J is for JUNGLE DAMES
Adventure Journal / June 15th,
1957
It was a breathtaking sight, my
first morning in the jungle; the mist rising off the jungle floor, the surface
of the lake east of my campsite, floating up from the within the limbs of the
marula trees that surrounded me. It was as if the very fabric of reality had
begun to pill and needed a trim. The sun rose sharply and lit the suspended
veils of water droplets into floating clouds of gold.
It was, regrettably, some time
before I noticed Jameson, my guide, was missing. It doesn’t paint me in a
particularly favorable or intelligent light, I know. I didn’t see him when I
awoke, and assuming he was still asleep in his tent, I continued on with my
morning activities—breakfast, washing my face, going over the maps for the
day’s travel—and let him sleep on.
Well, two hours had passed, and
when I noticed my wristwatch read nine o’clock, and I noticed Jameson was still
nowhere to be seen, I went to try and wake him. Only he wasn’t in.
His things were still there. Even
his boots, so I knew he couldn’t have walked off. Not far. He wasn’t at the
edge of the lake, sketching the secretarybirds like he had been the day before.
I started to try and think through the
other places he could have wandered off to, when I was startled by the sound of
a disturbance in the brush behind Jameson’s tent.
That’s when I saw them. They appeared at the edge of the
clearing we were camped in.
“Lookin’ for your friend, daddy-o?”
one of them sneered. She, like the other three, was dressed in what looked like
a turtleneck sweater and leggings fashioned from animal skins, and wore a
necklace of some sort of animal’s teeth. They were all young females, no more
than teenagers I would imagine.
“Hey!” she snapped, “I’m talkin’ ta
ya, picture frame!”
“P-picture frame?”
“Yeah,” she retorted, a mocking
smile curling her lips. “A real square.”
“You’ve seen Jameson?” I asked,
unsure who these young women were, or why they were prowling around the African
jungle speaking with the parlance of Greenwich Village hipsters.
“Your pal stumbled into our camp
during our bongo bash last night,” she said.
“Yeah,” cut in one of the other girls.
“He got some real nowhere ideas about gettin’ fresh. Had the Hemingway on his
breath, ya dig me?”
“Um…no…no I’m afraid…”
“Well we’re not!” proclaimed a
third girl. “We ain’t scared of no one or no thing. You read me pops?” She
produced what looked like a small segment of bamboo from beneath the collar of
her turtleneck, and with a snap of her wrist, demonstrated how she could flick
a thin blade of stone, hinged and hidden within, erect, and pushed it towards
my face.
“And we don’t enjoy outsiders
trying to smooth our groove. That happens, we start cutting grooves of our own.
You dig?”
The girl who’d not yet spoken
removed a small leather satchel from her shoulder and began to rifle around
inside. Finding what she was looking for, she yanked it out and tossed it at
me. I grabbed at it clumsily, unsure what it was at first, but when my senses
caught up with me, it was all I could do not to scream.
It was a tiny human head, olive in
pallor and shrunken and shriveled like a rotten apple. And I’ll be damned if
the grotesque visage staring back at me from my hands, its eyes and mouth
stitched shut with thin strips of leather, bore an uncanny resemblance to
Jameson.
The girls began to snicker and
walked back into the jungle. The one with the primitive switchblade turned and
jabbed at the space between us with the still-extended blade.
“You hear the drums tonight,” she
warned, “you don’t come a-knockin’. Not without a proper invite.”
And with that they were gone.
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