Following Fifi

by John Crocker

  Adding to my knowledge of the larger community of fifty chimps were the “gossipy” conversations we had in the evenings at the meetinghouse near the beach. The large wooden structure was our communal gathering place where the students, graduate researchers, and Jane met after swimming in the lake at the end of a long day tracking chimps. “Jomeo exerted a considerable amount of energy to capture a colobus monkey today in lower Linda Valley but immediately had it snatched away by Figan and Sherry, who took off with it before he even had a taste,” Richard described to the group as we sat at the large wooden table eating dinner. We all sighed in pity for Jomeo. The result of our sharing the adventures of our particular chimps was to gain a bigger social picture of the community on any given day. Of course we also had skit night, music night, card games and intense sociopolitical discussions in the soft lounge chairs near the large windows looking out toward the lake. The field assistants were quite happy to hang out in their area of multiple smaller structures where they ate, conversed in Swahili and prayed evening prayer. The generator kept the only source of lights going in these areas but time was limited since we parted company around 9:00 P.M. to reach our huts in time for a good night’s sleep. We needed to awaken before sunrise to find our chimps’ nesting sites before they left to begin their daily travels. For me, that was usually the nest of Fifi and Freud. I thought about them day and night.

  In a class of her own, Fifi, a young mother then at just fifteen years old, taught me the most during my stay because of her remarkable attentiveness, patience, and playfulness with her son. Her mothering skills seemed unmatchable. Though I didn’t know it then, the months I would spend observing Fifi’s every move as she roamed through the forest and cared for Freud, remaining patient and calm, would stay with me for the rest of my life, influencing how I treated patients and family.

  The first time I saw Fifi confidently stride into our camp, Freud on her back, I was struck by the richness of her sleek black hair, which stood out against the dark green forest foliage. She certainly was not the tattered-looking, dull-brown chimp I was used to seeing in zoos back home. I recognized her immediately from the films, and I could not take my eyes off her. She was right in front of me, seeming even more humanlike than in film. Still feeling overwhelmed in general on my third day at Gombe, I smiled excitedly at Hamisi, who was sitting close by. He smiled back with a knowing understanding of what I was feeling. Fifi stopped very close to me and rolled her son around on the ground to tickle him. I could hear Freud laughing—his rapid panting sounds accompanied by his play face were hallmarks of a chimp having a really good time. His laugh was infectious, like a human toddler’s, and I found myself chuckling quietly.

  I had known a lot about Fifi even before I arrived. Jane seemed to have a special fondness for her as the first female offspring of the grand matriarch Flo, and she told stories about her often. Fifi had a self-assurance like her mother’s and a confidence that carried her a long way. When she became mature and was sexually receptive, she traveled several valleys south of her own community and mated with males of a different community. This behavior is crucial in widening the gene pool to produce vigorous offspring. Fifi was also very competent in her mothering and food seeking. Shortly before I arrived at Gombe I heard she single-handedly took down a young bushbuck that weighed about fifty pounds. While these antelope are commonly seen at Gombe, it’s unusual for a female to hunt them on her own.

  One day I wore dark Levi’s while observing Fifi and Freud since my khaki shorts were all being washed. Freud noticed my different attire. As I sat with my clipboard, he slowly approached me. I caught my breath and looked around; I couldn’t really move away as I was backed up against an enormous thicket. I just froze, afraid to move a muscle while Freud reached out with his little index finger. He put it on my jeans—I took care not to startle—and then he looked at me and sniffed the finger he had touched me with. I was spellbound, and impressed that Fifi was comfortable enough to allow this without snatching Freud up in her arms, although she watched steadily from fifteen feet away. A brief sadness came over me as this encounter reminded me of my close interactions with Babu. Then Freud scampered back to Fifi and ignored me for the rest of the day.

  Freud had exuded a daring confidence and a competence from an early age, and I suspected then that one day he would rise to the alpha male position—which he did, eighteen years later. I’m sure this was partly due to his mother’s confidence in herself and in him.

