The raw truths of off-roading

The fourth metal hook of my Octopus bungee cord came off my mountain bike backpack carrier as I stealthily loosened it to attack the motorcyclist accompanying me. I was gearing up to claw his eyes out while strangulating him should he try to rape me.
I had never off-roaded solo in a dense deciduous forest before, let alone after dusk and with a stranger repeatedly deriding the fact that my biking group had committed the horrendous slip of leaving me – a girl – alone to navigate the 9km forest up to the Dudhsagar falls.
Rapists, serial killers, Naxalites and cannibals smugly taking attack positions in every creek were an undoubted vision in my mind’s eye, as I told myself that every distant unfamiliar squeal is likely not a wild boar, a jungle cat or a flying lizard. I second-guessed my memory of the 24 “commonly found [snake] varieties” in this part of the country whenever I saw a shiny green thing dart across a clearing.
As my stubby untrained thighs were peddling uphill at full speed and top gear, my brow was furrowed in focussing on not getting punctured, chainless, or wounded on the sinister jeepable road, and my throat was parched dry from hours of solo route-tracking without a drink, the motorcyclist chose to break ice with a: “So what is it that you do [for a living]?”
In reply I snubbed him with a request to drive to camp and bring a rescue team back. He responded with incoherent excuses about the camp being “not on the way to [his] house” and vehement protests against leaving me to “get scared of the jungle alone”. He finally left, perhaps in disgust, when told subtly that it was his prolonged company which was scarier than peddling alone for a short interval.
Now left alone on the long unforgiving dirt track, unsure that he was off to get help instead of trouble, I strained my eyes against the oblique dark of the forest broken in bursts by my manically wobbling headlamp, as I made it my mission to peddle relentlessly on the rocky terrain whatever my heart rate.
My last moments in that beautiful lap of nature studded with a million stars overhead were clouded with thoughts of self-defeat. Zealous peddling could not wipe out the conjecture that perhaps I had deliberately chosen this manner of killing self.
And then my reverie was broken by a stream of yellow light, the noise of a bike engine, the silhouette of an aged camp leader, and the blur of moisture that was safely tucked away in my throat for the last four hours now in front of my eyes.