by Evan Antin
Did this macho male perceive us as a threat? We wanted nothing more than to stay out of his way. My heart was pounding as we picked up the pace, continuing along the walkway, moving away from the orangutan. Five minutes passed. Then we rounded a bend and there he was, burly as hell, completely blocking our path. He had his left arm stretched out to grip a high branch on a tree, and his left leg was lifted and braced against the tree as well. You know how a guy who’s looking for a fight takes a wide, tall stance? This was that times ten. He held his head high and stared down at us, as if to say, “’S up? Don’t you know this is mine?”
And then he started walking toward us.
My mind started madly replaying a story a zookeeper had told me about an orangutan who lived in an enclosure with a wide-slatted walkway above it, to give zoo employees access. The keeper instructed a new employee to stay off the walkway, explaining that it was too easy for the female orangutan below to reach through. The new guy walked across anyway. Curious, the orangutan moved closer. Then she stretched her long arm through the slats and grabbed the guy’s foot. He screamed, and when he did, she screamed too, releasing her grip and racing to the corner of her enclosure. It was obvious that she hadn’t meant the poor guy any harm. It didn’t matter, though; every bone in his foot was broken. The doctor told him he was lucky his foot had stayed attached to his leg.
How much of that story was accurate? I had no idea. But it seemed very real in the moment as I glanced down at my own body and my own vulnerabilities. I wondered if orangutans would rip off men’s genitals the way chimps have been known to do; I figured I didn’t want to take any chances, given how closely related we all are. So I crossed my hands over my loins and said a silent prayer to get out of there with no bones broken and all my parts intact.
When I glanced over at our guide, he was slipping a few steps back. Tim, behind me on the walkway, froze. We couldn’t run, because there was no way we could have outraced the great ape if our fleeing provoked a chase response. We couldn’t keep going, because that might be mistaken for aggression. Our best bet was to get small. We gingerly stepped off the path, crouching as we did so, turning slightly away from the walkway and averting our eyes from the orangutan. Then we waited. His move.
Macho lowered his leg from the tree and took one step our way. Then another. In my mind I was screaming at my 210-pound, six-foot-two self to shrink, to blend in, look passive, be one with the forest.
Ask almost anyone who spends time working with primates in general and orangutans in particular and they’ll tell you this species is known for their thoughtful, solitary nature. They are thinkers, philosophers even. But this was my first day among these magnificent creatures, and what I was seeing was unmistakably aggression.
In the end, Macho seemed satisfied with our stand-down. While we held our breath, he ambled up the walkway toward us, and then mercifully eased right by—so close he actually grazed my daypack as he went. I suspect I’ve never been so happy to see a magnificent wild animal walk away.
* * *
Since we were already off the path, I got to thinking that I might spot a native snake if I ventured out a bit. Maybe a python, or a coral snake, or even a flying snake. I pushed into the jungle a short distance, focused on spotting a distinctive curve or hint of movement in a tree or on the ground ahead. When I reached a small clearing, I glanced up at the unexpected brightness, looked across the small patch of sunshine, and saw a middle-aged woman with a round face and shoulder-length gray hair. She wore glasses and a wide-brimmed hat, and I recognized her instantly: Dr. Galdikas!
I raised my hand in a wave, thinking I would introduce myself.
Dr. Galdikas looked me up and down, unsmiling.
I grinned, tongue-tied.
“What are you doing in this area?” she asked sternly.
I peered around myself, confused but still smiling. Had I wandered out of the visitor-friendly area? Had I offended the great doctor in some way?
I turned back to where she stood waiting for an answer, clearly not feeling the overwhelming surge of warmth and affection that I was experiencing.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t realize this area is restricted.”
She kept her gaze level.
“Um, I’ll head back now.”
She nodded and waited for me to go.
Call it what you want, but as far as I’m concerned, that interaction totaling seven curt words from the doctor and a few eager replies from me counts as meeting one of the great primate researchers of all time. Dr. Galdikas was a student of the famed anthropologist and archeologist Louis Leakey, along with Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. The three of them set out to virtually untraveled corners of the world to raise the level of primate studies, and succeeded. Had it not been for her, my trip to this remote spot in Indonesia might never have happened, and I would surely not be coming off a heart-stopping and mind-altering personal interaction with an orangutan in his natural habitat.
My only regret was that I hadn’t thought to introduce myself as Dr. Evan Antin. Maybe asked an intelligent question. Maybe shaken her hand.
Ah, well. I bounded back toward the jungle path, turning the moment over in my head, happy enough with what I’d gotten. Dr. Galdikas had spoken to me. I really didn’t mind that all she’d done was politely tell me to beat it.
* * *
Each day in Borneo was a new orangutan adventure. It’s impossible to observe these creatures and not be fascinated by how similar they are to humans—and yet how different. This is always the primate conundrum: one minute it’s like looking in a mirror or seeing your own mannerisms aped back for you (pun intended); the next you are clearly seeing a completely wild creature. One area where you can almost recognize the similarities, though, is when you watch a mother with her kiddos.