  As I studied the pair, I thought of my own mother’s natural confidence in being a mother and of her optimism about the world around her. Though not religious, she was spiritual and spoke of an inner strength that would guide us in life. “Just turn within to find the answer,” she would say when times were rough. I related well to this form of reassurance and also to Fifi’s motherly manner as she constantly made herself available to Freud for hugging and affectionate interactions during the first several years of his development. I could see this same trait in varying degrees in most of the chimp mothers I studied.

  By the time I had been at Gombe for nearly a month, I could watch several of the infants playing together under their mothers’ watchful gazes and tell most of the young chimps apart. Their individual faces and expressions helped differentiate them. Freud had big ears and very engaging facial expressions while he wrestled around with his peers; Gremlin’s face was longer and more serious. As I watched them playing, I thought, People will be studying these same chimps for years to come. That thought made me happy. Jane was committed to studying successive generations in an effort to uncover deeper and more significant information about their social behavior.

  My fascination with watching mother chimpanzees interact with their offspring never wavered. After I tracked the families through the forest from sunrise to sunset, my body ached with fatigue, but I never tired of witnessing the lengthy infant play sessions or the mothers’ intricate nest building each night, when they carefully wove long, growing branches into cozy sleeping platforms high in the trees.

  The vital bond between confident, attentive mother chimpanzees and their offspring seemed to set the stage for the offspring’s successes and even survival later in life. Fifi’s confidence and patience with her progeny as they learned—through observation and imitation—may have helped them secure the high-ranking positions I later learned they went on to hold as adults. Three out of Fifi’s five male offspring—Freud, Frodo, and Ferdinand—achieved alpha male status. Fifi had clearly benefited from her own mother’s parenting skills and likely passed that confident behavior on to her sons.

  After many days of tracking and noting on-the-minute distances between infants and mothers and tape-recording descriptions of interesting chimp interactions, I would spend a day transcribing this data by hand for use in Jane’s long-term study. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was contributing to one of the longest studies of wild animals in history.

  My recordings out in the field were interrupted by long periods—up to two hours—when a mother-infant pair would climb so high in a tree that my field assistant and I couldn’t even see them. Whenever this happened, we’d just wait for them to come down. Far from being boring, this was my daydreaming time.

  I once lost myself in watching a shockingly green, winged insect attempt to dig himself out of a spider’s web. He never made it out before I had to leave, to my disappointment. Another time Hamisi laughed at me for staring into a fascinating, unusually shaped forest flower as my mind wandered. He said, “It looked like it was telling you something.”

  My jungle musings had been primed from an early age, when my thoughts would wander away from my third-grade teacher’s lessons and on to more appealing subjects, like roller skating or climbing trees with friends. In those days, I would get called sharply back to reality by a frustrated teacher or giggling classmates, but in the forest daydreaming seemed natural and relaxing—my jungle meditation.

  I also experienced some heart-stopping moments. O
n one occasion I noticed a large baboon named Stumptail watching me through the window of the upper-camp lunchroom as I made a sandwich for the day and packed it into my shoulder sack. I left the structure to begin following Fifi but had to bend down to tie my tennis shoe. Instantly, a golden hairy arm reached over my shoulder to grab the sandwich out of my sack. I stood up quickly and yelled, and Stumptail ran off.

  I was told later by more experienced researchers that I should have surrendered the sandwich and remained still so that the baboon wouldn’t startle and sink his large canines into my neck. Even with such moments of terror thrown in, I couldn’t help but appreciate the raw beauty of my new surroundings. They were much more peaceful and relaxing than school, with the pressure of tests and paper-writing assignments in my premed classes.

