*
We were camped in a long valley, hills on all sides, huge evergreens around us and above us, a hundred feet high or more. The area was distinctly reverberative, especially in wetter periods, generally during the afternoons, when storm cells darkened the air, sent the palms stirring and unleashed torrents of water that passed on in minutes, leaving wisps of steaming moisture drifting over the vegetation. The immediate post-storm silence made the resultant calls – insects, reptiles, birds, our troop – even louder. Rain gathered in the thick, soft canopy, a vertical pressure I couldn’t shake off. With the thinner root systems it remained a possibility the weight of especially heavy storms could affect the trees’ integrity, upturning even otherwise healthy specimens. Sometimes in the storms I looked up and watched the trees sway. I was uncomfortable with the sounds that we were making, the din of our tin plates and cups as we prepared our evening meal, snatches of conversation, short laughs, occasional recordings played by Jane or by Alice. It was as if, with every sound we made, we contributed to the accumulating pressure weighing down the canopy. The water gathered there, drew our sounds in soft clumps, sent them echoing out and back again. The sound appeared suspended above us, a burden, something that at any moment might snap and break.
The troop used the reflective, wetter canopy to amplify their calls, pushing sound out further through the forest. Other animals exploited the quieter dry periods, typically mid-morning and an hour before dusk, to issue their own communications across more limited distances. We adapted to the mutable environment too, becoming more daring and moving closer to the animals at certain parts of the day, when our sounds, our footsteps, our arms pushing through the undergrowth, our limited speech, were at their lowest natural amplification. It was quickly apparent that many other factors affected our sound, from the flux of the temperature to the level of light to the relative density of the airborne insect clouds. Everything was significant. Each location in every separate moment gathered its own distinct profile, a certain audio character that would never be directly produced again. In order to actually listen to what was happening, and likewise to minimise the disturbance we made as we contributed to it, moving through it, we had to go slowly and with great care. Shifting, separately, along the forest, tracking our respective sub-groups, we tried to operate at a different acoustic scale.
Every single detail in the forest seemed to contribute directly to the resonance of sound. Not only the volume and density of the preceding storm cell, and the acid content and the weight of it pressing down on the canopy and the lower branches, bending them, coming off slowly in large thick globules, forming scattered pools across the forest floor, driving the tempo of the rushing nearby stream and creating temporary ponds almost instantly filled with the larvae of dozens of insect species, larvae that seemed, as well, to give off its own sound, early in the life cycle, a creaking, popping effect in the black ground-water, attracting other insects and birds, not only all this but our own composition affected sound too, the amount of moisture currently present in our bodies, influenced by our diet and our sleep, and then by our anxiety, our restlessness, the nature of the dreams we had been having, then the heaviness of our footfalls, the angle and height we raised ourselves to, the position we turned our heads towards, our optimism, the degree to which the entire history of our lives had led us to be confident that good things would happen – this defined, presently, the position of our bodies and this too conducted and issued sound. In order to learn anything about where we were and what was around us we had to think like this, in an increasingly fine-grained manner. Every single thing, regardless of size, was significant. Everything mattered and in those first several days, tracking and, the more I learned, coming incrementally closer to my sub-group, I felt a sense of urgency, purpose and vitality such as I had never previously experienced anywhere.
Crouching under palms, secondary water filtering down to me, my stomach contracted and I remembered waking the previous night to an audio hallucination, a sense of movement, the feeling of someone or something present directly outside the tent. Where was this coming from? What had caused this? The effect was that I placed a hand over my stomach, tipped back my head beneath the palms, closed my eyes, sighed, each of the movements being instrumental and decisive too, in the way sound carried. It struck me as ludicrous and impossible that the sound, here, in Westenra, of larvae shifting or of a virus unsticking from a hard surface, was altered – was relatively changed – because of my physical reaction to a recent nightmare (itself harking back to long, intense and recurrent dreams I had had as a child). Every moment of my life, every single thing I had seen, dreamed, believed, affected my current position crouching under the palms, altering the sound of the rain falling indirectly and thus the distance and direction of the surrounding animal calls. However many times I tried to consider this or appreciate this, the resolve passed.
Like mycologists, primate researchers also had to learn to speak to the ground, but as field research took up such a negligible proportion of our time it came less naturally to us. There simply wasn’t the same risk with zoo animals, whose immunity had flattened through prolonged contact and direct medical intervention. There was a limit, as well, to how feasible it might be to look down when the objects of your study were forty, fifty feet above you in the trees. We were aware – as Jane was in speaking of the impossible fineness of hyphae threads and the impracticality of it from a research perspective – of the violence of our observation. Too direct a contact kills. Our observation then had to be both intimate and indirect, rigorous, long, even constant. The fact Jane was aware of observer threat was at least promising, given we’d have to instruct her so she could pick up her share of the work. Essentially, we wanted to – had to, for our presence to be justified, to claim to be anything like useful – see everything, at least during daylight hours. It would seem daunting at the start, but she would learn. The reports would stack up, with some additional secondary video available afterwards to cross-check and ensure we didn’t miss anything important.
