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

had to get behind him to help push him up. His backpack had been torn off in the struggle, the strap ripped from the seams. She pushed it up behind him, as a lumbar support. He gasped with every movement, looking like he might be sick as he came to an upright position and she knew it was the head injury. ‘Don’t move. Take it slowly. Just breathe,’ she said calmly, watching as his head hung, his eyes opening and closing drowsily.

‘Do you know what happened?’ she asked after a few moments, when it became clear he could cope with gravity, he wasn’t going to pass out.

He gave a grunt that seemed to be an affirmation.

‘Who did this to you?’ He had no scratches, no puncture wounds. The wooden club clearly signified it had been a human attack and not animal. She remembered the streak she had seen through the trees and looked around again, just as another sound of twigs snapping came to her ears. She saw the knife she had left lying on the ground as she triaged him, and picked it up again, on high alert. She stared hard into the undergrowth again, knowing countless eyes were staring back at her. But the man, or men, who had done this – she didn’t know how many there were, or why they’d done this, or what they wanted – were they still here, watching them?

For several minutes she scarcely dared breathe, the tip of the knife pointed towards every bush, every tree as Jed sat slumped, scarcely conscious. They couldn’t stay here. A broken arm in the jungle was as dangerous as a broken leg in the Alps.

The rainforest pulsated and scratched loosely around them, with none of the quivering tension during the initial attack. Slowly, her grip began to loosen on the knife. Her nerves were frayed but her gut told her whoever had done this had gone.

Jed was beginning to come round, his head nodding as he tried to look up.

‘Jed, listen to me – we can’t leave you sitting in the wet mud. You’ll get hypothermia in these conditions and that will leave you vulnerable. We’ve got to get you somewhere warm and dry.’ But it was a laughable notion. Nowhere was warm and dry in the Costa Rican jungle, everyone knew that.

‘Jed, the rangers’ station. Where is it?’ She supported his head with her hand, getting him to look at her, to focus. ‘Where, Jed?’

He tried to look at her, but his eyes kept crossing.

‘Where is the rangers’ station?’ she asked slowly. It couldn’t be far surely? They’d been walking for a couple of hours already and it was supposed to be a ‘base’ station in the mountainous national park.

He stared back at her, both of them soaked in the pummelling rain. ‘. . . Map.’

Map. Of course.

She reached around him for his rucksack, holding his weight against her momentarily as she scrabbled for the map, drawn in a green dye on the scrap of cloth.

‘Here.’

She replaced the bag and brought the map over, opened it up. There was little more than a few scratchings to go by, symbols that might mean something to him, but nothing at all to her.

He stared at it for several long moments, then with effort, with his good arm, he pointed to a space below a simply sketched mountain peak – halfway down. ‘Us.’

Every word was a trial, he was blanched with pain.

He moved his good arm slowly, carefully, to a point only just above where he had said they were. ‘Ranger.’

‘Rangers’ station?’ she repeated. ‘Above us? Here?’

She looked up but they were shielded by the sprawling bush that had blocked him from sight from the path – and now blocked her view again too. ‘Jed, don’t move. Just wait here. I’m going to look and try to see where we are.’

He didn’t protest, just closed his eyes again, his head hanging. She scrambled back to the path and looked up the banking. Hectares of knobbled green stretched above and all around. The uniformity of it was dizzying, like looking into the deep blue when she’d gone scuba diving with Miles and her father in Belize. All scale was lost, nothing emerged from the all-encompassing black and green landscape.

Except . . .

She squinted, training her gaze hard on a single tiny, bright dot, several hundred metres up and along the path from here. It was nothing really, snagging the eye as just a break in the trees perhaps – a singular tree that had fallen. Or a building. It could be the roof of a building.

She kept staring. If that was the rangers’ station . . . if it was . . . it was still a long way from here. She didn’t think he could get that far. He’d taken a bad beating and she didn’t know yet how many other injuries he might have.

But to leave him here and get help was a risk too. Big cats prowled these territories. There was nothing hypothetical about an ocelot or puma or jaguar chancing upon him, injured and defenceless. This was their territory. It was she and Jed who were the visitors.

She ran her hands down her face, hardly able to believe this was happening. This time yesterday she’d been swimming in waterfalls, enjoying a picnic with her friends. How had everything gone so wrong in the space of a few minutes?

She tried to think clearly. Empty her mind of emotion and pretend she was in theatre . . .

She would leave him with the knife, something to defend himself with. She would find herself a better stick and go to the rangers’ station and bring help down to him here. The rangers would know the terrain, they’d be able to get back here to him in half the time it would take her to get there. The sooner she went, the sooner they’d have help.

She heard a sound behind her – the cracking of twigs again – and she spun round, startled, her eyes white with fear. She was jumpy and agitated.

Jed stood there,