"Copping out."

THE HAPPINESS OF THE CHIMPANZEE.

Joo told me a story one day while we were out in the field. We were watching Rita-Mae with Lester and Muffin. Muffin was playing with Lester, Rita-Mae joining in from time to time, tumbling the baby over, or checking Muffin when the fun became too rough. It was quite obvious to me that, as they romped and scampered, the young chimpanzees were enjoying themselves; they were having a good time. They were, not to beat about the bush, happy.

On our walk back to camp Joo told me this curious fable that he had heard from his father.

Two hunters, Ntino and Iko, were out strolling one day through the forest. They came across some chimpanzees who were playing in the branches of a mulemba tree.

"Look at the chimpanzees," Ntino said, "look how they swing so easily through the branches. This is the happiness of the chimpanzee."

"How can you know?" Iko said. "You are not a chimpanzee. How can you know if it is happy or not?"

"You are not me," Ntino said. "How do you know that I do not know the happiness of the chimpanzee?"

I never found the remains of Lena's baby. We searched all the nest sites we came across, hoping to discover some shred of skin or tiny bone that I could present as Exhibit A, but we failed completely to discover whatever Rita-Mae had done with the raggy scrap of a body she had carried off over her shoulder, that afternoon under the fig tree.

For several days after the killing we saw nothing of Lena either. And then one day she turned up again. She kept her distance from Rita-Mae, but otherwise there seemed no real change in her attitude to the others, nor theirs to her.

Indeed, the same apparent normality also existed between me and my colleagues. I told no one, apart from Joo and Alda, of the killing, and I was pretty sure Mallabar had been as discreet as he had promised. There was still a good deal of residual sympathy around for me as fire-victim-which did not diminish-and which, I supposed, was the best evidence that he had kept his word. Mallabar himself was perfectly cordial. I did not apologize or retract my story, but he acted as if I had done so: a momentary aberration for which he had forgiven me.

I kept smiling and each night worked on my paper.

One morning I left the camp early and set off for a rendezvous with Alda. As I passed the Artificial Feeding Area, I heard my name called. Mallabar was standing in the middle of the cleared area of ground. He waved me over.

It was just after six and the sun had not yet risen above the treeline. The light was the color of white wine and the air was cool. As I walked over, I checked to see if there was anyone in the hides but they were empty. This was the first time we had been alone together since I had told him the news of Bobo's death. I offered Mallabar a cigarette, which he declined. I lit up myself. I noticed there were three big yellow chandeliers of bananas propped against the concrete feeding cages.

"You're off early," he said.

"I've got to check on something," I replied, trying to be as cryptic as possible.

"I was wondering if you'd like to join us here today."

I glanced at the bananas. "Big feast?"

"Yes. My American publisher's arriving and I want to show him our chimps."

"I've got too much to do today. Sorry."

"Shame." He shrugged. "You'd like him. Might be useful to meet. Good man to know."

"Another time. But thanks anyway."

"You don't approve of all this," he said abruptly.

"What?"

"The AFA." He gestured at the cages and the bananas. "Hope, the stickler."

I looked at him. "It's a machine. An artificial and bountiful food source switched on and off at your whim. I don't think..." I paused. "It's got absolutely nothing to do with life as wild chimpanzees live it, that's for sure. You attract two dozen chimps here and let them gorge. It's unnatural. You've dumped a banana machine down in the jungle. You're playing God, Eugene. It's not right." I smiled at him. "But then I'm sure you know all the arguments against."

"Most of them formulated by me." He sat down on the concrete cage and leaned back, crossing his legs. He was very relaxed, very sure of himself. I dropped my cigarette on the ground and stepped on it.

"Hope, I like you," he said.

"Thank you."

"Despite our...methodological differences you're exactly the kind of person we need in this team."

I waited. He flattered me some more. Now that the war was virtually over, he said, and the new grants were coming through, Grosso Arvore would soon be back to its original size-in fact it would probably expand. He was thinking of opening another station, another camp, ten miles to the north. I happened to be precisely the type of person he imagined running it.

The first rays of sun had cleared the treetops and I felt their warmth begin to spread across my face. I wondered vaguely, and not for the first time, if Mallabar had a sexual interest in me. I certainly had none in him, but I knew that for some men such indifference was a powerful aphrodisiac.

"Is that a job offer?" I asked.

He lost his composure for a second.

"Well...let's say, let's say it's a-a distinct possibility." He stood up and rubbed his hands together as if he were washing them.

"I just wanted to let you know how I felt," he went on, his assuredness rushing back. "And how things lay ahead. There are no flies on the early bird. There's a future for you here with us, Hope, something considerable." He let his hand rest momentarily on my upper arm, and looked me candidly in the eyes. I felt the hot glare of his sincerity. "I want you to understand that," he said.

