Hunter Sniper

As the flames licked up and began to consume the dry twigs and sticks, it was a reminder that there was a primitive comfort in a fire. Maybe it went back to the oldest days of the cavemen, Deke thought. Wherever there was a campfire, a man felt at home.

Once the fire was going, Danilo slipped into the forest and used his bolo knife to cut a length of bamboo. The sharp blade went through the bamboo in one swift chop. Deftly, he cut away one side of the bamboo to reveal the hollow interior, which he filled with a handful of rice grains taken from his sack and a dribble of water from his canteen. He replaced the bamboo “door” that he had cut away and put the bamboo over the coals. It was an ingenious way to cook rice without a pot.

While the rice steamed inside the bamboo tube, Danilo produced half a cooked chicken from his bag.

Philly gave a low whistle. “What else have you got in that sack, Danilo? A chocolate cake?”

Danilo just smiled. It was anybody’s guess as to how much English he actually knew, but he seemed to understand them most of the time — he just chose not to speak in return. It was also possible that Danilo understood something that Philly did not, which was that silence was the first step on the road to wisdom.

The Filipino skewered the chicken on a stick and held it over the fire to heat up. Soon the skin began to crackle and brown, filling the lower part of the jungle canopy with the delicious smell of roasting chicken. Canned rations did not even begin to compare. A visceral hunger clawed inside the men’s bellies at the smell of meat cooking over an open fire. Soldiers looked enviously in Danilo’s direction and at the hot meal he was preparing.

“Hey, Danilo, I’ll give you five American dollars for that chicken,” one soldier said.

“Ten,” said another.

Danilo ignored them and focused on cooking his meal to perfection. Of course, there just wasn’t enough of Danilo’s meal to go around. With what seemed to be a collective sigh, the soldiers went back to scraping out the congealed beef stew from the walls of the steel ration cans.

When the rice began to escape from the bamboo tube to show that it had finished steaming, Danilo took it off the fire. Using a large leaf for a plate, he heaped it with rice and chicken and presented it to Deke. Danilo put the rest on another leaf for himself.

Before eating, Danilo crossed himself, and his lips moved silently in a prayer. Deke recalled seeing the man in the morning, on his knees in prayer. Deke never had been all that religious. To see such a tough man humble himself before God made Deke wonder if he ought to do more himself to get right with the Lord.

All in all, the meal was an impressive display of jungle craft of an entirely different sort than tracking the enemy or managing to move unseen through the forest.

Deke nodded his thanks. By now he was almost feeling too weak to eat. The fever was really taking hold. The air temperature couldn’t have been much less than eighty degrees, and yet he was shivering. His bones ached and his head hurt. He was deep in the grip of whatever bug he had caught.

He didn’t have much appetite. Deke never had been a big eater, and lean as he was after weeks of island fighting on Guam and Leyte, he didn’t have any reserves to spare.

But Danilo’s generosity was like a healing tonic in itself. Deke ate everything on the leaf, feeling like he had a belly full of real food for the first time in weeks. He thanked Danilo once again with a single nod, then wrapped himself in a blanket and slept.

Deke’s dreams that night were feverish, all mixed up with the farm where he’d grown up and the jungle where he was fighting to survive. He had one dream where he was hoeing weeds in a long row of banana trees. In another dream Deke imagined that he was in the woods without his rifle and a bear was tracking him, keeping just out of sight. At another point the bear turned into the jungle cat that he had seen earlier. Deke was using every trick he knew to outwit the predators, but he couldn’t seem to shake them. Strangely, the bear marked its territory by clawing Japanese characters into the trees.

Fever dreams, all right.

When he woke in the morning, he didn’t feel a whole lot better, but at least he felt more rested. Danilo pressed a tin mug full of steaming homemade tea into Deke’s hands. It tasted bitter and smelled like boiled socks, but the brew seemed to clear his head and lessen his fever.

The company’s lone remaining medic came by and checked Deke over. Japanese snipers had picked off the rest of the medics during the fight on the ridge.

“You’ll live,” he announced.

“What have I got, Doc?”

The medic shrugged. “Take your pick. Malaria, dengue, encephalitis, or maybe just your garden variety jungle fever.”

“You’ve got one hell of a bedside manner, Doc.”

“Hey, I’ve got news for you. This ain’t a bed, and I ain’t a doctor.”

Deke managed to grin. “And here all I thought I had to worry about was dodgin’ bullets.”