Page 2 of Love in the Wild

Eden closed her eyes tight. She imagined her parents’ faces back in Arkansas, could see the door of her childhood home. She choked down her despair and longing to be there in that moment and not here—anywhere but here.

The gun went off. Eden experienced a second of stunned surprised because she still felt the jungle air thick with moisture and smelled the heavy scent of sweat around her. She was dead, so why did she still smell the jungle?

“Ah!” Cash’s scream came a millisecond later, followed by a sickening crunch.

Eden didn’t dare open her eyes as she heard the sounds of violence—screams and snapping bones.

The beast was here. Her stomach churned as she swallowed down the rise of bile in her throat and her breath escaped in rapid pants of terror. She would be next. The long silence that followed made her brave enough to open her eyes, slowly taking in the scene of carnage. Cash lay dead a dozen feet away, his neck twisted right around. That was something.

The other tourists she had come with were all dead, but they had been left untouched by the beast. She swallowed hard as tears blurred her vision.

The sound of footsteps behind her and a huffing noise caused her to flinch and close her eyes again. Body heat and hot breath on the back of her neck sent a chill down her spine and stirred her hair. The beast was still here. She was next.

Please, let it kill me quickly.

A grunting noise, similar to the ones made by the gorillas, came from behind her. Something touched her ponytail. She gasped and threw herself to the ground on pure instinct, her hands crunching into the leaves beneath her. The beast moved somewhere in front of her. When she dared to look, her lips parted but no sound escaped.

A man crouched in front of her, ten feet away. His tan skin was covered with blackened, drying mud, making him look more monster than man. His long dark hair hung in loose tendrils down around his shoulders. His eyes were a vivid dark blue, and they narrowed on her as his full lips pressed into a hard frown.

In one hand the man held a blade. His other hand was curled into a fist. She watched the corded muscles of his forearm ripple as he shifted and moved. There was a lithe grace to his nearly naked body as he shifted back and forth on his bare feet. A loincloth of animal skin covered his groin but left his legs bare to her view. He chuffed at her softly, like a jaguar. But the strangest thing, perhaps, was a band of gold that rested on his brow like a crown, the precious metal shaped into small leaves like a laurel wreath.

He gestured with his balled fist to the man on the ground and grunted again.

Eden blinked, unsure what to do or say. This man had saved her. But who was he? Where had he come from? Why was he grunting instead of speaking?

“Hi,” she whispered, and he halted in his gestures. “Do you understand me?”

The man tilted his head to the side, and his nostrils flared. It was hard to read his face with the mud streaked across it.

“Hello?” She tried to greet him again. The wordhellowas also used in Swahili, in case he spoke that rather than English.

He slowly straightened to a towering height, and she got to her feet as well. Eden kept her distance, not knowing what to expect with this wild man.

She tried some Swahili and continued to stare at him. “Kiswahili?”

Suddenly his head turned, and he scanned the forest. It was still eerily quiet. Eden knew his attention was focused elsewhere, yet she had a sense he had missed nothing, including her movements. The man threw his head back and let out a roar, the same roar that had sent Cash’s Ugandan men running for the hills. They had known the danger of whoever this man was.

She asked him if he spoke Swahili. “Unaongea Kiswahili?” Unfortunately, she didn’t know enough of the language to truly have a conversation.

Her savior shot her another distracted look before he grunted again at the forest and whistled sharply. There was an answering whistle far to her left. The man turned her way, and with lightning-quick reflexes, he grabbed her.

Eden screamed, but a second later the air was knocked from her lungs as he threw her over his shoulder. He began to run, dodging through the trees and leaping over the taller bushes and vegetation like an Olympic hurdler. The impact of his feet jarred her and sent a punch to her stomach. She was going to throw up if he kept this up much longer.

Where was he going? What was he going to do to her? Why didn’t he communicate? He acted ... well, he acted more like an animal than a person. A wild man. It made no sense.

Eventually he stopped running. He rolled her off his shoulder and onto the ground. She couldn’t stop it—her stomach emptied its contents, and she lay gasping on the ground at the base of a particularly thick-rooted hagenia tree. She clawed at the ground, trying to catch her breath and stop the shaking of her arms and legs.

Her head spun, and she gazed up at the distant light, barely able to make it out through the trees above. She saw something jutting from the base of the tree, going all the way up. Small pieces of wood, like tiny steps in the trunk, created a path all the way up the tree. The wild man grasped her hand and pulled her to her feet. He then gestured for her to climb onto his back. Was he kidding?

She shook her head violently. “No, no, I’m not—”

He lunged for her, and she shrieked, holding up her hands.

“Okay!”

He pointed at his back, and he faced the tree, waiting patiently.

It was weird climbing onto this stranger’s back, but she did it. He used the wooden steps the way a mountain climber would use footholds. She nearly closed her eyes as they reached ten feet and kept on going. The tops of the trees looked to be another ten or fifteen feet away.

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