"It's understood."

Alda met me at our prearranged spot and led me east to the area where he had seen the six unidentified male apes. There were no cut trails out here, just ancient bush paths, but the farther east we went, and as the ground began to rise slightly, so the vegetation thinned.

He showed me the path where he had spotted the chimpanzees. He had followed them for ten minutes before he had lost sight of them in the undergrowth. I checked our approximate position on the map. If these had been northern chimps, then they had crossed the Danube and advanced almost a mile into southern territory. When Alda had lost them, he said, he thought they had been heading back north again. He showed me where this had happened. The Danube was eight hundred yards away through a thick screen of trees. It was a reasonable assumption.

Looking at the map again, I thought it was another reasonable assumption to conclude that these chimpanzees had made an exploratory incursion, an arc swinging through the southern area covering a mile or two.... An analogy kept nudging itself into my head.

"You say they were all males?" I asked Alda.

"Yes, Mam. I think. And they move very slow-looking here, looking there-and they make no noise. No noise at all."

To me this sounded exactly like a patrol.

That evening I typed the final draft of my article. It was twenty pages long, short on scholarly apparatus but very readable. I knew that whoever I submitted it to would publish it, such was the inflammatory and controversial nature of its contents. In the end I decided to send it to a magazine called The Great Apes. It was a monthly with a sound academic reputation and a fairly wide popular appeal. Also, I knew one of the editors there.

I sealed the article in an envelope, addressed it, and then sealed it in another envelope which I addressed to Professor Hobbes, with a covering note asking him to forward it to the magazine. I was taking no chances.

Two days later, when Toshiro was on the point of setting off on the provisioning run, I handed him my package. He accepted it without a second glance and added it to the pile of the project's mail on the seat beside him.

The article complete, I spent more time analyzing and transcribing Joo's and Alda's field notes. I noticed another discrepancy. Quantifying the traveling distances of the individual chimps over the last three or four weeks, I realized that they were diminishing. Plotting them on the map, it was at once obvious that the ranging area of the southern chimps had shrunk quite dramatically, by about thirty-five percent.

Something strange was going on, but I wasn't at all sure what. It was in the light of these observations that I called a halt to our normal procedures of observations and follows and instituted the watch on the Danube. Each day, Joo, Alda and I would take up our positions, about a mile apart, on the southern slopes of the small valley cut by the Danube as it flowed down from the escarpment, east to west. We each found prominent viewpoints overlooking the river and between us were able to cover a significant amount of ground.

We watched without any result for three days. Then, on the morning of the fourth day, at about half past nine, Joo called me up on the walkie-talkie. I was in the middle, Joo was a mile to the east.

"They comin', Mam," he said. "I think seven, maybe eight. They comin' your way."

He said they had just passed a big mafumeira tree, which I could see from my position. I told Joo to keep following and went to meet them.

There were seven chimps, moving cautiously along the ground on all fours, loosely spaced out in a column. Their complete silence and concentration was eerie and disturbing. They were led by Darius, whom I recognized at once. There was one female, anestrous, in the rear. They were coming straight toward me.

The ground cover here was patchy, so I moved off the path to give them a wide berth. I circled round to rejoin Joo, who was following about a hundred yards behind. He looked unhappy and grim. Neither of us had ever seen anything like this before.

We followed the chimpanzees for about an hour as they moved steadily, ever deeper, into southern territory. Then they halted at the side of a narrow valley with a stream running through it and climbed into a veranista tree. They sat there for forty minutes, still and silent, watching and listening. There was no sound or sign at all of my southern chimps.

Eventually the intruders climbed down from their tree and headed back north at a quicker pace. When they got to the Danube valley they burst out into a loud chorus of hoots and barks, running frenziedly across the stream, drumming on the trunks of trees, breaking off branches and shaking them in the air. Then they were off, deep into the northern territory, still screaming and whooping at each other.

"I don't like," Joo said. He was still upset and troubled, frowning intently. "I don't like at all, at all."

"It's so strange," I said. "What are they trying to do?"

"I fear too much, Mam." He looked at me. "I fear too much."

I asked Ian Vail if I could come out with him once more and spend a few days with the northern chimpanzees. He readily agreed, but when he asked me why, I said only that some strange individuals had been spotted in the south and I thought they might be his chimps.

I spent two days in the north with him and saw most of the males that belonged to the group. The composition of the northern group was in fact very male-dominated. There were three mature females but two of them had just given birth and would not resume their sexual cycles for two to three years. The only "available" female was Crispina. The other members of the group were four prime males, half a dozen adolescents (male and female) and a couple of old males. In the early days before the group split the sexual balance had been more normal, but the departure of Clovis, with three mature females-Rita-Mae, Rita-Lu and Lena-had, so Ian's theory went, destabilized the community. One other young female had also disappeared eighteen months previously, exaggerating the imbalance further. She might have been killed by a predator, or possibly lured away by the other chimp community to the north of Grosso Arvore. Since my last visit Crispina's sexual cycle had finished. There was every chance that she might be pregnant.

