The Ape Man's Brother Read Free

of the tribe, one who will not be named, later partook of that flesh in a waste not want not attitude.
    We followed them along, and it grew close to night. The moon was about half full, and shining through the trees. We could see clearly into their camp as they put up tents, built a fire, and so on. They had some long things with them that at the time I thought were clubs, but would later learn were rifles.
    We watched as they ate from their supplies and went to bed. When we could hear them breathing deep in sleep, we climbed down and made our way cautiously on all fours toward where their packs were. We silently went at unfastening them, looking through them. Another trait of our kind is we’re dadburn thieves.
    What we found were cans of food, though we didn’t know that, and we tossed those aside in favor of dried meat and fruits; the kind of drying used for keeping something way past the time it ought to be kept.
    They had also, stupidly, left a number of their pots and pans they had prepared their meals in unwashed. It was just the sort of thing that could call up a beast or one of us Jungle Folk. I found a kind of goo in one of the pans with chunks of vegetables I didn’t recognize. I scooped it out on my finger and tasted it. I was suddenly aware—except for that one really swell meal after the plane crash—that what we had been eating was nothing more than grass and worms and ticks and stolen bird eggs and raw meat and such. This whole cooking thing was all right. You see, we Jungle Folk, smart as we were—and this is embarrassing to say—had yet to discover fire. And I might as well mention that we hadn’t found out about the wheel either, or the missionary position.
    So, me and The Big Guy are licking pans, and all of a sudden, The Woman is standing there. Next thing I know she’s jabbering in a language that at that point in time I didn’t understand. But I knew enough from her tone to know what she had to say wasn’t pleasant and had something to do with us.
    Next thing I know The Big Guy is walking up to her. He had a look on his face like he had just been born and was seeing the world for the first time. He reached out to touch her, and she gave him a kick in the old melons that would have made an elephant go to its knees. Damn sure made The Big Guy drop. Strangely, he had a smile on his face when he looked up at her.
    Frankly, she had me feeling a might warm and contented myself. I wasn’t sure why a non-hairy, clothed female should make me feel that way, but she did. And to reiterate, I never was quite the same for the hairy women folk of my tribe after that. One look at the woman had spoiled me.
    I had seen gold and I no longer wanted silver.

[6]
     

I have to go backwards a little, because as I said before, I tend to wander. But I should say that where we lived in that deep jungle was a kind of bowl. It dipped deep down on the sides and went wide, and as far as we knew, there was no way out. It was miles and miles across, in all directions. If we climbed up any one of the sides, moving through the trees, eventually, the trees played out. When that happened there were some rocks to climb, and caves, if you were willing to go up that high. There were nasty things that roosted in those caves and they had lots of teeth and could fly, so we were extra careful. Finally, above that, there were straight slick walls, all around, and way up for miles. And when I say slick, I mean slick. The stone that made up the walls was like glass, and often damp. It wouldn’t even hold moss that you could grab onto. There was no way to climb. For us, that deep bowl of jungle, and all it contained, was it. A plane flying over might not even know what it was looking at, with all that jungle hiding what was down below, and the fact that a mist rolled high and over most of it much of the time like a roof of sun-leaking cotton.
    At one time, Dr. Rice (and you will soon know who he is) in his zeppelin, exploring, saw our