Hunt for the Bamboo Rat Read online

  Abir understood, and clasped Zenji’s shoulder in return. “Ti ngarud,” he said with a nod.

  Within an hour Zenji had packed his pouch with what little he had, including the returned pistol—still loaded—a full canteen of water, and some food Abir had wrapped in leaves.

  Zenji tried one more time. “Which way to a road?” He tried mimicking a winding roadway with his hands. “Road.”

  Abir understood.

  Sort of.

  He took Zenji to a path leading into the trees. “Roaad.”

  Zenji laughed and patted Abir’s shoulder. “Of course.”

  At the edge of the jungle, Zenji turned back to glance one last time at the village and the mountain people who had been so kind to him. Twenty or thirty small men with red teeth squatted behind Abir, watching.

  Abir raised a hand.

  Zenji waved and headed into the jungle.

  A few hours later, a burst of gunfire rattled in the near distance. It ended as abruptly as it had begun.

  He turned to face where the sound had come from so he would know the direction.

  He waited for more.

  But that was it.

  “This way,” he said to himself, heading toward the battle, or whatever it had been.

  Locate American forces.

  Try not to get shot.

  He found only deeper, thicker jungle. He’d lost the path long ago. With no more sounds of war to guide him, and from what little he could see of the sun, he wasn’t even sure of his direction.

  He stood stone-still, listening.

  Lost.

  Fine. What’s new? He would find his way out … eventually. Something or someone would stumble across his path. This green madness couldn’t go on forever … unless he was traveling in circles.

  That thought startled him. He’d have to figure out how to hold on to a single direction.

  A week passed, then two. At least, that was what it seemed like. He wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

  Foraging for food wasn’t easy. He’d grown weak, and was slowing down. Now he was eating leaves, grass, and bugs, as he’d seen the people in Abir’s village do.

  For water, he found trickling streams that had been reduced to mosquito-infested puddles. He lay on his stomach, pushed away the scum, and sipped what he could. So far, the water had not made him sick.

  In the middle of one day he came to a rare clearing. He stopped and sat in a spill of wondrous sunlight, fingering the thin beard-like hair on his chin. His glasses were smudged, but he didn’t care enough to clean them.

  Had he been here before?

  He sat for a long time, numb.

  Before pushing on, he stretched out in the sun with his face to the sky and slept.

  One afternoon he stumbled upon a running stream that snaked past the remains of an abandoned camp. Looked like a small platoon of soldiers had been there, and not too long ago.

  He approached it cautiously.

  “Oh,” he whispered. “Oh, oh, oh!”

  He squatted and picked up two small bags of rice. Japanese soldiers. Nearby, he found some powdered soy sauce and a few combat rations.

  Why would they leave this behind? In Baguio they had been foraging in the jungle and eating off the streets. Where had this come from? Had they somehow been resupplied from the air?

  Think later. Eat now.

  He’d cook a small amount of rice.

  Five matches. It was all he had left. He’d carefully preserved them.

  He built a fire and boiled water from the stream with his mess kit. The rice cooked slowly. He watched the smoke rise into the trees.

  His patience over how long it took to cook the rice was running thin. He gathered what dry leaves and twigs he could find and tossed them into the fire.

  Thick smoke rose up.

  He fanned the fire with his hand, trying to get it to spread.

  Kaboom!

  A thunderous barrage of artillery fire exploded all around him. A tree splintered and fell, just missing him.

  He scrambled for cover.

  More shells burst through the canopy, exploding, shattering trees, pulverizing dirt, vaporizing his fire.

  Zenji grabbed his pouch and stumbled into the bushes. A shell exploded behind him. Another in front. A third almost on top of him. Dirt flying, branches shredding, everything blowing up.

  He was suddenly flying.

  He slammed into a tree and fell.

  Then, nothing.

  He awoke in utter darkness.

  He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. He tried to move. His arm worked. He touched his face. No blood.

  He rose onto an elbow … and howled.

  Pain shot through his side, low, near his hip. Like a blowtorch.

  He fell back.

  Don’t touch it!

  He lay in near delirium, panic welling.

  What happened?

  He remembered the abandoned camp. A fire. Rice cooking.

  Explosions.

  Trees shredding.

  Flying, slamming into something.

  He groaned.

  The smoke. Someone had shot at the smoke.

  Fear surged in a rush of sweat. He was wounded in a jungle where no one would ever find him.

  He raised an arm, grateful that he could do that. He tried the other and his hopes soared. He wanted to sit, but feared the pain.

  Slowly, lightly, he felt his body, and when his hand touched his side it came away wet.

  Blood.

  Gritting his teeth, he managed to sit. Again, he felt around, fingering his filthy, bloody, torn shirt. It was too dark to see anything. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  He pulled the material away and tenderly touched the wound. He could feel the sharp edge of steel. Shrapnel. The cut was deep, it seemed, and about three inches across.

  He grimaced and ripped his shirt off. He bunched it up and pressed it over the wound. Slow the bleeding.

  “This isn’t good.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut and lay back, allowing the reality of having been wounded to settle in. He had to get out of this jungle.

