Jennie

by Douglas Preston

  ”Ndefa mu! Fifty shillings! Up de twenty-five! Masa!”

  “For God’s sake, be quiet and give the man fifty shillings,” I said, and went back into my tent, pulling the flap shut, with the baby in my arms. I could hear more shouting, a chorus of voices raised in discussion. Then there was a sudden hush, the sharp crack of the Ruger, and another swell of argument. After a while the talk died away and the camp became quiet.

  As I thought about the events of the morning, I knew that my excellent relationship with Kwele had suffered possibly irreversible damage. I had allowed him to lose face in front of strangers, bush men of no status. Some repair work was in order. I opened the flap of my tent and called for Kwele.

  The man arrived, after an appropriately insolent interval, and stood in the shade of the flap, his face uncharacteristically inscrutable.

  “Kwele, I owe you an apology. Masa feel sorry. Kwele done good work.”

  A small quantity of disappointment leaked into Kwele’s face. “Fifty shillings,” he said. “We go pay five, ten shillings, Masa. Hunter man be nekkid bush man.”

  “I know,” I said. “You savvay, Masa like dis small beef too much.”

  “Na fine ting dis big beef too. Why Masa no want big beef?”

  “I know,” I said. “We should have bought it.” It had been a foolish thing not to acquire the female chimpanzee. I had to get one for my research project, and chimpanzees were becoming increasingly rare. I could not shake that look out of my memory.

  There was a small silence.

  “Kwele, would you mind bringing me some warm milk, please?”

  The African spun around on his flat feet and flicked open the tent flap. He was still angry. I would have to think of something to bring him back around.

  As I sat at my camp desk, the baby chimpanzee continued to look into my face with slitted eyes, her tiny arms bumping about. She said “oo oo oo” and grasped one of my fingers with both hands, her fingers closing on mine with surprising strength.

  I suddenly felt quite strange, flooded with an unexpected surge of fatherly feeling.

  I was searching for several species of pongid—chimpanzees, bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), and gorillas, to be specific—for my major project at the Boston Museum, which was a reclassification of the primates. Because expeditions like this are extremely expensive, I was also collecting certain species of mammals for the Department of Mammalogy and lizards for the Department of Herpetology. The Ornithology Department had asked me to keep an eye out for a rare genus of raptor they were anxious to obtain.

  During the next months we crossed the vast Batuti forest on wide forest trails, my camp assistants trailing me with bundles of equipment balanced on their heads. I had found this a much better method of travel than by Jeep, which in the mid-sixties in west Africa was infuriating. Jeeps broke down, sank into swamps, ran out of gas, and had their tires and batteries stolen. There were no spare parts to be had. The rapid population growth had pushed the really rare pongids into the deeper forests that were still largely inaccessible by Jeep anyway.

  The news of my coming always seemed to precede me. As soon as we had set up camp, the natives would begin arriving with specimens. The government of the Cameroons had issued me with a permit to collect a specific number of specimens in each genera of the primates. Since the Africans hunted most of these species for food, it was easy (as well as ethical) to collect them. If the natives were going to kill and eat an animal anyway, I felt my efforts would not affect the rapidly dwindling populations of these animals. All I needed for my research was the skull, pelvis, and skin; the natives could still have the “beef.” Certainly, the benefits to science outweighed other considerations.

  I made a very wide circuit of the Batuti, planning to arrive back in Lukemba shortly before the monsoon season. A spacious wattle-and-daub house, built in the colonial style, awaited me there, where I could prepare my specimens and renew my acquaintance with the Mololo of Lukemba. The Mololo was the charming and vivacious leader of the area, a man I’d known since my first trip to the Cameroons as a graduate student.

  The baby chimpanzee slipped into this life without even a ripple. When we traveled, I carried her high on my back in a baby carrier provided by one of the camp wives. It was woven from pounded and separated vines, and padded with soft, dry bangi grass, which acted as a kind of diaper. I had to carry her close to my head, because she had conceived a fondness for my hair and clutched fistfuls of it with amazing force, as she would have clung to her mother as she climbed through the trees. Otherwise, she was completely helpless and unable to walk.

