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breathing being, and we were stuck in the stomach of it. We were food, the prey for this place, and any sense of free will we must have had melted away when the clouds rolled in.
    The rain trickled at first. We stood there silent in two rows of fifteen each. We stood stiff-backed and straight-shouldered waiting patiently under the light drizzle while Kumo sat on a tortoise-sized stone whittling a stick into an arrow with a shiny nine-inch Bowie. Occasionally, he gazed up at us, rotating his eyes over ours, staring into our souls. Then he would shake his head gravely and go back to shedding the stick.
    We watched Kumo and wondered how much he knew, how important he was. His face was elongated and oblong. A skin-headed Japanese, gaunt and lank with wide, insect eyes. He was taller than he should have been for a Jap. My height, six-foot-two, minus the meat. His smile, boyish under a praying mantis face.He wore a pair of fatigue shorts extending to the knee. Bare-chested and bare-footed, muddy with droplets of rain glistening off his face, he seemed animalistic, a jungle character, a Jap Tarzan with stretched out simian arms—arms that could throw a jab on the button of your nose from ten yards away. I glanced around at the others looking at him. Our thoughts brooded without conclusion.
    After a while, whispers broke out through the lines. Kumo told us to be silent. We should stand and listen to what the jungle was telling us. And so we did. For four more long hours. It felt like we hadn’t eaten in a day. None of us was sure of the amount of time that had passed, but this was a new day, and the day before it we had left early in the morning. We were still drowsy from the drugs. Thirst, once again, set in. One of the men on the front line, David Rigby, began to slouch, tilting his head, slowly drifting off. Kumo, whittling with his knife, glanced up and saw him. He bounced up from his seat with a stone in his hand, and in a flash threw it at Rigby. The stone had been the size of half a fist and hit Rigby hard on the forehead. Rigby crumbled to the ground. Kumo shouted for no man to move. We obeyed, standing more rigidly than before. Then he went up to Rigby with his nine-inch Bowie and bent down over him. Rigby’s head bled into his closed eyes. Kumo traced the tip of the blade around Rigby’s face, dug a bit into the skin of his cheek, perhaps to see if Rigby was really out cold. Then he stood up and grabbed some zip ties from his pocket. He hogtied the bleeding man and dragged him toward the woods. Then he opened a trap door to a hole in the earth and slid Rigby into it. It would be the last I saw of David Rigby.
    By mid-afternoon, a thicker set of clouds moved in, grey and languid, as if they had all the patience in the world. Floaters rolling like tanks across the atmosphere from a strengthening squall. Kumo gazed up at the sky and spoke for the first time since we were silenced. “Lesson from the heavy rain,” he said,snickering at us. “Now you will start to learn bushido.”
    The rain fell in heavy drops and plunked on our heads. Out in the distance we saw more thunderclouds, purplish giants, swirling in wind-sheared, dark-grey cylinders up into the stratosphere and moving fast. The sky split and lightning jolted out of the pregnant clouds, murderous rain pouring furiously, sheets of it like curtains in the distance. I peered down the line. There were others peeking about. Kumo stood there with his severe eyes bulging out at us. Slowly the group came to attention—feeling the purpose without words or communication. This was a test.
    The thunderclouds swept in on us. Lightning lit up the sky, cracking into the forest, the storm coming to humble us as its weight sunk us deep into the mud. Wind slapped our faces. The sideways rain needled our bodies as hot as stinging fire ants. Kumo sat there, sometimes peering at us with madman eyes while taking a pause from whittling sticks and fitting them with arrowheads.
    After