  Later, still lying on his back, he was amazed to see a blurry star blinking through the canopy.

  Blurry?

  My glasses!

  Gone. Find them in the daylight.

  Tears came to his eyes.

  “Ma,” he whispered, as if the word could cross the ocean, as if it would be heard, as if it—that one word—could make the world right.

  “Ma.”

  Eventually, he slept.

  When morning came he tried to get up.

  “Ahhh!”

  It took a while, but he managed to sit, the wound throbbing like the quickening heartbeat of fear.

  Sweat rolled from his scalp across his cheek. Feverish.

  “This is so bad.”

  The jungle was still.

  No distant guns, no animals.

  Birds. A few.

  He reached up to rub his face, and when his hand fell back to the ground it hit his glasses. “Yes!”

  He put them on. One lens was cracked. But he could see well enough. Not far away, his pouch lay, torn. There was a first-aid kit in it. Had to get it.

  His legs worked, but he couldn’t stand. He tried to roll over and get to his knees. But the pain was staggering.

  With one hand holding the dirty shirt to his wound, he dragged himself over to the pouch. The first-aid kit had been pulverized. Amazingly, one of the two small bags of rice he’d found was still intact. He jammed it into his pants pocket.

  Other than that, all that remained was a dented metal drinking cup and a piece of the kitchen knife. He gathered them. He didn’t know where the pistol was.

  The canteen had to be somewhere, unless it, too, had been blown to bits. He needed water to clean the wound.

  No canteen.

  But he did find the cap attached to a jagged piece of mangled metal.

  Zenji slept, or maybe he had passed ou
t. He didn’t know.

  Now, as he lay awake looking up at patches of blue sky through the canopy, the seriousness of his condition came back to him.

  Got to move.

  He dragged himself to his hands and knees, head spinning. The pain was staggering.

  His body convulsed to retch, but nothing came out.

  He crawled to a tree and sat with his back against it—dazed, half-conscious, his vision popping with colors.

  Quiet jungle.

  One birdsong, two.

  Then an amazing thing happened: tears filled his eyes. They weren’t tears of fear, but of the most unexpected sensation he could imagine in such desperation.

  Peace.

  He looked up. The world around him, the small patch of jungle, the pieces of sky, his hands, everything—all turned white, not just white as he knew white, but far more pure … and with that came stillness.

  Fear ceased, and he floated in the peace that enveloped him.

  The white light slowly turned back to blurry greens and blues as he became aware of the sound of flowing water.

  A stream!

  As he started to move, the pain in his side burned. He fingered the shrapnel, its sharp edge just under the skin. He tried to pinch it and pull it out. The pain nearly made him throw up.

  Infection.

  Get up.

  Clean the wound.

  Crawl!

  With willpower he couldn’t believe he had, Zenji pushed himself through the fire bellowing from his wound.

  A strand of drool hung from his lips.

  Hand. Knee. Hand.

  Hope flickered.

  The stream was less than twenty yards away.

  It took him an hour to get there, dragging himself through twisted foliage and down a slight incline.

  He didn’t stop until he was submerged to his neck in the cold water. He drank like a horse, with greed, and when he was done he lay in the shallows on his back, the stream running over him.

  After what seemed like hours, he struggled out to the dirt and slept.

  When he awoke it was pitch-black. No stars shone through.

  Alone.

  The sound of the stream lulled him into a kind of oblivion, and soon hungry sharks swam parallel to a long sandy beach, tall coconut trees swirling in the wind, banyans wildly swaying, wind wailing, and seabirds soaring, diving, snapping fish from some unknown sea, and in one raging motion a wave of mynah birds swept down, landed on his chest, and with quick jabs, pecked out his eyes and ate them.

  Zenji awoke with a gasp.

  Fever.

  He slept again in his sweat, and awoke sometime later in the earliest hint of day, visible only as a glow above the canopy.

  He sat with effort.

  Sleep had given him strength. This was good.

  He dragged himself back into the stream and gently washed away the dirt-caked blood. The skin around the cut was red and swollen. The shrapnel had somehow worked its way up as he slept, the edge now much more visible.

  It had to come out. He would not heal with it in there.

  But all he had to extract it with was the piece of kitchen knife. He wiggled it out of his pocket and washed it in the water. What if the stream was polluted? He knew you should boil river water before drinking it.

  Too late, anyway.

  He studied the broken blade.

  Do it.

  Zenji Watanabe had never known true pain until now. First, he cut just under the surface, looking for a grip on the metal. Once he was able to pinch it, he began to pull.

  He gritted his teeth and yanked.

  “Ahhhhh!”

  He stopped, panting, on the verge of passing out.

  Now. One big yank and it’s over.

  “Ahhhhhhhh!”

  He fainted, but came to when his head hit the water.

  He sat breathing heavily, the shrapnel in his grip. Blood oozed from the wound and snaked away in the stream. A slab of flesh hung from the cut and Zenji fingered it back in, then pressed the gaping hole tight to slow the bleeding.

  After a moment, he laughed and raised the shrapnel to the canopy. “You won’t kill me! Nothing will kill me!”

  Then he sobbed.

