by William Boyd
In this long catalog of success and glory Mallabar had made one important error—but it was one he could not have foreseen, to do him justice. He had chosen the wrong country. The civil war that began in 1968 brought massive problems, not to say occasional danger. Happily, the fighting that took place was at a safe distance, but there remained always the threat of sudden upheavals and breakouts from enclaves. The crude violence employed by the four armies contesting power and the unpredictable nature of their fortunes meant that the old days of glossy magazine stories, cover features and TV documentaries were over. The census of the chimpanzee population of the Semirance Forest (a very expensive and ambitious undertaking) was the first casualty of the unrest once the supply of Ph.D. students dried up. Work permits and visas for the remaining scientists became far harder to come by, and all manner of provisions became unobtainable as international opinion and superpower muscle-flexing imposed official or unofficial economic sanctions. Worse still, the uncompromising savagery of the federal government’s attempts to crush the competing guerrilla factions drew mounting condemnation and opprobrium from the West. The supply of grants and awards—the fuel upon which Grosso Arvore ran—began to dwindle alarmingly. Eugene Mallabar and Grosso Arvore found themselves attached, by association, to a bankrupt regime with an unsavory international reputation. Mallabar, needless to say, protested everywhere that the interests of scientific research had nothing to do with politics, but to little avail.
But good times, he said in his inimitable fashion, were just over the next hill. Lately, a UN resolution had been ratified and widely supported. The most radical of the guerrilla armies, UNAMO, appeared to be terminally underaided and the other two—FIDE and EMLA—began to talk vaguely of reconciliation. Thus prompted, the federal government started to make noises of appeasement and hatchet-burying. Suddenly there was a little new money available, but still—despite all the peace-mongering in the air—nobody was prepared to take up the short-term job it was meant to fund. Until, that is, I came along. What made me do it? I shall tell you about that in due course.
Mallabar had a new book almost completed, a summation of his life’s work. It was destined to be his chef d’oeuvre, the last word on chimpanzee society and what the years of work at the Grosso Arvore Project had taught humankind about their closest biological cousins. It was also designed as the crowning celebration of Grosso Arvore’s silver jubilee: we were securely placed on the scientific map, but the new book was designed to etch Grosso Arvore’s name in stone.
But as the book was in its final stages there had been a mystifying schism in the chimpanzee tribe that Mallabar had documented so thoroughly. For some unknown reason, a small group of chimpanzees had broken away from the main unit, had migrated south out of the Grosso Arvore park and had established themselves in an area of the forest not hitherto covered by the research project. Why had they left? Was this important? Did it signify something crucial and unrecognized in the evolution of chimpanzee society? A new job was funded to try and answer these questions. It fell to me to observe this small breakaway group—the southerners, as they were known—and continue the documentation of their daily lives until the book was ready, and to see if there was any explanation forthcoming for their untimely departure. “And besides,” Mallabar had said in—for him—a rare moment of anthropomorphism, “they are family. We would like to know why they left us and how they are getting on.”
João left me and Alda and set off in the rough direction Clovis had taken the day before. Alda and I planned to go to a large fig tree where the southern group often fed. We followed a winding path through the humid undergrowth. The seasonal rains were expected soon and the air was heavy with moisture, warm and stagnant. We walked at an easy pace, but I was soon sweating, and waving futilely at the platoons of flies that escorted us. Alda walked in front of me, the dark triangle of perspiration on his pink T-shirt pointing the way.
The fig tree proved to be empty apart from a small troupe of colobus monkeys. But in the distance, not too far off, I could hear the excited hooting and screaming of chimpanzees. Another fig tree grew in an outcrop of rocks about half a mile away. From the noise that was being generated it sounded as if the whole southern group might be there.
It took us half an hour to reach it. Alda and I approached with our usual caution. I led the way. I sank to my haunches about forty yards from the tree and took out my binoculars. I saw: Clovis, Mr. Jeb, Rita-Mae with her baby, Lester, Muffin and Rita-Lu…. Alda ticked their names off on the daily analysis sheet as I recited them. No sign of Conrad. No sign of pregnant Lena.
