JUNGLE PLOY, by Bryce Walton

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1973.

I suspected that this time Richter and I were irretrievably lost, for most of our supplies were gone—supplies which civilized man depends on for survival in such a hostile environment as the Serra do Roncador rain forest in Brazil.

We had lost our amphibious jeep to a swollen river when a defective winch cable broke. With it went our shortwave radio, compasses, and most of our rations, medicines, drugs, high-caliber weapons and ammunition.

More precious supplies went during the night to thieving Huambiza Indians.

We lost more when we tried to paddle the rising waters of the Araguaia River in two native canoes and one of them sank.

Then I lost my toupee.

During all of our expeditions I’d managed to avoid exposing my head au naturel. Now Richter, seeing me crouched in riverbank mud, rain pattering on my old bald pate, began to laugh.

Richter had a narcissistic love of his own Nordic good looks, especially his long, thick, sun-streaked, wheat-colored hair. He sat on the prow of our remaining canoe and I thought—or hoped—that he would die laughing.

I pointed out that we didn’t know where we were, had no idea which direction to go to reach the airport at Cocama, had no idea how far away it was within a radius of several hunched miles, and that soon he might he laughing on the other side of his face.

Richter shrugged wide shoulders. “We’ll find a way, Skimmer. We always do.”

I always do, I thought bitterly.

We were “medicine scouts”—pharmacognosists; hired by botanical firms to search back countries, pick medicine men’s brains and rifle their voodoo bags for herbs and remedies. Many drugs—quinine, curare, Rauwolfia, ipecac, and penicillin—have been found in the medicine chests of jungle witch doctors. Thousands of other remedies wait to be found, tested, analyzed, refined, given intriguing semi-scientific names, and put on the drug market at fantastic profits. South America abounds in exotic plants, is probably the world’s richest mine for these unknown herbs and miraculous brews.

This was my third expedition. I was a specialist in botanical chemistry and had made several important finds, but Richter somehow managed to get all the credit. He had all the TV interviews and got the popular articles and books ghosted in his name, so he was officially in charge of this expedition while I was, of course, stuck with the responsibility.

Richter had taken many things away from me in a few brief years: wealth, fame, status, knowledge, self-respect. He even took my wife for a while, after which she divorced me and went into the pharmaceutical business.

Richter never acted out of deliberately conscious villainy. He was simply amoral, thoughtlessly self-centered. He wanted power and possessions. He had the necessary machismo and total lack of sensitivity to the needs and feelings of others to attain success. Everything had come easily to him, and he considered things his due just because he wanted them.

In the most precarious circumstance, such as this one, Richter was an irresponsible child, sure that his good looks and good fortune—a kind of charmed life—would always see him through, whereas it was I who had always seen him through.

I fully intended to see us through this crisis, despite my festering resentments—until I contracted the fever, and Rima came along…

Everywhere the jungle was flooded. We were tied up on an island near the river’s shore waiting for the rain to ease. I lay in the dark under the dripping palm frond roof—that and a south wall supported by bamboo was my shelter. Richter had another like it nearby.

My bed was a soggy mat spread on eight poles. I lay in humid sweat, listless, itching, drifting in and out of fever dreams. I had the fever and I had to admit it. I also had to admit that there was little left of our vital medicinal drugs. Therefore, my chances were not good, but I was oddly unconcerned about my probable fate. As I lay listening to the endless rain I felt only a tired sense of futility. In the larger civilized jungle, I’d proved to have little survival merit. I was not a fighter. I’d been used, exploited. All of my natural talents and intelligence had accomplished nothing but a festering accumulation of injustices and self-contempt.

I kept a small smudge fire going, but it discouraged only a token few of the millions of swarming, biting insects. Sweat itched in the wounds made by the constant scratching of sand-fly and mosquito bites. Sores had reopened. I was covered with a vile rash. None of these offered much encouragement to a dwarfed ego trapped in a shrunken and enfevered body.

The only thing that kept me from openly admitting that I might welcome death was Richter; the thought that he might go on somehow and survive. He would have a somewhat better chance to do so with my half of the medicines and rations.

Then I heard a faint cry. Peering out, I saw just outside my shelter, squatting in the rain, an Indian woman so small and delicate that she resembled a girl.

She watched me intently, then crawled toward me in the mud, reaching out a small brown hand for help. She looked like a moonshadow, blending with earth and tropical color with the nearly perfect camouflage of a bird. She wore a ragged part of a faded yellow dress around her hips. Her face was red with mango stain. Her breasts had been tattooed on the sides by being stuck with thorns and the wounds filled with the dyeing soot of burned crude rubber.

