Building the Night

The rain stopped after about an hour.

When it stopped, the jungle did not go quiet. It got louder. Frogs started up from somewhere nearby, hundreds of them it seemed like, all making different sounds. Birds called to each other across the canopy. Something large splashed in the river behind Kai and he spun around but saw nothing except ripples spreading out across the brown water.

The light coming through the trees was turning orange. It would be dark soon.

Kai knew one thing for certain: he did not want to be sitting on the open bank when night came. He needed to move back from the water a little and find somewhere to shelter.

He pushed through a wall of ferns and found himself in a small clear space between two very large trees. The roots of the trees came up out of the ground in great flat walls taller than Kai himself. The roots made a kind of three-sided room, like the corner of a house with no roof and no front door.

He decided this was his camp.

The first thing he did was collect dry material for a fire before the rain came back. Under the thick root walls most of the ground was actually dry. He scraped together dead leaves, small twigs, and pieces of dry bark into a pile in the corner where the two roots met. He built it up into a small pyramid shape the way his dad had shown him.

Then he got out the matchbox.

He had twelve matches. He needed to use them carefully. He got down close to the tinder pile and struck the first match. The wind from somewhere in the jungle blew it out before the flame even touched the leaves.

He tried again. This time he curled his whole body around the match to block the wind. The flame bent sideways but caught the edge of a dry leaf. A thin thread of smoke rose up. Kai leaned down and blew very gently.

The leaf glowed orange. Then it caught properly and a small flame jumped up.

Kai fed it slowly. A small twig. Then a bigger one. Then a piece of bark. He worked for ten minutes crouching over the fire before it was big enough to stay alive on its own.

He sat back on his heels and looked at it with real pride.

He had used two matches. Ten left.

He spent the last of the daylight collecting bigger wood and stacking it near the fire. He also pulled long palm leaves from nearby plants and laid them across the top of his root walls to make a rough roof. It would not keep out a heavy rain, but it would help.

When it got dark it got very dark very quickly.

The fire was the most comforting thing Kai had ever seen in his life. He sat close to it and ate his chocolate bar even though it had gone soft and flat. It tasted wonderful.

The jungle at night was something else entirely. The sounds were different from daytime sounds, lower and stranger. Once, something walked past his camp in the dark, just beyond the reach of the firelight. He heard the soft heavy footsteps and saw the glow of two eyes before whatever it was turned and went away.

He fed the fire all night. He did not sleep.

But when morning light slowly came through the canopy and the birds started up their noise again, Kai was still there. Still in one piece. Still going.