Gone Wild (Thorn Series Book 4) Read online

  GONE WILD

  James W. Hall

  Copyright © 1995 by James W. Hall.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the expressed written consent of the author, except for short passages used in critical reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to places, events, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental or is used fictitiously.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  For Leslie, who is determined to take me to a higher level. Damn her.

  And a deep thanks to the many people who helped me research and write this book. For my lovely "sister" Laura Boniske, who got me pointed in the right direction in the first place. Couldn't have done it without her. John Witty, my jungle escort and backstreets culinary buddy. Shirley McGreal, whose passion is fierce and inspiring. For Lennie Jones, the real thing. A man of dignity, purpose and good taste. For Joe Wasilewski, who took me into the heart of the heart of snake country. For Vaughn Morrison, my faithful friend and birder without par. For Patti Ragan, whose love for orangutans gave this book its heart. For Majorie Doggett and Stella Brewer-Marsden, great hosts in the Far East, wonderful ladies. For Diane Taylor-Snow, the leech specialist and much more. For Birute Galdikas, who hovers like a powerful presence above all this. And for my great friends Les Standiford and Mary Jane Elkins, who patiently read and reread my manuscript.

  And as ever, for Evelyn, who is always there, full of wisdom and love, the best friend I could ever wish for.

  What would the world be, once bereft

  Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,

  O let them be left, wildness and wet;

  Long live the weeds and wilderness yet.

  — Gerard Manley Hopkins

  CHAPTER 1

  Allison Farleigh felt the dull tingle of a leech on her neck. Her fourth this week. With her right hand she reached back and touched the thing, fixed to her flesh like a damp strand of dough. She couldn't see it, but knew the leech was black with an eerie inner shine like a dark tube of neon.

  Probably tumbled out of a casuarina tree, or brushed onto her poncho from a palm frond as she and her daughters passed. Devious bastards, they secreted a blend of anesthetic and meat tenderizer as they anchored their twin mouths. Apparently it had been drinking her blood for several minutes, because Allison could feel the warm numbness beginning to seep down her backbone.

  She shut her eyes and dug her thumb under the flattened worm, tried to picture it as nothing but a strip of adhesive, not some living creature fattening itself on her blood. She pinched the leech, took a long breath, set her teeth, and ripped it off.

  Eyes watering, she slung the thing onto the soft ground, felt the warm trickle of blood on her neck and the itch of a rising welt. She bent over and watched the creature squirm. Then she squatted, drew out her trail knife, and sliced it in two. Both halves continued to wriggle, then both began to bleed. Allison Farleigh's blood leaked into the earth, that swampy foreign soil, thirteen time zones from Florida, as far from home as it was possible to go.

  For if someone were to drill a hole into Allison's backyard in Coral Gables, tunnel straight down, directly through the molten center of the globe, eventually they would pop out in that thicket of banyan and durian, jambu-batu and liana vines. That swampy tropical forest on the exact opposite side of the earth.

  The island of Borneo, a few miles north of the equator. For the last week Allison and her two daughters had been tramping through that airless jungle swarming with pythons and mosquitoes, scorpions, tiger ants, and great mobs of hornbills and garish pigeons. Along with twenty other international volunteers, they were working on the annual Borneo orangutan census, helping to calculate how much the population had dwindled in the last year, how much closer those great apes had moved to extinction.

  Allison pushed herself back to her feet and rubbed at her neck, then stumbled as a dizzy swirl passed behind her eyes. She felt the dull cramp begin to pulse once again in her stomach. Probably from something she'd eaten, like that fish-head curry ladled out onto banana leaves on a backstreet in Singapore last week, or maybe it was the lingering jet lag, her body still twelve hours out of synch.

  She steadied herself against the tree and waited for the swoon to pass, pressing a hand to her sore belly. She listened as Winslow and Sean marched back down the trail, retracing their steps. They'd finally noticed old Mom wasn't with them anymore.

