

He walked slowly through the jungle looking for anything he recognised. He found a palm tree with clusters of small red fruit near the top but he had no way to climb it. The trunk was too smooth and too wide and when he tried to shimmy up it he slid straight back down and landed on his back in the ferns. He lay there looking up at the faraway fruit for a moment and then decided to move on.

He found some large mushrooms growing on a fallen log but he had no idea if they were safe to eat. Some mushrooms in the jungle looked edible and were perfectly fine. Others that looked almost exactly the same could make you very sick or worse. He left them alone. His dad had always said: if you do not know it, do not eat it.

He spent almost an hour searching before he found anything useful. He came across a low plant with big shiny leaves and clusters of berries that were bright orange, about the size of his little fingernail. He crouched down and looked at them for a long time, turning a leaf over in his hand.

But then he remembered something. His dad had taken him on a jungle walk in Costa Rica two years ago and had shown him a plant with big waxy leaves and small orange berries. He had said those berries were safe and that some jungle peoples used them all the time.

Kai walked around for another half hour before he found something that looked like what he remembered. The leaves were right. The berries were right. He ate a small handful slowly, waiting between each one to see if anything bad happened. Nothing did. He ate some more.

They were sour and a bit bitter but they were food.

For the signal part of his plan he used fire. He went back to his camp and added green leaves and wet wood to the fire which made it produce thick white smoke. Smoke rose up through the canopy in a column that should be visible from the river or from the air. He kept the smoke going for most of the day.

Nobody came.

But Kai noticed something during those long hours of waiting. He started to really listen to the jungle. He noticed that the birds went quiet when something large moved below the canopy. He noticed that the monkeys in the trees made a specific short bark when they saw something on the ground that worried them. He noticed that the river sounds changed slightly in the late afternoon when the water level rose a little.

The jungle was not quiet at all. It was full of information. It just used a different language.

He was starting, slowly, to learn a few words.

That night he slept properly for a few hours, waking every time the fire got low to add more wood. He dreamed about his mum\'s cooking, which made him sad when he woke up. But then he looked at the fire still burning in his little root shelter and he felt something surprising.

He felt a small bit proud.