Amazon Air-Crash Survivors Scramble -- Girl, Young Man Endure Two Weeks

CARACAS, Venezuela - The airplane was far over the Amazon jungle when its engine faltered and it began losing altitude. The bush pilot ordered his seven passengers to throw out their belongings.

Noris Villarreal, 11, was returning home after summer vacation to start sixth grade in the jungle village of San Juan de Manapiare.

The Cessna 207 was dropping dangerously close to the forest and was still 10 minutes from the village's dirt landing strip. The pilot decided to try for an emergency landing in a river. He missed, smashing into huge trees along the riverbank.

When Noris regained consciousness a couple of hours later, four of those aboard the plane were dead.

It was the start of a two-week odyssey in the jungle for Noris and another passenger, surviving on plants, praying for strength and searching desperately for help that eventually - miraculously - came.

"If it wasn't for God, I wouldn't be alive," Noris said from her bed at a public hospital in Caracas, her body covered with hundreds of bug bites.

Her Aguaysa airlines flight had taken off Oct. 12 from Puerto Ayacucho in southeastern Venezuela. Her home in San Juan de Manapiare, a village of 3,000, was 45 minutes away by air - or a week by canoe.

The plane had midflight mechanical problems, so the pilot returned to the airport and switched aircraft. Then that plane had trouble, too.

When Noris woke after the crash, she heard a woman groan for her to push her toward the river to wash off. But the youngster had a broken wrist, and all she could do was rinse the woman's face. The woman later rolled herself to the water, where she died and was swept away.

Nearby lay another man, Carlos Arteaga, his lower right leg mangled. Noris fed him some bread and water, and tried to apply bandages she found in the plane's wreckage, now soggy from a downpour.

The only other passenger not gravely injured, a 19-year-old Yekuana Indian named Ismael Rodriguez, set off on his own to look for help and for his suitcase, which held his prized high-school diploma. He had been in Puerto Ayacucho applying to become a teacher.

That first night, Noris stayed at the crash site and slept among the dead and dying.

The next day Rodriguez returned, and he and Noris decided to head out together to look for help.

"We started to walk and walk until we got lost," Rodriguez said from his hospital bed, his feet swollen and purplish, his right cheek marred by a gash and a bandage covering an infected wound above his right eye.

For days Noris and Rodriguez ate plants, plucked fruits from trees and drank water from streams. Mosquitoes and flies attacked them ferociously. A few times they heard the buzz of search planes but could do nothing to attract them.

At night Noris cried herself to sleep, her broken wrist throbbing.

Rescue officials were flying over the missing plane's flight path each day, to no avail. Six days into the search, relatives and neighbors of the missing passengers persuaded authorities to drop them into the forest by helicopter so they could search on foot.

Nineteen villagers set off, armed with two shotguns to fend off possible attacks by jungle cats and other animals. Three days later, Arteaga's uncle, Geronimo Colina, caught a whiff of something awful.

Soon he spotted the wrecked plane across the river. It was 10 days after the crash.

He found the badly injured Arteaga, who pleaded with the Indians to let him die in peace, but rescuers arrived the next day and rushed him to Caracas.

An additional 50 villagers were recruited to continue the search.

Noris and Rodriguez had been in the jungle nearly two weeks, and for the first time he thought he might die.

"I couldn't take the hunger anymore," he said.

They wound up back at the river where the plane went down, just a mile from the crash site. They waded out to a large rock, hoping to be spotted.

Four hours later a helicopter appeared overhead.

Rescuers flew the pair to Caracas about 360 miles away. Television flashed images of them being lowered from a military airplane and then being wheeled into the hospital.

The nation was stunned. They were alive.

Noris' broken wrist was operated on, and Rodriguez was treated for the blow to his forehead. Arteaga's right leg was amputated below the knee.

The survivors - especially Noris - became minor celebrities.

The mayor of Caracas said he would present Noris with a medal for bravery.

She plans to go back to her family's village shack after her wrist heals, but first she wants to see Caracas and Venezuela's beaches for the first time.