  Allison nudged herself away from the tree and took a deep breath.

  "I'm back here!" she called out.

  A moment or two later Winslow rounded a kink in the trail, her bright, coppery red hair tucked up under a Marlins baseball cap, a couple of wisps of it broken loose, trailing down her neck. She wore baggy khaki pants and pink tennis shoes, a blousy denim shirt that concealed her lanky body, the sleek physique of a distance runner. There was a blue bandanna knotted at Winslow's throat and two Nikons hung around her neck.

  Twenty-two, Winslow was the older daughter by one year, inheriting Allison's green Irish eyes, her chalky, untannable skin, long limbs, and the same thick blaze of hair. Like Allison, the girl could eat mountains of food and not an extra ounce attached itself to her. She was five-nine, Allison's height, and had chipped-glass cheekbones, oversize eyes, the severe and edgy beauty of the women on the covers of fashion magazines.

  Several steps behind Winslow, Sean came tramping down the path. Faded jeans, hiking shoes, a dark green University of Miami long-sleeve jersey. Shorter than Winslow by several inches, a few pounds heavier. Hair cut short, the way she'd worn it since that morning when she was twelve years old. Snipping her long blond tresses with pinking shears in the bathroom, coming downstairs to model the new look and announce to the shocked breakfast table that she was no longer a girl. And what are you now? Harry asked. I'm a tomboy now, she said.

  And a tomboy she remained, with more or less that same Prince Valiant cut, hair the color of late summer wheat. Gray-blue eyes. A spray of freckles across her forehead, Harry's looks, Allison's spunk.

  Always a wisecrack bubbling on her lips. Her eyes flitting from one thing to the next as if she was searching out the target for her next quip. A college athlete, Sean was a specialist in the hundred-meter breaststroke, fourth on the tennis team, point guard in intramural basketball. Sean the irreverent, never seemed to brood or fret. Didn't have the haunted shadows that sometimes darkened Winslow's eyes. Yet, it was Sean who Allison worried more about. Sean who she suspected would take the news harder. The disclosure that Allison had brought them to the other side of the world to make.

  "Chalk up another o
ne," Sean said, touching one of the leech halves with the toe of her hiking shoe. "Ms. Allison Farleigh has stretched her leech lead out even further. It now stands at an insurmountable four leeches, while her daughters, bless their hearts, are not even on the scoreboard yet. So, tell us, Ms. Farleigh, how do you do it? What exactly is your secret for leech enticement?"

  "It's my animal magnetism," Allison said. "Has them falling out of the trees."

  Sean smiled and kicked the leech off into the underbrush.

  "So what do you think, do the Dayak natives eat these things? I mean, they eat everything else in the jungle, right?"

  Winslow made a disgusted noise, sat down on a fallen log, and watched her sister.

  Sean said, "Yeah, I can see it. Your hardworking Dayak wife is sitting in her hut holding the bag of leeches she's, pulled off her kids today, she's paging through her Joy of Cooking, Borneo edition. Tired of the same old recipes. Let's see, how about some leech chowder tonight? No, that was last night. Maybe barbecued leech on yellow rice. Then, of course, there's always the old standby, leech fransais."

  Winslow shrugged off her knapsack.

  "Here we go again," said Winslow. "Off to the races."

  "Romantic Borneo," said Sean, intoning it in the hokey travelogue voice she'd been using all week. "Come with us for a visit to the home of the Ibans and the Dayaks, those romantic headhunters. Experience every colorful lower bowel disease known to modern man. Only seventy-two vaccinations stand between you and alluring, rain-drenched Borneo, vacation capital of the Far East. You can leave your American Express at home, but don't forget your malaria tablets."

  Allison smiled as she reached back to rub at the welt on her neck. Above them, from the high branches of a ficus, a gibbon sang out, and in the distance a hornbill seemed to reply, its scream sounding like some child's gruesome tantrum.