They were sitting high in the branches of the fig tree, a partially leafless ficus mucosae that at some juncture, I guessed, had been hit by lightning. Half of the tree was dead, stuck in a permanent winter, while the other half, as if in compensation, flourished vigorously. The chimps foraged idly on the ripe red fruit. They seemed content and unconcerned. I wondered what had made them scream.
Alda and I settled down for a long period of observation, our analysis sheets ready, our field journals open. The chimps glanced at us from time to time but otherwise ignored us—they were thoroughly habituated to observers. Through my binoculars I studied them all individually. I knew them and their personalities, I felt, as well as I knew my family. There was Clovis, the alpha male of the group, with his unusually thick, dense fur. Mr. Jeb, an old male, bald-headed, with a gray goatee and a withered arm. Rita-Mae, a strong mature female, with patchy brown hair. Rita-Lu, her daughter, an almost mature adolescent. Rita-Mae’s son was Muffin, an adolescent, a nervous, neurotic chimp who was only happy in his mother’s presence and who had been deeply upset by the arrival of her new baby, Lester. The two members of the group who were missing were Conrad and Lena. Conrad was an adult male whose eyeballs around the iris were white, not brown, a feature that gave him a disconcertingly human gaze. Lena was heavily pregnant, by whom I had no idea. She was a lone female who had attached herself to this southern group. Sometimes she traveled with them for a few days but she always left of her own accord after a while, to reappear up to a week or so later. She kept herself somewhat aloof, on the fringes of the group, but they seemed to accept her comings and goings without fuss.
We watched the chimps for over two hours. Muffin groomed Rita-Mae. Rita-Lu left the tree for twenty minutes and returned. The troop of colobus monkeys—from the first fig tree, I supposed—passed nearby. The chimps barked at them. Clovis displayed aggressively, shaking branches, the hair on his body erect. Later Mr. Jeb tried, half-heartedly, to copulate with Rita-Lu, who was partially in estrus, but she drove him away. Lester played with his mother and brother. And so the time wore on, an average chimp day: feeding, grooming, relaxing, with a certain amount of aggression and sex.
And then they seemed to have eaten their fill. Rita-Mae picked up Lester, slung him on her back and slid down one of the huge buttressing roots of the fig tree to the ground. Slowly the others followed. They prowled around the foot of the tree for a while, munching on some fallen figs. Then baby Lester slipped off his mother’s back and ran off to tug and pull at what looked like a tangle of rotting vegetation. Rita-Lu scampered after him, snatched the bundle away and flailed it violently up and down, making loud waa-bark noises as she did so. Through my binoculars I could see that the object she was flinging about was limp, but solid, like a very oily rag, say, or a dead fish.
She soon lost interest, however, as she saw the other members of the group moving out of the fig tree clearing, and threw the bundle away as she ran to follow them.
“We go?” Alda said. Normally we would spend the rest of the day trailing the group.
“No. Wait,” I said. Something about that bundle intrigued me. We picked our way over the rocks to where Rita-Lu had flung it. Alda crouched down and prodded it with a twig.
“Baboon,” he said. “Baby baboon.”
The tiny carcass was half eaten. Most of the head was gone, as were the chest and stomach. Two legs and an arm remained
. A gleam of thin white ribs, like the teeth of a comb, shone through blackening membrane. The pale body, a bloodless bluey gray, was covered in the finest down. It looked distressingly human.
A dead baby baboon, eaten by chimpanzees, was not extraordinary. Chimps would eat baby monkeys, duiker, bushpigs, anything they could catch…. But I knew this wasn’t a baby baboon. This was the corpse of an infant chimpanzee, a few days old.
