Different Dreams

by Tory Cates

  But the wily patriarch had not survived these many years without learning some hard lessons about caution. Lessons that had recently been vividly refreshed by the disguised bitterness of those bright, honeyed berries. Of all the troop, Kojiwa was the last to succumb to the temptation of the piles of treats within the walls of wire. On the day that Malou saw him amble into an enclosure, she knew that the transfer would be a success. Quickly she arranged for her mentor at the university, Professor Everitt, to bring a dozen of his best primatology students down to Los Monos to help on the day of the relocation.

  And now that day was here. From across the field, she saw Jorge riding up on his chestnut mare. He tethered the horse beside a water tank and came up to the station, where Malou was standing at the door.

  “Buenos días,” he called to her.

  “Hola,” she answered back.

  Malou wondered how she could ever have thought Jorge menacing. Over the past few weeks, as they’d worked side by side stringing fence lines and hammering chicken wire into place, she’d seen what a warm, good-hearted man he was beneath a thin layer of reserve and natural shyness. He’d even managed to develop some late-blooming affection for the monkeys and to teach her some Spanish, like the word for “smile,” which he felt she didn’t do nearly enough of late.

  And so, this morning, she tacked one on her face as she answered his greeting. As it had been for the past month, however, the act of turning up the corners of her mouth seemed to require an inordinate amount of energy.

  Together they hauled out baskets of apples and peanuts and dumped them in the wire enclosures. Monkeys habituated now to the morning snacks scrambled in from all across the field. Kojiwa was the last. When he’d finally entered, Malou did what she had not done in all the long weeks of waiting: She shut the door and the enclosure became a cage. The monkeys continued munching away on the day’s extraordinary largess. Once Malou was sure that the monkeys were contentedly feeding, she and Jorge moved on to bait and then close up two other enclosures set up to lure the peripheral males from the outskirts.

  They were just finishing and the confined monkeys were just beginning to grow restless when Professor Everitt pulled up leading a convoy of pickup trucks. The students piled out, eager for the experience that lay ahead. Malou led them to the enclosures and pointed out the feature she and Jorge had built onto each one: a small section off to one side that monkeys could be admitted to one at a time.

  Trained by Professor Everitt, the students skillfully let the first monkey, a scrappy juvenile, into the little room. After a chase made short and harmless by the limited space, the little fellow was tranquilized, weighed, measured, and gently set in the back of a pickup. The trucks filled quickly with dozing monkeys, who were then shuttled over and set free in their new home. Malou went with the first truck of drugged monkeys to oversee their release.

  She was glad that Sumo had been among the first group transferred. With their leader to guide them, she was sure that the other monkeys would adapt swiftly to this new paradise she had carved out for them. As she waited for Sumo and the dozen monkeys with him to come around, a tiny thought of the variety she was always on her guard against assailed her. She wished that Cam could see her. Could see how competently she was handling everything. Could see the wonderful new home she’d created for the monkeys here, just beyond the stone cabin. Could . . . But then the wishes took an even more dangerous turn toward thoughts of sheltering arms wrapped around her, pulling her from the awful loneliness that she had only come to know for the first time in the last month. A loneliness that her work alone could no longer fill.

  She drove her straying thoughts back to the macaques. Sumo and a couple of the others were groggily trying to get to their feet. They had been put down near the creek on a spot that was thickly carpeted with grass and shaded by a spreading oak. A tiny thrum of excitement went through Malou as she imagined their happy frolics once they awoke fully in this wonderland.

  Sumo finally sat up and the other monkeys crawled to their leader, waiting for his reaction to the dumbfounding chain of events. They watched closely as he blinked his amber eyes, looking first in one direction then the other. Hesitantly he put out a long black finger and touched the velvety green stuff he sat on, then drew it quickly back. He’d known grass before. But only the scrawny, brown stuff that could survive in their parched field, not this suspiciously luxuriant green stuff. He looked up at the immensity of the thing he sat beneath. It was so different from the few wispy mesquites back in the compound.

