📸 Photo

The nylon thread with which he had sewn his boots together had already frayed.

We went back to the tent and got an empty tin can for the glue. We met up with Kevin and Marcus on our way back to the tree.

‘We bypassed the Eslabon,’ Marcus informed him excitedly.

‘Hey, that’s terrific, really. Was it hard?’ he asked nonchalantly.

‘Piece of cake,’ Kevin replied.

‘Terrific,’ Karl said, without the slightest trace of spite in his tone, ‘we’ll get an early start tomorrow.’

Within half an hour Karl had enough glue to fix his boots, and we went back to camp.

Marcus was lying in the tent. Kevin was turning the oars over to dry on the back side. Karl set the tin of glue down near the fire.

‘It has to harden a bit before I can use it,’ he explained.

Restless as always, he got out the fishing line and hooks. He rooted around in the loose earth of the jungle with the machete until he found what he was looking for, a nice fat worm. He baited a small hook with half of it and started fishing.

‘They’re nibbling, the little bastards, they’re nibbling,’ he said to me happily, and in a short while he had hooked a minnow. He cut the minnow in two and baited a large hook with half of it, using thick fishing line.