The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys (14 page)

I have no idea what drove me so relentlessly that day. Looking back at it, from a distance of many happy decades, it would be easy to imagine I was just following my destiny. But was I? Surely my conscious mind would have felt no such compulsion. I was leaving everything I knew and loved, a willing hostage to strangers. For the ten-year-old me it makes no sense at all. Yet it must have, for I remember no intense internal struggle. I followed the hunters because once I had set off down that path, going back just didn’t seem to be an option.

And so I plodded on, still battling the urge to drop to all fours, which grew harder as the vegetation thinned out and I felt exposed and insecure. I was terribly thirsty, too. I hadn’t seen anywhere to drink from in hours. The humans drank often, from metal flasks that hung from their necks. But they didn’t offer me any, and I was too fearful to try to ask them. I simply scoured the bushes we passed for my usual drinking ports. But they didn’t seem to exist in this part of the jungle, the conical leafy plants that I was used to seeing everywhere having been replaced by plants with much flatter leaves.

Everything was new and different. The trees had become shorter and much thinner in girth, their leaves just small shiny buds still awaiting their invitation to maturity. As a consequence, the canopy was sparser, and where shadows had been the norm, here the light reigned supreme, the forest floor becoming a feast of sun and space. The feeling of vulnerability was intense now. I had no roof above my head to shelter me, and I felt suddenly naked. It hurt my eyes to look up at the sky. It was very uncomfortable, all that space.

Eventually, the man had no further need of his machete and stowed it in a case he had strapped on his back. The landscape had changed radically and become hilly, even steep, and was no longer like anything I knew. The couple began slowing and eventually stopped, and as I waited in the sparse bushes, still bent in an unfamiliar, half-upright stance, I could see I was the object of some discussion. Once again, I had the strong sense of discord between them, such as I’d see if one of the young monkeys annoyed Grandpa in some way.

I stepped out from the bushes and drew a little closer. Why had they stopped anyway? It wasn’t clear. But in moving only half a dozen paces I had my answer. They had no choice but to stop for we’d arrived at the end of the world.

The land – the very ground I was standing on – just ended. It stopped abruptly, a few feet ahead of the hunters, and dropped dizzyingly away to nothingness. I edged a little closer – the hunters, busy arguing, seemed to have lost interest in me – and my eyes could barely take in so much all at once. It was the biggest panorama I had ever seen, even from way up in the canopy. In the distance, there were mountains, undulating grey and purple monsters, and something seemed to tell me they were where I should be headed. But they were so far in the distance that they seemed more like a shimmering dreamscape, and between us and them was a vast and seemingly endless blanket of trees. We were at the top of the world, and I felt giddy just looking. I had to clutch a nearby tree trunk to keep myself steady.

The hunters had moved off now, disappearing to the side of me, and as I followed them I could see that the world hadn’t ended. Instead, it dipped from the lip of the ridge and there was a steep path snaking down. I could also now see where the hunters were going: down the dirt track to something that initially confounded me – I had absolutely no idea what it was.

Again, I followed, my feet working hard to grip the steep incline, and as I drew nearer a new memory bubbled to the surface of my mind. This was a vehicle. A vehicle that wasn’t dissimilar to the one that had originally brought me here.

The flash of recognition was accompanied by others. I took in wheels and windows, the bulk of an engine, an open back, pockmarked and dusty and weathered, that was covered by some sort of green and grey material, which was stretched over a series of metal hoops.

The couple were by now divesting themselves of the things they carried: their water flasks and machetes, their rifles and bags. They were then throwing them, one by one, into the back of the truck, along with various sacks and nets, which only now did I appreciate carried captured animals. Once they’d dealt with everything, the woman looked at me again. Her signal – to come to her – was unmistakeable. I duly left the sapling I was now clinging to and at her next gesture obediently clambered up into the back of the truck.