Ian thought the patrolling in the south was highly significant.

"I'm sure they were looking for Rita-Mae," he said, casually. "She was very popular."

"It didn't look like it."

"Is she in estrus?"

"No. But her daughter's about to start."

"Ah-ha. What about the pregnant one?"

"She...the baby died."

"Well, she'll start her cycle again." He thought. "What do you call the alpha male?"

"Clovis."

"He'll have his hands full." He gave a leering grin. It was at moments like this that he was easy to dislike. I changed the subject.

"Have you got photos of your chimps?"

"Mug shots? Yeah, masses."

We were sitting on a rock in the afternoon sun. At the foot of some trees ahead of us, some chimps were searching for termite nests. I waved away a couple of circling flies and wondered briefly whether to tell Vail about Bobo's killing. I decided not to, in the end, because of Roberta and her connection to Mallabar.

Vail was looking at the foraging chimps through his binoculars. He was wearing khaki shirt and shorts and suede ankle boots. His legs were brown and dusty and covered in small scratches. Blond hair grew thickly on his knees and lower legs. Perhaps I should tell him, I thought again? I needed an ally, after all. But he had warned me off once before.

"Do you know anything about Eugene's new book?" I asked.

"Well, yes. Roberta's correcting the proofs at the moment. It's huge."

"God. What's it called?"

"Primate: The Society of a Great Ape," he said in a sonorous American accent.

"They've got proofs?...When's it out?"

"Four months, five months." He turned and smiled sarcastically at me. "So we might as well pack up and leave. It's very much the Last Word, if you know what I mean." He unslung his binoculars from around his neck. "Better find another area to write about." He stood up. "What were you doing before you got into this lark, anyway?"

"Hedgerow dating."

"Oh yes?"

"Always has been a bit of a conversation stopper."

We were walking back to the Land-Rover. I decided to go a little further.

"Ian, do you think...I mean, how aggressive are these chimps? Violently aggressive, I mean."

He stopped and looked at me quizzically. I could see he was trying to guess what was behind the question.

"I don't know," he said. "Not really aggressive. No more than you or me."

"That's what I'm worried about."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not sure, but I'll tell you if something comes up."

We watched three more northerner patrols. They crossed the Danube at more or less the same point, and each time penetrated deeper into the south. With the aid of Ian Vail's photographs I was soon able to identify and name the individuals. The groups were always led by Darius and there were always a few adolescents with them (whom I found harder to single out), and usually three other mature males: Gaspar, Pulul and Americo. From time to time an old male called Sebastian would accompany them. These five were the nucleus of the northerner patrols.

It was when they crossed the Danube that their normal noisy chimpanzee demeanor changed. They became tense and careful and almost completely silent. Their sweeps into the south grew longer and more extensive. Often they would stop, climb trees and watch and wait. It was obvious to me they were looking for my chimpanzees.

Our watch on the Danube, and the shadowing of the northern patrols, meant that I had lost contact with the southern group. One day I sent off Joo and Alda to try and locate them. We knew now where the northerners tended to cross the river; I could watch it effectively on my own.

This time, they came over at about four in the afternoon. I heard them before I saw them-the sound of vigorous drumming on tree trunks. Then I saw Darius, fur bristling, displaying aggressively, shaking branches and shrieking. Then the other chimps joined him, calling, shouting, hurling rocks into the Danube. Then they crossed the river and fell silent. Darius led, and strung out behind him were Pulul, Gaspar, Sebastian and Americo-and one adolescent that I couldn't recognize. I followed them as best I could. They saw me, of course, but they were completely habituated to human observers. All the same, I remained a prudent forty or fifty yards behind them.

They moved south, cautiously, for an hour. Then they stopped on the edge of a small rock cliff to watch and wait. At this point Joo came through faintly on the walkie-talkie-I had the volume low, and he was at the limit of his range-and told me that he had seen Clovis, Rita-Mae, Lester and Rita-Lu. There was no sign of Muffin, Mr. Jeb, Conrad or Lena.

I took out my camera and took some photographs of the group on the cliff edge. Their concentration was intense. Nearby, there were fruits on chavelho bushes but none of them seemed interested in eating. They watched. They smelled the air. They listened.

Then I noticed that Darius's attention was now focused on a small grove of date palms about five hundred yards away. I called up Joo.

"Where are you?"

"Far in the south, Mam. Near the bamboo."

"Rita-Mae and Rita-Lu?"