  And that sound. Sumo whirled around to confront the brook babbling behind him. He knew nothing of this creature of water except that it chattered belligerently and slithered across the green stuff, infinitely huge and longer than any enemy he’d ever before battled.

  And so Sumo did the only thing a monkey faced with such fearsome foes could do. He surrendered. In abject, quivering terror he ceded the monster’s ground and scampered away to the farthest edge of the sanctuary to escape it. The other monkeys, infected by the terrible fear of this alien place that had gripped their leader, ran after him. Only the fence prevented them all from running back to their old parched home.

  “Los monos don’t like this new place.” Jorge, who had come with the second load of monkeys, had slipped up next to her as she watched the trembling monkeys.

  “I can’t understand it,” Malou answered, disappointment weighting her words.

  “It’s hard in a new place,” Jorge offered. “Even if the new place is better, it’s still hard. El corazón”—he put his callused brown fist over his heart—“still in the old place. I know.”

  Malou attempted a smile for him, but the sight of the new arrivals joining the others to quake at the fence sank her spirits even lower.

  The day passed swiftly with load after load of transplanted monkeys taking one look at their new home then immediately rushing to the safety of the troop, where they were all infected with fear of a place that should have been paradise to them.

  Professor Everitt rode over with the last batch. As Malou might have guessed, Kojiwa, one of the last to venture into the tranquilizing room, was with that group. She personally carried him off the truck and set him down in the cool grass. She knew that the move had been a strain on his old heart, still recovering from the last trauma.

  “Not taking too well to the new place, are they?” Professor Everitt observed with his usual understatement.

  “They hate it.”

  “Well, they hated the open field when we brought them there ten years ago.”

  “Yes, but this is so much like their native home in Japan. I was sure they’d love it.”

  “Don’t forget,” Professor Everitt cautioned, his eyes lively beneath beetling brows of sandy brown, “most of them weren’t even born then, and those that were have long forgotten the ancestral home. I’ve never heard of any long-term memory studies being done with macaques, but that’s probably because there’s no such memory to test. So this place is just as foreign to them as Los Monos was at the beginning, and they’ll have to adjust to it just as they did to Los Monos.”

  “I know it was hard at the beginning,” Malou said hesitantly, “but tell me, just exactly how hard was it?”

  Professor Everitt’s eyes squinted as he tried to see back to that time ten years ago. “Pretty bad, Malou, I’ll be honest with you. We lost probably a fifth of the monkeys we brought over. Some of them just weren’t strong enough to make the adjustment. I guess that, like you, I was hoping the adjustment wouldn’t have to be quite so difficult.”

  “We were both wrong, then, weren’t we?” Malou said as she stared at her answer—the terror-stricken monkeys clumped together along the fence.

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself. They’ll make it. Most of them.”

  Most of them, Malou thought as she drifted away from the professor toward the cowering group. Kojiwa was still dozing. It was taking him longer than the others to shake off the effects of the sedative. Wo
uld he be one of those who didn’t make it? After all he’d been through? She squatted down next to him.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the sleeping monkey. “I thought you’d be happier here. I’m sorry you’ve had to go through all this.”

  She straightened up when Señora Maldonado stepped onto the porch of the stone cabin to clang out a call to dinner on a triangle of steel. The students pushed into the cabin, where the feast the señora had prepared on the cabin’s wood stove awaited them. Malou was the last one in, and though Señora Maldonado’s carne guisada was superb, Malou had no appetite and was the first back out.

  The sun was lowering on what had been a very long and, ultimately, very disappointing day. The first hint of an evening breeze cooled Malou as she walked back toward the sanctuary hoping that the drop in temperature might have caused an increase in courage among the monkeys.

