The River Was Supposed to Be Safe

Kai had been told three things about the Amazon River before his family got on the small wooden boat.

First, the river was very wide. His mother said it was so wide that on some parts you could not see the other bank at all. Kai had not believed her until he saw it for himself.

Second, the river was full of things. Fish of every colour, river dolphins that were actually pink, giant water lilies, birds that looked like they had been painted by someone who could not decide on just one colour. His father, who was a wildlife photographer, had told him this part. His father knew everything about animals.

Third, the river was safe as long as you stayed on the boat.

Nobody had said what would happen if you fell off.

It happened because of a storm.

The storm came in the afternoon, when the sky turned from bright blue to dark grey in about ten minutes. Kai had been sitting at the front of the boat watching the water when the first fat drops of rain hit his arms. He looked up. The clouds above were the colour of a bruise.

\"Get inside!\" his father shouted from the back of the boat.

Kai stood up to move. That was when the wave hit.

It was not a huge wave. It was not even a very scary wave. But the boat rocked hard to one side, and Kai\'s feet slipped on the wet deck, and before he could grab onto anything his hands were grabbing at empty air and then he was in the water.

The river was warm. That surprised him.

He came up coughing and spitting out brown water. He could hear his parents shouting. He could see the boat about twenty metres away, turning slowly in the current. He tried to swim toward it but the river was pulling him sideways and it was much stronger than he was.

He heard his mother scream his name.

Then the current pulled him around a bend in the river and the boat disappeared.

Kai swam hard for the nearest bank. The current pushed him downstream as he swam but he kept his arms moving and his legs kicking. He swallowed more water. His arms got tired very quickly because the current was fighting him the whole time.

But he made it.

He dragged himself up onto the muddy bank and lay there on his stomach breathing hard into the wet soil. Rain hammered down on his back. Around him the jungle rose up on all sides, enormous and dark and dripping.

He turned over and stared up at the sky through the rain.

His parents would come back for him. They would turn the boat around and come back. He just had to stay on the bank and wait.

He sat up and looked at the river. The brown water rushed past, wide and fast. There was no boat. There was no sound of a motor. There was just the rain and the river and the jungle.

He checked his pockets. He had his small penknife that his dad let him carry on trips. He had a waterproof matchbox with twelve matches inside, also his dad\'s idea. He had a chocolate bar that was now a soggy mess in its wrapper. He had his compass, which his dad had given him on his last birthday and which he had never actually used.

His dad had always said: the jungle is not your enemy. You just have to know how to read it.

Kai had never been very good at reading.

But he looked around at the jungle, and then at the river, and he decided to start trying.

The first thing he did was move away from the water\'s edge. His dad had told him once that rivers could rise very fast during storms, and that sitting right on the bank was asking for trouble. Kai pushed through a wall of ferns and found higher ground about ten steps back. He could still see the river between the trees from here.

He sat on a thick root and made himself breathe slowly. In through the nose, out through the mouth. His dad did this when something went wrong on a trip. He said it helped his brain work better.

His parents would have seen him fall in. His dad knew this river well. He would not panic. He would turn the boat around and search the banks. But the current had carried Kai a long way before he got out, and spotting one boy clinging to a muddy bank in all this rain would not be easy.

His dad always said that in any survival situation the most important rule was to stay where you were if you could. Moving around made you much harder to find. But Kai had already been pulled far from where he fell in. There was no swimming back up that current.

He wrapped his arms around his knees and watched the raindrops drip off the giant leaves above him. Each one hit the soil and made a tiny round hole.

He was not going to cry. He was eleven years old and he had fallen into the Amazon River and survived. That already meant something. He was going to stay calm. He was going to do the things his dad had taught him.

He was going to build a shelter before dark.