“Jaguars go for the jugular.” Actually they were wrong there. Jaguars were skull-crunchers.
“Anacondas strangle you until you are dead.”
They’d been proved right on this score. Almost. But Felix Ballesteros had been lucky. Now he was on the ground groaning. A few seconds longer in that water and he’d have been dead. And perhaps his father too.
2
The City of Gold
A voice crackled over the intercom. “We will be landing in ten minutes at El Dorado Airport. Keep your seatbelt fastened until the plane has come to a standstill and the seatbelts signs are switched off.”
Ollie peered through the rushing clouds. There were snow-capped mountains below. Odd to see snow almost on the equator. So here he was. El Dorado airport, Bogotá, Colombia! Coordinates: 4° 42’ 05” N and 74° 08’ 49” W. El Dorado – the lost city of gold!
He turned to his father. “It doesn’t really exist, does it? No one has actually ever seen the lost city of gold, have they?”
“Not in modern times. But at the Gold Museum in Bogotá, there are thirty-four thousand pieces of sculpture and jewellery made of solid gold from ancient times.”
Zinzi’s eyes flashed. “Thirty-four thousand pieces of gold?”
Oliver’s father nodded. “From pre-Hispanic Colombian societies before the Spanish conquistadors arrived. When they came along in the fifteenth century, the local Indian people retreated deeper and deeper into the forests and took their gold with them.”
Zinzi gave Ollie a nudge. “Perhaps we’ll find some.”
The plane hit an air pocket. Ollie felt his stomach lurch like when he’d gone on a rollercoaster. He swallowed hard. A runway came up from nowhere beneath them. The wheels touched down with a jolt and the engines went into a screeching reverse.
The airport was a vast emporium of glass and lights with a strong smell of coffee and a babble of Spanish voices. Ollie clutched the dictionary his grandmother had given him and tried to remember some of the words she’d taught him back in Tooting.
“I didn’t know you could speak Spanish, Grandma.”
“I was once engaged to a Spanish count.”
“A Spanish count? Why didn’t you marry him?”
“If I’d married him, you wouldn’t be Oliver Strange practicing how to speak Spanish right now.” Grandma handed him a little book. “It’s a dictionary of common Spanish words. You don’t want to arrive in a country unable to make yourself understood – especially on an expedition into an unknown Colombian rainforest to find some people who use the most dangerous poison on earth to hunt with. Your father is being reckless taking you and Zinzi.”
“Zinzi’s mum was going to come, but she’s been caught up in an emergency and had to cancel.”
Secretly Ollie was pleased she’d cancelled. Zinzi’s mum and his dad were getting on far too well. He didn’t quite fancy a new stepmother in his life. And he wasn’t sure he wanted Zinzi for a stepsister.
The small dictionary with its faded green cloth cover and yellowed pages with tiny print was in his backpack now, alongside his notebook, pen and magnifying glass and his penknife that he’d rescued from his checked luggage as soon as they’d collected it.
His dad was grabbing more odd-shaped bags off the luggage carousel. “We have to hurry. There’s barely time to make our connection to Popayan. Our truck driver will meet us there. Some botanists doing an orchid and fungi count in the forest are travelling with us from Popayan.”
“Popayan?” Ollie tried to visualise it on the map.
“We could’ve flown into Buenaventura. It’s the closest airport to the Rio Saija where we’re heading, but it’s too dangerous. It’s full of drug traffickers and militia with machine guns. You could get your throat cut for just looking at someone the wrong way.”
Grandma was right!
By the time they arrived in Popayan, the sky had turned dark and it was raining. Rodrigo, the truck driver, was wearing turquoise mirror glasses in aviator frames and had long sideburns. The seat in the front of the cab was missing so they all sat on the back of the truck under blue tarpaulins – Zinzi, Ollie and his father on one side and the two botany students from a university in Popayan and their professor on the other – huddling like two opposition rugby teams on the benches in a locker room.
The students were twins. They were both wearing white T-shirts and identical khaki anoraks. It was hard to tell them apart. One was called Felix. The other was Alonso. He wasn’t quite sure of the professor’s name.
Ollie pulled the tarpaulin further over his head to stop the rain running down his neck. “I thought it was supposed to be hot on the equator.”
“We’re high up in the Andes here. Moisture rolls in from the Pacific and drops when it hits the mountains.”
“Why do frogs hang out in the wettest parts of the world? Why don’t you do research on rhinos, Dad? At least it wouldn’t rain. Or even pandas or polar bears? Surely they’re more important than frogs.”
His father laughed and ruffled his hair, which made even more water run down his neck. He wished he father wouldn’t do that in front of people. It made him feel like a kid.
“You’re right. Rhinos and pandas and polar bears get five hundred times more conservation money than endangered frogs.”
Zinzi nodded. “I wish my mother researched pandas.”
“Pandas might be cute but they can’t cure cancer. Frogs might. Their toxins might produce cures for anything from HIV to Alzheimer’s. The entire pharmaceutical industry is based on micro-fauna like frogs and micro-flora like fungi and ferns.”
His father was onto his favourite topic.
Zinzi fell asleep sitting upright listening to her headphones. Ollie closed his eyes and listened to the students joking with each other in Spanish. But his eyes flew open as the truck’s engine juddered and came to an abrupt stop.
His father spoke rapid Spanish to Rodrigo, the driver.
“What’s up, Dad?”
“Run out of petrol. We’ve got a jerrycan full. But we’ll stop here overnight and set out again tomorrow. Might as well.”
“Here?” Ollie looked up into the trees that disappeared into the mist at the side of the muddy road. He saw Rodrigo picking up a gun from the cab of the truck. He leant it against a tree. Ollie hoped it had a safety catch. It was an AK-47. Or at least he thought it was. He’d seen pictures of the ones used in Vietnam. Did AK-47s have safety catches?
It had stopped raining. Vine flowers were hanging down everywhere like bright red stars. Ollie felt Zinzi watching him as he strung up his hammock between two trees. “Your knots are all wrong, Ollie.”
“What makes you such an expert on knots suddenly?”
She laughed. “Let’s swim. There’s a stream over there.”
“What about alligators?”
His father shook his head. “There won’t be any so high up in the mountains. But, all the same, watch out. Take a stick and probe the water first.”
Felix and Alonso had the same idea. They were stripped down to their shorts and were already prodding the pool with long sticks. And that was when the anaconda took Felix Ballesteros. Except right then, Ollie didn’t know whether it was Felix or Alonso. Nor did he know that he, Oliver Strange, would willingly jump into the same pool of water as an anaconda.
3