The final station we visited was the most spectacular. It was bigger than the others, constructed so that the jungle leads your eyes to it, almost like a natural amphitheater in the forest. Rangers put out food on a set schedule, so if you arrive there before a day’s meal is delivered you have a great chance of getting a glimpse of the orangutans coming to eat. For nearly two hours we sat a few yards from the feeding platform, mesmerized by the show.
When the orangutans finally left the platform, we reluctantly headed back toward our boat, but our encounter wasn’t over yet. On a narrow footbridge we encountered a juvenile male and his mother. The young orangutan was not a baby, though he was still small and immature, and naturally curious about the strangers in his habitat. He came up close to us, checking us out, then eased back a little without looking away. It was nothing bold, just a little bit of engagement. He was the cutest thing, big wide eyes in his bald brown head, pudgy belly, long arms and legs, with a quizzical look on his face, like he just wanted to figure things out. At one point he decided it might be okay to touch me, and he reached out his hand and brushed mine.
And that was when Mama, who’d been watching from a cautious distance, decided she wasn’t having it anymore. She put herself between me and her son, squared off, and then started marching toward me, chiding away in a steady barrage of vocalizations that it took zero imagination to interpret as a mother telling a stranger to get away from her kid. I’d heard that tone before—from my own mom, from my grandma. The international, interspecies tenor of mothers who are not taking any more crap from you right now, so cut it out, thank you very much.
I respected the mother’s wishes and retreated, ready to hike back out of the forest. At no time did her tone or body language seem hostile, like that of the male orangutan who had blocked our path the first day. She was issuing a friendly warning, one I accepted and respected. The last thing I wanted to do was upset her or the peace in her precious family of people of the forest.
Surgery in Sulawesi
North Sulawesi is a thousand miles from Camp Leakey. It’s a critical location for the illegal wildlife trade because it is the closest Indonesian island to the Philippines and an exp
ort point for animals and animal products bound for China, Taiwan, and Japan. Authorities here have confiscated everything from orangutans to sun bears, pangolins to cockatoos on their way out of the country. Without a safe, capable wildlife rescue center to care for these animals, though, those confiscations wouldn’t lead to any kind of positive outcome for the animals.
That’s where Tasikoki Wildlife Rescue Centre comes in. The sanctuary cares for, rehabilitates, and, when possible, releases a wide variety of rescued species, and it does it with a team of local experts and volunteers who come from all over the globe to participate in their mission.
I wanted to be a part of this, but I’d tried to contact the organization through its website a couple times without success. I’d read that the facility only takes veterinarian volunteers who can stay for a month, something I couldn’t do, but I still hoped I’d be able to pitch in and work with this team, even if for only a few days.
So with no invitation or reservation, Tim and I made our way to Tasikoki and were greeted at the gate by a volunteer who seemed distinctly stressed-out. Was it something we’d said? I told her I was a veterinarian, and she said just that morning over breakfast, the staff members had been talking about how much they needed a vet to help out, but all their usual resources were unavailable.
As far as I was concerned, that was fate. I told her we could stay for four or five days and that I was at the facility’s disposal to help in any way I could while I was there.
That’s when we realized that her distress had nothing to do with unexpected company. A totally unexpected drama had been unfolding just as we’d arrived. The volunteer had left her fanny pack sitting too close to the enclosure of a male orangutan, and he’d snatched it and picked through it. To her horror, the one thing in it that had interested him was a pill bottle. It had taken him a few seconds to figure out the childproof cap, but once he had, he had proceeded to take all the Ritalin pills inside. The poor young woman was devastated, telling us the story through tears.
It seemed I was the closest thing to an expert who was going to show up that day, so I asked how many pills she’d had in the bottle. The answer was reassuring: no more than five. There was an active discussion going on among the staff about whether this orangutan needed to be sedated so he could have his stomach pumped, but I was fairly certain that such a step would pose a greater danger than the pills. Humans and orangutans have similar physiology, and given the animal’s weight and the relatively low amount of the overdose, we decided to monitor the pill pilferer rather than go overboard and dart him. Remarkably, over the course of the next twenty-four hours, there was no observable difference in his behavior. People who take too much Ritalin may find themselves wanting to clean their homes, and when I heard about this orangutan I immediately thought of that scene in There’s Something About Mary where someone accidentally takes an upper and then aggressively cleans her house. I wasn’t anticipating behavior like this in a greater ape, but I would’ve kept my eyes open for apparent restlessness—acting jumpy or excitable, hyperactive, more vocal (just like people on drugs like this)—or a loss of appetite, increased urination and/or defecation, or, worst case, cardiac arrest/coma/death. Unfortunately, it would be too dangerous to try to do a physical exam on an orangutan, but it would’ve been nice to monitor his heart rate, body temperature, and blood pressure. In the end, though, the medicine didn’t seem to affect him at all.
