A rustling and a gurgling was surrounding him. His bare feet stuck out of his tan, ripped pants. He stumbled. The trees where everywhere, oppressing him.
Clutched in one hand was a small, soggy piece of paper which used to be the London times, his last connection to a world that had been taken away from him so abruptly.
It had been just a little excursion. Off to a vacation resort. There had been a little turbulence which turned to a lot of turbulence, then to an emergency situation.
He remembered fire, and falling.
He was the only one left, everyone had gone, but he awoke perfectly uninjured, laying on the mulchy ground ,the London times sitting on his stomached.
He thought he had heard voices, speaking in a foreign tongue, but he guessed the forest was making him go crazy.
It had been nearly a month he figured, stumbling mindlessly through the uniform foliage.
The thing he missed most was not, surprisingly a person or a map. He missed his alarm clock. He needed his time.
His foot scraped against the wet exposed root of a tree. He cursed and rubbed his foot.
He had tried to think that the world he had lived in was bad, corrupt, to make himself feel better. But it didn’t help.
One thing that did help was dedicating his usually idle mind to academic thought. One question constantly bothered him, “What is the meaning of life?” which is all the more important when one is stumbling around in the forest.
But today was different. Today he had a plan, though not a particularly proficient one, it was a plan non the less. He was to find a temporary place to live until the search party came.
For the same reason he had fashioned a nametag out of a piece of bark in case he was incapable of speech, it said, “Ryan Wright- Hertfordshire, England.”
Ryan had considered some very nice hallow trees, but none seemed very much like they wanted someone sleeping in them. Thus Ryan walked on, with a slight limp now.
A slender, light colored, piece of wood flew past his right ear and stuck into a tree in front of him. He turned around, slipped on the wet muddy ground and hit his head on another protruding root. Reality slowly drained away.
* * *
I’m defiantly am going to have to start seeing my psychiatrist twice a week, thought Patrick VanHover. The propeller moaned, pulling the plane over the forest. It had been a grisly wreck, unrecognizable bits of twisted metal and burning trees.
He adjusted the fuel mixture and pointed the plane up, a way from the trees. No one could have survived.
* * *
He first felt the rough rope pressing against the underside of his wrists and a extreme head ache. His eyesight slowly came back, blurry first, then resolved. The ringing in his ears slowly faded to a background noise, like the sound of static on a muted television.

It was at this point that Ryan realized, he was tied to a tree. Just out of the protective circle of firelight.
He looked up, though a hole in the foliage exposing a tiny patch of the universe. He whispered “why me?”
He noticed five figures huddled near the fire, muttering in the same unrecognizable language. They had been watching him the hole time! They seemed to be holding something that interested them very much. Ryan started to struggle with the bonds only to realize his feet weren’t touching the ground, he was about thee feet up. Thus his own struggles would only tighten his make-shift manacles. He struggled anyway.
One of the men sitting at the campfire got up , walked over to him and tapped him on the head.
So busy with struggling Ryan hadn’t noticed the man get up, he stopped struggling and blinked. The man held his hands up palms facing Ryan, classically meaning “I’m not going to hurt you.” he had very dark skin.
The man untied him from the tree but kept the ropes on his hands. With the rope that was previously on the tree, he tied one end to the rope around Ryan’s wrists, the other he held in his hand. Thus creating a sort of leash.
They continued to speak to each other late into the night. Ryan’s head ache became steadily worse and he eventually drifted off to sleep.
He awoke to the crackling of fire and was startled to see his name written in the dirt next to him in very immature penmanship. He looked up and found all five men looking at him as if assessing if a appliance is fixable or not. Ryan pointed to himself and then to the words and said “my name.” over and over again. The men seem unimpressed.
They picked him up and dumped on a sled made of a hollowed out log. He protested by yelling. The men clamped their hands onto their ears and whispered reproachfully, look bewildered.
Startled Ryan quieted himself.
They dragged him for a long time. Seeing a best-seller of a memoir, Ryan took close mental notes of everything about these strange people.

They were warring light leather shirts, though the forest was very warm. Also they had leather pants. What they reminded Ryan of are Native American Indians.
As he bumped along, looking up at the canopy of trees, he noticed that the surrounding foliage was becoming less dense. There was signs of human use. Time passed.
The men, dragging Ryan, went in to a large cave. Ryan gasped, the men muttered, the entire cave, ceiling, floor, walls and everywhere in between was covered in paintings.
They depicted, hunts for some sort of wild beast Ryan had never seen before, people building odd, concave houses out of trees. But what all of the paintings seemed to point to a single painting. This being of depiction of, what looked like, thousands of people gathered around a thick deep red book.
As Ryan looked around he noticed that, in many of the paintings, there was also a red book. It seemed to be a religious icon of these abnormal people.
As they proceeded through the tunnel Ryan noticed other people in the tunnel. The log trundled along, creating a dry scraping sound.
They came through the tunnel into the warm light of an unusual sunny day, reveling adobe houses. Many people where outside doing several kinds of manual labor.
As the men (and Ryan) came into view the people looked up from their jobs, leaving the grindstone to watch the new arrivals with this odd, human-like, thing.
Soon there was a large crowd around the hollowed out tree, still scraping slowly along. The people were touching him, trying to rub off the white substance covering his skin. Though making no sound but for the occasional worried whispered remark as it proved that the white substance was his skin.
The log came to a stop and Ryan was unceremoniously dumped into a room with a dirt flood. The wooden door was lightly closed.
* * *
The television crackled and blurred with static as it searched for the signal of the news station. The static resolved into a newscaster.
“—the search for survivors in the Brazilian rain forest plane has stopped—” there was and other burst of static. “—no survivors were found—”
The television made one final attempt to stay on the channel then gave into the impending static.
* * *
The room was actually quite nice Ryan had discovered. It had a bed and a spring that came through the wall toward the back of the room, providing him with fresh water. Also they brought