The air inside was so fetid that it almost made me recoil. It eddied in foul swirls, stirred up by my presence, and as I peered into the eerie greenish gloom of the interior it soon became easy to see why. The truck was almost full to bursting with cages. Some were made of mesh and contained a variety of unlucky animals, including lizards, giant butterflies and beautiful birds. There were birds that were familiar to me – parrots, parakeets and macaws – as well as some that were not, such as small, pretty blue ones. Not all the cages advertised their contents, however. Some were solid boxes with airholes I couldn’t see into. They might, looking back, have contained tranquillised animals. Dead ones as well, perhaps, given the intense heat.

There was also a little monkey, next to whose cage was a space I could fit into, and I scrabbled up beside it to keep it company. It was not of the same species as my own monkey family and was speaking a language I didn’t quite know. But the tone of his calls was very clear to me. He was making a sort of grunting noise that immediately seemed familiar as the sort of noise my own troop only made when sick or distressed. He was also hooting piteously, trying to project his feeble calls to the family he was so far from and would never see again.

What had I done? I couldn’t stop thinking about these humans. I had entrusted myself to creatures who felt nothing for other creatures. No, worse than that – creatures who captured and caged other creatures, who routinely tortured them for their own ends.

I tried to comfort the monkey with my own voice, but it was pointless. I could see he was too deeply in distress. I pulled up my legs as the woman lifted the tailboard and locked it. Did he know something I didn’t? Did he have a sense of despair? It was impossible to say, but as I felt the passenger door slam and the truck shudder into life, I wondered if, in my willingness to be led from the jungle, I had just made a very grave mistake.

We travelled all through the night. In the back, under the canvas cover, I could see very little, as the only view was from a plastic or glass panel in the back, much of which was out of sight behind the piles of boxes. But soon there was little to see anyway, as when the night deepened the darkness was absolute. The air was still thick and foul, choked with the smell of the captive animals’ excrement, and bluebottles and other winged insects competed with the engine to provide a constant thrum of angry sound.

Up in the cab, I could hear the low voices of my captors, and from time to time one of my fellow animal prisoners would cry out in pain or distress. And I did feel like a prisoner. I had crossed the line and let these humans take me from the jungle, so I could no more think of leaving than if I’d been locked in a cage, too. I had loved my jungle life, and desperately wanted to belong to the monkeys, but the spell had been broken the day I’d seen the Indian woman. However many times I’d had it proven to me that humans were cruel, cold and murderous, I knew I would never rest until I’d been accepted by them. They were my own kind and that need to live among them had never left me. Whatever became of me now, I had to follow this through; it was a drive so strong inside me that it refused to be ignored.

I spent the night alternately wakeful and sleepy. The chugging of the engine would lull me into slumber only to wake me again moments later when we’d hit some small obstacle or pothole. I remember we stopped once, the slam of the cab door rousing me, and I saw the humans embracing each other up in the cab. I remember being fascinated but also a bit revolted to watch them touching mouths and stroking and playing with each other’s hair.

I also recall the man disappearing for a while – presumably to relieve himself – and the woman doing the same a while later. Locked in the back of the truck, I had no choice but to urinate where I was, just like every other animal trapped there.

Every time I woke, I would feel immediately anxious about the monkey next to me. I would rattle the bars of his cage and coo to him, trying to get him to respond to me and only allowing myself to sink back into slumber once he had. At first, he would chirp at me, letting me know he was still hanging on, but as the night had worn on he’d grown increasingly feeble, and now, as I desperately shook the bars and tried to communicate with him, his stillness had taken on a different quality. I peered into the murk, trying to spot some reassuring sign of movement, but then the horrible truth hit me. He had gone.

I cried then. I let out a wail of such desolation that many of the other creatures stirred and began vocalising too. I think a part of me died as well in that moment, the loss of my little monkey companion summing up everything I had lost. Just as he’d been silenced, so I couldn’t hear my family any more.

But if the hunters heard the commotion in the back, they took no notice. The truck still travelled on to wherever it was headed, stopping only once more, for the man to buy what must have been fuel from a man at the roadside. It filled the whole truck with acrid fumes as he poured it into the tank. And on we went. I could tell that the sun had travelled high in the sky before we stopped again.