I was not so weak that I couldn’t drag her into my shelter, cover her with my poncho and dose her with a little of our remaining antibiotic. She whispered to me in an Antipas dialect that she was weak with hunger and exhaustion; that the rest of her people had been butchered by white homesteaders who wanted Indian land; that she was the last of her small tribe.

She had many X’s scattered through a long Indian name, so I called her Rima, after the bird-girl in W.H. Hudson’s novel Green Mansions.

She smiled at me in gratitude and with a soft, vague sweetness. She took an instant liking to me, I knew that. Oddly, she seemed utterly fascinated, enthralled, by my bald head. She kept staring at it, murmuring, caressing it with her hands that fluttered as delicately as brown moths.

She stayed in my shelter, even under my poncho later. She was warm, giving, generous, soft as a bird. She played to me later on a kind of flute that had a heartbreaking note of desire, always in a minor key, like the voice of that sad and desolate forest.

The next day Richter took her away from me. He made her stay with him and serve him in his shelter, not because he really desired her for herself, understand, but because he considered a possession of mine as his. Too, perhaps he didn’t want her taking care of me in my illness. It had occurred to me that Richter was not at all concerned about my condition as, indeed, why should he be, now that I was no longer able to help him reach Cocama. He would be thinking just as I did, that my half of our remaining medicine and rations would considerably increase his chances of reaching civilization.

He cowed her into doing his every bidding like a slave. She detested him but was afraid to resist. Often I saw her watching me sadly, tears on her cheeks. What I didn’t understand was why she didn’t just fade away into the forest.

Then Richter bragged to me that he had made Rima promise to guide him back to Cocama. If I weren’t strong enough to go, I would have to stay behind until he reached Cocama. Then he would hire a helicopter to come back for me. They would leave tomorrow.

I nodded without looking at him or agreeing with him. I was nodding to myself, to my own sudden inner resolve that Richter would never leave this island; or that if he did manage to leave and reach shore, he would never live to reach Cocama.

If I were not going to make it, neither would Richter. I would see to it.

That night I stumbled down through the rain and mud and reeds to the riverbank. I untied the canoe and let it go. It plunged away into the soggy dark, leaving nothing around me but that staggering smell of flooding rain—the decaying stench of exposed roots, mold, worms, rot and germination everywhere.

We had left all of our remaining supplies—one rifle, some ammo, all of our rations—in the canoe, reasoning that, if the river rose again rapidly, we could make a fast getaway without having to leave our vital supplies behind. The river could do that—rise several feet in as many minutes. We would, of course, have left that island long ago but were afraid to risk the canoe in that raging flood.

As I staggered back to my shelter through the tall cane, I saw Rima’s face looking at me through the dripping green leaves like a strange flower. She had seen me let the canoe go—I knew she had—but she only nodded at me and gave me an enigmatic, somehow conspiratorial smile.

I started toward her, but her face disappeared. I lay down in my shelter and built up the smudge fire. I was confident she would never tell Richter what I had done. She detested Richter at least as much as I did, and the canoe meant nothing to her. Her survival in her jungle did not depend in any way on a few civilized artifacts.

That I had finally taken action against Richter buoyed my spirits a little. I lay in the eye-burning smudge smoke and listened to the rain and anticipated the pleasure of watching Richter crack, or start to crack. Perhaps I wouldn’t live long enough to enjoy more.

The rain had been falling heavily, nonstop, for I had no clear idea how many days. Now it seemed to slacken a little. The river could drop before morning as fast as it rose. That meant that the Antipas or the Huambizas might pay us a visit. Their actions were never predictable this close to civilization. No one really knew how many there were in the decimated remains of these tribes, or how they still could appear and disappear like a smoke dream.

Then I remembered that Rima had said there were no more Antipas, that she was the last; but how much of what she had said was true? I had begun to wonder. What was the real reason she had come into our camp that night? Why had she stayed? I had a sudden strong reason to suspect that she had been following us all along, knew where we were and had tied up with us for some unknown motive of her own. Otherwise how could she have gotten to the island after the river rose?

At dawn, Rima’s shrill cries awakened me; I stumbled into a sticky mist. Rima’s cries came up from the riverbank, high and shrill as a parrot’s. I ran down through the wild cane that reached twenty feet high along the two-mile length of the narrow island. I broke out of the cane. The river was lower. Giant hardwood trees, uprooted, still hurled down the muddy tide though, like toothpicks. The green wall of the shore was only several hundred yards away now.

Rima lay curled on the sand. Richter, in his khaki shorts and sandals, chest bare, was bending over her, beating her naked back with a cane switch. Her face was turned toward me like a bleeding hand.

Fury such as I had never felt consciously before broke out of the cyst of my body. I screamed as I went down the path. I leaped and struck out at Richter. He grabbed my arm effortlessly with his left hand, punched me in the stomach with his right and I fell on the sand, sick and gasping for air.

