**The fourth day and the seats.** By approximately the fourth day, she had reached the area where the row of three seats had landed, each with its occupant still strapped in. The bodies were in a state of decomposition. She checked, with a stick, for nail polish — her mother’s absence of it — and identified that her mother was not among the three.
She has described the specific deliberateness of checking. It was not a moment of panic or avoidance but of controlled inquiry: she needed to know whether her mother was there, and she found the way available to her to make that determination. That she was capable of this level of controlled action on the fourth day of her ordeal, with the physical and psychological weight she was carrying, speaks to the specific character that the forest had formed in her.
**The subsequent days.** After the fourth day, the specific chronology becomes less distinct in her account. She was walking, following the stream, wading when the bank vegetation was too dense, resting when exhaustion demanded it. She had no food. She was subsisting on water from the creek. Her arm was infected and worsening.
The forest provided some shelter from rain at night — not warmth, not comfort, not protection from insects, but something like shelter under the canopy. The cold of the Amazonian night in December — the wet season, with rain frequent — was not the extreme cold of high altitude or temperate winter, but it was cold enough to add to the physical demands of each night’s rest.