Natural Selection (A Free Spider Shepherd Short Story) Read online

from the man. Navigation had always been one of Shepherd’s strengths, his near-photographic memory meant that he usually knew exactly where he was, even if he didn’t have a physical map to hand.

  The stop-start patrolling routine continued until midday when they stopped for an hour and ate a lunch of more tea, biscuits and cheese, then carried on patrolling until two hours before dark, when they ate their main meal of patrol rations, tea and more hard tack biscuits. After that the patrol moved on for another hour, then sat and listened again. Once they were sure everything was quiet, they doubled back on their tracks, stopped to listen again for one more hour and then after night had fallen, they put up their bashas, changed into clothes from their bergens that were only damp instead of soaking wet, and stripped down, cleaned and oiled their weapons. They did it one at a time, so that the rest of the patrol was always armed and ready to respond to any threat. Eventually they bedded down for the night on the jungle floor, using a candle to read or study for an hour or two.

  Shepherd lit a candle and unpacked his kit then sat by his basha and stared into the black depths of the jungle. The iridescent shells of beetles sparkled in the flickering light of his candle and huge luminous eyes reflected it back to him. Lizards of all colours, salamanders and frogs were captured by the light for a moment before disappearing among the foliage.

  He blew out the candle and lay back, feeling rather than hearing the sonar of bats swooping and twisting between the trees as they hunted down moths, while a torrent of other noises flooded through the darkness. A gibnut foraging in the litter of the forest floor gave a hoarse bark and clattered off deeper into the jungle. A howler monkey screamed its defiance into the night, frogs and toads croaked endlessly and there was the squeaking, buzzing, clicking and rattling of a million insects, but none of the jungle noise sounded threatening to him, not even the snarl of a jaguar deep in the forest. He fell asleep at once, so tired from the exertions of the day that he was oblivious to the thought of the snakes, scorpions and other venomous creatures that he knew roamed the forest floor.

  For five days they followed the same hard routine, sleeping on the ground, eating cold rations and drinking water collected from small tributaries of the river system. They kept up their silent patrols from dawn to dusk, following Pilgrim through the jungle. As Shepherd watched him, learning from his actions, he became convinced that if he wanted to, Pilgrim could probably walk on water - he seemed to be able to do everything else.

  A couple of hours before sunset on the fifth day, Pilgrim called a halt in a space where a fallen hardwood had created a temporary clearing. Nothing was said, but Shepherd had the feeling that all four of them had passed the test Pilgrim had set. ‘You’ve earned a hot meal so we’ll cook tonight,’ he said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud after so many days of communicating in whispers. ‘Jimbo, gather some dead standing wood - dead branches still on the trees.’

  Jimbo worked his way into the forest and snapped off several long, dead branches. ‘Now we have to feather it,’ Pilgrim said. He stripped off the damp bark from the smallest pieces, then feathered the wood by shaving a ring of fine flakes away from the branch. He set Geordie and Liam to do some more. ‘We need about fifteen of those; no shortcuts if you’re going to light it with one match - or one strike of the flint if your matches are wet.’

  When they’d prepared enough wood feathers, Pilgrim pulled a few tufts of cotton wool from the medical kit and handed it and a flint to Shepherd. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Now all you have to do is light it.’

  Very aware of Pilgrim’s eyes on him, Shepherd flinted it, blew gently on the spark, and then began feeding in the wood feathers one at a time as the cotton wool burst into flame. He added sticks and larger branches as a thin column of blue smoke drifted upwards and the sticks crackled as the fire caught hold.

  ‘Not bad,’ Pilgrim said. ‘Boil up some water in a mess tin, Geordie, and make a brew while Shepherd and I find us something to eat. You’ll never starve or die of thirst in the jungle; the one thing that will kill you is disease.’

  ‘Or drug-traffickers or Guatemalan soldiers,’ Shepherd said.

  ‘Or those,’ he said. ‘But food’s no problem. Not if you know what to look for.’

