Maria Faulkner re-writes the true story of Clara Rojas’s horrifying ordeal deep in the Columbian jungle.
All around the muddy tent guerrilla guards swore, farted and spat.  Clara Rojas’s birthing was heralded by the crudest of masculine choirs.  Alongside the edge of the tent a tarantula hid, its hairs raised, fangs open, a mirror of her own fear.  Something was wrong.  The baby would not come.  Pain seared through her groin, down her cunt, into the opening that screamed for release.  A tribal sound escaped into the night.  The guards signed the cross.  A dead woman and child would be an unholy curse. One of her captors leaned over her, a crude anaesthetic was given and then he bent to his task.  Slowly he slit open her abdomen with his knife.  

Juan ran his fingers over the words she had written in her letter, begging him to return.  They were written in Spanish, his native tongue.  He read them in French, the country she had chosen as their political exile. The pages were worn with reading.  He knew them all, memorised, like her face in the photograph after her release.  How could she possibly look so well.  Were these the voices that had sustained her?  If so, they left only a hollow despair in him.
‘O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.’
He was tired of it all.  His longing for the jungle had brought him here and he did not intend to return again.

He quietly adjusted the rifle against his shoulder.  Across the narrow clearing the eyes of the panther gleamed in the darkness of the jungle.  She was beautiful, a sleek intensity in her slow movement across the branch.  She was alert as she lapped at the muddy pool under her feet.  He aimed between her eyes.  Was this the same cat that drove his mother and friend back to captivity?  Her panting became his, against the richness of the green dripping foliage around them.  Her tail switched, back and forth, back and forth.  He pressed the trigger, preparing for her rush toward him.  Her muscles tensed, a spring in every curve and twist.  Their eyes met and she leapt.

It was over.  Juan held the crude necklace in his hands.  His mother had never removed it, except to bathe or shower.
    “I never gave up hope,” she said when they were reunited.
Of course Juan did not remember these words, they had been written down by journalists, repeated over and again in conferences.  Painted onto banners, walls and burned across the backs of guerrilla extremists.
Emmanuel: ‘God is with us,’ his other name written on the back of the photograph.

He turned the picture over in his hands and slowly crushed it, until the sharp edges of the crude frame cut into his palm.  The blood was little compared to that now being spilled in his name.  He walked over to the panther lying below the huge swell of trees.  She was still breathing.  He pointed the gun at her and pressed the trigger again.  Her body twitched once and then was still.  Emmanuel crouched next to her, tears filling his eyes.
    “It’s better this way,” he said, stroking her warm hide.  “So much better.”

A movement signalled his own capture.  Jaun David Gomez.  Emmanuel.  He pressed the picture, his name, her words, into nature’s soil.  The panther’s blood and his mixed as the metal of the gun pressed into his neck.
    “Stand up.”
Jaun stood. 
    “Thank God you have come,” he said.
The barrel of the rifle cracked across the back of his head.  He dropped to the ground, blanketing the beast, a grotesque parody of love.  As the world melted into a nauseas mist he saw the man’s expression change from one of pleasure to one of horror.  He heard the shout for help and felt his body lifted and crudely carried.  The panther’s shape moved beside him.  He watched her shimmering shadow until the rough movements of his captors forced him into an unconsciousness only she and he understood.