________________________
A crack in the canopy, a sort of liquid rustling, a burst of sudden sunlight entering through the swaying trees. Three individuals, at once, leaping and then calling, definitely juveniles. My heart thumped and I alternated my gaze, looking centrally, peripherally. They were gone; we heard nothing. This was the first meeting.
In their proportions they were closer to us than to chimpanzees, limbs shortened, thinner trunk, and they furthered this impression by regularly walking on two legs. They were unnerving when they were on the ground because they were so quiet; they appeared and vanished discontinuously; they knew how to measure everything around them so perfectly there was often no audible sign that they were there. But the trees were different: thinner branches bent and curved and creaked to them, leaves washed and rustled as they moved through them, while just the sound of their bodies carrying through the air had a particular quality you soon learned to identify. They exploited the fact that the ground carried them in a way we didn’t. For them the ground was an option, it was a thing to be considered, it wasn’t inevitable. If they were careful they could walk on almost any ground surface silently. If they’re walking on the ground, it’s because they want something. Their faces, while they walk there, take everything in. I almost wanted to say that this was one of the reasons they went with their mouths open – trying to absorb more of the world. It was obvious they were looking and planning as they went. They acknowledged more than we did – basic, important things, shapes and textures and densities and temperatures. And I had to concentrate, pay close attention, because I would so easily lose them. Intermittently walking in the forest, moving in a kind of temporally jerking way, there and gone.
When they were extinct – a technicality, a matter of syntax – I was trained to imagine they’d come back, that their movement had tricked and beaten my concentration, that they were effectively hiding and would reappear again. And I would stupidly
keep waiting like that. I knew it was not necessarily interesting or significant or unusual that they were so aware when they were on the ground, aware of being on the ground, and that soon – I kept having to correct my thinking: not soon, already – they would be erased from the ground. There was something in the contradiction of, on the one hand, their fineness in being on the ground, their constantly monitored consideration of being on the ground, and on the other their sudden, irreversible, almost unacknowledged separation from the ground that I couldn’t process, just as I wasn’t able to properly understand their way of walking, forgetting them and losing them from sight.
We set up audio recorders at hundred-metre intervals based around Alice’s measure of foraging patterns and favoured food sources. Bonobos had an extensive vocabulary, mild differences in pitch denoting a range of meanings. The call we heard more than others was this quickly repeated ‘weeah-weeah-weeahweeah’ sound, used at various volumes according to proximity. It was casual, a simple expression of presence – ‘here’ – alerting individuals who had become lost from the sub-group or announcing the discovery of something of interest, most likely food. To me, this close, it sounded artificial, sort of rubbery. I pictured practice CPR, chest compressions on a doll torso, the air wheezing out of the plastic body, though the animals’ sounds came twice as fast.
They had thin larger necks, delicate heads, giving them an almost studious appearance. They had been observed pointing and throwing items into a specific location. Their quieter somatic communication was breathtakingly elaborate and capacious; you could watch a group all day and observe the constant subtle interplay of gesture, transmission and reception from the slightest cue, the smallest movement – a turn of the head, a shift of the arm, a look in a significant direction, the silent extension of the mouth, each pregnant with information.
I remembered reading about researchers’ attempts to teach them human speech, doomed because the animals couldn’t close the velopharynx and form consonants. Insane imperial fantasies, believing the only thing obstructing them was a difference in anatomy directly below the chin, that with prosthetics or an altered, vowel-heavy language they could bring out familiar and intelligible sounds, that the vast space of the animals’ lineage could flow unimpeded from human symbols.
We prepared as much as we could in advance but there were certain limitations. You couldn’t, for instance, apply the alcoholic solution to your hands before the animal went under, as the scent drew its curiosity, making its movements unpredictable. The gloves we wore were fresh, but these had to be treated too. We couldn’t be too cautious. We would apply the tranquilliser remotely, through a dart – Alice had the best aim – then wait to see how well we’d judged the animal’s size and the corresponding strength of the compound. It was imperative that the three of us performed this task together; for the period of the blood extraction we had to leave our groups unsupervised. We decided to limit ourselves to a single instance of bloodletting each day, starting in the early evening, the dip time when activity was at its lowest among the waking period. For this first extraction, we chose an adolescent male – group B, position 6 – not young enough to still be under his mother’s protection, but not so large as to challenge the volume of tranquilliser.
