Endangered (11 page)

Toward dusk, the foraging group I'd been tailing began to call out and move to the center of the enclosure. Otto and I followed a short ways behind, careful not to lose sight of them. They made locating calls to keep track of one another, and Otto would hesitantly call back, though not loud enough for anyone but me to hear. Eventually the first foraging group joined with another, greeting and rubbing and chattering. I tried to keep at a distance, but as soon as the new group spied us, they came over to investigate. Mushie stayed near me and worked like an ambassador, rubbing against Otto to demonstrate that we'd earned a place in the group. They'd seen my mother in the enclosure before, so they took my presence in stride. I was thankful that they seemed more interested in one another than in me.

Except for Anastasia. She studied me from a treetop, Songololo begging for attention at her feet. Seated in a ring of branches around her were four females, one of whom was nervous Banalia. I figured I was seeing the Pink Ladies.

I had an idea about the order of their hierarchy by who was grooming whom. Anastasia only received. Banalia only gave.

Sometimes a bonobo would come over and sit in front of Otto and me, back turned, expecting to be stroked. I wasn't sure what to do, so I'd make a few lame attempts to pat their hair until they wandered away in disgust. Mushie was always grooming ladies, never receiving. Since even he never tried to groom me after we
joined the other groups, I figured I was still at the bottom as far as the hierarchy went.

Minutes before darkness plunged, rain started to fall and I had barely enough time to pack everything I had into the nylon duffel and hang it from a tree branch to keep it dry. August was in the dry season of Bas-Congo, and normally we'd go months without a drop, but it was like the weather had decided to join in the political upheaval. I stood in the driest spot I could find, clutching Otto and wondering what to do. The main building would be nice and dry, but the
kata-kata
were in there. Within the enclosure there weren't any caves or rock overhangs to shelter under. The ground would soon become wet, and sleeping in a puddle would be a surefire path to pneumonia, without any hope of a doctor or medications.

So I studied what the bonobos did.

The rain quickly went from a sprinkle to a downpour, thundering against the leaves and trenching water through the soil. To save my shoes and socks from getting soaked, I did like the bonobos: I found a tree and climbed. Otto rode on my back, occasionally reaching out to grasp a leaf or twig whose beading water interested him.

I stuck near Mushie. He took one branch in hand, reached for another nearby, and skillfully tied the supple ends together. Then he found another and tied it to the first two. Within minutes he'd made a springy platform, sheltered by the branches above. Only a little rain made it through, and what did funneled right down the leaves and to the ground. I was impressed: Mushie had been able to choose any position he liked in space, all by selecting which branches to use and where to tie them.

This task was made easy for Mushie, of course, by his long arms and grasping toes. It's like bonobos have four hands. With
my relatively worthless feet, I didn't find making a nest quite as easy. Tottering high over the jungle floor, I braced against the trunk and got one branch into my hand. When I reached for another, though, the rain-slicked first branch slipped right out of my grasp and I wound up on my butt, nearly falling to the ground. I was down to one branch again. When I reached back for another, both of them slipped from my hand. I cursed. Otto, curious about what was getting me so upset, got off my back and sat in the next tree over to get a better view.

Finally I managed to get two branches limply tied together. They didn't look like they'd hold any weight, but it was a start. I'd need a third and, ideally, a fourth branch to make the nest stable. Those would have to come from the next tree over — I'd have to climb back down, go up the other tree, and hope I could reach across in the rain without plummeting to my death. All in the darkness, which would be nearly absolute within a few minutes.

I flopped down, sighing in frustration. Otto joined me, huddling his wet back against my side for warmth. I rubbed a hand up and down him, and he crawled inside my damp sweatshirt, shivering against my clammy belly. As I sulked in the fading light, I noticed Mushie staring at me from his nest. Suddenly the tree shook as he leaped to my side. Nearby bonobos cried out in surprise and I cringed. But he didn't mean me any harm; he focused immediately on my nest. Mushie undid my pathetic knot and, leaping easily to the next tree over, efficiently made a new nest, using eight branches instead of his own three, maybe because he knew I needed a far safer nest than the average bonobo. Without another glance at me, he returned to his own nest and lay down to sleep.