We have been aware for a long time now that chimpanzees are not pure vegetarians like gorillas. In London Zoo, in 1883, a chimp called Sally was observed to catch and eat a pigeon that had flown into her cage, and she continued to feast on any curious bird that hopped in looking for pickings. Indeed, Mallabar’s own work here at Grosso Arvore had done much to establish the different types of meat that chimps consumed, and revealed for the first time their predatory nature. Mallabar was the first person ever to observe and photograph chimpanzees hunting monkeys. In a memorable film he shot, the world saw a group of adult chimpanzees organize themselves into a hunting party, chase, capture and consume a baby bushpig. Chimpanzees liked eating meat—people were very surprised to learn—and chimps hunted and killed in order to get it. It made them less lovable, less gentle, perhaps, but more human.
I walked around the rocks and the blasted fig tree and I thought of the way Rita-Lu had thrashed the ground with the tattered remains of this baby. I wondered what Eugene Mallabar would make of this. Alda waited patiently for me.
After a minute or two I told him to put the corpse in a plastic bag and seal it. As he did so, I examined the ground beneath the fig tree and collected samples of feces in my specimen bottles. As I labeled them I tried to keep my thoughts calm and rational. What I had here was some very interesting evidence, but the case it made was highly circumstantial…. First, there was the meat in Clovis’s feces. Second, the half-eaten corpse of a baby chimp, two or three days old. Third, the gleeful aggression Rita-Lu had displayed toward the corpse. And fourth? Fourth, the possibility of more meat traces in the fecal matter just collected. What did that add up to? I checked my natural excitement: softly, softly, I thought.
Then there was the baby. Whose baby? Lena’s? It was possible; she was due to give birth any day. But if so, how did the baby die? What had eaten it and why? And why had Rita-Lu behaved in such a way? I stopped myself from further unprofitable speculation. We needed more facts, more data. I sent Alda off to find João and said that both of them should try to locate Lena, find out if she had given birth and if her infant was with her. I picked up the plastic bag with the dead baby in it—so light—and headed back to Grosso Arvore.
I stood in Hauser’s lab. The simple building, a rectangular corrugated-iron shack, contained a small but surprisingly efficient and well-equipped laboratory. Hauser’s work at the project was to do with chimpanzee pathology. He was currently trying to identify the various types of intestinal worms that infected chimps; hence the avidity with which he welcomed our cloacal samples brought in from the field.
We stood together, now, looking down at the pathetic remains of the baby chimp laid out on a stainless steel dissecting tray. Hauser’s lab had a small generator to power his centrifuges and chill his refrigerators. In a corner a table fan turned its face this way and that, dispensing its breeze, endlessly saying no, no, no. Hauser wore a white coat and trousers, but with no shirt or undershirt under the coat. Beneath the antiseptic smells of his chemicals and preserving spirits it was just possible to distinguish the thin vinegar reek of his body odor, a noisome seam in the olfactory strata.
He gave a soft grunt and poked at the body with the end of his ballpoint pen. He lifted a minute leg and let it drop.
“It is a chimp,” I confirmed.
“Absolutely. Very young and maybe dead for twenty-four hours. Hard to say. Brains gone, viscera gone. Hardly worth chewing on the rest. Where did you find it?”
“Ah…at one of my feeding sites.”
“The very discreet Mrs. Clearwater responded.”
I ignored him and laid out my specimen bottles.
“Is there any way,” I began as lightly as I could manage, “that you could tell if these ones”—I pointed at the bottles—“had consumed this one?” I indicated the baby’s corpse.
Hauser looked steadily at me, thinking. The sweat stood out on his bald head like little sun blisters. “Yes,” he said. “Tricky, but possible.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“Then I assume these aren’t chimp feces.” He tapped one of the bottles with his pen. Hauser was no fool—which was annoying.
“God no,” I said. “At least I assume not.” I tried a laugh and it came out not too badly. But I could sense Hauser’s mind at work, testing the implications. “Just a crazy theory of mine,” I went on, “about predators.” As soon as I uttered the words I regretted them. I had said too much: Hauser knew better than anyone what chimpanzees ate. He had identified dozens of plant and fruit types from fecal study alone. He would be looking much more closely now. For some absurd reason I suddenly felt guilty about my insignificant duplicity. Why didn’t I simply air my suspicions, test my theory on a fellow worker? But I had the answer to that: I knew my colleagues too well to trust.
