The flight from Lima to Pucallpa was meant to take less than an hour. Juliane Koepcke, seventeen, sat by the window; her mother, an ornithologist, in the seat beside her. They were going to spend Christmas with her father at Panguana, the biological station the family had built deep in the rainforest. Halfway there, the plane flew into a storm. Juliane saw a white glow over the wing and heard her mother say, very calmly: “Now it’s over.” Then the plane was no longer around her.
She fell from about three thousand metres, still strapped to a row of three seats that spun like a maple seed. Below, the forest looked like a field of broccoli. She woke the next day on the ground, alone. She had a broken collarbone, a deep cut on her arm, one eye almost swollen shut and a single sandal. She had lost her glasses, and without them the world was a green blur. She called for her mother for hours. Only the insects answered.
Among the wreckage she found a bag of sweets. She heard the engines of light aircraft and helicopters searching for her, but the canopy was so thick they wouldn’t have seen even a fire. Then she remembered something her father had told her over and over since childhood at Panguana: if you get lost, look for water. A trickle leads to a stream, a stream leads to a river, and people live by rivers.
She found a little stream and followed it downstream. She walked in the water, shuffling her feet along the bottom instead of lifting them, and tested the ground with her remaining sandal before stepping. On the banks, the undergrowth hid snakes. On the sandy bottom, stingrays slept. On the fourth day she saw vultures circling and, beneath them, a row of seats stuck in the mud, with three women passengers. She went closer, her heart in her mouth. One of the women had painted toenails. Her mother never painted hers.
The wound on her arm began to move. Flies had laid eggs and the maggots were growing under her skin. Juliane remembered the family dog, years before, with an infested wound, and what her father had done to cure it. The sweets ran out. It rained at night, and the cold of the jungle, which nobody imagines, made her shiver until dawn.
On the tenth day, the stream flowed into a wide river. On the bank there was a moored boat, an outboard motor and a shed with a can of petrol. Juliane poured petrol on her arm and, with her fingers, pulled out some thirty maggots. Then she looked at the boat for a long time. She could take it. She didn’t. She lay down in the shed and waited.
At dusk the next day she heard voices. Three men came out of the undergrowth and froze at the sight of a fair-haired girl, covered in bites, sitting beside their boat. One of them even thought she was a water spirit. Juliane spoke to them in Spanish and told them where she had come from. That same night, the three loggers took her downriver by canoe to the nearest village.