Malingu scrabbled around in the back of the truck and stood up with two machetes and a shovel.
His father handed the shovel to Ollie. “Okay. Start digging, while we cut some branches.”
He opened his mouth to explain it was useless but with loud whacks his father and Malingu disappeared into the forest and the noise of them swishing through the undergrowth was swallowed by the sound of rain thudding against the thick leaves and the metal of the truck.
He started digging. Soon he was cursing not just the mongrel truck but also the mongrel tyre. The clay was heavy, squelchy and slippery. And he was sodden. He stood up and swiped his face with the back of his hand and glanced over to where he’d seen the forest swallow Malingu and his father. He wasn’t going in after them.
Then finally he heard voices and they were back. They packed some branches in under the tyre. Malingu got into the cab.
“Rev! Rev!” his father barked. “Turn the steering wheel. Turn!”
The tyre spun and sent up a spray of mud and shredded leaves and sticks, then settled even deeper. He took a look at his father and started to laugh. He was covered in mud and had leaves sticking up from his hair.
“You look like someone who’s just come out of the Vietnamese jungle.”
“You don’t look much better yourself.” His father let out a hefty sigh. “It’s no good. We’ll have to try rocking it out.” But with every shove the truck sunk in deeper. He gave the tyre a kick. “Looks flat to me. Like a slow puncture.”
Ollie opened his mouth to ask about a spare tyre. No. Of course not. Not even a mongrel spare.
“I’ll raise someone on the radio.” Malingu fiddled with an earpiece and pushed wires about into a black box. “Tana Tana … do you read me? Over and out.”
There was a hiss of static, then the sound of a faint, strange voice like someone speaking from Mars. Then nothing more but a few crackles.
Malingu pulled and pushed the wires again. “Lost him. It’s the rain. Reception’s never good when it’s coming down like this.”
Ollie bit his lip. “What now?”
His father shrugged. “We can’t sit around. We’ll walk back to the main road to get help.”
“We could push on,” Malingu offered.
“Push on?”
Malingu nodded. “Walk to the camp. If it’s a puncture, we’ll reach camp long before anyone from Tana gets here with another tyre.”
Ollie stared down the mud track they’d just come along, hoping he might make someone appear.
His father shrugged. “Sounds good to me. We’ll take some of the equipment. I don’t want to leave cameras and microscopes out in this downpour, even under the tarpaulin.”
Ollie pulled out the map from inside his back pocket. It was wet through and beginning to come apart at the folds. He tried to hunch over it so it wouldn’t get even wetter. “How far away is the camp?”
“You need a proper map. Take this one.” Malingu tapped a place that seemed in the middle of nowhere. “We’re here. But we have to get there.” He used his thumb and forefinger as a protractor to measure. We’ll probably make it by the time it gets dark. We’ll take a short cut. I know a track.”
He gave Malingu a look. “A track through the forest at night?”
“If we hurry we’ll get there before dark.”
His father nodded. “We might even come across some golden mantella frogs along the way.”
He shot a look at the thick tangle of creepers, ferns and trees. “Or … we might get lost.”
Malingu laughed. “I’m a tracker. I grew up in the forest. I know the terrain.”
As if conjured up by wishful thinking, a truck loomed up out of the murkiness in front of them. It slid to a halt just in time. The driver clearly hadn’t been expecting anyone on the narrow road. He leaned out of the window and raised his hand, “Mbola tsara.”
“Salama,” Malingu replied, then spoke very fast in Malagasy and pointed at the tyre. Every now and again Ollie thought he heard a few words of French popping up. The man sitting next to the driver snapped something. It was hard to catch a proper glimpse of him through the misted windscreen.
When Malingu tried to introduce them, he lifted his hand in an impatient wave and mumbled something.
“They’re in a hurry,” Malingu smiled.
The man on the other side wound down his window on his side and poked his head out. His face was tanned and craggy. Even in the gloom, his eyes were the colour of aquamarines. His hair was wiry and straggly as a bird’s nest and his beard sprouted in all directions. He looked like some wild scientist who’d lived in the forest all his life. But Ollie saw that the arm he leant across the edge of the window was as muscled and hard as a Christmas ham. It was criss-crossed with tattoos.
“D’accord. We’ll send a message back to Tana,” he growled in a voice that sounded as if he woke with a cigarette in his mouth every morning. “Just keep off my land. I don’t want anyone tramping through my plantations.” He nodded curtly at the driver. “Allons-y!”
Malingu waved as their truck jolted past, barely managing to scrape between them and the forest. Ollie shrunk back as far as he could from the mud-churning wheels. Then it disappeared around a corner in the track and was swallowed by the forest and rain.
“He’s not your friendliest!” his father laughed.
“He’s a plantation owner. Jacques du Pré.” Malingu shrugged as if that explained everything.
Ollie wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?” It hung in the air. Sweet like custard or some sort of flower.
“Ylang-ylang.”
Ollie tried out the word. “Ylang-ylang.” It was like something you might say if a bee had stung your tongue.
Malingu nodded. “You say eelang-eelang but you write it with a ‘Y’. There was probably stuff under the tarpaulin on the back of the truck. They extract oil from the flowers for the perfume industry.”
His father gave a shrug. “What’s the bet he’s chopping down forest to grow ylang-ylang. It’s happening all over Madagascar. Huge tracts of forest just disappear. And if it’s not lost to ylang-ylang, it’ll be palm oil plantations supposedly grown for non-fossil fuel, or logging so they can trade in exotic wood. Golden mantellas can’t survive. The forest’s shrinking. They’re trapped in smaller and smaller patches between vast areas of destruction. It’s time the golden mantellas got back their forest back, so they won’t be wiped out and condemned to the dodo list. Never to be seen on this earth again.”
His father was onto his pet subject. Ollie looked up at the sky. The rain had stopped as abruptly as it had started. Just a few odd drops were still falling, as if the clouds had forgotten to wring everything out.
“What now, Dad? How are we going to get out of here?”
“Walk, of course!” His father had already hoisted up some equipment. “But there’s no way I’m leaving my Nikon D3X with its Garmin for tracking the GPS of each photograph and which …” a sudden guilty smile crept across his face.
“… cost you the price of a small car,” Ollie finished the sentence for him.
The sun was trying to come out and was filling the forest with a strange green glow. His father smiled at him. He had more equipment slung around him than a man arriving on the moon. “Come on. Let’s go. Allons-y!”
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