Pg. 147 of my autobiography
It would seem by this point that my head would be about to explode. Those countless hours spent on homework, swim team, and other various scholastic activities. However, having the strong mental capacity that I have I was able to overcome this mind blowing amount of work and achieve greater operating levels. However the greatest part of my life was still to come, which coincidentally brings me to my next great rest stop on the highway of life.
It was a dark night in the mysterious Yucatan jungle. My Hante group and I had spent the day hiking through the lush jungles filled with tropical birds of paradise and strange new creatures crawling from the dimly illuminated jungle floor. We had settled down for the night at our usual resting place, an old encampment owned by a local, deep in the jungle. We slept underneath a strung up tarp, carefully arranged, constantly swatting away the golf ball sized mosquitoes that never faltered in their persistence. There were five of us packed underneath the small tarp which added to the warmth of the already heavy humid air of the tropics.
On this particular night there was something different, the air was hung with a sense of urgency and inscrutability. Before proceeding with my story I find it necessary to tell you of a certain pact that my dear friend Katie and I had made earlier on in the excursion. Seeing as the night was dark and often quite frightening in the middle of the night, we made a pact that if one of us should feel the need to relive themselves we would wake each other up so that we would not have the brave the unforgiving jungle alone. On this fateful night just that incident occurred.
It was near 2 am when I was awakened by the unrelenting calls of Katie to get up and walk with her down the long stone pathway to the small hut that contained the hole in the ground underneath the small box with an attached toilet seat. I was standing in the pathway when I first heard the crunching of steps being taken instantly I began thinking of every possible disaster that could be encountered on that pathway. As you can imagine, I was picturing meeting my fate with an elephant sized jaguar. In fact if you had asked me to bet on what my fate was I would have been sure that my life only extended 30 seconds more before I was devoured by some horrible carnivore of the jungle. I would have never guessed in a million years what was still to come.
At this point I was staring at the ceiling calling on every power I knew to make whatever was coming my way turn around and crawl back into the hole it had come from. As the crunching got closer and closer I became more and more panicked. Just as I was expecting the jaguar to round the corner and pounce, the crunching stopped. Of course I was ecstatic by this turn of events and just so happened to look down at that same moment. This was a bad idea as in that same instant I encountered a dark shadowy figure of a child at about waist height. As adrenaline began surging through my veins my entire body ran cold with the intense feelings of shock and fear. I was incapable of movement or speech and could only stare as the small shadowy figure which turned its large yellow eyes to stare up into my face. Thankfully it disappeared within a few seconds. As Katie emerged from the hut I frantically began telling her of my recent encounter. Naturally she assumed I was half delirious with sleep and simply mixed the dream world with the real world. It wasn’t until the next morning that we learned of the child sprit protectors of the Yucatan jungles called Aleutians.