Free Jungleland by Christopher S. Stewart Page A

back in Brooklyn. Snakes seemed to me more dangerous than bandits and even more worrisome than the weird airborne diseases. I hate snakes. Harmless garter snakes freak me out. I tried to get Chris to tell me not to worry. “I’m probably just being crazy about the snakes, right?” I asked.
    He shook his head. “No,” he said. “They’re a very serious concern.”
    Chris can discuss poisonous snakes for hours, to the brink of madness. He’s seen most of them—from the hog-nosed viper to the coral snake. But the most feared is the fer-de-lance—one bite and your blood stops clotting, and you start bleeding from all your pores and orifices, including your eyes. When Chris gets going about the fer- de-lance, his face tightens. They hide in rocks, in trees, in the brush at your feet. Sometimes you see them every day out there. “Once I was climbing a cliff face, and just as I pulled myself up a level I was staring right at one on the rock. Inches from my face,” he said. Even with snakebite serum, he went on, you have about eighteen hours to get to a hospital for even a shot at survival. “That means you need a helicopter,” he said. And even if you do make it out in time, there’s no guarantee you’ll live. At the very least, you’ll probably lose the leg or the arm that took the bite.
    The fear that bolted through me is hard to describe. Before now, I had tried to block out the existence of snakes. Maybe that’s why I’d forgotten my gaiters. I had been to war zones and been confronted by mobsters and killers. But this was somehow different. The thought of a giant snake dropping out of a tree onto my neck or a snake chasing me through the jungle freaked me out—it seemed like bad fiction—and then bleeding from every bodily pore for nearly a day sounded worse than the most depraved kinds of torture. I did not want to die by snake.
    I asked Chris for ways to protect myself, and he said, “Just stay alert. Do not put your hands down in a bush.” Chris had encountered dozens of them over the years and had been lucky so far. But that’s all it was for him: luck. Unfortunately, there really was no bulletproof method of staying safe. “Pray,” Chris said. I popped my first Valium that afternoon, and, deciding that I wasn’t going to rely just on prayer, I bought some soccer shin guards at the local mall.

“Definitely on the Way at Last”
    T HE CISNE COULD sleep up to twelve, but the bunks smelled awful. Morde and Brown lay awake at night, worrying about the black clouds shadowing their wake.
    The winds grew, and mountainous swells buffeted the ship. The first night, a doctor on board warned that he had heard on the radio about a typhoid outbreak inland. He said that some people had already been evacuated. Be careful, he cautioned them.
    Sometimes Captain Cashman turned on his radio, and when the signal was clear enough, there was news of the war in Europe. It continued to unnerve Morde, but the farther he got from La Ceiba and Trujillo, the less interest he had in events across the Atlantic. The war, he said at one time, “seemed far away,” the distance of the conflict a relief. Meanwhile, he decided to let his beard grow and began taking quinine for malaria.
    When the ship drew within sight of the coastline, there was nothing much to see, just long stretches of white beach, then patches of green, then sandy beach again. No villages. No inhabitants. Here there would be no regular meals, no hotels or beds. All communication with the wider world would soon be cut off.
    On April 29, after two days at sea, the Cisne entered the Caratasca Lagoon, the first part of a swampy miasma of interconnected creeks, rivers, and lakes that reached twenty-five miles inland and stretched along the coast for nearly sixty miles. It was the gateway to the Mosquitia. The skies still dark, Cashman dropped anchor just off a small village built on stilts. While supplies were unloaded and delivered, the explorers killed time