PART TWO
The Monkey House
RESTON
1989 October 4, Wednesday
The city of Reston, Virginia, is a prosperous community about ten miles west of Washington, D.C., just beyond the Beltway. On a fall day, when a western wind clears the air, from the upper floors of the office buildings in Reston you can see the creamy spike of Washington Monument, sitting in the middle of the Mall, and beyond it the Capitol dome. The population of Reston has grown in recent years, and high-technology business and blue-chip consulting firms have moved into office parks there, where glass buildings grew up during the nineteen-eighties like crystals. Before the crystals appeared, Reston was surrounded by farmland, and it still contains meadows. In spring, the meadows burst into galaxies of yellow-mustard flowers, and robins and thrashers sing in stands of tullip tresses and white ash. The town offers handsome residential neighborhoods, good schools, parks, golf courses, excellent day care for children. There are lakes in Reston named American naturalists (like Thoreau, Lake Audubon), surrounded by expensive water-front homes. Reston is situated within easy commuting distance of downtown Washington. Along Leesburg Pike, which funnels traffic into the city, there are developments of executive homes with Mercedes-Benzes parked in crescent-shaped driveways. Reston was once a country town, and its history still flights obliteration, like a nail that won’t stay hammered down. Among the upscale houses, you see the occasionally bungalow with cardboard stuffed in a broken window and a pickup truck parked in the side yard. In the autumn, vegetable stands along Leeburg Pike sell pumpkins and butternut squash.
Not far from Leesburg Pike there is a small office park. It was built in nineteen-sixties, and is not as glassy or as fashionable as the newer office parks, but it is clean and neat, and it has been there long enough for sycamores and sweet-gum trees to grow up around it and throw shade over the lawns. Across the street, a McDonald’s is jammed at lunch hour with office workers. In the autumn of 1989, a company called Hazleton Research Products was using a one-story building in the office park as a monkey house. Hazleton Research Products is a division of Corning, Inc. Corning’s Hazleton unit is involved with the importation an sale of laboratory animals. The Hazleton monkey house was known as the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit.
Each year, about sixteen thousand wild monkeys are imported into the United States from the tropical regions of the earth. Imported monkeys must be held in quarantine for a month before they are shipped anywhere else in the United States. This is prevent the spread of infectious diseases that could kill other primates, including humans.
Dan Dalgard, a doctor of veterinary medicine, was the consulting veterinarian at the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit. He was on call to take care of the monkeys if they became sick or needed medical attention. He was actually a principal scientist at another company owned by Corning, called Hazleton Washington. This company has its headquarters on Leesburg Pike not far from the monkey house, and so Dalgard could easily drive his car over to Reston to check on the monkeys if he was needed there. Dalgard was a tall man in his fifties, with metal-framed glasses, pale blue eyes, and a soft drawl that he had picked up in Tedas at veterinary school. Generally he wore a gray business suit if he was working in his office, or a white lab coat if he was working with animals. He had an international reputation as knowledgeable and skilled veterinarian who specialized in primate husbandry. He was a calm even-tempered man. On evenings and weekends, he repaired antique clocks as a hobby. He liked to fix things with his hands; it made him feel peaceful and calm, and he was patient with a jammed clock. He sometimes had longings to leave veterinary medicine and devote himself full-time to clocks.
On Wednesday, October 4, 1989, Hazleton Research Products accepted a shipment of a hundred wild monkeys from the Philippines. The shipment originated at Ferlite Farms, a monkey wholesale facility located not far from Manila. The monkeys themselves came from coastal rain forests on the island of Mindanao. The monkeys had been shipped by boat to Ferlite Farms, where they were grouped together in large cages known as gang cages. The monkeys were then put into wooden crates and flown to Amsterdam on a specially fitted cargo airplane, and from Amersdam they were flown to New York City. They arrived at JFK International Airport and were driven by truck down the eastern seaboard of the United Sates to Reston monkey house.
The monkeys were crab-eating monkeys, a species that lives along rivers and in mangrove swamps in Southeast Asia. Crab eaters are used as laboratory animals because they are common, cheap, and easily obtained. They have long, arching, whiplike tails, whitish fur on the chest, and cream-color fur on the back. The crab eater is a type of macaque (pronounced ma-KACK). It is sometimes called a long-tailed macaque. The monkey has a protrusive, doglike snout with flaring nostrils and sharp canine teeth. The skin is pinkish gray, close to the color of a white person. The hand looks quite human, with a thumb and delicate fingers with fingernails. The females have two breasts on the upper chest that look startlingly human, with pale nipples.
Crab eaters do not like humans. They have a competitive relationship with people who live in the rain forest. They like vegetables, especially eggplants, and they like to raid farmers’ crops. Crab-eating monkeys travel in a troop, making tumbling jumps through the trees, screaming, “Kra! Kra!”. They know perfectly well that after they have pulled off an eggplant rad they are likely to have a visit from a farmer, who will come around looking for them with a shotgun, and so they have to be ready to move out and head deep into the forest at a moment’s notice. The sight of a gun will set off their alarm cries: “Kra! Kra! Kra!”. in some parts of the world, these monkeys are called kras, because of the sound they make, and many people who live in Asian rain forests consider them to be obnoxious pests. At the close of day, when night comes, the troop goes to sleep in a dead, leafless tree. This is the troop’s home tree. The monkeys prefer to sleep in a dead tree so that they can see in all directions, keeping watch for humans and other predators. The monkey tree usually hangs out over a river, so that they can relieve themselves from the branches without littering the ground.
At sunrise, the monkeys stir and wake up, and you hear their cries as they greet the sun. The mothers gather their children and herd them along the branches, and the troop moves out, leaping through trees, searching for fruit. They like to eat all kinds of things. In addition to vegetables and fruits, they eat insects, grass, roots, and small pieces of clay, which they chew and swallow, perhaps to get salt and minerals. They lust after crabs. When the urge for crabs comes upon them, the troop will head for a mangrove swamp to have a feeding bout. They descend from the trees and take up positions in the water beside crab holes. A crab comes out of its hole, and the monkey snatches it out of the water. The monkey has a way to deal with the crab’s claws. He grabs the crab from behind as it emerges from its hole and rips off the claws and throws them away and then devours the rest of the crab. Sometimes a monkey isn’t quick enough with the claws, and the crab latches onto the monkey’s fingers, and the monkey lets out a shriek and shakes its hand, trying to get the crab off, and jumps around in the water. You can always tell when crab eaters are having a feeding bout on crabs because you hear an occasionally string of shrieks coming out of the swamp as a result of difficulty with a crab.
The troop has a strict hierarchy. It is led by a dominant male, the largest, most aggressive monkey. He maintains control over the troop by staring. He stares down subordinates if they challenge him. If a human stares at a dominant male monkey in a cage, the monkey will rush to the front of the cage, staring back, and will become exceedingly angry, slamming against the bars, trying to attack the person. He will want to kill the human who stared at him: he can’t afford to show fear when his authority is challenged by another primate. If two dominant male monkeys are placed in the same cage, only one monkey will leave the cage alive.
The crab-eating monkeys at the Reston monkey house were placed each in its own cage, under artificial lights, and were fed monkey biscuits and fruit. There were twelve monkey rooms in the monkey house, and they were designated by the letters A through L. Two of the monkeys that arrived on October 4 were dead in their crates. That was not unusual, since monkeys die during shipments. But in the next three weeks, an unusual number
