The Secret Path by Karen Swan (summer beach reads TXT) 📕

She stared in horror at the sight, hardly able to comprehend what she was seeing. In the space of mere moments, he’d gone from walking and laughing to this – broken and face-down in the mud. Who had done this to him? Or rather, what?

It wasn’t over yet, she sensed that now, the scale of the danger dawning fully upon her. This was the jungle, no place for mercy, and a man down meant one thing: prey.

She looked up into the undergrowth again, still able to feel the weight of a stare upon her, cold eyes blinking through the leaves. She felt her blood still in her veins. Carefully, reaching down, she unsheathed the knife from Jed’s leg holster and brandished it wildly, jabbing towards the bushes, seeing how the steel blade flashed even in the rain.

Her rage, courage, grew with every joust. The adrenaline was beginning to pump freely now and her body was telling her to fight. Her knuckles were blanched around the handle, her own body falling into a feral mode as she scanned the bushes.

Then it came again.

She jerked her head up with a loud gasp as behind her the rainforest suddenly shimmied and shook. She spun round and saw a streak of something moving through the undergrowth, ten metres away. She couldn’t see what it was, only what it displaced as branches were pushed aside and snapped. But the cacophony was growing fainter, not louder . . . it was retreating. In the near distance, several howler monkeys began screaming as if tracking the predator, their shrieks carrying from the canopies across the gorge and down the jungled valley.

The knife began to shake in her hand as she sensed the danger pass finally – she had done it! Scared it off, whatever it was! – and she slowly, slowly, let her arm drop. She looked back at Jed. He was still motionless in the mud, water running around him like he was a rock in a river.

‘Jed, talk to me!’ she panted, getting down on her knees in the mud and putting her face near his. She felt his breath on her skin; he was breathing. She took his pulse. ‘Jed, can you hear me? Wake up!’

There was a long silence; he was still out cold.

‘Jed, what happened? Can you talk to me?’

He didn’t respond, but on the ground beside him, she saw a large club. Like an old-fashioned policeman’s truncheon, it had been carved from a single piece of wood. He had been hit with that? A weapon?

Who . . .? Who . . .? She looked around them desperately again. Had it been a man she had seen running away? Were there more? Others, watching her, even now?

There was no possible way of knowing. She just knew she had to get him to wake up, to move out of this wet mud, get away from the rain. She looked desperately around them. His forearm was broken, she could see that just from the angle of it. His shoulder looked dislocated too. Once he regained consciousness, she wouldn’t be able to move him in this condition. He wouldn’t even be able to sit up with these injuries. He’d pass out from the pain.

She felt her brain slide into autopilot . . .

She looked around her again. There was a bamboo plant a few metres away, its shoots straight and strong, and she went over and after a few clumsy hacks, cut down the straightest length she could see. Then she cut it in half.

Raindrops dripped from the tip of her nose as she kneeled beside Jed again, trying to keep quiet, wanting now not to wake him. His eyelids fluttered vaguely, too heavy to lift and she knew his semi-conscious state would be a blessing for the next few moments at least. Carefully, she lifted the broken arm and began palpating gently. She could discern two fractures to the radius. The shoulder was definitely out of place. Defence injuries.

She remembered she’d brought her small doctor’s kit with her and she shrugged off the rucksack, scrabbling to find it at the bottom, beneath their food. It didn’t have what she really wanted – which was a tank of morphine – but she had some basics that would help. Finding the strip bandage rolls, she placed the two bamboo lengths either side of the wrist and bound them to one another, splinting the arm. Then carefully, supporting the weight of the splinted arm, she slowly levered it to a ninety-degree angle.

Jed groaned, more alert this time, and she knew she had to act quickly. He was coming round. With the forearm now supported, she rolled him carefully onto his back, then placed her hands either side of his upper arm, above the elbow. She put one of her feet gently against his ribs and with a steady pressure, pulled.

She felt the joint click as Jed’s eyes opened and a cry of pain left him like an exhale, his face pale with sweat, pain and fear. ‘What . . .?’ He stared up at the sky, rain pelting his face, his reactions too slow.

‘Don’t move.’ She scrambled back onto her knees so that he could see her. ‘You’ve got a broken arm.’

He groaned in reply, disoriented and concussed.

Moving quickly, she stripped down to her bra and knotting her shirt in one corner, created a roughly triangular shape that would serve as a sling. Lifting his head, she knotted it behind his neck so that the arm was now splinted and strapped across his chest.

She needed something else though . . . saw his belt. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, as she pulled it from the loops of his trousers and carefully fastened it around his torso, going above the right arm rather than under it. It meant the injured limb was pinned down and would help immobilize the shoulder too.

‘What . . . T-t?’ He was coming round quickly now.

‘Jed, can you sit up for me? I’ll need to help you.’

He looked bewildered and, without free use of his arms, she