Little Tiny Teeth

the other passengers.

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This offer they politely declined in their own and in Phil’s behalf, and Gideon asked if it was possible for the boat to travel a little closer to the shore so that they might perhaps catch a glimpse of the rain forest wildlife. Vargas, as always, was anxious to oblige: as it happened, there was a sufficiently deep channel on the starboard side that ran along only a hundred feet from the southern bank, and he would be pleased to have the Adelita cruise in it for the next few hours. John and Gideon were to make certain to be on the lookout for monkeys and sloths in the trees, and down below for caimans and capybara, who liked to come down and lounge along the waterside when the heat of the day was on the wane.

Indeed, as dusk approached, and enormous, pink-tinged, end-ofthe-world clouds began to build on the horizon, and the light turned from brassy to golden, the small, darting swifts and swallows were replaced by larger birds: white cattle egrets and brilliant toucans and macaws. The caimans did show up along the shore, as still and gnarly as old tree stumps, their eyes and nostrils poking out of the water. And life within the trees became visible. They saw a sloth making its lethargic, languorous upside-down way along the branch of a tree—it covered only three or four feet in the five minutes it was in view—and a spider monkey and a family of squirrel monkeys chittering among the leaves.

“This is what I was hoping it would be like,” Gideon said happily.

“Yeah. Hey, is that a capybara?” John gestured at a pig-size animal wallowing in an eddy along the shore. “With the nose?”

“Tapir,” Gideon said, as confidently as if it weren’t the first one he’d set eyes on outside of a zoo.

“Well, whatever the hell it is, you don’t see them in Seattle.” He shook his head and considered. “We are really a long way from civilization here, you know?”

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“Can’t argue with that.”

The local denizens, the ones aboard the ship, also began making their appearances as the air cooled. Arden Scofield, in gym shorts and with a towel draped around his neck, came out to circle the deck for exercise. “Hundred and ten feet per circuit,” he informed them as he zipped by. “Forty-eight circuits to a mile.” Apparently completely recovered from his earlier encounter with Theraphosa blondi, he merrily mimed exhaustion and panting. “Only forty-six to go, if I can last.”

Fifteen minutes later, the Adelita slowed and Vargas returned with exciting news. There was a school of pink Amazon dolphins playing up ahead and if they cared to move back to the port side of the boat they could see these remarkable creatures for themselves.

They saw three of them slipping in and out of the water in concert a few hundred yards ahead; gleaming, blubbery objects not as sleek or graceful as the more familiar dolphins of the north, but assuredly, indubitably pink.

“Aren’t they marvelous?” Scofield called out from behind them. He had finished his walk and now stood leaning against the bar, mopping his face and watching the dolphins play.

“These fish,” Vargas said, “in all the world are found only in the Amazon. On our future trips, there will be a, what do you call him, a naturist, a naturalist, aboard to—”

He was shocked into silence by a reverberating thunk that could be felt in the floorboards, and then a microsecond later a tremendous crashing and tinkling of glass. The racket had come from behind them, from the bar, which was basically a slightly modified eight-bysix-foot prefab storage shed, the back of which had been bolted to the outside of the dining room wall, beside the entrance. Glass shelves

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filled with bottles and glasses around three sides left just enough room for a bartender to fix drinks and serve them through the opening of the Dutch door. The walls on either side had been fitted with large, fixed glass panes so that the attractive array of bottles within could be seen from the outside.

At the moment, however, it was anything but attractive. The glass pane on the port side had been shattered— shards lay everywhere underfoot—and two of the glass shelves had come down in fragments, their bottles—those that hadn’t been broken—rolling around on the floor. The air reeked of whiskey and beer. In front of this enclosure stood Scofield, openmouthed and frozen in place, his towel clutched to his chest with both hands. His eyes popping, he was staring at the shaft of a heavy, still-vibrating six-foot-long spear that had buried its point in a half-empty vodka carton inside the little room, nailing the carton to the floor. Given where the chalk-white Scofield was standing, it couldn’t have missed him by more than a foot.

The three others ran up to him. “Arden, are you all right?” Gideon asked.

Scofield just stood there quaking; rippling shudders wrenched him all the way down to his legs.

John shook him roughly by the shoulder. “Are you hurt? What the hell happened?”

That brought him around, at least to the point at which he could speak, if not yet in full sentences, then in a torrent of disconnected chips and chunks of speech, from which at least some sense could be made. “Someone...I was just, just standing ...that, that spear, it, it ...”

It didn’t take long for them to understand that the obvious had happened. Someone had hurled a spear at the Adelita. Scofield had

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been watching the dolphins, his back to the nearby shore. He had seen nothing, heard nothing, when suddenly, next to him, the window exploded and the spear came crashing through, showering him with glass shards. The wooden shaft had actually brushed him in passing. Look, you could see the abrasion on the back of his right hand. And see the little splinters of glass stuck in his arm? He had almost been killed! But miraculously the point had passed him by. If it had been even six inches to the left . . .

“Come along, now, Arden,” Maggie Gray said in her teacherly, dismissive, Our Miss Brooks tone, taking his other arm. With some of the others, she had come to see what the clatter had been about. “Let’s go and sit you down in the dining room. I’ll get the splinters out of your arm. You’ve got some in your hair too.”