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Author Insight
How Lost Is Lost? Just Another Tuesday
For twelve months, I scanned the green wall across the valley waiting for one tree to flower. When Coeden finally dropped her leaves and exploded into gold, I set off alone through the creek and up the ridge before the blossoms disappeared. The rainforest does not care about human milestones, and Coeden certainly didn't roll out a welcome mat, especially once biting ants found my forearm. But sitting under a drift of yellow petals in the middle of nowhere, doing nothing until lunchtime, I felt completely at home in the wild.
Book Excerpt
Surviving Nature
A peccary snuffles through the undergrowth. He’s not the most beautiful animal – razor-sharp canine tusks and coarse hair like a steel brush – but out here he looks like a celebrity. I pick up a stick and thump it against the buttress of a fromager tree. The sound booms through the forest like an underground heartbeat, echoing through a heavy, sour musk that hangs thick in the heat. Nothing like alerting every creature around that I’m here.The humidity is unbearable. It drapes over me like a wet blanket, turning every breath into an effort. I lean against the trunk of a cecropia tree and look up. There is no sky. From The Edge, Coeden marks the horizon like a mariner’s beacon. But from down here, only a dense, overlapping mosaic of giant green leaves remain. I hang a length of tape. This is a place where I could easily vanish. Frank, bless him, would check the house, then the neighbours, then the local boat ramp. Only after exhausting the obvious would he realise I’d done the unthinkable: wandered off into the unmapped rainforest to find a tree.The threat of getting lost flickers, then dies. Survival means something different now. Chikungunya, papillonitis and a near-drowning in the Montsinéry river pass like minor milestones. In the grand scheme of things, how lost is lost? It’s just Tuesday.
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