  Such was not the case. She let out a long, wilting sigh when she caught sight of the entire troop still clumped together in fright along the fence, then began calculating what the cost of their fear would be. The most immediate one was monetary. With the monkeys too frightened to forage for food themselves in their new home, they would have to be fed. Which would mean going to Cam for additional funds. The prospect depressed Malou. She had wanted so badly to report unadulterated triumph.

  But that wasn’t the worst of her problems. She walked along the chain-link fence ringing the sanctuary. For yards in either direction the fence bulged with the weight of monkeys pressed against it. She walked along until she spotted Bambi clinging to Tulip’s chest; then she bent down to greet the tiny, wide-eyed monkey baby. As she did so a shriek of alarm rippled through the troop and the agitated monkeys began milling about, bumping into one another as they tried to flee.

  Malou straightened back up, even more dispirited than ever at this latest demonstration of how badly unhinged the troop was. Never, since her earliest days, had her presence caused them the least concern. She knew the certain outcome if they didn’t adjust quickly and fan out over their new territory. With all the troop jammed together, the number of confrontations between the leader males and the peripheral males would skyrocket. The losers of the fights, too scared to flee into the unknown, would face an awful fate at the hands of the leader males.

  A stab of pain made Malou aware that she was gnawing fiercely on her lower lip, trying to think of a solution to an insoluble problem. She was crushed by the weight of her helplessness in the face of the certain doom of so many of the troop she had labored so long to save. A stew of frustration boiled within her, heated by the searing flame of the loss of Cam’s love. Tears stung at her eyes. She was ready to admit defeat. She’d done all she knew how to do, and it hadn’t been enough. She was tired now. Tired of trying, tired of fighting back pain. Malou too wanted to surrender.

  Maybe she should. Malou thought for the first time about leaving Los Monos and all the memories that it now held. The researcher within her rebelled at the idea: Los Monos was where she wanted to do her life’s work. No other subject interested her as much as the monkeys’ adaptation to this harsh land, and now, with a second move, the data she could collect would really be fascinating.

  But emotionally she was ready to throw in the towel, to retreat to safe ground that wasn’t already mined with wounding memories set to explode in her face whenever she wasn’t on her guard. She could go to Professor Everitt tonight and talk to him about leaving. He could find someone to take over for her. Now that the monkeys no longer regarded her even as a familiar and comforting presence, there was no further point in her staying on. She’d been offered a research fellowship in Kenya working with the baboon troops there; she could find out if the offer still stood. Kenya should be far enough, Malou guessed. Far enough that she might have a chance of beginning to forget Cameron Landell.

  Night was fast approaching, the canyon wrens winging back to the high bluffs on the other side of the creek to roost, when Malou saw old Kojiwa finally begin to stir. He was having a harder time than the others shaking off the dose of tranquilizer, and she worried about the old-timer’s being so groggy with night coming on.

  He sat up slowly, stretching his muscles, which had grown stiff during his long nap. As soon as he was upright, he took a long slow look around at the tall trees spreading over him, at the creek sparkling in the last, slanting rays of the sun, at his troopmates huddled along the fence. Then he held out a long finger and touched the grass.

  Malou waited, expecting him to recoil in terror as Sumo had done, then flee to the safety of the troop. But Kojiwa didn’t do that. Instead he held out the rest of his fingers and drew them along the velvety grass, stroking it. Stiffly, he rolled over and crawled through the soft stuff, stopping at a bush trailing vines. Without hesitation, he poked his hand in and plucked something off that he sniffed then popped into his mouth. It was a dewberry.

  Malou tried to fight back her excitement. She reminded herself of what Professor Everitt had said about the probability that macaques had no long-term memory. Surely Kojiwa couldn’t remember the sweet berries he had plucked on Storm Mountain, or the thick grass he had tumbled upon as a youngster more than three decades ago. No, Malou decided; as soon as he recovered fully from the tranquilizer, he would shrink in terror from the “paradise” she had consigned him to and join his fellows quailing by the fence.