  In those first weeks at Gombe, I experienced the majesty of the African forest and its denizens. As I lay in bed at night, my tired muscles aching, I heard baboon grunts and trees swaying in the wind outside my hut. While waiting for the chimpanzees to come into view, I watched troops of graceful colobus monkeys swing across twenty-foot distances high in the canopy. One day, field assistants sent out a message Paul Revere-style, saying we should come see some birds, rarely seen at Gombe. We gathered to gaze at two majestic crowned cranes that landed and strutted across an open field near the beach. They were dazzling. Laughing to myself, I thought, If only they knew what celebrities they are to those of us watching them.

  After what felt like a particularly long day, a number of us gathered around a campfire on the beach. For a while, I listened to people tell stories as I dug in the sand with a stick. But before long, I sunk into some sort of a trance. Perhaps it was the sheer exhaustion from scampering through thick bushes and hiking up and down hills for twelve hours to follow Fifi and Freud. Or maybe it was the hypnotic flames of the fire. Regardless, I entered an altered state. I was surrounded by chatter in English and Swahili, the sounds of crickets and conga drums, brilliant stars against a clear black sky, the bobbing yellow lanterns of fishing boats reflected on the lake, and a warm breeze. I felt at peace, relaxed, deeply connected to the never-ending cycle of the jungle. It wouldn’t have surprised me to suddenly see my ancient hominid ancestors emerge from a nearby cave and join us.

  I was becoming more intimately connected to my natural surroundings. I wasn’t departing from reality; on the contrary, I was finding my place. The physical environment, the natural environment, was permeating me with all its history, its life, and its dangers. I had never felt so alive with ideas and imagination back home in the States. I was feeling the essence of the Gombe forest. Just as it was the living, breathing, pulsating home of the chimp families, it would become a home for me too—as these gracious primates seemed willing to share their land with a peaceful white ape visiting from California.

  The Gombe Medical Clinic

  When Jane asked me at the beginning of my stay at Gombe to help out in the small medical clinic at the camp originally set up by Jane’s mother, I responded hesitantly. As much as I was interested in helping, I knew little about clinical medicine.

  The one-room clinic had chairs, an exam table, and a supply of medications ranging from aspirin to antimalarial drugs, which had come not only from Kigoma but from the United States and England as well. In the clinic we treated field assistants, staff, and their families, some of them from Bubongo Village. One researcher, named Emilie, had training as a veterinary technician; she was the most experienced in medicine. Another, Julie, had a biology background, and she and I worked on alternating days as Emilie’s assistant.

  We saw people with injuries, malaria, and fevers of all kinds. We would treat them or send them to Kigoma in our park boat to be seen at the clinic there. Back pain, stomach ailments, and skin and eye infections were some of the most common conditions. We treated them as best we could. One man from a neighboring village came in with several beetles in his ear canal after sleeping on the ground. A staff member who grew up in a village close by knew a remedy for this and poured a warm, oily liquid into the man’s ear, which I assumed killed the beetles, since he had no further complaints.

  Some people elected to go to the local medicine man, who dispensed herbs and other natural remedies and who was accepted by many villagers as their main resource for health concerns. In rural Tanzania at that time, these natural healers seemed to be used as much as, if not more than, the government clinics.

  Early in my clinic experiences at Gombe, a mother came in with her feverish baby. She spoke calmly, telling me, “He has not been eating, and he feels so hot,” but her strained expression has remained in my mind to this day.

  When I examined him, I was surprised by how hot his little face felt. Since we didn’t have much ability to treat an infection, I taught her some basic fever care and told her that she would need to go to the hospital in Kigoma if the baby did not improve in the next twenty-four hours.

  Four days later, I was eating breakfast when Emilie came in looking teary. “That baby died,” she told me, and I suddenly lost my appetite. I remembered his tiny face under my hand, and his mother’s worried expression. The next day, she had walked the infant to the local healer rather than go to Kigoma as we had encouraged her to do. Her belief system had likely influenced her choice. I knew, however, that the baby could have had a bacterial infection or malaria, and the hard truth is he might not have survived even if treated at the nearest hospital. Regardless, it was tremendously difficult to have to witness firsthand how vulnerable infants are to infection in tropical areas.

