tossed the figs in a compact clump to the path about five feet from Zonk.
Neither moved for a full minute, although Zonk’s eyes, more calculating than cautious, flitted continually from the figs to Will and back to the figs again. Then, ever so slowly, he leaned toward Will and stretched out one of his long arms, and his long flexible hairy-backed fingers closed around the figs. He only got seven of them, one was left on the trail. He stood erect, stuffing the figs into his mouth.
Then he gave a sudden yelp, leaped toward the last fig-and incidentally, Will-scooped it up, and in a second bound was gone into the undergrowth. Will blundered home wet and muddy and insect-stung long after dark, finding the hut more by accident than skill, but happier and more excited than he had been at any time since Molly had died.
And now here was Zonk again, getting laid, if dog style-chimp style? — could be called by that term. Will marked the time in his notebook-twenty-seven seconds. World-class for a chimp. But when he reapplied the binocs to his eyes, Shady Lady already was having it off with another, Old Blue. Six seconds.
So much for true love. Will busied himself with his notes, but he was feeling something… wrong about the observing. As if he didn’t have the right. As if it violated something in his one-sided bond with the animals. So the next hour of Shady Lady’s sexual activities came to him almost as tableux, when he would look up from his notes and raise the binoculars to his eyes for the quick observation the scientist in him made de rigueur no matter what his personal feelings.
At first, Randy Andy was successful in his possessive mating strategy. For nearly half an hour he was making it with Lady about every ten minutes. None exceeded fourteen seconds in duration.
Finally Randy was all through-he couldn’t get it up any more. He returned to his figs. Shady Lady was of sterner stuff; she was insistent. He moved away, she followed; Will’s binocs were tight on his face at that moment, and he could have sworn he saw alarm there. He was sure of it when Shady Lady began tweaking Andy’s flaccid penis in hopes of getting a little action. Andy-Randy no more-fled, shrieking.
Will lowered his glasses, lowered his head, scribbled furiously in his notebook. He felt strange, had a choking sensation in his throat, a burning in his eyes.
When he looked up again, the other eight male chimps were lined up to take turns on the complaisant, indeed demanding, Lady in what scientists liked to call opportunistic mating. Will suddenly remembered a book by an apostate Hell’s Angel he had read years before. The man had turned state’s evidence against his former associates concerning a couple of cold-blooded murders, and had gone into the witness relocation program.
His book had been full of raunchy anecdotes about Angel activities in the swinging sixties, including that feature of every encampment, Angels lining up for a gang bang on some complaisant, indeed demanding, Mama. They called it pulling a train-because at the head of the line, on her back in some thicket, was the Mama taking them all on one after the other, puffing and chuffing like a locomotive.
Will was too far away from Shady Lady in her thicket of mucuso leaves to know if she was grunting like a locomotive pulling a train or not, but there were the males lined up with very little time between mountings, each taking ten to fifteen seconds for the act, then moving to the end of the line for another turn.
Will knew he was observing an extreme end of the chimp spectrum of sexual behavior in the wild; at the other end, as with humans, was pair-bonding. And unlike Shady Lady this time, most female chimps in heat would have a nursing infant doing his shrieking, biting, hair-pulling best to interrupt his mother’s couplings-a new baby would take her attention from him, thus reduce his chances for survival.
Finally all were through-worn-out. Exhausted. Not Shady Lady. She put a move on the closest ape, Captain Hook, but he gave a shriek of alarm and fled at her approach. She stood looking after him, one hand between her legs in momentary, absentminded masturbation, then spotted Old Gray higher in the tree and took off after him.
Damn! Raindrops were hitting the pages of Will’s notebook. Then he realized they were tears, not raindrops, and belatedly knew what the tightness in his throat and burning in his eyes had been.
For the second time in his adult life, Will Dalton was crying, silently at first, then sobbing aloud, shoulders hunched.
Moll. He had been seeing Moll there through his field glasses, Moll with a line of eager, raunchy men waiting their turn at her, Moll puffing and grunting and pulling her sexual train while he stood aside and watched, Moll whom he wanted and needed… Where was the difference?
And what difference did it make? He loved her, wanted her, craved her, lusted after her, needed her, no matter who she was or what she had done. And she was gone. Unfairly, undeservedly dead and gone and buried and he was still here.
So he cried, cried as if he would never stop, cried out of his grief and rage and loss and anger, cried there in his little crushed nest of ginger and ferns, cried at last for Molly as he had been unable to cry at her funeral. As he had begun to cry for her at his home until the two cops had arrived with their good-guy bad-guy routine to disabuse him forever of his naive delusions of their love together…
He realized that for some time a consoling arm had been draped across his shoulders, long fingers had been gently patting his upper arm. Will turned his head, slowly, unbelievingly. Zonkers was sitting beside him, his long arm around Will’s quaking shoulders, offering silent comfort for his vocal grief. When, in his shock and amazement, he stopped wailing, Zonkers suddenly was gone, leaving only swaying branches behind him.
Will stood up also, almost overwhelmed by a great uprush of emotion. Chimps couldn’t cry, couldn’t possibly feel sorrow. Not as a human being did. Only Zonkers had. Had known those sounds Will Dalton was making were sounds of desolation, and had known, somehow, what desolation meant. And had offered comfort.
Will thought feverishly, he would stay here forever. His supplies were all but exhausted. So what? He would live as the chimpanzees did.
Better than that, he would make Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fantasy creation of Tarzan a reality. He would join the troop. Live on fruit, maybe the occasional monkey or small antelope the chimps and him, hunting in unison, could catch. He would lead them through the forest, learn from them, teach them to avoid poacher’s snares, would cut the snares that couldn’t be avoided off their arms and legs before the limb could drop off from lack of circulation…
Meanwhile, his notebook was bulging with new observations that would have to be rerecorded and systematized, but Zonk comforting him would never be passed on to his colleagues. Few would believe it, but beyond that, it would be a betrayal of whatever had reached across 5 million years to bind them together in mutual distress and comfort.
So it was Will Dalton, ethologist, who dazedly gathered up rucksack, notebook, pen, binoculars, moving on automatic. This was crazy stuff, this was total emotional breakdown. Yet the bursting forth of his desolation and loss, and the ape’s genetic understanding of it, had told him he had to complete his work. He had been wavering, vacillating; now he knew he had made the right choice. It was as Ardrey had said: our hearts were indeed pledged to the animal world’s subtle, antique ways.
Meanwhile, he was down to a quarter kilo of coarse-ground white corn flour that he could cook with water to make posho, that standard of East African field cuisine. For now, it was time to leave.
He checked the mucuso one last time. It teemed with the two local monkey species, sooty mangabeys and redtails, gobbling the ripe figs left by the apes. The twenty-pound mangabeys wore their correct charcoal business suits, but the redtails, half their size, were dressed like clowns: long burnished coppery tails, white bellies and black backs, with a white spot on the end of their noses like clown makeup. Everyone chittered and called and scolded.
The chimps might never have been. So for now it was goodbye, Shady Lady and Randy Andy, Captain Hook and Brandy and Knuckles and Lefty. The vagaries of rain forest life, especially the poachers, meant any or all could be dead when he returned.
Robinson Jeffers’s line from “Hurt Hawks” leaped into his mind: I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk… Or a chimp.
The chimpanzees were his godparents, his uncles and aunts, his cousins, his nieces and nephews, and he loved them.
Especially Zonkers. Twin. Brother.
