FOUND TREASURE

FOUND TREASURE

“We’ve been walking for days. I think we are lost. I think we should turn back. We’ve already lost two sherpas.”

“They are not sherpas,” corrected Reggie.

“What are they then,” said Jake with sarcasm. “Oh please enlighten me, oh mighty brother?”

 “To begin with, Sherpas are Tibetan people from the Himalayas in Nepal. They act as guides for mountain climbers and hikers.”

“Whatever! They are just our mules.”

“You might be less condescending, more respectful, and more politically correct.  We are not in Tibet, not even close, not even in the same hemisphere or same side of the planet, for that matter. I mean, these guides have got us safe and sound this far.  Without them, we would just be running around in circles looking for this ancient ruin.  This is their home turf. They know the terrain, the weather, the vegetation, the wildlife, the trails. They know what they are doing. Sherpas and these Peruvian guides have risked their lives to take people like us to where they want to go. Show some respect.”

“Whatever.”

“ Is that your answer for everything? I know you always say you are geographically challenged but, you asked for enlightenment and because we now have time for a geography lesson, listen up.”

Jake rolled his eyes as Reggie continued his montage

“Tibet and Sherpas are in a cold snowy, icy mountainous region. In case you didn't notice, we are in the tropics, filled with monkeys, mosquitos the size of cars, and panthers that stock us at night.

“Don’t forget the Piranha-infested waters,” Jake inserted.

“Like I could forget that. I barely made it across that last creek unscathed. 

“Well, I don't know why you have insisted on going to this God-forsaken country to find this ancient ruin and find some golden deity statue thingy which is probably just a myth or an urban legend. Especially when we could be back home getting ready for the holidays.”

“Jake, sometimes your stupidity astounds even me, and I have had to live with it for twenty-two years.

“Yeah, but we are brothers. Ya gotta love me,” Jake struck a pose, clasping his hands over his heart.

“For my sins. You are the cross I have to bear. My burden in life. My trial by fire. My …”

“Yeah, yeah! I’ve heard all this before. So what do you think actually happened to those two missing Sherpas?” Jake correctly interpreted his brother's glance and added. “Ok, ok. Guides. What do you think happened to those missing guides? I’ll tell you what I think happened to them. My first thought was they wandered off and got eaten by a jaguar or a panther or whatever inhabits this forest,  or maybe they got too close to the water and got eaten by a swarm of frenzied piranha.”

“ No! I checked our supplies, which I do nightly, and found out that there were some missing provisions from our packs. I think they got spooked and amscrayed.”

“So you think they just stole some supplies and bugged out?”

“Yup.”

“Crap! I guess they didn’t like the human bones we found today, along this trail.”

“Guess not. Which means, little brother, that you and I have to each carry a pack now.”

“In this heat.  I'm sweating bullets as it is. I can barely make it through this jungle.”

“Rainforest.”

“Whatever!”

“It's getting late,” said Reggie, “we better turn in. You are going to need all the beauty sleep you can get. Tomorrow is going to be brutal. The temperature is climbing tomorrow and those packs have got to weigh a million pounds even with the stuff those guides took from us.”

Reggie threw a few more logs on the fire to keep the fire going. He headed into his and Jake's two two-man tent. It certainly wasn't for warmth, the nighttime temperature in the rainforest was still steamy. It seemed, however, to keep the big cats in the rainforest at bay. They were far from civilization and the wildlife was unused to seeing fire.

Reggie zipped the tent flap closed securely. They slept atop the sleeping bags which had thick mats under them. The lantern was between them. Reggie laced his fingers behind his head and stretched each muscle in his body. He glanced over at his brother, Jake was almost asleep, he could tell this after spending most of his years sharing a bedroom with his little brother.

“Reggie,” questioned Jake, his voice heavy with tiredness. “Do you think it might be wiser to turn back … like those guides did?  Many people have searched for this ancient relic and many have not returned. Look at those bones we found along the trail.”

“ Our guides are experienced, we’ll be ok.”

“What of the ones who deserted us?”

 “They were from a different tribe. The guides we hired were just using them as … what did you call them …  mules?”

“Mules!”

 “To carry all our equipment. You're the one who insisted on all these…creature comforts. A Coleman stove, pots, pans, sleeping pads, tents, and what was it, oh yeah,” real food”. Lots and lots of “Real Food.” You wouldn’t have come if we were just going to be living off the land like I usually do on these trips.”

“ I had to come, Grandpa forced me. He said that since my tropical vacation got canceled, I could ‘Jolly Well’ come on this trip with you and man up. He said since I am good with a camera, I could take pictures of all the treasures you find and make myself useful.  When Grandpa says jump, you say ‘how high.’ He holds the purse in this family as you well know since he is financing this little jaunt of yours to find some ancient golden relic. You are Grandpa's pride and joy, following in his career footsteps. He is now living vicariously through you. I'm just an obligation he has had for the past ten years since Mum and Dad died in that car accident. According to Grandpa, you broke the mould, I'm just a poor carbon copy.”