  He lay by the stream for days, drinking its water and tending his wound. Eventually he could stand, and take a few steps, and finally, walk … slowly, with a limp.

  But the cut was not healing.

  Get moving, but stay near the river. Water means life.

  He found a sturdy branch that was somewhat straight and broke it off to use as a cane.

  He hobbled upstream.

  Within minutes he discovered something that made him bend over and heave. This was why his wound had gotten worse.

  He backed away from the bloated body of a Japanese soldier, writhing with maggots.

  Three weeks later, he was walking without the cane. His limp had gotten better, but he was still lost.

  His wound began to heal once he’d started cleaning it upstream of the body. He kept it bandaged with mud and leaves and bark. He’d read about that in JROTC.

  He ate only easily caught bugs and small translucent crayfish he captured in the stream. He ate them raw, eyeballs, legs, guts. He caught lots of them and stuck them in his pocket for later. They were chewy, and sweet, but if he kept them too long, they began to stink.

  Still, he needed more.

  Meat, if he could find it.

  He would hunt.

  That thought made him laugh. “Right. A hunter with a limp and a broken knife. I will hunt ants.”

  He laughed, loud.

  He was losing it.

  Who cared?

  Where was the gunfire? He hadn’t heard it in weeks. Had he gone so deep into the endless jungle that he was lost to all humans?

  He stopped and listened for sounds, any sounds.

  Quiet.

  Must be closing in on evening.

  Too bad his few remaining matches had gotten soaked in the river. He could cook the crayfish in his pocket, or maybe catch some fresh ones in the mud along the riverbank. Cooking them would at least break the monotony.

  He no longer worried about smoke. He was on the moon, as far as that went.

  So what had Abir done for fire?

  Sticks.

  Rub them together to make sparks fly. He wondered if he could do it. He could try.

  As he limped along, he kept his eyes open. Besides the sticks, he’d need dry grass or leaves he could crumble between his hands.

  For a while, the problem with following the river was mosquitoes. Soon they left him alone, and he was grateful for that. Probably my stink repulses them. They’d rather feed on a pig.

  He snorted.

  Near the end of the day he came upon a clearing. An outcropping of rock rose on one side. If it rained he would at least have some shelter.

  He set up camp, making a bed of whatever softness he could gather. He limped down to the stream for a drink, then came back to settle for the night. Too late for a fire. He’d do it tomorrow.

  But what about the crayfish in his pockets? Some creature might wriggle in as he slept and eat them.

  He ripped a piece of his ragged pant legs off and tightly wrapped the crayfish in it. He then wedged the bundle into a crack in the rock outcropping, where he hoped small night creatures couldn’t reach it.

  Looking up through the trees, the night sky astonished him. Stars! A whole universe of them. Billions.

  “Wow,” he whispered.

  Stars gave him hope. People all over the world gazed at them, and that made him feel connected to something.

  Other humans.

  He wept.

  When he awoke the next day, he found that the torn piece of pants had been taken from the crevice.

  The crayfish were gone, every last one of them.

  “Hey!” he yelled. “Hey!”

  He gritted his teeth and tried to calm himself. Getting angry would do no good, and might even reopen his wound.


  He sat and held his head in his hands.

  A few minutes later he had a plan. He would catch whatever creature had stolen his stash and eat it!

  Unless it was a poisonous snake.

  All day long he looked for food, to eat and for bait. He found very little, which he ate. When he returned to his camp he sat and filled a new torn piece of his pants with dirt, adding in a few crayfish he managed to catch in the stream. For the smell.

  He wondered if creatures were as easy to fool as humans.

  He set the bundle back in the same crack and mulled over ideas for a trap. He was elated to find eight grains of rice in the seam of his pocket. They were damp and ruined, but still, perfect!

  Cackling, he made a trail of them along the rock leading up to the bag of dirt and crayfish.

  He fashioned a kind of platform out of sticks and propped it above the bundle on stilt legs. On the platform he placed a large rock, the heaviest that it would hold.

  From the filthy, crumpled shirt that still bandaged his wound, he carefully removed enough threads to make a line about eight feet long. The threads were so aged and rotted that he worried they might break with even the slightest pull.

  They’d have to do.

  He tied one end of the line to a flimsy platform leg and stretched the rest of it back as far as it would go.

  That night, he curled into a ball and waited.

  He would listen. Sound would tell him when to pull the thread.

  I can hear you tiptoe, little thief creature.

  Zenji giggled, nearly ecstatic.

  “Come, come.”

  He would not sleep until he pulled the leg out from under the platform, and he would only do that when he could hear the creature’s feet scratching up to the bait.

  But he dozed, and jolted awake a while later. “That wasn’t smart,” he mumbled.

  He squinted at his moonlit trap. The trail of rice was still there.

  This time he didn’t lie down, but sat against a rock with his ear cocked.

  Around an hour later, he heard the small scratchy sound of some creature closing in on the trap. He couldn’t see it, but he could imagine it. Forward, stop. Forward, stop.

  When the scratchy progress stopped, Zenji figured the creature was sniffing at the dirt bag and cussing its contents in animal language. Maybe a monkey?

  He yanked on the thread.