  Winslow took the waxed paper off her sandwich and began to eat. Sean popped open her Tupperware jug and drank half her iced tea in one long guzzle, then sat down on the log beside Winslow.

  "Does this mean we're doing lunch?"

  "Well, I am," Winslow said. "I'm starved."

  "Lunch it is then."

  Through the thick undergrowth twenty yards away, Allison caught a flit of movement. She peered past Winslow at a stand of tree ferns and bamboo, but whatever she'd seen had vanished back into the blur of greenery. Another bird perhaps, or one of the heavy durian fruits falling from a limb. That sharp-spiked gourd weighed three or four pounds, could knock you unconscious if you took a direct hit. Just one more of the jungle's surprises.

  They were working a quadrant of the Semonggoh rain forest two hours up the Lupar River by speedboat from Kuching. Every morning for the last week they'd left the Holiday Inn in the dark, and arrived by seven-thirty at the base camp in Serasam. Then each group of volunteers was given a rough map of the area they were responsible for that day and dispatched in different directions for the day's count. Sweeping her binoculars across the treetops, Sean was their spotter, while Winslow handled the photographic work. Bringing up the rear, Allison was the tabulator, carefully filling out the forms. Time, date, place of sighting, size, approximate age, weight, sex. Notable behaviors.

  It was Allison's fifth orangutan count, her daughters' first. Once again Dr. Sidra Tindusiri, who headed the Semonggoh orangutan sanctuary, had courted and bribed the necessary Malay officials to secure the permits the volunteers needed to be able to assist in the annual tally. Dr. Tindusiri knew within a few square miles where each of her rehabilitated orangutans was supposed to be, but it was the volunteers' job to confirm that each of those apes was still alive. A task it would have taken Sidra months to accomplish with her limited staff.

  This year there was a sense of dread among the volunteers, because for the last few months there had been steady reports that a band of poachers had been working this part of the jungle. The bastards used high-powered rifles to blast mother apes out of the trees so they could steal their newborns and sell them as pets or to unscrupulous zoos. As the orangutan population declined, its price soared. Forty thousand dollars a head was this season's rate for wild-born babies. A reward so high, apparently the poachers had grown brazen enough to hunt in even that well-patrolled national preserve.

  Poaching orangutans anywhere was bad enough, but hunting down the rehabilitated animals that roamed this preserve was particularly horrific. Years of work went into reestablishing each ape into the wild. Most of the adult apes in this part of the jungle had once been domesticated pets. Abandoned on the streets of Taipei when they'd grown too large and threatening, or voluntarily handed over to the Malaysian government's rehab program, these apes were getting a second chance. But in their years as household pets or as nightclub entertainment, they'd lost their natural fear of humans, and often made easy prey.

  One of Allison's goals this year was to take home a stack of photographs of this section of the jungle; the apes at play, at rest, mothers and their babies. She was hoping Winslow's shots would be strong enough to help sell an article to Nature or National Geographic, a passionate piece that would detail the orangutan's plight, plug Sidra's work and Allison's organization on a huge scale. Get more money flowing in this direction.

  While Allison's watchdog league was devoted to shutting down the buying, selling, and smuggling of all endangered wildlife, Allison specialized in orangutans. Pongo pygmaeus. People of the forest, the orange apes, wild men of Borneo. Their long, reddish hair standing out from their bodies as if it were charged with static electricity. Bulging stomachs and eyes full of melancholy wisdom. They spent their lives in the forest canopy, dangling from limber branches hundreds of feet up, or bending saplings like pole vaulters to reach down for pieces of fruit, jambu-air, longsat, nangka.

  Same number of teeth as man; blood pressure, body temperature the same. Ninety-eight percent of their genetic material identical to humans. And as far as she was concerned, whatever comprised that other two percent was pretty damned wonderful. The orangutans Allison had spent time with were a hell of a lot more intelligent and certainly more trustworthy than most of the humans she'd run into.

