The Cuckoo Colloquium

25 - Dim

Dim was frustrated. He had never been this lost before.

They would all laugh at him back at Cuckoo Camp, and Fat Hus would probably dock his salary to pay for all the stuff that was never coming back-especially the boat. Even worse, the floodwaters had taken his bowler hat, and he missed it very much.

His tourists were also getting weaker by the hour. Nini couldn't even escape from a spider, and Dim had to pull her free from the webbing as if it was packing tape around a gift box of pickled mangos (though he admitted to her that it was a big spider, one of the biggest he'd ever seen). Unfortunately, spiders didn't taste very good.

"It was in my hair," she prattled on the whole night like she was reliving some overwhelming trauma.

The next day the girl seemed barely able to stand, yet he led them along the base of a steep spine that took them east with stubbornness and refused to turn north. Nini and Puso both pained and they moaned, and they were sucking the water from the creeping vines he had cut open with his little knife. They never had enough water, and the two teens sucked wildly at the small openings in the vines as if in the throes of some heated flute performances.

Westerners were peculiar, and they had customs that were downright hilarious, especially when the old Aussie insisted they wave the underpants before speaking-That was so crazy-funny! It reminded Dim of his village, where the elders told everybody what to do and how to behave, yet they were the ones getting caught in the whore houses and gambling the funds away-It was stupid! It was crazy!

Westerners were also arrogant, and this flaw didn't help them here; they lacked the knowledge to endure the forest. Dim didn't trust his tourists to stay living.

"I climb to see," he said, jumping up onto a small ledge of a near-vertical cropping of rock.

Nini carped again about her itchy eye, and she sat on the remnant of a tree that had died and would soon return to the soil. Another tree, the victor, angled upwards nearby-its large, straight trunk, bursting with different kinds of ferns. Puso sat under those ferns and complained about his stomach; he had the shits, and that was not good, either-His dehydration was showing, making him look like a withered up piece of fruit.

"Dim return soon."

He climbed the rocky face, knowing that if they just went north, they would eventually find Cuckoo Camp.

"I'm not exactly fond of heights," Nini said.

"Especially the sheer, vertical kind," Puso added.

"It first time you twos agree on anythings," Dim chirped back at them. But they didn't laugh.

He was soon well over their heads in his efforts to locate something notable-a wide river, a village, even some smoke; anything, really.

The tourists simply couldn't understand the forest the way he understood it. The datuk, the spirit of the dead, it seemed especially strong in this area, and it intended mischief-Dim had no doubt about that. He spotted it again yesterday on a high branch, and then things went dark all around. It was a blackness blacker than the night, and Dim knew that more bad things were going to happen.

The cliff was layered sandstone, and it was slanted, so that he didn't have to rely much on his hands as he ascended, more so to balance. He grumbled about their situation as he climbed, wondering why the tourists were always saying he was lucky to live among some of the world's most remarkable flora and fauna in the world; Dim didn't know what that meant, because he had never been off the island of Borneo. How could he compare his homeland to lands that were apparently poor in terms of trees and animals? It wasn't possible.