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

52 OUT OF CAPTIVITYSonia made a quick change in course and diverted to the well. Shecame back toward us, carrying a large ceramic bowl filled with water.She set the water bowl in front of Keith and then knelt in front of him.Sonia flicked her mane of hair over her shoulder and untied the laces onKeith’s shoes and then pulled the shoes off him completely. I looked atKeith and he seemed as shocked as Marc and I were. We all exchangedglances and shook our heads. Sonia continued to wash Keith’s feet andto massage them. Like all of ours, his feet had been wet for the betterpart of twenty-four hours. They were swollen, wrinkled, and looked likea relief map of the terrain we’d been covering.We wanted to be sure that we kept the line between “them” and “us”clearly plotted on our charts, so we didn’t accept the FARC’s offer ofletting us sleep in the house—what they called a finca—that night. Wealso knew that the spot that Marc had bunked in the previous nightwouldn’t hold the three of us. We didn’t want to be separated, andnone of us wanted to have anything that the others did not. While notbeing separated was something we discussed, the desire to be treatedequally wasn’t something we talked about; we just naturally fell intothat plan. Without words, we had coalesced into a unit; we were all inthis together.That said, we didn’t begrudge anyone when he got something theothers didn’t. I wasn’t upset that Keith had gotten his feet treated asthey had. Likewise, I had gotten a pair of the rubber boots, and Keithand Marc hadn’t.We slept on top of a small hay mound, and all through the night, wecould hear the campesinos’ horses moving around in their little corraljust beyond where we slept. They were clearly uneasy about something,and their agitation bothered us, since they could have easily gotten out,come to claim their feed, and stomped on us. In the end, though, sleepwon out and we stayed put for the night.We were awakened in the morning by one of the horses munchingon the hay that had been our bed, but it didn’t matter. That morning