Beneath a Southern Sky - By Deborah Raney Page 0,59

and Quimico? Since the fire, he had not seen them. When they’d first arrived in Chicoro, his guides were careful to keep a wide berth of the sick hut he’d set up, lest they, too, contract the deadly fever. For that reason, he felt certain they hadn’t perished in the fire with the others. He assumed they had gone back to Timoné for help. Surely they’d had time to get there and back by now.

When he had begun to remain conscious for longer periods, he had tried to mark the passage of time by scratching marks in the dirt floor of the hut. But he’d soon become confused. There were too many marks. He must have forgotten and tallied more than one mark for each day. Finally he had given up, certain that any day now the Timoné would come for him and the marks would not matter any more.

The first day he had felt strong enough to leave the hut, he walked several hundred yards, into the village, looking for the chief. The children saw him first and ran away into their homes, obviously frightened of him. Alerted, the village leaders met him near the center of the compound and began to motion wildly for him to leave. He tried to speak with them, but they made it clear that they would not allow him to remain inside the village. At first he guessed that they were still afraid they would contract the disease from him. But as the days went by and he lived in exile in his hut outside the village, he noticed that some of the older Chicoro boys sneaked away and came to peer at him. They kept their distance, but from what little of their dialect he had picked up, he was horrified to realize that their superstitious beliefs had made him into some kind of a god or good luck charm in their eyes. The Chicoro were a very superstitious people, and they apparently held him in awe because he had escaped not only the deadly illness to which he had been exposed again and again, but he had also walked through fire. He had defied the flames of a deadly inferno that had killed twenty-eight people in the sick hut. Of course, he himself believed his escape from the fire to be miraculous. But it was certainly no miracle of his own doing.

A million times he had gone back in his memory to the day of the fire, wishing he could have had a chance to do things differently. When he and Tados and Quimico had first come to Chicoro, the fever continued to devastate the village, taking ten more lives in the first two days he was there. Nate could not positively diagnose the illness, but he believed it to be a strain of influenza to which these people were highly susceptible. The only way to stop the spread of the disease was to isolate the ill downriver from the stream that supplied their drinking water. And there had been indications that the measure was working. At the time of the fire, it had been three full days since they’d had to isolate anyone new. But when the chief’s young son died on the fourth day, the village leaders had begun to lose faith in Nate.

Tados and Quimico sensed that the good will of the chief had soured, and they implored Nate to slip away quietly in the night. But he insisted that they remain for a few more days. He should have trusted the judgment of his two guides. They knew the culture, and they understood the malice of the chief toward Nate. But he had not wanted to leave until he knew he had the outbreak under control.

He knew in his heart that his motives hadn’t been totally altruistic. In his mind, he had written a glowing report for the board of Gospel Outreach, telling of his success in putting down a major epidemic. His pride had gotten in the way of his good judgment.

So he had been forced back to the hut outside the village. Night after night he watched the fires from afar and listened to the chatter of the children playing before bedtime. Loneliness overwhelmed him, and he began to make desperate plans to return to Timoné. In his weakened physical state, without a guide, without provisions, he knew it would be suicide to attempt such a journey alone. But every attempt to secure a guide