22.

The canopy above us thinned out a little from time to time, but the undergrowth, one or two welcome clearings aside, was pretty unrelenting. Innocent and Marcel – and Caleb of course – increasingly had to use their machetes to cut us a pathway through it. The noise of the rainforest was unending, a constant drone-hum of insects punctured by rain-hiss and leaf-patter and the whooping and chattering of birds, monkeys, god-knows-what, overlain with our own hard breathing and the squelch of our boots and the snick of the machetes: it was music, of sorts, a soundtrack encouraging us to keep on walking. And that’s what we did. We were all puffing harder than Patience, but managing to maintain a pace that I think impressed our guides all the same. Innocent paused less often than he had en route to the chimpanzees. We took on water (I’d made sure to bring three times as much with me that day) without slowing down. It was tough going, but either the troop had moved closer or we made better progress than Innocent had predicted. After just two and half hours Marcel, who had been making the occasional soft grunting noise as we walked, heard something in response that made him kink left, push through some dripping ferns and kneel down next to a hefty pile of greeny-yellow droppings. ‘Juste là-bas,’ he whispered.

Innocent handed out masks before allowing us to get closer, and not long after we’d begun moving forward again I glimpsed a tantalising hillock of black fur through the foliage. Moving stealthily, we emerged at the edge of a trampled clearing of sorts. I crouched low and quickly counted six, no, seven gorillas. The nearest one was stripping leaves from a long bent stalk. I was close enough to see the fibres in the stalk as she broke it, the shifting black of her fur and the tiny flies that rose in a cloud as she turned. Her eyes were a reddish brown. The creases around them looked like the laughter or worry lines you see in a human face. Immediately I realised I was doing the one thing we’d been told not to do, stare straight at her, but I couldn’t help it. Her gaze was magnetic. It was all I could do to break from it and look to one side. Even then the imprint of what I’d seen didn’t fade. To me the gorilla had the look of an elder, a judge, a prophet even; she seemed not only to know what I was thinking, but to be deciding it.

The rest of the group, as I looked around, camera clicking, reminded me of an extended family at Christmas, or on a picnic maybe. I felt as if I’d stumbled into somebody’s front room or garden. A couple of the gorillas were grooming one another, one was dozing and others were absently stripping leaves to eat. The two young ones off to one side were rough-and-tumbling through the foliage. It appeared a scene of lounging contentment to me. So I was baffled when Innocent said, ‘Something’s strange.’

‘Strange? They’re magnificent!’ insisted Amelia.

‘But Spenser’s not here,’ said Patience.

‘What? Who’s Spenser?’

Innocent explained: ‘The silverback. He’s the head of this family. But I can’t see him, or Annabel and her baby.’

Marcel, who had skirted the group, now came back with a worried look on his face and spoke hurriedly to Innocent in French. I caught one phrase I understood, gravement malade, and though I didn’t know who he was referring to, I got the gist: somebody was badly sick. ‘Agité, très agité!’ he went on.

Xander was about to explain what that meant when the situation became obvious. A female gorilla moved in among the troop carrying an infant. It was obviously sick, limp across her forearm, its head canted back. I wondered if it was in fact dead, until I saw its lolling head roll to one side. One of the baby’s arms flopped forward. It was missing a hand, the stump still raw. Seeing the wound, I winced.

‘Can we help it?’ asked Amelia.

Innocent shook his head.

‘Why not?’ said Caleb.

A crashing sound cut off his answer. The foliage behind the troop shook and exploded. A huge gorilla, almost twice the size of the next biggest, shot headlong into the clearing. His back was a slab of muscle dusted in silver fur. It shimmered as he jockeyed sideways with the momentum of a small car. He thumped the ground in front of him, then rocked back on his haunches and beat his chest, making an astonishing percussive sound like two coconut halves being whacked together. It echoed over the noise of the forest. This was Spenser. I couldn’t believe the size of him. The other gorillas had seemed so solid and powerful, but this silverback dwarfed them. Without realising I’d done it, I’d copied Patience and shrunk low to the ground in the face of his display. Her head was bowed. I looked at my hands in my lap. They were quivering.