  At first she was terribly distressed when she was separated from me. Her little arms would wave about and her face would screw up into a wrinkled mask of unhappiness while she made an “oo oo oo” distress call. Baby chimpanzees must cling to their mothers while they climb trees and run along the ground, and as a result evolution had given her a shockingly tenacious grip. Where she held on to my neck or shoulders, tiny bruises developed. Sometimes when I put her down, her hands would wave about and find each other in a crushing clasp. Then she would squeak and cry, unable to understand what was gripping her hands so painfully.

  I was deeply attached to the lonely life of the forest, the smell of the ika wood burning, the forest cave about me humming and crackling with the electricity of life. I loved especially the long, soft green light of evening, with only the distant flash of gold in the upper canopy indicating the presence of a sunset. During these evenings, I would sit in my camp chair smoking my pipe, with the chimpanzee nestled in my partly unbuttoned shirt, sleeping quietly, or sucking and pulling on my chest hairs. I have never quite been as contented as I was during those four months in the Batuti forest.

  I had made peace with Kwele. I had told him that the little chimpanzee was a very rare specimen indeed, for which fifty shillings was an absurdly low price. The poor ignorant bush hunter men had been royally snookered. Kwele was to be congratulated. It was terribly important to keep the specimen alive, I said, and to that end I was putting Kwele in charge of it, with a salary supplement equal to the gravity of his new responsibility.

  As I had anticipated, Kwele immediately subcontracted out the work of caring for the chimpanzee to two of the camp wives, paying them only a fraction of his supplement, and loudly directing every operation with imperious gestures and references to the terrible anger of the Masa should any mistakes be made. The two women took excellent care of the chimpanzee, treating her just like a child, heating her milk, feeding her every four hours. When the chimp began to look peaked they had a discussion and found her a wet nurse—a woman whose own baby had died of diarrhea. The chimp seemed to thrive on human milk, although I could not overcome my astonishment at seeing an animal sucking for all she was worth at a human breast, clamoring and pawing around and raising a racket whenever she felt deprived of the tit.

  We supplemented the chimpanzee’s human milk diet with powdered milk. Every morning the squeaking, gurgling chimpanzee sat in my lap and sucked on a bottle.

  During my four-month circuit of the Batuti forest, the chimpanzee grew fast. Faster, it seemed to me, than my son, Sandy, had when a baby. Her skin remained white (white skin is not uncommon among lowland chimps) but the hair thickened and shortened, and the face grew rounder and more appealing every day. The eyes, which started off blue, began to darken into blue-black. She learned to grab, and while she suckled on the bottle one hand would wave about and finally snag my button or a wrinkle in my shirt—which she would yank.

  She walked for the first time just before we reached Lukemba. She was about four months old. The forest had begun to darken every afternoon, the sky filling with unseen clouds. Sometimes a wind shook the upper canopy and distant thunder rolled through the muffling trees, bringing with it a whiff of humidity and ozone.

  The chimpanzee had been crawling around under my camp desk, patting the dusk and crooning softly to herself. I felt her fist on my pantleg and looked down in time to see h
er launch herself across the room, taking four or five quick wobbly steps before pitching forward onto her knuckles and then facedown in the dirt. This performance was followed by a triumphant gale of high-pitched hoots and cries, while she bounced up and down holding on to a table leg.

  The rains began early. A few heavy drops slapped down through the leaves, the chimpanzee began screaming with displeasure (she hated rain), and soon it was as black as night. We arrived in Lukemba in a warm downpour, the mud streets running with water. Steam and cooking smoke rose from the conical thatched roofs. A wet chicken strutted around, and a tethered goat with a swollen udder forlornly watched us.

  The peace lasted only a moment. Pouring out of the huts came the naked village children, their bellies swollen with kwashiorkor, their white teeth flashing, their pink throats showing behind their shouts. Incredibly enough, almost every child already had a dead specimen in hand, a toad, a spitted cane rat, a bird, a salamander, a big beetle, or splay-winged cricket. They hopped up and down and grabbed at my shirt, flapping and waving the dead animals in front of me, hollering out in Pidgin the most outrageous sums. Kwele immediately went into action, perhaps too enthusiastically, scolding, pushing the children back, waving about a big stick, grimacing and slapping down hands as they thrust dead specimens in my direction.

