Out of Captivity : Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

164 OUT OF CAPTIVITYat high altitude, circling around our position at what seemed to be thirty-minuteintervals. Pre– and post–proof of life, the equation was thesame: Planes were good and helos were bad. For most of the time inthe Second Mud Camp, the helos were not nearby.That didn’t mean we stopped jumping out of our hooches at the firstindication of air activity. I’d see the guerrillas standing in the clearingwith their ears cocked looking a little bit like a couple of hunting dogson point. We established an informal kind of threat-level assessment. Ifthe Fantasmas—the gunships—were in the immediate area, we knewto get out of our hooches and to be prepared to run. If it was a fixedwingintel bird, like our high-flying friend, we could relax.Perhaps the most positive immediate impact of the POL was that itput an end to the rules regarding our communal silence. During thePOL, we asked to be allowed to speak again, and while Ferney nevermade an official proclamation, the silence and separation rules wereeased and then eliminated. The guards no longer harassed us to stopspeaking, and even began to engage us in conversation more. The samewas true of our restraints. We still had to wear them, but we no longerhad to tie ourselves to a branch.Freer to move about and to speak to one another, we spent a lot ofour time at the Second Mud Camp obtaining an oftentimes painfuleducation in botany, ornithology, and entomology. We were constantlybeing bitten by something. If it wasn’t the tábanos (horseflies), montablancas (gnatlike pests), jejenes (no-see-ums with a vicious bite), it wasthe tarantulas and scorpions and their ant foot soldiers, the yanaves orcongas. We began to refer to getting up in the night to urinate as Russianroulette. You never knew what was going to be in your boots whenyou put them on in the dark. In addition, wasps were a constant threat,and the worst was when you were being attacked and fled the path. Ifyou lost your balance and put your hand out to steady yourself on a treetrunk, you had better hope you didn’t have the misfortune of comingin contact with the barras santas (holy bar) tree and the stinging ants of