Yet Caleb was still standing beside me, arms folded across his chest. ‘It’s just for show,’ he explained to Amelia, suddenly an expert, though his voice sounded a bit thin. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

In a low murmur Innocent said, ‘He’s upset. We must be respectful.’

‘Everyone knows they’re nature’s gentle giants,’ Caleb said.

‘Even so, he’s defensive of little Redmond, with the injury.’

The silverback, heavy on his knuckles, now crabbed sideways into a thicker patch of vegetation, which partly obscured him for a moment. I lifted my camera to my eye. Beside me Caleb took a step forward. ‘We’ve got to do something about that injured baby, you’re right,’ he said to Amelia.

‘No, no, no,’ insisted Innocent. ‘Stay still.’

The bushes into which the silverback had retreated rattled and staccato guttural alarm calls came from within them.

‘It’ll die if we don’t intervene,’ Caleb went on. ‘Look at it. Poor thing.’

The injured baby gorilla, still limp over its mother’s arm, wasn’t moving. Of course I felt sorry for it. And for its parents too. But if we could have helped, Innocent would have said so. He was saying the opposite. Squatting next to Patience, I saw that the tendons in her father’s neck were rigid with tension. If he’d had a leash on Caleb he’d be drawing it in now. But there was no leash, and Caleb, shirtsleeves rolled and swinging that stupid machete of his, Caleb who I sincerely doubted would lose a moment’s sleep over the baby gorilla, however things turned out, Caleb was taking yet another step towards the troop.

‘Really?’ muttered Xander. ‘I mean, what’s he trying to prove?’

It wasn’t just what he was trying to prove that struck me in that moment, but who he was trying to prove it to.

Within the undergrowth concealing the silverback, the top of a large sapling bent sharply. A splitting, ripping sound accompanied the movement. The gorilla had torn down a tree three times his height. He rushed forward again, dragging it, and flung it aside without apparent effort, scattering some of the troop, most of whom were now noisy, restless, agitated. The silverback beat his chest again, veered off in a different direction, spun and faced us.

I could feel my pulse in my throat, hear my heart despite the din.

‘Just showing off,’ said Caleb.

‘Perhaps we should give him some space,’ said Xander.

‘Oui. Lentement, lentement …’ urged Marcel, smoothly stepping backwards.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ said Caleb. ‘The worst thing you can do in a situation like this is run away.’

Nobody was running. Quite the opposite. But having accused us of doing so, Caleb, looking straight at the silverback across the clearing, for some reason felt compelled to take two big strides towards him. He drew himself tall, pointed at the gorilla with his machete, and said, ‘See? Harmless.’

The silverback charged. One second the whole scene was stock still, the next everything seemed to be in motion. The gorillas, the bushes, the grass and leaves, us; the whole tableau was a frenzy, with Spenser the prime mover, a whirlwind spinning forward. He came at us unstoppably fast. A vision overtook me in that moment; I saw light bouncing off car windscreens as the mini swerved behind me in the street, heard the squeal of tyres, felt the rush of something heavy moving wrongly through space. The crash was happening again and this time I was in it, welded to the spot. As the gorilla closed in, Innocent jumped past me to pull Caleb clear, and Caleb swung both hands up to protect himself, and the gorilla thumped straight through them and kept going, running over Xander and bouncing me into the bushes as he swept beyond us and veered away.

The attack, if that’s what you’d call it, was over in a flash. I jumped back to my feet before I knew it, desperate to see where Spenser had gone and if he was readying to charge again. He wasn’t. He’d immediately retreated into the middle of his troop and was studiously ignoring us. Having witnessed the energy unleashed in that one charge, heard the heaviness of his feet as he’d pounded towards us, felt the massive blur of him knocking us aside, I knew that he’d barely tried to hurt us at all. If he’d wanted to do that, he’d have torn us limb from limb. I was still intact. And he’d not touched Amelia, Patience or Marcel. Caleb was also dusting himself down, apparently OK, if white in the face. But Xander was rolling from side to side, both hands gripping his left knee, clearly in pain. And Innocent was bent double, half groaning, half gasping, hugging himself hard. I leaned down and put an arm around him, thinking he was probably winded, since that’s the same sort of noise I make if I hit the ground hard falling off my bike, and it was only then that I noticed his fingers, pressed against his neck, were vivid with blood.