 “You're not going to start this crap again, are you?”

“Hey, look, you’re the one who grew up sleeping in a hammock hung from that old Maple tree in our backyard every hot steamy summer. I was the one nestled in my bed with the air conditioner on full blast. You were the one foraging in the woods for edible mushrooms to cook over your campfires. I was the one dining on filet mignon.

“Here we go again,” said Reggie under his breath. “So our priorities were different. Big deal.”

“You’re the one who went to university to study… whatever it was you studied and mastered in Indiana Jones 101.

“Really!”

“I just came on this trip to keep you company, to keep you out of trouble, so you wouldn’t go half-cocked, madly into the fray.  I'm here to be the voice of reason.”

“Ha! You, the voice of reason. That's rich. I remember when mother…”

“Oh please,” broke in Jake. “There you go again. We have discussed this ad nauseam. We have always been brothers but we have never agreed on anything in our entire adult lives. If you say black, I say white. We are as different as night and day. You are brave, I am… I am, yes I admit it, afraid of spiders. You're always useful, I'm always useless. You were always early to school. I was always late. I was always neat, and you were always dirty. Digging some holes in the back fields trying to find some ancient relic. An arrowhead or part of an old lantern. You were always hard at work, I was always hard at play. We are as far apart as the North is from the West.”

“It's actually as far apart as the North is from the South, or you could say as far apart as the East is from the West,” corrected Reggie.

“See, there you go”, said Jake with exasperation. “You are always right and I am always wrong. You are clever, I am stupid.”

There was a deep silence in the tent.

Reggie finally broke the silence. “You're not actually stupid you know, I sometimes say you are, but you’re not, you sometimes just act stupid.”

“Well, maybe it's the defense mechanism that my shrink always talks about because I have to be different from my perfect, smart, can-do-anything-better-than-anybody-else brother. You were always the success, I was always the failure. Do you have any idea what it is like, living in your shadow?”

“So you took a different career path from Dad and Grandpa. Why do you blame me for your ….”

“Dad and Grandpa always doted on you Reggie; I was only tolerated.”

“Jake, we used to be so close when we were little. I think that deep down inside you resented the fact that I lived through the accident and Mum and Dad died.  What happened to us?”

“ You know what I really resented? I resented the fact that I wasn't even allowed to go on that last car trip. Our parents took you but left me behind with Grandpa.”

“We were going to look at an archeological dig,” said Reggie. You would have been bored out of your mind, besides, you had chickenpox. If you had been in that car that day, you might have died too.”

“You always have to rationalize everything.”

 Silence penetrated the tent. 

Reggie and Jake awoke early the next morning to the sound of their guides breaking camp and preparing for the day's trek. Reggie had a word with the head guide, Eduardo, who informed him that they should reach the ancient ruin which was their destination, by noon at the latest. Reggie was eager to start the last leg of his journey and had convinced Jake to forgo the long preparations of a cooked breakfast.  They would instead, dine on the bounty of the rainforest. A plethora of fruit grew everywhere and the nearby river had water, which although piranha infested, was fresh and surprisingly cool. In this remote area, there was no concern about toxins and pollution in the water.

Jake grumbled about missing his morning coffee but was soon easily distracted by the excitement of the native guides. Reggie was pacing back and forth in anticipation of reaching the ancient site.

The guides spoke Spanish and Quechua, which was their ancestor's ancient tongue. Reggie spoke a little Spanish but the head guide spoke some English so they managed to make each other understand.

 They had several hours of hard climbing in front of them. The level land was starting to incline steeply and their destination was on the other side of this small mountain range. To go over the range would cut off several days of travel that they would have had to endure by going around the mountains. It was much faster to go over, said Eduardo, the guide. They followed an old game trail that meandered through the rainforest.

They had almost reached the top of the first cliff when a sudden landslide of rocks started tumbling down upon them. Each man ran for their life. It only lasted for a few seconds but when the dust had settled, Reggie was nowhere to be found.  All that remained where he had been walking was a pile of rubble. Jake scoured the area and even started frantically pulling at the rocks on the trail when a cry was heard and inching forward the weary travelers headed to the edge of the trail beside the cliff's edge. Reggie was about twenty feet down the mountainside. Fortunately, he had landed on the only rock ledge on the mountainside. The terrain he had landed on was strewn with rocks and debris from the landslide, but there were a few scrub trees and low bushes clinging to the side of the mountain. It was on these that Reggie had landed.  Reggie was lying on his back in the middle of a bush.

“Reggie?”  There was fear in Jake's voice.” Are you okay?”

