Maisie squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated on just her right arm. If she could get her right arm free, then she might be able to get all of herself free.
She felt like she spent an hour or more trying without any luck to release her arm from the vine’s clutches. The flies kept eating her sweat, and the heat felt hotter and every now and then she heard the sound of an animal she did not recognize. Maisie tried not to think about lions or snakes or hippos. She tried not to think about how Mr. Landon, her science teacher last year, had told them that the hippopotamus was one of the most dangerous animals in Africa. They’ll charge you, Mr. Landon had said. And you won’t be able to outrun them. Then it had seemed funny, sitting safely in P.S. 3 surrounded by other kids and the smell of books and paint and ink. The image of a hippo running fast had made Maisie laugh. But now, as the earth trembled again and an animal’s calls echoed through the air, it didn’t seem funny at all.
Frustrated, Maisie stopped being so careful and methodical and just tried to yank her arms free. The vines cut into her and held on tight.
Now she felt an unmistakable trickle of blood on both arms and what sounded like the footsteps of someone running. Or maybe slipping?
Then came a series of yelps and groans before Felix tumbled right past her, slipping and sliding down what Maisie saw was a steep embankment.
“Ugh!” she heard Felix say.
She could turn her head just enough to see him climbing slowly up toward her, using vines and branches and whatever else he could grab on to so that he wouldn’t go falling back downward again.
“I . . . have . . . looked . . . every . . . where,” he panted as he finally reached her side.
His face was smudged with dirt and his glasses hung crookedly on his face.
“Just get me out of here,” Maisie said. “Please.”
Felix took a couple of deep breaths, then straightened his glasses and studied Maisie’s predicament. He remembered how a few years back, their mother had gone through a knitting phase, bringing home skeins of yarns and needles and patterns. She would sit after dinner, frowning at the sweater or scarf she was trying to make, all of it turning out ugly and lumpy or full of holes. She always got her yarn tangled, and he and Maisie would help her straighten it out, pulling it through loops and back again, trying to follow its knotty, complicated path.
This is just like that, he told himself. Pretend you’re untangling Mom’s yarn.
Carefully, he lifted a vine and began to send it backward, away from Maisie. Then he did another. The work was slow and frustrating. Just when he thought he’d released one, he saw that it was looped through yet another.
Maisie moaned. “Can’t you go faster?”
“I’m trying,” he said.
“It is so hot,” Maisie complained.
Felix nodded.
Sweat dripped off his forehead and onto his glasses. Flies kept landing on his face and hands. He didn’t know when he’d last felt this miserable.
“Are these flies biting me?” he said, knocking them off his nose.
“I think they’re eating our sweat,” Maisie said, disgusted.
“Do you think they’re tsetse flies?” Felix asked, pausing in his work to stare at his sister.
“Maybe?” she said.
“Tsetse flies give you sleeping sickness,” Felix said in a trembly voice. “And sleeping sickness can kill you,” he added in an even more trembly one.
Still in the distance, but closer now, came more of those grunts.
Maisie’s eyes widened.
“I thought you were making that noise,” she said softly.
Felix shook his head, a vine dangling in his shaky hand.
“Do you think it’s a hippopotamus?” Maisie asked.
“Maybe?” Felix said.
“Remember what Mr. Landon said? That they’re the most dangerous animals in Africa?”
“Uh-huh,” Felix said, trying to calm himself so he could get Maisie out. But his hands shook so much he had to quit and sit on them to make them stop.
Maisie wriggled a bit and her left arm came free.
She wriggled a bit more and her left leg came free, too.
“Pull,” she told Felix, offering up her arm and leg.
“You don’t understand how steep the ground is,” he said. “If I stand up, I’ll slide all the way down.”
“Pull,” she said, gritting her teeth.
Felix knew this was one of those times that he could not win. So he got to his knees, one leg already sliding out from beneath him. Quickly, he grabbed on to a vine. It slipped through his hand as he fell back even more.
Once again, he climbed back to Maisie, holding on to whatever he could find, his hands burning from the vine whipping through them.
When he reached Maisie again, he tried not to say I told you so.
“See?” he said, which he knew meant the same thing.
“Plant yourself against that tree,” Maisie said, pointing with her chin. “And then pull.”
It took more crawling to get to the tree, and then a lot of slippery maneuvering before Felix had his back supported against the tree’s trunk in such a way that he could lean forward and take Maisie’s hand without sliding down the hill again.