  “Masa no want dis beef! Ha! Masa gone be angry! No want dis beef! Dis bad beef! Whaaaa!”

  A group of men had gathered in the village square—a pool of mud surrounded by ancient bala trees—behind a large man in a white robe and embroidered skullcap, thatch umbrellas clustered over his head. He was the Mololo, the Lukemban chief. He met me with a large, wet hand and a brilliant smile, while his men rushed to shield me from the downpour, jostling each other and arguing as they held the umbrellas over my head.

  “Na foine!” said the Mololo, in his rich, rolling voice. “Na foine ting dis! Welcome!” The crowd echoed “Welcome!” and he linked his arm with mine and we proceeded toward the big house at the edge of the square.

  It was a welcome sight, an old colonial house with a large porch, a pitched roof, and an airy interior of small cool rooms opening one into the other. A heavy mass of bougainvillea twisted up the adzed tree trunks that supported the porch roof, and inside sat an enormous stone fireplace, an atavism of some turn-of-the-century colonial official.

  After we went inside, Kwele took a stand at the doorway, brandishing his stick, poking back the children, while the rest of the expedition filed inside and piled their gear and specimens in the back. As most of the skeletal material was still “dirty,” the house soon filled with the smell of decaying flesh, augmented by the odor of wet people. It was a smell I had grown accustomed to years ago.

  The Mololo seated himself opposite the fireplace and opened his palm toward a chair, giving me leave to sit. The officials stood in a respectful circle around us, steaming and dripping water. A bottle of Bombay gin appeared from underneath someone’s robe and was placed on the rattan table with a loud thump, along with two tumblers.

  “We drink!” the Mololo said, filling each glass with care. While this was going on I had freed the chimpanzee from her carrying sling and she now climbed over my head and down my face, dropping into my lap.

  We drained our glasses, as courtesy required, and the Mololo refilled them.

  “Welcome!” he said again, immediately echoed by the men around him. “You get um good beef?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Lots of good beef. It’s been a good trip.”

  “Na foine! We got um many hunter mans here, get you all good beef you want. We done been waiting.”

  “Thank you, sir.” The Mololo had been very helpful on my previous trips, encouraging his people to comb the forest for specimens.

  “Na whatee dis ting?” he said, leaning over at the chimpanzee. The animal sat up in my lap and peered at the Mololo.

  “Wheee!” she said, and ducked down.

  “I found her in the forest,” I said. “Her mother was killed by hunter man.”

  “You savvay dis beef? When he go big, he done cause trouble, you watch um good!” He laughed and tossed back his glass. “Na whatee dat palaver for dis beef?”

  “We call it a ‘chimpanzee.’ “

  “Timpansee! Na foine name.” He leaned over and looked at the little animal. With a solemn expression on her face, the little chimpanzee reached out and he enveloped her tiny hand in his and shook it.

  “He shake um hand, like all de Masa!” The Mololo exploded with laughter. (“Masa” is the Pidgin term for any white man, and does not necessarily connote rank or respect.) “Dis beef gone grow into Masa for true!”

  My work in Lukemba proceeded smoothly. Kwele organized the buying of the specimens. Every day at four o’clock, those villagers with dead animals would fill the dirt area in front of the house, and Kwele would wade through, swagger stick in hand, dismissing most of the people but sending those with unusual specimens up to the porch, one at a time, where they would lay their catch on the table.

  As soon as a deal had been made the specimen would be carried around to the back, where it was immediately skinned and defleshed; the meat was given back to the seller, the skin pegged for tanning, and the fleshed-out skeleton dumped in one of several old bathtubs I kept as maceration vats.

  The chimpanzee played under the table while the bargaining sessions went on, climbing the legs, dropping back to the floor, rolling around and hooting softly. Sometimes she would climb into my lap and suck on my buttons, and once in a while she would climb to the top of my head and sit there, surveying the world like a diminutive Chinese emperor. Her appearance on my head always caused an uproar from the ubiquitous crowd, who laughed and stamped their feet. Sometimes she would sneak under the table and lie in wait, ready to grab the feet of some unsuspecting African, usually with lively results. Then she would scream and retreat behind my chair.

