Omag sat apart from them, his diseased flesh inflamed by the wrestling and physical contact, but he was very pleased. Ulok was learning quickly. Indeed, Goro was like a she-ape.
Though Omag had to admit that Eeda was a special case, for even he had learned to avoid her anger. Especially, when it concerned her sleeping son.
A sure way to awaken the she-ape’s most concentrated fury was to draw attention to Gazda’s sleeping habits. The entire tribe had always found the night ape’s day-time sleeping odd, and some considered it a sign of laziness, and a few went so far as to say as much.
Those apes Eeda met with her fighting fangs and her powerful arms. They were given a beating and tufts of hair were sure to fly.
Fewer still took it upon themselves to find the places where her son would hide and sleep, and there attempt to wake him on their own.
Any who so provoked Gazda soon regretted the action for then the night ape’s mother became an incarnation of maternal retribution. She viciously attacked whoever or whatever dared to molest her son and rarely stopped before blood flowed.
Indeed, Omag had learned that lesson himself one day when his curiosity over Gazda’s napping had caused him to search the sleeping creature out.
He did not find him, but he must have wandered near his hiding place for out of the trees came Eeda in full fury. She had been guarding the night ape from behind some elevated blind.
The she-ape had landed on Omag’s blistered back like a leopard and tore at him with her claws and teeth. Indeed, so severe had been the initial mauling that the crippled ape had imagined that very thing was occurring and like a little infant had run shrieking in terror.
When Goro and the blackbacks later investigated Omag’s claims and found “the big cat” to be a she-ape, many panted in humor and others with disrespect at the crippled bull ape as he huddled on a high branch with the old queen’s gingerly tending his wounds.
Disrespect, Omag remembered overhearing from the blackbacks who had joked with Goro and old Baho beneath the tree, and somewhere in the laughter he had heard someone quietly make the Sip-sip noise.
SIP-SIP! Despite the fury that slander always stirred in him, and the suffocating shame that Oluza and Akaki had tried to groom away, Omag had yet to launch any reprisal against Eeda—though he had vowed he would. But Omag was patient...
Eeda shielded her son from the other apes as she always had because their curiosity was annoying, and their accusations of his laziness unfounded.
They did not know that Gazda slept in the day because he was becoming a great hunter at night. Not long after she had started weaning him, he had begun returning from his nocturnal wandering smelling of flesh and blood and sometimes bearing gifts for her.
The night ape, as all the others in the tribe now called him, was a hunter and he did not fear the dark.
Small things he brought to share: frogs and toads and snakes, and furry things that leapt from tree to tree and from that flesh had his mother grown strong.
The tribe, even Goro, hunted in the day for only then could they see their prey; but also it was because they feared the beasts that roamed the night.
Eeda would always fret over her son even though he limited his stalking to the sleeping trees, but how could she be anything but proud?
After all, why did the apes sleep in the branches of trees at night? Because they feared the carnivores that sniffed around the roots.
And the tribe only rested on the ground in the morning and when the day was at its hottest because they knew the hunters were asleep—asleep like her son—and resting for the night to come.
One day in his sixth year, Gazda and his friends Ooso, Kagoon and Poomak were swinging in the branches that hung low over the tribe. The apes had stopped in their southern-trending migration to break apart a gigantic fallen tree that was rotten and filled with tasty grubs.
The sun was directly overhead in an azure sky, but was lost to the dining anthropoids, as barely a glimmer of its burning rays could make it past the thick green canopy that grew upward in successive layers of dense foliage.
After the night ape’s playmates had eaten their fill of the squirming delicacy, Gazda had endured a round of taunts for passing on the tasty treats.
The teasing faded quickly since all were young, and his friends knew Gazda had a powerful bite that his mother had taught him to use freely in his own defense. Also, they were all outsiders to the tribe, and had themselves been objects of scorn, so they rarely bullied one another in a prolonged or mean-spirited way.
The youngsters had climbed into the trees for a game of tag, and they were soon a quarter mile from the others, leaping from branch to branch until they came upon a line of tall moss-covered rocks that rose up from a misty profusion of ferns growing around a circular pool that was 20 feet across.
They dropped silently to the black earth by the pond, and started wrestling to determine who would be the first allowed to drink.
In the end, they broke from their play and all but Gazda crouched at the water’s edge to slurp up the cool, clear liquid. Their friend, the night ape, had never been comfortable around such an abundance of water, and as an infant had run screaming whenever his mother had tried to get him to drink.
Gazda did not know why he disliked the open water, but approaching it had always caused his heart to race, and made him anxious and feel smothered. This was a strange response when considering that unlike the tribe, he enjoyed the rain when it came and the mists that it produced.
The other apes were miserable in such circumstances,
