Felix took a step backward.
He was inches away from an enormous snake! So enormous that he couldn’t even see its head, just what seemed in that moment like miles and miles of snake, slithering across the path.
His mind began to list all the kinds of snakes he knew lived in Africa: black mambas and boomslangs and wasn’t there something called a puff adder that was the most poisonous snake in the world? Back in third grade, Maisie had written a report on deadly snakes and she’d given him nightmares by describing just how venomous certain ones were. Her favorite one was the boomslang, whose venom affected your blood’s ability to clot. It could take hours for the symptoms to appear, and then you bled to death from every orifice. Felix shivered despite the heat.
The snake in front of him was the color of the ground, spotted tan and white. He closed his eyes and forced himself to concentrate on the pictures in Maisie’s report. The boomslang, he remembered with relief, was green. Bright green. But his relief disappeared when he remembered that black mambas weren’t actually black. Felix took several more steps backward. If a black mamba encountered prey, Felix knew it would strike as many as twelve times. He could almost hear Maisie telling him how each bite delivered enough cardio-and neurotoxic venom to kill a dozen men within one hour. Isn’t that cool? she’d told him before shutting off the light and going to sleep, leaving Felix alone in the dark to contemplate all the terrible snakes out in the world. Like the one right in front of him. Without antivenom, he thought, the mortality rate for a black mamba’s bite was 100 percent.
There were all kinds of vipers, too, he suddenly recalled with a sickening feeling. And cobras. And puff adders, he reminded himself. They could kill a grown man with just one bite. And Felix wasn’t a grown man; he was just a twelve-year-old kid. How fast would a puff adder’s venom kill a twelve-year-old kid?
Felix squinted at the snake. It was hard to make out against the ground because it blended in so well. The puff adder had such good camouflage, Felix knew, that people often stepped on it. The picture from Maisie’s report popped into his mind. Felix took a deep breath and then another, trying to calm himself. Because he was certain that snake in front of him was indeed a puff adder. By now, it was almost all the way across the path. But wouldn’t it hide in the brush there and get him when he passed by? Some of the snakes were aggressive, and others only bit when provoked. Felix was too scared to sort out their personalities right now. Besides, how did he know what provoked a snake? Why, he could be provoking it just by staring at it.
He watched as the last of the snake disappeared. But even with it off the path, he was too scared to continue. Instead, he stood paralyzed in the hippo tracks. When he looked away from where the snake had been, Felix realized that Maisie and the silverback were nowhere in sight.
With surprising gentleness, the gorilla put Maisie down and walked away.
Maisie sighed. In no time, Felix would get here and the two of them would figure out what to do next. They would find the Ziff twins and Dr. Livingstone and maybe even Amy Pickworth. They would give the map of the Nile to Dr. Livingstone and explain themselves to Amy Pickworth and then they would go home, safe and sound, just like they always did. Until then, she just had to wait.
She would sit on that big boulder over there and do just that, she decided. She would wait and not worry because somehow things always worked out. The boulder was covered with a fine red dust. When Maisie swept her hand across the rock to brush it off, the dust took off in every direction. She jerked her hand back and peered at the tiny red dots spreading across the boulder.
Fire ants!
“Yuck!” Maisie said, shaking her hand in case even one tiny ant was still on it.
Well, she decided, she would just stand up and wait for Felix then. She fixed her eyes in the direction from which she’d come, expecting to glimpse him at any minute.
Maisie waited and waited, but no Felix.
She tried not to think about him getting eaten by a lion, bitten by a snake, or charged by a hippopotamus.
At one point, she even called his name, extra loud. But she didn’t even hear her own echo in response.
A watched pot never boils, her mother had told Maisie too many times. But maybe she was right. If Maisie looked away, Felix would most definitely show up. After all, she thought as she swung her gaze in the opposite direction, she’d been down that same path and hadn’t seen any lions or snakes or hippos or anything dangerous. He was just being his usual slowpoke self.
Even though the gorilla had carried her far, the jungle here looked exactly like where they’d been. Trees thick with foliage that formed a canopy of leaves above her. Branches and vines everywhere. Some dark shapes in the distance, probably even more trees.
Maisie stared harder.
Those dark shapes were moving.