Escape Under the Forever Sky (11 page)

I
F
I'
D HAD
any doubts before about my decision to escape, they were gone now. One thing I knew for sure: My mother may have been impossible and hugely disappointed in me, but if this were just about ransom, my parents would have given them anything. But taking on the government? Committee or no committee, they underestimated what it would take to get the United States to give in to the demands of kidnappers.
The lion isn't going to get up for one spoiled little girl, even if she is the American ambassador's daughter
.

I had to face facts: Nobody was going to come for me, and I couldn't wait any longer. The dogs were asleep, and Dawit, Helena, and Markos were in their
shack. I needed to get out early, while I still had plenty of time to find . . . whatever I could find.
Don't think; just do
.

I stuffed the
injera
into my pants pockets and drank the last of the water Helena had brought with breakfast. I peered through the cracks in the walls one more time to make sure the dogs were sleeping and Markos, Helena, and Dawit were inside. My eye was still tearing from what was left of the dirt on my contact, but I could see the coast was clear.

I picked up the crate and carefully set it down under the opening, digging it into the dirt a little so it wouldn't slip when I jumped. I was going to have to jump as high as I could to get a good hold on the top of the board and then pull myself through.
God, I better fit
.

I jumped once, too cautiously, and didn't make the grab. Clearly, reaching that space was going to take more of an effort than I had thought. I squatted down low to give myself better leverage and leaped as high as I could, smashing my knee into the wall in the process. Swallowing a scream of pain, I held my breath and counted to ten, waiting for someone to
notice the huge thud that my knee had just made. But for once, luck was on my side.

Next time I jumped strong and straight.
One, two . . . Made it!
My fingers dug into the rough wood, but I ignored the sting, pausing for a second to fully appreciate the bizarreness of my situation: There I was, dangling from a tin-roofed shack in rural Ethiopia, making my escape from captivity to almost certain death. Tana was probably in her room listening to her iPod right now. Teddy was probably napping under a tree or something. My parents . . . I couldn't think about my parents.
Don't think; just do
.

I took a deep breath and pulled myself up as hard as I could, trying to walk my feet up the wall. It didn't work. I wasn't strong enough. All I could think about was my complaining about doing chin-ups in gym because “we'll never have to do anything like this in real life, so what's the point?”
Boy, if there is a God, he sure does have a sense of humor
.

But I wasn't going to give up. After all, this was the easy part, right?
One, two, three
. Walk-walk-walk-walk up the wall.
Yes!
My head and shoulders were hanging outside, but the opening was too small for
me to wriggle all the way through.
Okay, not a problem. I'm flexible
. I gave another little prayer of thanks for all those years of gymnastics classes. Pulling back a bit, I slipped one arm through, then my head, and then the other arm, almost like doing the front crawl in a swimming pool. Now half my body, from the waist up, was hanging outside. My hips are so narrow it should have been easy to slide the rest of me out.

Except that I'm an idiot. A complete and total idiot. I was about to slide face first out a hole six feet off the ground! Somehow I had to get my feet out first.
Okay, Lucy, you can do this
.

I inched back into the cabin until I was hanging onto the board by my hands again, with my knees bent and my feet pressed against the wall. All of a sudden one of the dogs let out a squeal, and the other one answered it with a growl.
Damn!
I jumped to the ground and crouched down, anxiously tapping my fingers on the dirt floor.

Six endless minutes later the dogs were quiet, and I felt pretty sure no one was coming to see what had disturbed them. I started over: stepped onto the crate, leaped up to grab the board, and this time walked my
feet up the wall between my arms and through the opening. It was almost like hanging upside down on the monkey bars, but much more painful because my hands and the backs of my knees were gripping splintery wood instead of smooth metal. Grunting with the effort, I pushed the rest of my lower body through the hole and rolled over so my stomach and hands supported me on the edge of the board. With both legs out it was easy to slide the rest of myself through and jump to the ground.
I did it!
I was actually standing outside.

After the semidarkness of the cabin, I was practically blind in the blazing sun, but my eyes adjusted quickly. My heart was pounding so hard it was a wonder the dogs couldn't hear it. Now all I had to do was run the hundred yards or so to the trees without anyone seeing me, and I'd be home free. No problem, as Iskinder would say. No problem at all.

Not wanting to waste a second, I started running as fast as I could, but I hadn't gone more than fifty feet when the dogs started barking again. How had they heard me running through the grass when they had slept through the giant thud of my knee hitting
the wall?
Don't look back; just keep running
. And I did keep running, but it wasn't long before I heard voices shouting my name, “Stop! Lucy! Get back here!”

I ran even faster, ignoring the stitch I already had in my side. The tall grass was prickly and so thick it hid the rocks that were buried underneath, but I didn't have time to think about how much it hurt each time one of my bare feet landed on a stone. The trees weren't far now, but I could hear the barking dogs gaining on me, and I knew Markos, Helena, and Dawit were close behind. I dug three fingers under my rib cage to stop the pain and kept going.

Faster, faster
.

Finally I reached the trees, but I couldn't slow down yet. There was no way I could outrun those dogs. I needed to find a place to hide. My senses zoomed in on every detail: the sudden drop in temperature, the dappled light, the twigs snapping under my feet, the gnarled bark on the trees, the faint scent of eucalyptus. I glanced up—that was where I needed to go. I would hide in the trees.