Physical brutality like this was alien to Richter. Now he was shivering, yelling wildly, accusing Rima of turning the canoe loose. His golden skin and blue eyes seemed dirty, his long wheat-colored hair a filthy mat. He was frightened, I knew; more frightened of our circumstance than I had ever been.

Richter struck Rima again. Finally I managed to speak, to tell him to stop. “She hasn’t done anything,” I said.

“She turned the canoe loose,” Richter shouted. “So her Indian friends could pick it up downriver.”

“No. Last night I thought I had a fever—thought I saw two painted Huambizas sneak through the camp. Now I know I really saw them. The river lowered enough for them to come across from the shore. They took the canoe. Rima is not a Huambiza.”

Richter had the hot, angry, flushed look of a boy betrayed by indifferent authority. He backed away from Rima, seeming a little ashamed, but pale and shivering with apprehension.

“Anyway it’s done,” he mumbled. “Everything is gone. What the hell can we do now?”

Rima sat up and said in Antipas that she would help.

“How?” I said, surprised, curious.

“I still take you to Cocama.”

Why? I thought, but I didn’t ask. She must know I would never hold up long enough to get there. Why should she help Richter?

She made a salve to protect us from insect bites. She boiled herbs and I drank the brew and my fever immediately began to heal. I felt stronger.

She knew how to hunt, how to find food and the way to Cocama; how to cross the raging river. She knew many things.

First we ate. She got a monkey and dipped the coto into the river to moisten its hair, singed it as it hung from its tail by a pole. As the muscles contracted with the heat, its dead limbs moved and it contorted its face in a last wild grin.

Soon we savored monkey meat, a pate of monkey brains, with side orders of two turtle’s eggs each, while macaws cried in shrieking chorus and wild turkeys, or paujils, took off with those odd cries that sound like lowing cows. Other cotos, once known as the Howling Monkeys of the Incas, jabbered at us from the cane.

Then Rima led us to the dead tapir she had spotted earlier half a mile up the island. Soldier ants had killed it somewhere upriver. It had been carried away on sudden floodwater before the soldiers got a chance to eat it, and here it had been beached. It weighed 600 pounds, was bloated with gas and very buoyant. Rima said it would float us easily, and it did, as we each hung onto it with one hand, paddling with the other and kicking our feet. We touched shore three miles downriver under a dripping jungle wall.

We kept going; straight for Cocama, Rima promised. She gave me another curative dose of her special herb. It was indeed a miracle cure for a rare and deadly jungle fever.

Rima made a bow from bamboo, and straight arrows twelve inches long and sixteenths of an inch thick. She made another brew from a crashed vine. An arrow dipped into this potion had only to break the skin of any game to kill it within five seconds.

Another poison she whipped up was dropped into a pool of water. Fish floated up instantaneously to the surface, dead but edible. Their flesh in no way absorbed the poison.

We were never hungry anymore.

Rima guided us on through jungle that would have choked us and bound us in a few hours. We were surrounded by a thick, green, stifling mass, a quasi-Mesozoic swamp as dense and clinging as a huge wet spider web. Only Rima could have found a way to slither through. Richter and I had no idea where we were or in what direction we went. For days we never saw the sun, but Rima always knew the way.

I grew more puzzled about why Rima should go to so much trouble to save Richter. She wouldn’t do that just to save me also. I knew she could easily have cooked Richter’s goose separately, at any time.

Why hadn’t she? I knew she detested Richter as much as I.

I felt betrayed, disappointed.

Two days later we broke into a semi-clearing with a floor of something oozing and bubbling like soggy peat moss. It led to a green-scummed river ripe with alligators. Monkeys howled. A tapir kept up a strange whimpering whine.

Rima whispered suddenly, “Huangana!” Even she seemed afraid.

“Wild hogs,” I told Richter, and he turned pale.

The huangana is one of the two murderous species of Pecariesi, probably nothing more murderous in all of nature. Rima heard them coming. I smiled. Perhaps now even Rima would have no way out for Richter. Then I stopped smiling. It seemed an extraordinary price for me to pay—even for the thousand insults of my parasitic partner.

Alligators bellowed and churned the water to green froth in a frenzy of fear. All things run in terror from wild hogs. Their musk scent filled the air. Their rustling snorts, their massive rooting and snuffling came at us like a tornado, and then they showed black through the leaves, tusks glistening in their lower jaws—tusks for digging up roots, or ripping the entrails out of anything that gets in the way, from jaguar to bull-buffalo. The wild hog eats anything. It can devour a buffalo, head, tail, skin and feet in a few minutes.

The huangana war cry, a terrible rattling of hundreds of tusks, bore down on us. Richter was screaming and turning around and around, waving his hands.