Leaving camp, we ensured our masks were fixed in place – I rarely saw the others during the daytime, and this vision of their faces obscured surprised and fascinated me. Jane, in particular, seemed to have become something else, and I barely recognised her. She was strident, attentive and not unnerved. Alice led us to sub-group B. We tracked the animals for forty-five minutes, waiting for B6 to become isolated from the others. Quickly, we moved. Alice released the dart; it thumped into the skin. We watched, waited. After the animal had gone, falling backwards onto the leaves with a slow rustling as it tipped and a single soft thud as it landed, we removed our gloves from the sealed container. The animal lay peaceful, as if dreaming in front of us, and we worked quickly. Size was only so reliable an indicating factor. Alice brought out the syringe while I looked for the most promising entry, directing Jane where to shave the hair. Once the syringe was safely inserted and the blood drawn, I asked Jane to prise open the mouth and set the teeth apart. The warmth of the animal came through in our hands as the bitter scent of masticated plant stung us from its opened mouth. I examined the tongue, palate and teeth, recording images on the micro-camera. I removed any external matter for later analysis, indications of dietary behaviour and/ or parasites we might have missed. We were quiet, wary of external interference, curious conspecifics gathering, possible hostility or, more pressingly, of the animal prematurely waking.
This first bloodletting was performed on our sixth day at camp, considerably earlier than our best hopes. From first shot to filled syringe took nine minutes. We retreated, monitored the prone body, timed its period unconscious. We were buoyant. Everything had been a success. In the evening, after we’d eaten, the flask was passed around and I found myself mimicking and only pretending to drink, dipping my head back in a way that was surely evidently inauthentic. My memory of the nausea earlier in the week remained clear, but I was too much of a veteran of these kinds of trips not to realise the importance of the group’s unity and the instrumental role played in it of passing round and drinking from the same cup.
Jane was given responsibility for transcribing the night sounds. This was Alice’s idea. We found ourselves waking up in the night with the sense of something passing over us. The mass of flowing ink looked more like a painting than a data transcription. I hadn’t expected that the group’s mycologist would have musical training, nor that it might prove more instructive for her time here than her knowledge of fungus types. She was locked into the recordings, completely absorbed. The more I watched her, the more I thought she was almost another person. She rendered everything she heard in great detail, pages and pages of marks for every two to three seconds of sound. The device auto-recorded once sound reached a certain level, and we typically heard cries lasting sixty to ninety seconds. Something was disturbing the animals in the night, and Jane was attempting to find out what it was. She didn’t just transcribe each recording once: she tried meshing and overlaying the various nights’ recordings, using separate ink tones. She took me through the transcriptions, playing one, two seconds of sound, stopping the recording and then opening out the sheets that corresponded to it. She wasn’t just transcribing the bonobos’ calling, she was attempting to pull out the peripheral and secondary sound – bird call, the insects, the moving trees – the counterpoint, she called it, which could be instructive itself. The more she listened and brought out different aspects of the recording, the clearer picture she got. She kept describing what was happening – both what was in the sound and the way that she approached it – in visual rather than aural terms. She nodded, said something about relative constancy, stability, variation and differential pattern. I was staring at these sheets, pages and pages scored minutely, aggressively, and I must have been exhausted because I felt I saw something moving in the pages, an object, underneath the graphs and illustrations, an identity, a face, I thought, behind the scrawls and sounds.
*
Effects from the mining were difficult to measure; it was an open secret that even direct fatalities were statistically adjusted to average levels. Alice spoke about ‘remote motion sickness’ brought on by the constant juddering of the ground in deep drilling and blasting, affecting populations many hundreds of miles from the source and which could result, after prolonged exposure, in brain swelling, loss of balance and other kinaesthetic defects, haemorrhaging, even death. Additionally there was the problem of valley fever, where the disturbed soil displaced harmful spores that became airborne, shattering immune systems, creating problems in breathing and provoking disease. By far the biggest problem was exposure to excavated heavy metals, which were absorbed into the wider environment. WEBG, in a statement, denied the problem, claiming uranium was ‘a natural trace element found in the great majority
of living things’. We collected plant and soil as well as fungus samples and rainwater and water from the stream, we gathered stool pieces and urine, though we were cynical about our chances of taking any of it beyond the gates, and though storing some of these materials carried a risk, any escaped odour liable to draw in other animals.
Uranium was brought into the park by many routes. It was possible we introduced it ourselves, just by being here. Tailings discharged from the mines were incorporated into water, soil, plants and invertebrate animals, consumed in sequences of larger animals – birds, reptiles, mammals, ourselves – who further spread the element through the movement and breakdown of their bodies. Jane described uranium leaching directly into hyphae and travelling rapidly over the great extent of these organisms, hundreds, she said, even thousands of metres. One of the things she was looking for in her fungus samples was malignant growths, signs of mutation and distortion in the white filaments, altering toxicity levels in the fruit it spawned.
Gathering Evidence Page 8
