Before the look in their faces he slunk away. He stumbled past the hut, the thorny branches reaching out their hands, catching him, tearing his clothes. On down the path, his terrified flight impeded by the gnarled roots.
Behind him followed a human avalanche, great cries issuing from their throats, sticks raised, ready to strike. Silent Sven fought his way to the front, called them to silence. “Let him go!” His voice rang out. “Let him go! His fear will punish him, far, far more than we could punish him! It will follow him, as it has followed him all these years. But never again will it affect us, and she is at rest!”
Before him, in the gap left by the branches, lay the river, coiling and twisting in the sun, a waiting, hungry look upon its face.
THE BAMBOO TRAP
By ROBERT S. LEMMON
From Short Stories
“A letter, patrón.”
One corner of the mosquito bar that made of the tent fly an airy, four-walled room was lifted and a brown hand thrust in the envelope with its array of foreign postmarks and smudgy thumb-prints, all but concealing the familiar American stamp. Outside, the steady roar of the Chanchan River, softened by distance as it charged down the last pitches of the Andes on its way to the Gulf of Guayaquil and the Pacific, blended into a musical background for the messenger’s guttural voice.
John Mather laid down the birdskin on which he was working and reached eagerly for the missive. Any word from the outside world was a godsend here in the jungle—doubly so when it came in the form of a letter whose bulk proclaimed several pages of home news. He ripped open the flap with dexterous, capable fingers and flattened the folded sheets on the camp table before him among the litter of skinning tools, cotton, and specimen labels.
For a space he read absorbedly, sensing behind the cold impersonality of the typewritten words the analytical mind of the man who had dictated them. Not until he came to the last page did his expression change and a half frown pucker the corners of his eyes.
“Hell!” he growled. “Isn’t that the way of things? Just when I’m finishing up my collections here, too, and planning to catch the next steamer north. No Christmas at home this year! Let’s see—how many of the damn things does he say he wants?” He re-read the final paragraphs of the letter, mumbling them half aloud in the manner of one in whom many years of living alone in the back of the world’s beyond have bred the habit of self-conversation:
“The Department of Entomology is extremely desirous of securing several specimens of the Cuabandan spider, to complete their habitat group of insects from the high Andes. It seems that the ones they intended to use proved to be rather poorly prepared and could not be mounted satisfactorily.