Magnuh had attacked and Eeda brought her son to safety to...to...
His pain would wrench him around to see his mother’s dead eyes...her shredded breasts. Gazda had done this—her son had... The night ape!
But he loved her so. An accident—terrible but not his fault...he wouldn’t...he couldn’t...
He’d been out of his mind with sickness—dying...
...and yet, the justifications did not matter. He would never escape the pain so close at hand, but to leave her would feel like he was denying his crime.
Such a betrayal should follow him forever. It had to. The responsibility for this lay with others, but it fell to Gazda too. So he would carry it with him always, and as monument to her sacrifice he would hoist her memory high in death.
Poised outside his mother’s crypt, he swore that he would never set her precious body near the jungle floor. Flies would come and other crawling things...come to reduce all life to dirt and dust—his mother and her love to fading memory!
He would catch her dignity and spirit in this high place she chose, and keep it safe for all time within.
So the night ape climbed down from her resting place, and sobbing spent the day dragging mud in green leaf bundles high up into the tree where he layered it on the bark around the hole to close it up—to protect the place where a mother had taken a son for safety, and where he had...
Still as he wept, he spread mud and sticks and leaves over the opening—covering the place where she lay still. Constantly, he cursed himself as the shameful son, praying sadly as he peered through the closing gap that some final rays of light might fall across her gentle face...
But she was gone into shadow...his mother—gone.
When he finished, Gazda disguised the layered mud with sheets of bark that he pressed into place, and soon, none could know that behind it. Behind it...
He collapsed on the tree limb and wept his heart out—in grief he tore hair from his head. His heart staggered from guilt to sorrow to rage at the monster Magnuh, at the night ape Gazda—and he swore revenge upon the beasts that were responsible.
And as he wept, the tears brought that time more vividly to his mind, and he remembered first waking to Eeda’s cry of pain and terror—waking and then flying into the bull elephant’s trap.
What had happened to bring that call from her loving breast?
He could only think of Magnuh then—oh Magnuh! Gazda would use his hunting skills to learn the truth, and bloody revenge would fall upon the guilty.
The guilty? At the thought he wept anew, ashamed at his own weakness—his inability to accept—undeserving to be near his mother’s tomb.
From deep beneath his swelling guilt, he looked down again upon his crouching naked body. Where were the scars that Magnuh must have left? He knew of his flesh’s ability to heal, but nothing could survive a bull elephant’s wrath unblemished!
Is it a dream? Oh please! And he rose upon his haunches glaring at the bark that covered... Had his mother truly died? Could this not also be a dream?
But he remembered her eyes...flat and glassy, and the scent of her dead flesh.
This was no dream.
At sunset, the night ape gathered in a sobbing breath and climbed into high branches where he began hurtling recklessly hand over hand until he caught a hanging vine from which he swept swiftly through the night.
And as he swung, he cast about for his tribe, and upon a wayward breeze he recognized their scent. He thought of Goro then, and of his mother, and Gazda paled at his own shame.
Then came Magnuh’s stink from the forest floor. The beast’s scent was stronger still.
Gazda continued through the canopy until the fruit trees grew shorter and then a large group of them abruptly fell away altogether to form an open space of ruin.
The night ape landed lightly on the torn and gouged earth where the elephant had attacked him.
There, on all fours, he searched the broken brush with his night-enhanced senses attuned to subtle light, shapes and scents, and soon in a tangle of shattered branches and splintered trees he found his shining snake disk. He slipped its chain over his head as he combed through the wreckage and found his belt twisted many times around the sheath and long knife where Magnuh’s mighty foot had crushed them into the black earth.
The powerful weapon was undamaged, but it had been useless in the fight. Magnuh had given him no chance to draw the blade, and because of that...
There was no sign of his loincloth; the untreated leather would have been consumed by a million crawling bugs forever in search of food. The night ape would replace it from the skins at his lair.
But first, he jumped into the trees and flew from branch to branch, the sense of loss still pulling at his savage breast. Loss and pain grew together inside, and swelled until his breath came short and choking and his heart struggled feebly—the constriction causing his fury to boil.
He hunted until sunrise, and in his wrath killed many more creatures than were needed to feed his angry hunger. He killed many mercilessly, fueling his bloodlust until the sun began to rise and the night ape raced through the jungle to drop onto the grass by the sleeping trees, just as Goro and the tribe was climbing down.
The scent of so many apes brought his mother’s kind face to Gazda’s thoughts, but no tears came; his shame had been washed, and his anger cooled by the blood he’d shed in the night.
He told the others that Eeda had bravely saved him from Magnuh, and nursed him back to health in a place she knew he would be safe.
Baho shuffled wearily forward and told him how Goro had saved his mother from the apes with bone faces; how Baho had joined the king to unsuccessfully chase