  Seven years ago it had begun for her. Returning from Harry's consulate job in Brunei, Allison had gone with Harry and her daughters into a back room at customs at the Singapore airport to check on their Labrador before their long flight home. It was a muggy afternoon, everyone cranky.

  The Lab was fine, thumping its tail against the wire mesh as they approached. But in a far corner of the room, Allison noticed a stack of cages filled with primates. Chimps, macaques, gibbons, orangutans.

  As she veered toward them, gooseflesh broke out on her arms and neck. While she stood before the cages, some of the animals gibbered and peeped, but most were silent, staring at her with the look she came to recognize as forlorn and confused.

  At that moment, gazing into their baffled eyes, Allison felt a deep ache growing inside her. Spellbound, she watched as the apes shifted in their cages, as one grabbed the bars and rattled, and from inside another cage a hairy hand reached out through the bars toward her, then suddenly drew back.

  "You going to eat, Mother?"

  ***

  Allison said yes, took off her backpack, found a dry spot at the base of a neram tree and sat. She opened her canteen and took a long sip.

  "So, Winslow," Sean said. "You read about the palangs yet? The penis ornaments?"

  "Penis ornaments?" Winslow eyed her sister suspiciously. "Get out of here, Sean."

  "No, it's real, I swear. Isn't it, Mother?"

  Allison nodded that it was.

  "It's true," Sean said. "They stand in the cold river, get all shriveled and numb, then they drill holes in the tips of their penises. And later when they're healed, they pull out the retainer plug and insert colorful, interesting thingamajigs in the holes. Feathers, small bones, wood carvings. Something pretty. Part decoration, partly to please their women. Like a French tickler or something."

  "You read this?"<
br />
  "Yeah, in one of the books Mother brought. Palangs."

  "And their women are supposed to like that? A bone through the penis? Jesus."

  Sean took a bite of her sandwich. A slug of iced tea.

  "Maybe what it is, it's a trick the Dayak women play on their guys," Winslow said. "They tell them what they want, so the men go off, drill holes in their wieners. Their women are sitting around laughing about it: 'Those idiots, they fell for it again.' "

  Allison chuckled.

  "What I was thinking," Sean said, "maybe we could open a shop back home. Be the first to introduce palangs to America. A little stall at the mall like the Piercing Pagoda."

  Winslow let out a whoop. The two of them matched laughs for a few moments, then Winslow folded up her waxed paper, slipped it back into her pack, the chuckles fading.

  "No, no," Winslow said, "it would never fly. American men are too spineless."

  "I don't know," Sean said. "You present it the right way, put the proper spin on it. Get some celebrity spokesman, Stallone, Schwarzenegger, one of those guys: 'My woman can't get enough of my new palang. Are you man enough?' "

  Winslow chuckled.

  "Never work. The only guys who'd do palangs would be ones you wouldn't want to be around anyway. Motorcycle guys, tattoo geeks, like that. The nose ring crowd."

  "What do you think, Mother? Is this an idea or what? Maybe a whole new career path. Forget law school. Open a little kiosk at Dadeland Mall. Drill and Fill. Introduce palangs to Middle America. We wouldn't have to pay the staff. I know a dozen girls who'd do that work for nothing." Allison felt her smile drifting away.

  Sean swung back to Winslow and said, "Okay, here it is. I got it now. So, yeah, maybe some American men don't have the guts for something like this. Then we'd have to offer a whole different product line. Fake palangs."

  "Fake palangs?"

  "Yeah, yeah, like that arrow-through-the-head thing by that comedian, Steve Martin. You know, a flesh-colored spring that fits around their penis, looks like they drilled a hole, but they didn't really. An optical illusion palang. We could have bones, arrows, maybe some yuppie stuff miniature golf clubs, little tennis rackets. Customize your own palang. Go home, pull down your shorts, it's 'Honey, look what I did for you.' "