Chapter 24

DOG FELL ASLEEP at last. She dreamed of Carlos flying far away over green treetops, but when she woke in the early morning, he was back. He flapped his wings above her head in great excitement.

“Home! Home!” he shouted. “Get up. Go! Go!”

Carlos didn’t offer any more explanation, and although Esme was reluctant to leave the crabs, Dog knew it was time to move on. She trusted Carlos to know which direction to take. They bundled up bits of coconut and a medicine bottle of coconut milk in the jersey that Eady had given Dog, and set off along the beach.

They didn’t have to walk far. Just a mile or two beyond their beach a river ran muddily into the sea. The far bank was thick with huge trees, but on the nearer bank was a little village of tiny whitewashed houses with tin roofs glinting in the sun. Threads of blue smoke rose from the huts into the morning air and people were moving about in their doorways and on their rickety verandas.

“Home, nearly,” announced Carlos, landing on a bush that wasn’t really ready to take his weight. “Home, nearly, nearly,” he said again, bouncing on a whippy branch. “Riverboat.”

The sight of a skinny brown child, a fat coati and a talking macaw wasn’t at all unusual to the people of the village. They were mostly quite skinny and brown themselves, and wild jungle animals often became their pets. So they smiled as Dog walked between their homes with Esme trotting beside her and Carlos resting on her shoulder. They greeted her too, with words she’d never heard before, but which were somehow more familiar than the ones she’d heard every day in the pet shop.

“Hola!”

“Qué pasa?”

The words were even more familiar to Carlos. He greeted them back and even asked questions. “Barco ría arriba?” he said.

“Cobetizo orilla,” people told him.

It seemed perfectly ordinary to them that a macaw should ask where to get a boat upriver. That was where the macaws lived.

A wiry man with threads of grey in his hair and a neat moustache stood by a ramshackle boathouse. He wore an orange T-shirt, a voluminous pair of bright blue shorts and a faded baseball cap with the word AMAZONINO written on it. His boat was long and narrow, with faded pink paint and a little outboard motor at the back. It was already quite full of round drums of petrol, sacks of rice and woven baskets with live chickens inside. He smiled and showed two perfect front teeth when he heard Carlos speak.

“Yes, I go upriver. You have money?” he said in Spanish.

“Have money,” Carlos repeated in the same language.

“No money, I take the bird,” said the man.

“Take the bird,” Carlos said, copying the man’s voice perfectly.

Dog didn’t understand a word, but smiling and nodding had worked with Asky, so she tried it out again here. The man grinned back. Then he helped them into the boat and cast off. In just a few minutes the jetty was far behind and the boat was puttering its way up the wide river.