Cautiously, I eased along and settled into the bed he'd made me. It was unnerving to be suspended high above the ground, but
the nest felt sturdy — surprisingly sturdy, as good as a store-bought hammock.

Once we were out of the rain, Otto crawled from under my sweatshirt and snuggled beside me. Now that I was in the security of a nest, the sounds of raindrops against the broad leaves and the good-night cries of the other bonobos became soothing instead of alarming. I drank a little rain that had collected on a broad leaf, figuring it was more sanitary than the pond water, and enjoyed the cool sensation on my lips. Otto followed suit. Although it was totally new to me, this life was routine for the bonobos. This was an evening like any other to them, and from here I could fool myself that the massacre at the sanctuary had never happened. As Otto's breathing slowed, I realized an unexpected miracle:
I might sleep tonight.

 

I knew I was falling before I knew I was awake. As soon as my eyes opened I stopped being me and started being a body — I was a bag of meat, soon to splatter. Bonobos screamed above me, and branches thudded against my back and then my face as I contorted through the fall. Then my belly came down hard on a branch. My arms swung out in reflex and I held on.

I couldn't breathe; there was a sharp pain in my gut, I was wet and in shock, and all I could think about was keeping my arms around the branch. Then I realized that all my weight was on the part of me that Otto had been clinging to when he fell asleep. I reached under my belly, terrified of what I'd find. But he wasn't crushed. He wasn't anywhere. I listened for Otto's cries, but heard nothing.

Still struggling to get my breath back, I wrapped a leg over the branch and tried to get my bearings. It was still nighttime. The rain
was still slapping the leaves and running down my arms. I could barely make out the shapes of other sleeping bonobos around me.

“Otto?” I called.

From far below, I heard a murp. Then it was closer and closer, until Otto swung up onto my branch and flung himself into my arms. I held him and clung to the wet branch, only slowly becoming aware of slight burning feelings on my arms and legs. My nose was tender and smarted when I touched it. I was intact, but I'd been scratched up pretty badly by the branches I'd passed. I'd be looking great come morning.

I'd fallen out of my nest. I was such an amateur bonobo.

I slowly made my way back up the tree, pressing sloshy, squeaky sneakers onto branches until I was up high again. I edged past Mushie, still snoring away in his nest, and relocated my own. The branches he'd tied were still attached. I cautiously got in, thankful for the brief but intense exertion: I might be wet and a little bloody, but at least I wasn't shivering.

It was going to be impossible to calm down enough to fall back asleep, not when I might wake up plummeting to the ground. I stared up at the stars, feeling my thoughts slow and my mind grow calm as the bonobos around me stopped shrieking and dozed off.

There was movement above me and I saw, like in a grainy movie, a humanoid figure silhouetted by the moon. Anastasia.

I watched, horrified, as she turned her attention to me, so we stared at each other through forty feet of vertical space. Then she was hurtling through the air, her mouth open in a scream, canines gleaming white. Her shape grew larger and larger until she was on me with a shriek and a rush of wind. As the nest pitched downward, my mouth filled with wet bonobo hair and my gut dropped. My nest didn't give, but the branches sprang, slingshotting Otto from me. He screeched as he and I and Anastasia plunged through the night. I glimpsed him as he grabbed a branch and clung to it
while I kept falling. I was in the air for another second before sharp leaves raked my face as I hit the upper fronds of a bushy branch, sinking in until I stopped, panting, mired in brambles.

I heard a loud cry and scrambling sounds as Anastasia returned to her nest.

Now it all made sense. I hadn't fallen out of my nest before — it had been her both times. I picked my way out of the brambles and climbed to the ground, ankles wounded and creaking. I called Otto to me. He bounded down, and I rummaged through the duffel for a few moist shirts to use as a mattress. I laid them down in the mud at the base of the tree, positioned Otto on top of my belly so he could sleep without being directly on the ground, and got ready to wait out the night.

I'd started a war with the queen. And I was losing.

