Jennie Read Free Page A

first she was terribly distressed when she was separated from me. Her little arms would wave about and her face would screw up into a wrinkled mask of unhappiness while she made an “oo oo oo”distress call. Baby chimpanzees must cling to their mothers while they climb trees and run along the ground, and as a result evolution had given her a shockingly tenacious grip. Where she held on to my neck or shoulders, tiny bruises developed. Sometimes when I put her down, her hands would wave about and find each other in a crushing clasp. Then she would squeak and cry, unable to understand what was gripping her hands so painfully.
    I was deeply attached to the lonely life of the forest, the smell of the
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wood burning, the forest cave about me humming and crackling with the electricity of life. I loved especially the long, soft green light of evening, with only the distant flash of gold in the upper canopy indicating the presence of a sunset. During these evenings, I would sit in my camp chair smoking my pipe, with the chimpanzee nestled in my partly unbuttoned shirt, sleeping quietly, or sucking and pulling on my chest hairs. I have never quite been as contented as I was during those four months in the Batuti forest.
    I had made peace with Kwele. I had told him that the little chimpanzee was a very rare specimen indeed, for which fifty shillings was an absurdly low price. The poor ignorant bush hunter men had been royally snookered. Kwele was to be congratulated. It was terribly important to keep the specimen alive, I said, and to that end I was putting Kwele in charge of it, with a salary supplement equal to the gravity of his new responsibility.
    As I had anticipated, Kwele immediately subcontracted out the work of caring for the chimpanzee to two of the camp wives, paying them only a fraction of his supplement, and loudly directing every operation with imperious gestures and references to the terrible anger of the Masa should any mistakes be made. The two women took excellent care of the chimpanzee, treating her just like a child, heating her milk, feeding her every four hours. When the chimp began to look peaked they had a discussion and found her a wet nurse—a woman whose own baby had died of diarrhea. The chimp seemed to thrive on human milk, although I could not overcome myastonishment at seeing an animal sucking for all she was worth at a human breast, clamoring and pawing around and raising a racket whenever she felt deprived of the tit.
    We supplemented the chimpanzee’s human milk diet with powdered milk. Every morning the squeaking, gurgling chimpanzee sat in my lap and sucked on a bottle.
    During my four-month circuit of the Batuti forest, the chimpanzee grew fast. Faster, it seemed to me, than my son, Sandy, had when a baby. Her skin remained white (white skin is not uncommon among lowland chimps) but the hair thickened and shortened, and the face grew rounder and more appealing every day. The eyes, which started off blue, began to darken into blue-black. She learned to grab, and while she suckled on the bottle one hand would wave about and finally snag my button or a wrinkle in my shirt—which she would yank.
    She walked for the first time just before we reached Lukemba. She was about four months old. The forest had begun to darken every afternoon, the sky filling with unseen clouds. Sometimes a wind shook the upper canopy and distant thunder rolled through the muffling trees, bringing with it a whiff of humidity and ozone.
    The chimpanzee had been crawling around under my camp desk, patting the dusk and crooning softly to herself. I felt her fist on my pantleg and looked down in time to see her launch herself across the room, taking four or five quick wobbly steps before pitching forward onto her knuckles and then facedown in the dirt. This performance was followed by a triumphant gale of high-pitched hoots and cries, while she bounced up and down holding on to a table leg.
    The rains began