  Hearing about the 12 percent infant mortality rate in Tanzania (compared to the 1.8 percent in the States in 1974) prior to my arrival was one thing, but witnessing it was another. There did seem to be an acceptance of this loss of young life, and people had larger families knowing that some of their offspring wouldn’t survive childhood. It was a hard reckoning for me, coming from the West and trusting in medicine as the best weapon against illness. The loss of young lives is always tragic, but in Africa, it was also a part of everyday life. This new perspective was overwhelming to me. And yet that young mother’s face showed me the human side of the statistics.

  A few weeks later, I learned another life lesson when a physician who was also a Catholic nun visited Gombe to meet Jane. The woman was highly regarded for her missionary work in Africa. She appeared to be in her early fifties and dressed in her full habit, which protected her well from the sun but must have been uncomfortably hot to wear in the humid, eighty-degree tropics.

  I was in the clinic seeing a young child with a mild fever and cough when the doctor arrived at the meetinghouse. I decided to seek her advice and walked the shy young mother and her child over for a consultation. The doctor was talking with Jane but was told why we were there. She simply nodded and kept speaking with Jane.

  It seemed a bit insensitive to me for the doctor to ignore us as we waited. After about ten minutes, which seemed more like an hour, the doctor came over and introduced herself.

  I told the doctor, “I’m concerned the child might be developing pneumonia.”

  Without even examining the little girl, she told us, “She will do fine without any medication. If not, the mother should bring her back.” I couldn’t understand her response but didn’t feel comfortable questioning her for a more thorough answer in front of the mother. Though the doctor was calm and matter-of-fact in her diagnosis, and the mother herself seemed reassured, I remained worried.

  After clinic hours, I caught up with the doctor. “I don’t want to be disrespectful,” I said, “but I still feel worried about that little girl I brought to you earlier. I was afraid she had pneumonia, and I was a little worried—maybe you didn’t get a very good look at her.”

  She smiled. “Are you worried that I didn’t examine her?” I nodded, feeling uncomfortable. “I’m glad you care. But don’t worry. I was observing the girl out of the corner of my eye while I was talking to Jane. I didn’t once in that whole time see her cough or show a
ny sign of distress.”

  It was remarkable. Through her close yet unnoticeable observation, she was able to correctly assess the girl’s condition and needs. The doctor’s vast experience working with few resources and little technology had made her a more observant physician. She compensated for what she lacked in equipment by perfecting her observational skills in diagnosing patients. I will always remember this doctor—her calm, direct manner, and her ability to provide medical care in challenging circumstances.

  The Gombe medical clinic allowed me to help meet the basic needs of a rural Tanzanian community while learning some of the fundamentals of medicine. I also hold fond memories of forming a closer connection with the field assistants’ family members, most of whom I would not have met if I had not provided medical care for them along with the other villagers. And even today, when I look into the ears of my patients to check for infection, I think of the man with beetles in his ears and the oily concoction that was used to treat him. The only case that has come close to this in my medical practice was when I found a tiny sparkling Christmas ornament in the ear of a four-year-old girl. When I shined the otoscope light into her ear, I let out a big “Wow!” as I saw the glittering reflection shining back at me. I thought about using an oily concoction to get it out, but instead I called a specialist.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A DAY IN THE LIFE OF FIFI AND FREUD

  I spent the next few months observing mother-infant pairs. Fifi’s skills as a mother made a deep impression on me and would one day help me to understand maternal nurturing among my patients. The constant physical closeness early on in a chimp’s development provides deep reassurance to the growing primate. Chimp mothers also provide on-demand nursing, protection from other animals, and time for learning through the youngster’s close observation of his or her mother. Young chimps gradually achieve independence from their mothers, with males starting to break away for short periods of time at around eight or nine and females at ten or eleven years of age. They reach full maturity at sixteen for males and thirteen or fourteen for females.