I ran wildly, directionless, searching for a tree I could climb. The dogs were still barking.
Tune them
out, Lucy. Don't listen
. There! I spotted a rock about the size of a small SUV next to a baobab tree with a long, low-enough-to-grab branch that was sticking straight out. I did a quick mental analysis: no thorns, good leaf coverage, sturdy-looking upper branches, and a clear climbing path to the canopy. An instant later I scrambled up the rock and leaped, catching the low branch in both hands.
Easy does it; it's just like the uneven bars
. I swung out, pushed myself up onto the branch, and started climbing. Gasping for breath, I climbed as high as I could until I reached the dense foliage about fifteen feet above the ground.

Eyes closed, I leaned my back against the tree trunk and braced my hands on the thick branch between my legs. I could hear Helena and Dawit calling for me, and when I glanced down, there was Markos standing directly under my tree while the two dogs sniffed the ground around him.
Don't look up; please, don't look up
. I held my breath and squeezed myself into the smallest, tightest ball I could.

And that's when I realized I wasn't alone.

P
EERING OVER MY
kneecaps, I looked straight into the small, round, black eyes of a colobus monkey.

She sat on a branch maybe ten feet above me (I guessed she was a she by her size—like a really big cat with a long white tail, super fluffy on the end like a feather duster), clutching a fistful of leaves and staring down at me as if I were some species of large, furless monkey she'd never seen before. Her silky black-and-white coat made her look like an overgrown tree skunk. Usually colobus monkeys are shy around people, but clearly she'd decided I wasn't a threat, which for some wacko reason made me feel slightly insulted:
Even a monkey can tell how scrawny and weak I am
.

I prayed she wouldn't make some hooty monkey noise and give me away.
That's right, Curious Georgina. Just keep eating your nice leaves, nice and quiet
. . . .

“Lucy!” Markos called.
Oh God, has he seen me?
“Where are you?”
No, he hasn't. Not yet, anyway
. “Come out, and we will take you to your parents.”
Oh please, do you really think I'm going to fall for that, Mr. Psycho Dog-Killer?

“You should not have run away, Lucy. We were just coming to tell you that we reached an agreement with your family,” he cajoled, searching for me around the trees like the Child Catcher in
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
. “Don't you want to go home? You cannot stay here; it is too dangerous. Come out, Lucy!” For a split second I almost believed him. I wanted to believe him so much, and he sounded so nice. Too nice. That's how I knew he was lying.

Markos stopped about ten feet away from my tree. He looked up, squinting against the sunlight that streamed though the trees, and I swear he stared right at me and Georgie. I froze, praying my green pants would help camouflage me among the leaves and that Georgie wouldn't pick now to have a screech festival.
Please, please, please, go away
.

When I opened my eyes again, he was gone—and so was Georgie. Which meant that for the first time in my entire life, I was really, totally alone.

No way, Lucy, don't go there. Not now. Okay, next topic. Something. Anything . . . monkeys
.

Remembering that colobus monkeys always travel in groups, I scanned the trees near me. Sure enough, there they were, almost hidden by the shadows but visible if you concentrated. I counted twelve of them, including a snow-white baby clinging to her mother's belly.
How many more weeks until the fur starts to turn black?
I wondered.

I sat perfectly still, watching the monkeys. I decided the trees were like a primate spa, where the monkeys dined on healthy, all-natural foods, like leaves, bugs, and bark, and beautified each other, picking off pesky fleas and forest debris. A couple of them leaped away, swinging hand over hand through the trees until I couldn't see them anymore. Not for nothing are colobus monkeys considered the best climbers in Africa.

The monkeys seemed perfectly content, and why wouldn't they be? This was their home, their natural
habitat, where they had everything they needed to do what monkeys do. All they had to worry about was avoiding predators. But me? Like the colobus, I had to worry about avoiding predators, including human predators. But unlike my primate cousins, I was way out of my element, with none of the things I needed to survive. Markos, Dawit, and Helena were bad enough. There were so many other ways I could die in this forest.

I could starve.
How long can a person go without food? Ten days? Two weeks?
To be fair, I knew that I would probably find something safe to eat before that happened, but you never know. After all, I had no idea how to tell if a plant was poisonous, and finding an animal that was willing to stand still long enough for me to kill it with my bare hands was kind of a long shot. I crossed my fingers and prayed for some nuts.

Dehydration was more likely than starvation. If I could find a water source—a stream, watering hole, anything—I'd be okay (forgetting the parasites for the moment).
If not, I'm hosed
.

Of course, all this foraging depended on my being able to forage. A sprained ankle could turn even
Tarzan into a sitting duck. Which brought me to my biggest fear of all—animals. A lion will kill you via suffocation. That's a nice way of saying tearing out your throat. Hyenas are even worse—they'll go straight for your guts. Even the cute animals like hippos and elephants are dangerous. Most people don't know this, but hippos and elephants can be extremely violent. If you get between a hippo and its water source, it'll rip the limbs right off your body with those big, powerful jaws. Elephants aren't very friendly either, especially if they've got babies around.

It was survival of the fittest, and let's face it, I wasn't very fit. I gave myself a day, two at the most. But I hoped it wouldn't come to that. I hoped I'd get lucky and find some kind of civilization before the day was out.

Which got me thinking. How would I know when it was safe to come down and start running again? It was nearly noon already—if I didn't leave soon, I might end up actually having to spend the night in the forest. A night. In the forest. Alone—with lions, hyenas, and snakes.
Oh my
.