WITH TOOTH AND NAIL: Thrilling action and suspense (The Max Donovan adventures Book 2) by Riall Nolan

Author:Riall Nolan [Nolan, Riall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: THE BOOK FOLKS bestselling thriller publisher
Published: 2023-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I woke at sunrise and lay quietly in bed for a while, listening to the forest sounds as the day began. Pale green light filtered in through the windows and slanted across the bed. Finally, Lindy stirred and opened her eyes. “Oh, great, it’s tomorrow,” she breathed.

She rolled over, looked at me and smiled. “Still here, huh?”

I smiled back. “Still here. Who gets to make breakfast?”

“Wrestle you for it,” she said.

* * *

We breakfasted on toast and kinkiliba tea. Then I shook a hunting spider out of my boots, got dressed, and went outside.

The chimps had been up for hours. They greeted us effusively as we came out of the hut, clustering around and making small grunts of pleasure and anticipation. “They’re looking forward to their walk,” Lindy explained. “We go out for a couple of hours every morning. I usually take them down into the valley to look for food. Afterwards we can have a bath and sit around – it’ll be too hot later to do much.”

“Fine,” I said. I picked up my shoulder bag, and we started off into the bush. The forest had been washed by the night’s rain, and now it sparkled in the light, the colors vibrating softly in the crystal sharpness of the early morning.

It is a very Mediterranean light. In the hot lands, however, such a light only comes rarely, and only in the morning. In an hour or less, the sun would climb higher in the sky, dragging heat like a blanket across the forest. The air would lose its tang, and by noon, the bush would look like a washed-out color photograph, the blinding glare of the sun overwhelming and flattening everything.

But for now we enjoyed the morning’s coolness and light as we moved easily through the high trees along the side of the broad river valley that stretched away to the south of the camp, towards the mountains in Guinea.

After twenty minutes, Lindy stopped. “Time for breakfast,” she announced.

“We just ate,” I pointed out.

“Not us, silly. The chimps.”

She pointed to a large anthill just off the trail. In West Africa, the ants come equipped with a pretty decent set of pincers, and in the dry season, they’ll form huge, long ribbons along the ground as they snake through the forest – or through your house – in search of food and water. They also build nests which look like something out of science fiction – tall skyscrapers of yellow-red mud, some of them twenty feet high.

“Ants for breakfast?”

She grinned. “Watch.” She picked up a stick from the ground and thrust it into the entrance to the nest. The chimps had surrounded the anthill now, and were grunting excitedly and jumping up and down. Almost immediately, ants boiled out and began running up the stick.

“Hey, careful,” I said, stepping back. “Those bite.”

“Relax. They won’t bite you if you’re careful.” She held up the stick and began to lick ants from it, eating them the way a kid would lick chocolate sprinkles from an ice cream cone.

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