With the crisis averted, we could get to more urgent issues. First on the list was a crested black macaque with a nasty tooth abscess. This was not a species I knew. I’d encountered other macaque species in my travels, but this particular kind—also called a Celebes macaque—is rare and critically endangered, not an animal I would have met without going out of my way to find one. I watched the troop that morning in awe of how beautiful they were. They look like small-scale black baboons, with sleek fur, expressive amber-brown eyes, and hairless black faces whose long shape makes them seem permanently concerned. I love to watch these guys in action, because they’re 100 percent sleek black, like little monkey ninjas in the forest. The staff pointed out one monkey who was staying to the sidelines, especially at mealtimes. An infection in his canine (fang) tooth had spread to his maxilla (a.k.a. upper jaw) and was hurting every time he tried to eat. He’d lost weight, and the staff was worried about him. This is a common issue in large-fanged monkeys, so I wasn’t surprised to see the tooth-root abscess.
I’d never done dental work on a monkey, but I’d done plenty on dogs and cats, and I’d taken enough exotic animals classes to know that one of the most common refrains in exotics is that a lot of what we do in the field is extrapolating from what we do know. Dogs and cats are our basics, where we have the most experience and knowledge. And they help us learn how to approach other mammal species. I knew I was capable of the job. The facility had an anesthesia protocol they’d used successfully before, so I helped prepare the little OR while they darted the macaque.
As I operated on the monkey, I was outwardly cool. Inside, though, I was nearly overwhelmed by two different trains of thought. The first was just about successfully completing the task at hand. The upper incisor I was working on was more prominent than any animal tooth I’d encountered in my training, with deep roots. I focused on a just-another-dog mind-set, but the fact is, these teeth were unlike anything I’d ever touched before.
The second train of thought was more unnerving. When you are working on a dog or a cat, you understand that your patient is someone’s family member. You are painstakingly careful because you know that pet is treasured. When you work in an environment like a wildlife rescue, the stakes are different, and for different reasons. The monkey on my operating table was a critically endangered primate who could die if I made a mistake, and who could also die if I failed to stop the spread of his infection. There might have been only a few hundred of this rare species left in the world, and if I contributed to the loss of the beautiful, sleek black monkey under my hands, that loss would have a toll for the overall population of his species, bringing them one step closer to extinction.
In the moment, I knew the best I could do was to push all those feelings down and focus on the surgery. Extract the tooth, clear the infection from the socket, flush the wound, suture, and administer antibiotics while my patient was unconscious. Through it all I kept thinking, Stay calm, Evan. This is what you came for.
Some of the scariest moments of my career have happened in the operating room. Most veterinarians who do surgery will tell you the same. But that day my hands were steady, my eyes were sharp, and I was confident that I was fulfilling my purpose, putting four years of veterinary studies to good use.
Over the course of the next few days I performed examinations, cleaned and stitched a laceration on another crested black macaque, repaired a wound on a moor macaque, and helped manage a chronic wound on a massive Bornean river turtle—probably the largest freshwater turtle in that part of the world—but no moment stands out more vividly in my memories than one from our last day in Sulawesi, when Tim and I lingered outside an enclosure and watched the crested black macaque who now had only one large upper canine tooth in his jaw feast on his dinner along with his troop. He had recovered beautifully. It was huge for me. I swear that this one moment, not to mention the thousands that would follow, was worth the four years I’d invested in vet school—all the studying, all the exams and practicums and lectures.
I stowed my stethoscope in my bag as we headed for the airport and the long trek home, completely satisfied with the ten weeks we’d spent in Indonesia and with the life choices that had brought me to this place.
PART FOUR
Critical
8
Fiji and Tahiti
I’ll start with a happy memory from the Kansas City suburbs. It’s 1999. I’m fourteen years old, hanging out with a bunch of friends in one of their basements. We’re watching a movie, trying to find girls to invite over, sneaking a couple beers, and laughing our asses off.<
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Among the boys in that basement is my new friend Joey Brown. I met him early in freshman year, and he and I had a lot in common: both (pretty) good students, both athletes, both born with a wild streak that made us quick to sign on for any out-of-the-ordinary adventure. Joey had a huge, disarming grin that gave him an air of total innocence, but it didn’t fool his close friends.
Flash forward to 2017. I walk out of Nadi International Airport in Fiji, seven thousand miles from Kansas City, and there’s that big grin. My longtime bro is now a highly respected wildlife expert, a herpetologist, a conservation biology scholar, a wildlife consultant on Survivor, and my host as I assist for a week with his research on the critically endangered Fijian crested iguana.
I’ve always had a good imagination, but if someone had told me that night in 1999 that one day the two of us would be working together on a tropical island halfway around the world from where we started—trying to help save a reptile species from extinction—I’m pretty sure I would have laughed hard enough to choke on my beer.
Super-Sleepy Iguanas
Joey was headquartered on Mana Island, where there are plenty of creature comforts, but his research was on nearby Monuriki Island, which is uninhabited. When he was in research mode, he’d pack up his tent, gear, and food, then boat over for a few days at a stretch to work. The entire island is less than a square mile, surrounded by coral reef on all sides. It’s visually stunning, a tiny mass of jagged cliffs, gold sand, and lush vegetation jutting up in the middle of the Pacific. It’s so much the definitive island setting that with the whole world to scout, the producers of the movie Cast Away chose to film on Monuriki.
