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might have broken; either way, she had once again been thrown into total darkness. She had spent half an hour searching for it before giving up.
    About an hour after that, s he’d found the road, and right away had come upon this logging truck stuck on the shoulder. Not the same truck that had blocked her way last night, but one she’d seen en route to the camp the previous afternoon. It had probably been there for days. The cab had seemed like the safest place to spend the night, since the mystery fever was supposedly spread by animals that roamed after dark.
    Now, walking up the endlessly rising road, she wondered if there were a second camp nearby, because she could smell the most delectable cooking aromas. She couldn’t identify anything as eggs or bread or any particular dish, but the totality of the smells definitely comprised…breakfast.  It lingered even after she’d gone at least a mile.
    She recalled a dream in which a juvenile chimpanzee had been trying to get into the truck cab, slapping at the window next to her. In the dream , she’d tried to let the animal in, but couldn’t figure out how to unlock the door, and had just sat there tugging uselessly at the inside latch, making kiss-kiss noises at the little ape face.
    She ran a fingertip across her right shoulder and felt five raised bumps, still sore as hell to the touch. The skin around them was rough with smears of dried blood.
    Then she remembered what had happened sometime before the dream.
    She’d awakened to find a long, furry appendage reaching into the truck through the slightly open passenger-side window. Something with claws rather than nails – therefore no chimpanzee – had been clutching her left shoulder, really digging into it. She’d cranked the window hard, making the edge of the glass bite into that grasping limb, and the thing had wailed and whimpered and squealed. When Amy eased back on the window crank, her assailant had slipped away, thumped onto the ground with a final, sad, “Oooh,” and scuffled off.
    Then there had been a suffocating stink, heavy and rotten. She’d gagged, feeling panicked in the closed space and still air, wanting to be outside but afraid to open the door….
    And then it had all vanished: the desperation, the pain in her shoulder, even the stench. The cab had suddenly smelled like a steamy shower, the very thing she’d been dreaming about ever since leaving the logging camp. It had smelled, in fact, just like the scented bath soap a friend back in California had given her, an elegant little cake in the shape of a scallop shell. She’d finally unwrapped that soap just a couple of days ago back in Dakar.
    She was sure the rest of the night had been full of vivid dreams, but could only recall the one with the little chimp trying to get into the truck. 
    Now it was hot and she felt horrible, not just the wounds in her shoulder and the long gouge along her back from skidding down the slope, but a headache as tight and sharp as any she could remember. And she simply could not adjust to the day’s brightness.
    She was hopelessly unfocused, too. Her mind kept wandering even as she told herself how badly she needed to stay alert, to be ready to charge back into the forest at the first sound of an engine.
    Almost as soon as that thought struck her, a truck growled somewhere down the hill, and she barely got into the cover of vegetation before the vehicle came within sight. The vehicle came so slowly that, for a moment, she was afraid the driver had spotted her, but the truck kept rolling by.
    The shade was exquisite . There were shrinking drops of two-day-old rain on many of the broad leaves, and Amy harvested them greedily. She wanted to stay out of the sun, but the going was too slow here in the undergrowth, and she needed to get out of this basin as fast as possible.
    A few minutes after returning to the road, she realized something was moving in the greenery, just out of sight, staying roughly abreast of