“No hurry,” I said. “Whenever you’ve got a moment.”
“No, I’ll get right onto it,” Hauser said, ominously.
I left the lab with some relief. It was hot outside, the midafternoon sun burning palely through a thin screen of clouds. No birds sang. All the noise came from the Artificial Feeding Area, and from the volume of pant-hoots, barks and screams it sounded as if there were two dozen chimps scoffing Mallabar’s free bananas. And with such a large number present everybody else would be there: Mallabar, Ginga, Toshiro, Roberta Vail, and half a dozen assistants, all observing and notating furiously. Ian Vail would be out in the field, I supposed; like me he was highly dubious about Mallabar’s celebrated toy.
I walked back to my tent, debating whether I had handled the discovery of the dead baby correctly. I should learn to be more craftily evasive, I thought: a bad evasion is tantamount to telling the truth. I was interrupted in my recriminations by the sight of João and Alda waiting for me. No sign at all of Lena, they said. There was no point in sending them out at this stage of the afternoon so I let them go home. I dragged a chair out into the shade of a canvas awning stretched above the tent’s opening and tried to write a letter to my mother, but my mind was too busy to concentrate and I abandoned it after three or four lines.
That evening in the canteen I waited until Roberta had left before I approached Ian Vail. His surprise, and then sly delight, might have been touching under any other circumstances, but his evident pleasure that I had initiated a conversation irked me. Our relations were cordial and professional, so far as I was concerned. I was making an innocent inquiry, so why did he have to render it personal, find it implicit with other motives? He set his tray down and turned to give me his full and focused attention.
“Fire away,” he said, his pale-lashed pale eyes irradiating me with telepathic avowals, I felt sure, but to no effect: Ian Vail did not interest me.
I asked him if there had been any recent births to any of his northern chimps.
“No, there are two pregnant, but nobody due soon. Why?”
“I found a dead baby today. Looking for a mother.”
“How did it die?”
“Accident, I think. I don’t know.”
He stroked his chin. The light from the hurricane lamp caught the hair on his forearm, dense and whorly, golden wire. It looked half an inch thick.
“There’re a couple of nomadic females pretty far gone,” he said. “Do you want to check? If Eugene isn’t feeding tomorrow we might find them. Shouldn’t be hard.”
“Fine,” I said, trying to ignore his boyish grin of pleasure. We arranged to meet at seven in the morning. He would come by in the Land-Rover and collect me.
I walked back to my tent, noticing that the lights in Hauser’s lab were sti
ll on. I realized I hadn’t seen him in the canteen that evening and I felt a seep of worry drip through me. Hauser was not known for working late.
Half an hour later, as I was writing up my field notes for the day, I heard Mallabar’s voice outside, asking if he might have a word with me. I let him in and offered him a scotch, which he declined. He looked around my tent, and then back at me, as if its contents might provide some encoded clue to my personality. I offered him a seat, but he came straight to the point standing.
“That body you found today, why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“Why should I?”
He smiled patiently, the wise headmaster confronted by the difficult pupil. I always strove for extra confidence where Mallabar was concerned. He worked his charms so thoroughly on everyone else that I made special efforts to show how impervious I was to them.
“Deaths must be logged. You know that.”
“I am logging it.” I pointed to my book. “I just don’t have all the facts yet. Hauser’s—”
“That’s why I’m here, to preempt you.” He paused. “We have the facts now. It wasn’t a chimp.”
“Oh come on.”
“Hope, it’s a terribly easy mistake to make. I’ve done it many, many times myself. A partially eaten or decomposed body of a newborn…hard to tell, my dear, hard to tell.”
“But Hauser—”
“Anton just confirmed to me that it was a baby baboon.”
“Ah.”
“I don’t blame you, Hope, I want you to know that. You were doing your job. I just wish you had come straight to me with your hypothesis.” Now he took a seat. I wondered what he knew of my hypothesis.
“I must say I thought—”
“I didn’t want,” he interrupted again, and gestured at my journal, “I didn’t want you to be barking up blind alleys.”