  They walked into the jungle and Pilgrim found a standard palm tree. He pulled out his bush knife and gave it to Shepherd. ‘Shin up the trunk and cut off the top growth.’ Shepherd climbed a few feet up the trunk and hacked off the pale green top growth. He dropped it down to Pilgrim and slid back down the trunk. Pilgrim carried it back to the clearing, stripped off the outer layers and threw them on the fire and then passed the tender heart of the palm to Geordie. ‘That’s our vegetable, I’ll go and get the meat. There’s a softwood tree in Belize, softer than birch - you can cut it down with a parang - your jungle knife - strip off the bark and the heartwood looks and tastes like chicken.’

  ‘What if the tree doesn’t grow in this area?’ asked Liam.

  Pilgrim gave an enigmatic smile. ‘Then we’ll be needing the curry powder.’ He returned a while later with his supplies wrapped in an attap leaf and announced ‘I’ll cook it. It needs a special knack to bring the best out of it.’

  He chopped up the meat, roasting it until it was brown, then made a curry and served it up with the palm heart, using more attap leaves as plates. Shepherd and his mates fell on it like starving men, the first hot food they’d had in a week.

  As they sat eating, Pilgrim glanced around the circle of faces. ‘Any of you done a jungle survival course yet?’

  All four shook their heads.

  ‘I used to train pilots - they all have to do the course in case they have to eject from their aircraft and E & E through enemy territory. The biggest problem is always a psychological one, getting people to eat things that their bodies need, but their minds might reject: plants and fish, but also insects. Pound for pound insects will give you more protein than beef.

  ‘The first time I did the course, I made a serious mistake. I gave them some insects to eat: termites, ants eggs and rhino beetle grubs. The beetle grubs look especially revolting. They’re grey and bloated, about seven inches long, and have four sets of legs on the middle. They look even more hideous when they’ve been boiled, but they’re very nutritious. I managed to persuade one pilot to volunteer to taste one but as he tried to put it in his mouth, it flopped over onto his chin. It wasn’t alive, it had been boiled after all, but the pilots all took one look and then point blank refused to touch them.’

  ‘You can’t blame them,’ said Liam. ‘I don’t think I could something like that.’

  ‘Depends how hungry you were,’ said Jimbo.

  ‘If I was that hungry, I’d take a bite out of you,’ said Liam. ‘But a grub?’ He shook his head. ‘No bloody way. I’d rather go hungry.’

  Pilgrim smiled. ‘Anyway I left them to it while I went back to my base camp, roasted the insects, chopped them up and made a curry with them. I served it up that night when they were all starving hungry and they wolfed it down. They all thought it was delicious until I told them what was in it. So that was a lesson learned: the first time you feed insects to anyone, camouflage the fact.’

  Shepherd’s expression had been changing throughout the latter part of Pilgrim’s story. He put down his fork, looked around and saw that the others had also stopped eating. He thought about it for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed. ‘Bastard,’ he said. ‘Rhino beetle grubs?’

  Pilgrim nodded. ‘And termites and ants eggs.’

  Liam put his hand up to his mouth. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘It’s protein,’ said Pilgrim. ‘And now you’ve eaten it, and enjoyed it, next time…’

  Liam nodded. ‘Point taken,’ he said.

  They made another brew and then Pilgrim began educating them on regimental policy as he saw it. Still unbadged and with nothing having been said directly, Shepherd took the way that they were now being taken into Pilgrim’s confidence as sign enough that he now no long
er regarded them as candidates on Selection but as members of the Regiment. ‘A lot of the guys serving in the Regiment are happy to coast along taking promotion and career moves,’ Pilgrim said, ‘but they’re not prepared to put in the hard work and the hard yards to be a proper professional SAS soldier. With a couple of honourable exceptions, most of the trainers on the Selection course are also guys who couldn’t make it in the fighting Sabre Squadrons. They’re happy to lord it over the new recruits but will find any reason to avoid going back to a squadron.’

  Shepherd nodded enthusiastically. That was exactly what he’d been thinking, even before they had arrived in Belize.

  ‘However, there is an inner core of like-minded guys within the Regiment who want to be the best of the best,’ Pilgrim continued. ‘You’ll never hear them bragging and big-timing about the stuff they’ve done. They don’t need to. They know and their comrades know, and that’s all that counts, but if you study them and learn from them, you might one day join their ranks. I’ve seen enough in you four to think you all have the potential to do so, but only you can decide whether you’re willing to make the necessary commitment. Green Army training and even SAS training will just give you the basics. After that, you must then put in the follow-up