 

I woke up soggy and congested, my nasal cavity smelling faintly of blood. When I sat up, my pants squished. I warily laid a finger on my nose; I didn't think it was broken, but it was close. It was hard to get a stable reflection out of the pond's surface, but I could see enough to know I was heavily bruised. My primary task would be to keep Otto's curious fingers away from my wounds. He, too, was doing none too well. His wet hair stuck out in random directions, he was limping slightly from his wounded foot, and he wheezed through obstructed nostrils. At least the rain had stopped with the morning, but the sky was cloudy and it seemed likely that the bad weather would be back. If we spent many more nights sleeping on the ground in the wet, I might not survive. Little Otto definitely wouldn't.

I skinned a papaya with a sharp rock and removed the seeds. Then I unwrapped the second-to-last granola bar and mashed its bits into the sweet flesh. Using the curved peel as a plate, I fed it
to Otto and me. We got a drink of tea-brown water, and I rummaged through the duffel for the driest change of clothes I could find. Even though the morning was warm, Otto was shivering, so I wrapped him up in a cardigan. Its musty fabric pooled at his feet.

Having suffered the rainstorm, the bonobos appeared to be taking the day off, draped around the clearing like damp towels left to dry. When the rain started back up that afternoon, it was even harder than the night before. Some of the bonobos got back into their nests, but most hunched around, holding elephant-ear leaves over their heads to keep the water off. Otto and I used my rain poncho the same way. Banalia kept clutching her leaf-stalk so hard that it would bend over and let water flood in. She would sulk, then go find a new stalk, and the same mishap would repeat. Finally she came over and tried to pull my poncho away. When I refused, she joined us instead, crowding in with me and Otto.

Anastasia was hunched over a safe distance away. She held her leaf in such a way that water streamed right onto Songololo's head, where she sat shivering in her mother's lap. Songololo would move so she was out of the rain, at which point Anastasia would shift position and expose her daughter all over again. As far as Anastasia was concerned, there was no child in her lap, and it was driving Songololo insane.

In one of the books Patrice gave me, I'd read about an American scientist who'd experimented with monkeys in the 1950s. He'd taken babies away from their mothers and offered them two fake mothers instead. One was made of wire, but provided food, and the other was made with snuggly cloth, but didn't offer any food. The babies would always choose the cloth mother, even if it meant they didn't have any nourishment to live on. Then the scientist went a step further and installed a device in the cloth mother that would make it kick out and hurt the baby monkey. When it was hit, the
baby would run away in fear, then try to win the fake mother back. It would flirt and coo and risk curling back up against it. The baby monkeys would ignore their friends, concentrating all their energy on winning their fake mothers over.

Watching Songololo brought all that home. She could have given up on her mother, but she was obsessed with trying to get Anastasia to love and take care of her, even though Anastasia acted as though she didn't have a daughter. Songololo was the most insecure of all the bonobos, and for good cause — she was the only one, after all, still getting soaked in the downpour. Finally giving up, Songololo slid off Anastasia's back and hunched in the rain.

Banalia seemed to take great pleasure in Otto, toying idly with his hair as she took cover with us. At one point, as an experiment, I slid snoozing Otto into Banalia's lap. She squealed and looked down at him with a mix of confusion and delight, like I'd given her a pound cake. Freed of Otto, I motioned shivering Songololo to come join us. She looked at me, and then peered up at Anastasia, her mouth opening and closing but no sound coming out. Songololo was in full despair mode. Leaving Banalia with Otto and the rain poncho, I crept over. Anastasia looked at me and then looked away, but I could feel her focus. I came right near. The runoff from Anastasia's leaf splashed against my ankles.

Songololo startled when I placed my hand on her back. I opened my arms, and she looked at Anastasia, looked back at me, then slowly climbed up. She burrowed under my sweatshirt. My heart pounding, I watched Anastasia's reaction. Sighing, she turned her back as I crept back to Otto and Banalia.

When I sat down with Otto and Banalia, Mushie bounded over and joined us. It was getting to be quite a crowd under my little rain poncho. Old Ikwa wandered over curiously and, when he
couldn't find any room underneath, sat near us with his elephant-ear leaf held up.