Wild Beasts
The plane plummeted from the sky, screaming like a released demon. It ploughed a long furrow in the jungle, scaring birds and beasts far into the forest in a cacophony of squawks, squeals, and roars. An eerie silence descended on that part of the jungle where sound had been as much in residence since the beginning of time as the huge trees and the blanket of ferns. Only the rustle of an animal late to escape broke the dead quiet, no spark flew from the shattered wings of the plane, no smoke hissed from a ruptured pipe. A bird flew high above; it’s rainbow tail feathers streaming out behind it in the departing rays of the sun. The site of the crash was nothing to it but a place where it could not land, and it flew on.
Night fell quickly in the dark recesses of the jungle, and still no sound was heard from the plane. Cautiously, a tribe of monkeys crept from the undergrowth or hand over hand down vines to the edge of the charred earth. They looked quizzically at the massive white invader in their green homeland, chirping at it in defiance. As night advanced and the moon glided it’s silent path in the high heavens, they advanced, becoming braver with time. The leader would run forward, give the plane a good look, then sit back and watch it as the other members of his group moved to join him. By dawn they had colonised the body of the plane, skittering up and down the curving metal beast as though it was no more than a particular species of tree. Noise returned again to the jungle with the dawn, the birds forgetting their fear in answer to the primal call to herald the rising sun.
The monkeys sitting on the great white expanse of the plane looked into the sky, chattering their terror at the new sound they heard. The birds scattered ahead of the low flying helicopter, which hovered above the crash site and surveyed the damage. When a rope fell from the thundering windmaker, the monkeys too ran back into the forest, watching from a safe distance as a man swung down the rope and looked over the plane.
He knocked on the cockpit, but gave up hope as the smear of blood on the inside told of the pilots fate. To no avail he tried to open the sealed door of the main body. He was watched from all around by a multitude of animals as he strove to crack the sealed door. Elsewhere in the forest a monkey smashed a nut with a stone, and ate of the contents released.
The man looked in through the windows, and he turned away from the carcass of the plane, tossing away the stone that he had been trying to the break the windows with. The silence cloaked the scene as he rose ethereally on the rope and thudded away in the helicopter.
The monkeys returned quickly, and in time the white the plane was stained by the jungle and it was lost to mankind, left to the animals as a place to stand and look around.
Al records of the flight were destroyed, and the families of the unfortunate passengers were told that it had blown up and ditched in the pacific, making any salvage operation pointless. They were told this because of a certain briefcase that one of the 450 passengers was carrying. No one knew what was in the briefcase, because the helicopter ran into bad weather on the way back to the States and crashed in the sea. Strangely, the bad weather was concentrated in the prowling shape of the USS Idaho.
In the jungle, the monkeys ate nuts.