“I don’t know.” Reggie slowly raised his arms and then his legs. 

“I don't think anything is broken, thank God, but everything is definitely not alright. I’m covered in blood and I think my head is going to fall off.”  He tried to sit up but fell back.

“Can you climb up?”

Reggie turned his head slowly and scanned the rock face. “No, the rock wall is sheer rock, not a hand or foothold in sight.”

There was a flurry of activity amongst the guides and one of them unpacked a long thick coil of rope from his pack and held it up grinning. The guides started to chatter away in a language that Jake did not understand.

“Hey bro,” Jake shouted down. “We have a rope. How are you doing?”

“My head feels like it got hit by a sledgehammer and my back feels like a tank ran over it. He put his hand to his head and when he pulled it away it was covered with blood.

“ Are you able to climb up if we throw you a rope?”

Reggie tried to sit up but flopped down and lay still.

“Reggie? Reggie?”

During this conversation between the two brothers, the guides had managed to tie one end of the rope to a giant boulder by the edge of the drop. Eduardo held the other end out to a burly guide who was preparing to tie it around his waist.

“No! No! Tie around my waist, I'm going down for him.” Jake pantomimed his words to the guides.

“You no big,” said Eduardo. “Diego, he strong.”

“But that's my brother,” said Jake.

Eduard shrugged but tied the rope around Jake's waist and showed him how to repel himself over the cliff.

Jake took one more look over the edge then steeled himself and repelled off the cliff. It didn't take long to reach the boulder-encrusted ledge.  When he landed on solid ground he looked over at Reggie, lying still but with his eyes half-opened.

Jake leaned over Reggie,

“Hey Man, let's get you up to safety okay.”

“Jake, how did you do that? I thought you were deathly afraid of heights.”

“I am.  But I am more afraid of losing you.”

The guides strained and pulled to get the brothers up the mountainside. They gave Reggie water from the canteens they carried while  Eduardo rendered medical aid.  They carried him over the barricaded trail and found an area where they could set up a temporary camp until Reggie was able to be moved. 

Reggie wanted to press on the next day. They traveled very slowly due to Reggies weakened condition. It was mostly downhill as the ruins were on the other side of the peak where Reggie had tumbled down the cliff.

They reached the ancient ruins several hours later. There was a rough clearing in front of the ruins. The guides were using machetes now, hacking away at the undergrowth and vines that covered the entrance to the largest structure. Reggie was almost trembling with excitement. It wasn’t quite Machu Picchu, but it was still a significant historic site. At last, the opening was wide enough for a man to pass through. Reggie and Jake quickly entered and waited for the rest of the guides to enter, they quickly shook their heads Reggie looked at Eduardo.

“They no go in.” Eduardo shook his head. “ Ancient curse to them that go in. I said to you before we start. We sit outside. We wait.”

 Reggie and Jake clicked on their flashlights, illuminating the interior of the relics. There were ancient scripts on the walls, Jake was eager to take photos but that would have to wait till after they had found the treasure. Reggie had studied the ancient Inca tribes in the remote La Rinconada district of Peru since he was a child. He loved the legends of the gold statues in the temple ruins, and now he himself, stood in the hallowed halls of the temple.

“Look,” said Jack, turning his flashlight to the far wall,” a table.”

“It's an altar,” said Reggie, “an altar to Wiracocha, the creator god. The Inca’s melted gold and made golden statues to honour him. Professor Lopez,  at university, told me about him.”

 They trained their flashlights around the altar. Underneath, Reggie discovered a square box-like structure. It looked like it was made from some dark petrified wood. On the sides were carved reliefs of the God-like figure, Wiracocha.  Putting it gently on the altar, Reggie, trained in dealing with antiquities, carefully opened the box while Jake trained his flashlight directly on it.

There was nothing in it. 

“Crap,” said Reggie. They stared for a long time at the empty box. “Looks like we aren’t the first people to find this site after all.”

Jake put his hand gently on Reggie's shoulder. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry you didn't find your treasure.  Actually … I’m sorry about a lot of things.”

Reggie turned and stared at Jake, disappointment etched deep in his face. He noticed Jake's hands, now wrapped in gauze, protecting the severe rope burns that he received while carrying his brother to safety, he noticed the large bruise on his brother's head, the wound he received from protecting  Reggie from smashing into the cliff wall while navigating up the sheer face of the mountain.

“I think I did find a treasurer …  of sorts,” said Reggie.

“Is the box worth a lot?” questioned Jake.

“No! This trip is pretty much a bust, obviously, someone else made it here before we did, but I think I found my little brother again, you’re my treasure.” Reggie pulled his brother into his arms for a quick embrace.

“I love you, Bro.”

“I love you too,” Reggie smiled. “ Enough of this mushy stuff. Now go get your camera and get busy.”