her presence, he held out a basket with five or six small trout in it.
She smiled at him and spread her hands wide. “You catch a big one for me, okay?”
“Okay,” he grinned, using his favorite English word.
She walked on silently, bidding the little boy a final goodbye in her heart. She followed the path back to the village, committing the jungle to memory as she went. Several times along the way, she stopped and closed her eyes, listening to the soothing sounds of the rain forest, recording them in her mind. After today, she might never return, but she would hold this place in her heart, forever entwined with her memories of Nathan Camfield.
Anazu’s boat sat ready at the trail’s edge. It was time to go, and now she felt an urgency to carry the tragic news to Nate’s family and to her own.
In an inspired moment, she made a gift of their hut to Anazu and his family. There was no Timoné word for church, but she explained as best she could that she would like them to use it as a place to pray and to seek God.
“It would make Dr. Nate very happy to know that you remember him here, and that you always pray to the one true God,” she said in her halting attempt at the dialect.
Anazu thanked her for her gift. Paita embraced Daria, while Anazu’s nephews loaded the small bundles that held her belongings into the boat. Then they hoisted the craft onto their shoulders and, without a word, turned toward the forest pathway that led to the river.
Daria followed, gulping back tears as she walked away from the cherished memories she had lived here with her husband. She remembered the day Nathan had disappeared down this same trail. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
Overhead the birds of the rain forest squawked and sang in a harsh cacophony. The sun burned down on her back, its scorching rays a comfort simply because it was something she could feel.
As she followed her guides along the trail, she turned several times and drank in the scene, trying to sear the picture in her memory.
Finally, as the village disappeared from sight behind a curtain of thick vegetation, Daria turned back to the trail. Forging ahead, she wrapped her hands protectively over the small mound of her stomach, cradling the only part of Nathan Camfield she had left—the child she was now certain grew within her womb.
Four
The trees spread out beneath them as far as the eye could see—an ocean of emerald green broken only by an occasional glimpse of silver ribbon that was the Rio Guaviare. The Cessna 185 Skywagon swooped down into the swell of the jungle like a hungry gull, made a wide circle, and dipped left for another look.
“There!” the pilot shouted over the roar of the engine. “See how those trees are stripped—there on the east bank where the river curves?”
He flew lower, and Daria peered out the window over the left wing from her seat behind him. She saw the section of the forest he was talking about, the trees bare of leaves, their bark ashy and grey. Her heart lurched as she caught a brief glimpse of charred debris through the branches. A peculiar sense of reverence filled her. She was looking at the place where Nathan had died.
As they circled again, Bob Warrington put his binoculars down and turned to her from his seat beside the pilot. His face was pallid and drawn, as her own must have been. “Are you all right, Daria?” he shouted.
She could only nod and put her head against the window.
“There’s nothing we can do here,” Bob told the pilot, his voice grave.
The deafening drone of the plane’s engine drowned out her sobs as it turned westward and gained altitude.
Coming through the doorway into the terminal waiting room of Kansas City International Airport, Daria felt as though she had stepped into another dimension. The bright lights and the throng of bustling, well-dressed travelers unsettled her. The mechanical jangle of computers and telephones and the public address system was strange to her ears, more surreal than the jungle sounds of Colombia had ever seemed, even in the beginning. Each breath she drew in carried a stranger, stronger scent than the last—detergents and soaps, colognes and lotions that all seemed to be garish imitations of the softly fragrant flowers and herbs of her rain forest. For a moment she ached for the familiar noises and