  But each minute that passed took Malou farther from that unhappy hypothesis for Kojiwa continued to revel in his new surroundings. The grizzled fur around his lips was stained purple by the time he’d eaten his fill of berries. Once sated, he plucked a few from the vines and tossed them over his shoulders. They landed in the grass trampled down by the troop. Every amber eye had been trained on Kojiwa since he’d first sat up. They were all waiting, watching. One adventurous juvenile reached out for the nubby purple thing that the old-timer had tossed his way, but Sumo barked out a warning and the young monkey froze.

  Kojiwa glanced back at his timid troopmates, and for just the second before Malou could censor such anthropomorphic thoughts, she was certain that the old monkey grinned, gloating at the evidence of his successor’s cowardice. Then he was off, forcing his creaky old bones to climb one of the irresistibly tall trees that grew nearly as thick and straight as they had back on Storm Mountain. He made it halfway up a towering live oak, and there he perched on a branch and crowed down at his bedazzled troopmates. From that height something even more appealing than a real, honest-to-goodness tree instead of a mesquite caught his attention, and Kojiwa clambered back down.

  Swallows were skimming along the surface of the creek in the place where it bulged into a small pond. As Kojiwa approached the chattering monster, Sumo stepped out in front of his troop, ready to do battle if the befuddled old-timer stirred the slithering enemy to attack. The troop watched, silent and wide-eyed, as the old gray one boldly stepped forward and took a daring swat at the silver snake. They jerked back in terrified wonder when the beast exploded into glittering shards that sprayed across the setting sun. Then Kojiwa jumped onto the creature and it engulfed him in one gulp.

  The baby Bambi toddled away from her new mother toward the old one who had been so nice to her and who had suddenly disappeared. Tulip snapped the baby back to her side and all the monkeys huddled a bit more closely together. Sumo’s lieutenants stepped forward, ready for the combat, and death, that was surely to follow. Some of the young females began to shriek uncontrollably, letting off the tension that had built so unbearably high. They were silenced with rough cuffs, and the whole troop settled down to await the inevitable. For surely now the chattering monster would rear up and obliterate them.

  At just that moment of darkest dread, Kojiwa burst to the surface, scattering the swallows, which had returned to feed, and sending a rooster tail of water droplets spraying across the sky. He gave a jubilant cry of celebration. In that instant, the young males knew that the silver thing was no enemy; it was just a stretched-out version of their pond back home. Once they�
��d deduced that, even Sumo’s warning cries could not hold them back. They scrambled forward, bursting with the energy of fear now transformed into exuberance. Their rollicking bodies became furry projectiles as they launched themselves from the bank to sail splashing into the water around Kojiwa.

  When Kojiwa relinquished the creek to the splashers and settled himself in the waning light of the far western sun, the older females who had always remained loyal to Kojiwa left Sumo’s side and went to his. Some of the younger ones approached as well, and they groomed the old monkey who had shown them all the way in this scary new place that wasn’t so scary after all.

  Soon Sumo was holding back only a few of his lieutenants, and even they were eyeing the creek with growing longing.

  “Hah. That’ll be the last time you chase Kojiwa away from the center of the group.”

  Sumo furrowed his brow in response to Malou’s outburst. She laughed, a full-throated, releasing laugh that was more rejoicing than amusement. She’d done it. They’d done it. Kojiwa had done it.

  “Bless your grizzled old hide,” Malou shouted out to the patriarch in the center of the attentive group of females. He looked over at her with a lordly disdain as if to ask what all the fuss was about. Bambi marred his haughty nonchalance, however, by scrambling up his back and clinging to his head like a dark, furry hat that had gone askew, sliding forward over one eye.

  In the waning light, Malou stood back, at last relaxing her grip on the chain-link fence, and took in the scene before her. It was one of those rare, perfect images that she liked to store away to bring out and linger over later on like a favorite snapshot in an album.