She knew this quality of the forest. She had lived under this canopy as a child. The specific texture of the Amazon — its sounds, its light, its rain — was familiar to her in the way that familiar places are familiar: not consciously inventoried but available to the body as a kind of recognition.
That recognition — the body knowing where it is — may be among the most important forms that the childhood at Panguana took when it mattered. Not the specific knowledge of bird calls or the downstream principle alone, but the deeper, somatic familiarity with the forest that comes only from having lived in it. The forest was not alien. It was home, in the most complicated possible sense, and she moved through it as someone who knew it, and that knowing — built across four years of childhood in the Amazon — carried her the length of eleven days and whatever distance it was to the lumberjack camp and the river and the canoe and the world outside the canopy.
She fell from the sky into the forest she had grown up in. The forest held her until she found her way out.