  We spent two months in Lukemba. It was remarkable to me how fast the chimpanzee grew and how quickly she lost her shyness. During the second month of our stay the children of the village would come by the house in the morning and squat outside the door calling out a word in Nala that I couldn’t quite understand. The chimp would be up and tumbling out the door like a bullet, and later I would see her running through the village with a laughing crowd of children.

  When we first came to Lukemba, I had worried how the chimpanzee would fare with the dozens of vicious dogs that slunk and skulked around the town. But the village children teased the dogs mercilessly and I noticed that the chimp was a most enthusiastic participant in this game. The dogs, for their part, reacted to the chimpanzee as if she were a human child, whining and groveling whenever she swaggered by. I once saw the chimp threaten a dog with a stick and take away a piece of garbage it was eating.

  One morning I asked Kwele what it was the children chanted at the chimp every morning.

  “Dat be dis beef’s palaver,” Kwele said.

  “What is the word? What does it mean?”

  ”Jen ikwa si go. It say, dis little beef, he stick out de hairs, make himself look bigger den he is.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You see dis beef, when he have de fear? Or he be angry? He stick out de hairs. Whoof! Like dis.” Kwele hunched up his arms and hunkered down in an imitation of a chimpanzee display of aggression.

  “I see.”

  ”Jen ikwa si go. Dat be his palaver.”

  I thought about this. I had been having some difficulty thinking of a name for the animal. I have always had trouble with names, and it was my wife, Lea, who had to choose names for our two children, Sarah and Alexander. For six months I had struggled to name the animal, but they all sounded awkward and flat and in the end I’d been too embarrassed to voice any of them out loud. Jen-Ikwa-Si-Go. Little-Animal-Who-Bristles-Herself-up-to-Look-Big. It sounded like a fine name to me. I called her Jennie.

  two

  [FROM interviews with Mrs. Hugo Archibald, January 1991, October 1991, and
September 1992 at her apartment in Kibbencook Lower Falls, Massachusetts.]

  Is that really necessary? I don’t like tape recorders. They make me nervous. Well, if you insist. Yes, I talked to Dr. Epstein. What a clever, sly old man he is, the way he stares at you with those beady eyes. He’s always been a wrinkled old man, as long as I’ve known him. He was one of those people born old. I’m not sure I altogether trust his judgment of people. He’s too clever for his own good. I hope he’s right about you. He said you were going to set the story straight.

  Where shall we begin? It’s such a terribly long story, I’m not sure I’m up to going through the whole thing. Oh dear. I’m just an old lady now. How long is this going to take?

  We lived in Kibbencook proper, about a mile from here. Our house? It was a rambling, seedy old place. Hugo loved it. I found it nearly impossible to keep house. It wasn’t a nice suburban house by any means. It was too big and rambling. And not very chimpproof. When we bought it we weren’t exactly thinking about having a chimpanzee. The yard was full of dandelions. How the neighbors hated that! It was enclosed by the most awful hedge. A diseased-looking thing, all gapped and yellow. We tried everything, but every year a little more of it died. The lawn had big brown patches all over it. And the rhododendrons! They were so overgrown they grew up to the second story windows and when the wind blew we could hear the scraping noises from inside. It used to scare the children. Hugo told them it was a bear outside. In the side yard was a marvelous old crabapple tree, with sagging limbs propped up on sticks. Behind that was the Kibbencook golf course. Our yard was not the envy of our neighbors, to say the least. [Laughs.] Hugo was not exactly interested in lawn care. And I certainly was not going to start pushing around a lawn mower.

  Kibbencook was a lovely town. Very quiet. Not like it is today. Those horrid town houses along Washington Street hadn’t gone up, and the bandstand was still in the square. Kibbencook had once been an Indian settlement along the Charles River. You can still see their shell heaps down by the river. Do you know Route 9, that dreadful strip with all the gas stations? That was once the Kibbencook Trace, the old Indian trail that went to Boston Harbor. The Indians had villages along the brook, where the golf course is today. Once in a while a golfer would lose a ball in the brook and find an arrowhead where the bank was eroding. Every golfer seemed to have an arrowhead. Sandy, our son, used to trade golf balls for those arrowheads. Golf is a ridiculous game. My father, who was of English descent, used to call it a Presbyterian game. Of course I married a Presbyterian, but thank goodness he didn’t golf.