She has described checking, using a stick, whether her mother was among them. She had to identify the bodies indirectly, unable to look too closely. One body had painted toenails. Maria Koepcke did not wear nail polish. The body was not her mother.
This detail — the nail polish, the identification made through its absence, the specific forensic logic of a daughter who cannot look at a body directly to determine whether it is the person she is most afraid it might be — is one of the most quietly devastating moments in a story full of them. She confirmed her mother was not among the three dead passengers by confirming who they were not.
Her mother was elsewhere in the forest. She did not know where. She did not know whether Maria was alive. She kept walking.
## The Wound and What Grew in It
The cut on her arm, sustained during the fall or the impact, became infected in the jungle environment. Infections in open wounds in tropical rainforest are not unusual; the combination of moisture, heat, and the extraordinary density of microbial life in the Amazon basin creates conditions in which open wounds can deteriorate quickly without treatment.
She has said that she noticed movement in the wound — that fly larvae, botfly larvae specifically, had colonized the cut. She counted approximately thirty larvae by her account, though as she has acknowledged, the exact count in her state of exhaustion and pain is an estimate.
She remembered, from her time at Panguana, how her father had treated a dog with a similar infestation. When she found the lumberjack camp on approximately the tenth day — the camp by the river, with its boat and its equipment — she found gasoline. She poured it into the wound. The larvae emerged. She removed them.