Lost City of the Sun

Prologue

May 1930, Dead Horse Camp, Matto Grosso region, Brazil

"FATHER, I'VE FOUND SOMETHING! Uncle Zeb, come see!"

Ethan Hutchins and his brother, Zebulon, made their way over to see what had made the boy, sixteen year old Zane Grayson Hutchins, so excited. Bright yellow feathers protruded at eye level from a huge rubber tree at the edge of the clearing. A dark stain of latex ran below, long dried up.

Zane reached to yank the curious find from the tree.

"Careful, don't touch the tip," warned Ethan. "That's a blowgun dart. The tip might be poisoned."

But what had caught Zane's attention, apart from the colorful feathers, was what was hanging from them, as if the deadly dart was meant to pin the object to the tree.

"An Indian artifact?" he asked, holding up the intricate workings of leather and knotted string, looking something like a dreamcatcher, but not quite.

"Interesting," said Zeb. "Probably a tribal marker of some sort. But unfortunately, nothing that's going to lead us any closer to finding out what happened to Percy Fawcett."

"And it's got to be relatively recent," said Ethan. "Something within the last couple of years. Otherwise George Dyott's expedition would have found it, when they were here on their own search, two years ago."

Regardless of its importance, the artifact was interesting enough that Zane carefully removed it from the blowgun dart and slipped it into his pocket. As he poked the dart back into the tree, into the same hole from which it came, a rustling and a hoarse coughing sound in the bush behind them drew their attention.

Zeb quietly drew his Webley revolver, just before the jaguar leaped from the jungle thicket onto a nearby branch.

Not expecting three potential victims, the big cat hesitated for a second, deciding which would be the easiest prey.

That hesitation saved both the lives of the humans below and the predator above, as it gave Zeb the opportunity to fire a warning from big revolver into the air, rather than a kill shot at the cat itself. The jaguar was only defending its territory, after all. And at the deafening roar of the .455 caliber hand gun, the beast disappeared back into the bush, as if it had been a spirit of the jungle.

As each of them let out the breaths they had been holding, Ethan said, "Nothing else to see here. We may as well move on."

Nerves shaken, Zane fell into line behind his father and uncle as they shouldered their packs and made their way along the compass heading they had been following, the curious artifact in his pocket all but forgotten. For now...