Rima led us up the bank to an ironwood tree. We got up it just in time. We would never have reached that tree, even if we’d known it was there, without Rima.

The huangana smashed past below us, snorting, stinking the forest with their kill tide. The green river scum turned red where hogs and gators met.

That night Rima said we were close to Cocama, that we could be there in another day. I believed her fully now. I heard a big jet pass above the umbrella of jungle and mist. Still, “close” was a highly relative if not altogether meaningless word for us. Without Rima we could not have gone a mile.

We stayed that night in a small clearing near a river. It seemed that it had been used before, more than once. By whom and for what, I had no idea. We built a fire and, as usual, ate well, thanks to Rima. She had killed a huangana and planked its ribs near the fire. I ate so much that I rolled over on the white sand and dozed right off.

I woke after dark. Richter still slept. Rima was on the other side of the fire making some sort of song to the sky and dancing expressively without moving her feet. She swayed and twisted like a part of the fire’s smoke.

I dozed off again and was wakened by thunder above the trees, and wind. Rain was coming down in solid sheets. It was an intense tropical storm, with lightning ripping, and the sound of trees being struck down and slicing great swaths through foliage.

I woke again in the quiet morning. I stared at Richter’s body a few feet away, in the center of the clearing. His body was dressed the same. It looked the same—except that it had no head.

The rain had pounded his corpse for hours. Tatters of flesh in his torn neck had turned pale and water-soaked, like fish-bait left too long in the water.

Rima still danced on the other side of the dead fire ashes. Richter’s eyes glittered as they went bobbing around, up and down, as she swung his head by a tiny fistful of wheat-colored hair…

* * * *

I watched through leafy curtains as Rima made a crude cutting instrument from a shell, then carefully parted Richter’s hair from the crown to the base of the skull. She slit the skin down the line of the part. She turned the skin back on both sides and peeled it from the bone, just as someone else might peel off a silk stocking.

She cut delicately at the eyes, ears, nose. Then the flesh and muscles came off with the skin. She threw the clean, naked skull away like an apple core. It rolled through the ashes and into a mass of dead leaves. She cut the crown to the base of the neck, then sewed it together again with a bamboo needle and palm-leaf fiber called chambira. She skewered the lips with three bamboo splinters, each about two and a half inches long, and lashed together with more fiber.

She closed the eyeholes by drawing down the upper eyelashes. The eyebrows didn’t fall. They were held up by small pegs of bamboo.

She worked as if she’d had years of practice, perhaps as a priestess in her tribe before it was wiped out, and this was her specialty. Beautiful, an art. Now a lost art.

It took many hours. During the ritual Rima noticed me a few times behind the leaves. I was very glad to see that her manner remained warm and friendly toward me.

Then there was Richter’s face—that boyish, grinning, arrogant face—perfectly preserved.

This was not finished perfection; not yet. Rima got a fire going out of the old ashes. She brought a stone pot, carefully wrapped in palm leaves, out of the brush. I knew it was a ritual pot, and that this was a special site—that Rima had been leading us here all along.

She filled the pot with water and filled Richter’s head with sand through the neck opening. She put the head into the pot. Just as the water began to boil, she took out the head. This was to prevent the softening of the flesh and the scalding of the hair roots.

Richter’s head had shrunk now to about one-third its living size. When Rima poured out the pot water, it left a scum of yellow grease that soaked into the sand.

Rima then poured the sand that had been heating under the fire into Richter’s shrunken head, and ironed the head carefully on heated stones.

This bringing of the head to a boil had to be repeated many times. Every act was painstakingly delicate and thorough. Finally the skin of Richter’s head was smooth, hard, tough, like expertly tanned leather. Though his features were still exactly as they had been in life, his face was no larger than an orange.

Every feature, even the cheek scar, was intact.

I admired Rima’s work. She accepted my praise with modest pride. She gave me samples of the herbs that cured my fever, poisoned the arrowheads, repelled the insects. These I have parlayed into some of the recognition and wealth I have considered long overdue.

Then she led me to the big modern airport at Cocama, or I should say, to a paved road leading to the city only a mile away.

The reason she kindly showed me to the airport while Richter remained behind is not so simple as a mere liking for me.

Contrary to popular belief, most headhunters have never been primarily interested in heads. You may verify this by reading any authoritative work on the subject, including one of mine soon to be published.

The value of a head to a headhunter ends soon after the ceremony. Then the hair is removed and kept as the permanent trophy. The head, no longer valued, is thrown away. Most of the otherwise authentic heads you see have been discarded. The hair is false, added later by collectors, or sellers. Any shrunken head with the original hair has either been stolen, taken by force, or found in the ruined remains of an extinct race—perhaps those of the ancient Antipas.

So my bald head was of no ritual interest whatever to Rima.