His clothes were soaked with a combination of mud, sweat, and blood.  The wreckage of the small airplane lay maybe fifty feet away, in a tangle of trees and vegetation it had flattened when it crashed.  He had dragged himself away from it to avoid any possible explosions.  He didn't know if an explosion was likely, but he wasn't taking any chances.  The damp, verdant smell of the tropical rainforest and the stink of burning oil and fiberglass filled his nostrils.
 

The pilot and the other two passengers on the sightseeing flight, a young couple, were dead.  At least he was pretty sure they were dead.  They weren't moving or breathing when he was able to look around after the plane had come to a stop, and it was hard to believe that the positions in which he saw their bodies were positions that living humans could assume.
 

He sat on the ground, his back against a tree, his legs splayed out in front of him. His left ankle was probably broken.  When he had tried standing on it, he collapsed in searing, gut-wrenching pain, so he was forced to crawl to his current spot.
 

There was still too much adrenaline racing through his bloodstream for him to rationally assess the situation.  His thoughts were a jumble of incoherent fragments, with one overriding, primal imperative: "Stay alive."
 

Time passed — he couldn't tell how much — and the explosion he had feared didn't come.  His mind slowly began to function again.  He wondered if he should go back to the plane and see if any of the others were actually alive and needed help, or if maybe there were some supplies he could scavenge.  He tried moving, and the pain from his ankle struck him again, hard.  He pulled up his pant leg gingerly, and looking down, he was upset but not surprised to see that it had swollen grotesquely.  A wave of agony took him, and his eyes squeezed shut involuntarily.
 

He awoke to almost pitch black and a sickeningly painful throb in his left leg.  Looking straight up, he could see a million stars in the sky, but all that surrounded him on the ground was inky darkness.  His eyes slowly adjusted, and bit by bit he started discerning some vague details.
 

The guttural, hungry snarl of a large cat came from behind him.