Now it was fully light and I was wakeful, I pulled back a tiny corner of the truck’s cover, as I was desperate to see out. My view was very limited, but what I could see was both tantalising and worrying. I could just make out a sliver of the road winding away behind us. It was partly blurred by the dust cloud the moving truck created, but to my astonishment it looked as if the jungle had disappeared. I tried to square this with the view I’d had of that enormous green plateau and found it incredible that there seemed to be no evidence of it here. Most amazing – and alarming – was that we seemed to be travelling along the side of a mountain. To one side, a great wall of rock seemed to loom upwards, while to the other, or so my severely restricted view seemed to suggest, the ground abruptly ended and the drop looked immense.

The journey in the intense heat was making me nauseous. By now, my mind had begun sifting through memories. I remembered this feeling. I remembered these sensations. The shaking and bouncing and being slung around. I well remembered the sensation of being lifted from the truck bed only to be slammed down again, hard, on my bottom.

As the sun moved lower and I drifted in and out of sleep, there seemed to be a new kind of light that seeped through the canvas cover. I could see very little, but such glimpses as I could get through the small plastic window opening made me gasp in wonder – it was so incredibly bright.

My first thought was fireflies. They were everywhere in the jungle, and their sudden streaks of yellow were tiny flames of night-time joy. But these lights were bigger and did not flash on and off. They seemed to be strung along the roadside, big and bold above me. A thought surfaced – these lights were not natural. Like the pots and the campfires and the huts I had seen, these lights had been fashioned by human hands, and they seemed to pierce my eyes and make them weep.

Other glimpses intrigued me too, making me momentarily forget my nausea. There were dwellings, but not dwellings made of woven grass and branches. These dwellings seemed to have solid, sandy-coloured walls. But these obvious signs of human habitation didn’t reassure me. The more I saw, the more terrified I grew.

And the sights and the smells and the cacophony kept on growing as we travelled. Soon it seemed we’d entered an entirely new kind of territory. A human territory but one quite different from the Indians’ jungle home. The dwellings grew denser, the lights brighter and more frequent, and the road teemed with trucks like the one I was being carried in. They swooshed past us so close and so fast that I would quake in terror as the eyes of fierce light they wore blinded me and fumes from their engines invaded my nose.

I was becoming increasingly agitated, my eyes darting around so I could see in all directions, trying to keep on top of all the possible threats to my life. But it was the noise that was the most terrifying. There just seemed no end to it. As well as the roar of traffic, the air was also full of new sounds. I could hear human sounds, noises that reminded me of the Indians, but so many, and at such volume, that it began to hurt my ears. There were other sounds, too; sounds not so readily identifiable. Strange hoots and a loud and blaring background noise that seemed an assault on all my senses but which I’d soon learn was the sound of human music.

I had encountered music before, of course, even if I didn’t know what to call it. I would make sounds of my own for no other reason but my own pleasure, and at the Indian camp they would sometimes make sounds by blowing into different lengths of sugar cane. But this was different. It had an unnatural, insistent beat, and to my highly attuned ears it was alarmingly loud.

By now I was petrified. For so long, I had tried to imagine what the land of the hunters might be like, and in my head it was like the Indian camp, just located somewhere else, not this vast teeming place, thronged with scary noises; this place full of strange smells and speeding machines.

Nothing reminded me of my human past at that point. Yes, those recollections would return over the coming days and weeks, but at that moment all I could think, as I clung to the handrail, was that I wished for all the world to be back in the jungle. Back with my real family. Home with those that loved me. Safe again. What had I done?

*

The journey ended in the same way it had begun. One minute we seemed to be travelling at great speed through the thundering traffic, and the next we lurched violently, the truck slowed beneath me and, with a shudder, it stopped and finally fell silent. I tensed my body and tried to get a glimpse of where they had taken me. All I could make out through the canvas flap was a fence made of woven canes. What would happen now? What would the hunters do with me? Had they brought me to their human camp?