Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

AMY TAN
selves the rest of our lives?” She did not tell them that she had seen a
man who had been murdered. “I’d be uncomfortable,” she said,
“putting them at risk.”
“But we’re already uncomfortable,” Dwight retorted. “And we are
at risk! Don’t you realize where we are? We’re in the fucking jungle.
We already had malaria. What’s next? Snakebite? Typhus? When do
we factor us into the equation for what we do?”
He had brought up their unspoken worries and a series of morally
ugly questions. Whom do you save? Can you save both? Or do you
save only yourself? Do you do nothing and risk nothing, or die from
whatever happens to come along as you sit on a log waiting for what­
ever comes?
They agitated over the questions in private thought, wishing to
forget morals and just be out of this place. Who else had discarded
morals and saved themselves? Could they live with themselves later?
If they put away the concerns of the Lajamee, how soon would they
push aside one another’s welfare? At what point do people resort to
“every man for himself”?
Dwight spoke again. “A few of us can try getting down.” It was
the idea they had discussed when they first learned they were stuck.
They would follow the crevasse, the ancient dry stream. It was possi­
ble that the sinkhole closed farther down the mountain. They would
have to go quite a ways, since Wyatt and Dwight had already done an
initial exploration, and the split went on as far as the eye could see,
before it disappeared around yet another bend.
Only a few people would go, Dwight said. They would borrow
two machetes from the tribe, take food and gear, one of Heidi’s
headlamps, the extra batteries, some wormwood leaves. “Who’s go­
ing to go with me?” Dwight asked.
Moff knew that he was logically the one who should go, but he
couldn’t leave Rupert. He had almost lost him. He had to watch over
him from here on out.
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