You never want to be an ex—alpha male baboon in the troop where you were once alpha. By the early 1980s, Solomon sank, but into anything but obscurity. Uriah, not a particularly vicious kid, was not overly cruel to his exnemesis after he had unseated him. But everyone else couldn’t get enough of the change. Solomon did not merely trade places with Uriah, becoming number two in the hierarchy. He had held on to the alpha position long past the point when he had the physical means to do so, holding on purely by dint of the status quo and intimidation. Once everyone saw that Uriah had successfully challenged that status quo, everyone else tried it, and by 1980, Solomon had plummeted to ninth rank, solidly middle. And a pattern emerged that has grown familiar to me over the years. When you look at the frequencies of dominance interactions, the typical pattern you see is that, for example, number 4 is having his most interactions with 3 and 5, losing to the former, defeating the latter. Number 17 mostly interacts with 16 and 18. But, as an exception to that nearest-neighbor pattern, you’ll suddenly note that ranks 1-5 are having an extraordinary number of interactions with the lowly number 11. Why are they so intent on rubbing Mister 11’s nose in it all the time? He, invariably, turns out to be the ex-number 1 who used to dominate 1-5. The tables are turned, and baboons are endowed with long, vengeful memories. Solomon got no end of grief. Isaac, Aaron, both in the top six positions in the hierarchy, even Benjamin, who by then was about number 8 or so, got their licks in. Solomon lost his austere minimalist style and became craven and obsequious around those higher ranking and pretty vicious to those lower. He harassed poor, weird Job endlessly, to the point where his probable family of Naomi, Rachel, and Sarah once chased Solomon across two fields. He lunged at me a few times, sending me cowering back inside the Jeep. And, finding the resolution that many ex-alphas come to, he upped and left one day, joining the troop to the south, where, if of a mediocre and declining rank, he would at least be anonymous. He would be seen occasionally when the troops met and hollered at each other from across the river.
There were some changes in the troop on other fronts. Joshua was hitting prime age, and Boopsie and Afghan went wild over him. Devorah had her first child, a daughter who appeared to have been Solomons child, since he was the only male to spend time with Devorah during her conception estrus. This had been his last consortship as the alpha male, while he was in the final throes of Uriah’s harassment. Thus the rape of Devorah by Solomon must have occurred when she was a few weeks pregnant. Had Solomon not been toppled by Uriah, this infant would have been growing up now with the troop’s alpha male being reasonably certain that he was her father. Despite the change in the political winds, she was hardly an abandoned child. Between Devorah and her dominating mother, Leah, the kid grew quickly and with no lack of confidence. By chance, the low-ranking Miriam had a daughter the same week, and the differences between the two were striking. Devorah’s daughter was larger, held her head upright first, walked first, sat on her mother’s back first. Devorah could sit and feed while her child was able to wander off; lower-ranking females would cluster around and groom Devorah, for a chance to examine the kid. Miriam’s daughter, in contrast, could go only a few steps before Miriam would nervously retrieve her—the world was full of endless individuals who would be delighted to maul the kid. Miriam had to feed with both hands full, had to frequently scamper away from a fight with the child barely clinging to her belly. Various studies had shown that having the good fortune to be born to a high-ranking mom like Devorah, rather than a Miriam, made for faster, healthier development, and a greater chance of surviving during the tough times. On a day that each of the babies was about a week old, they interacted with each other for the first time. Devorah’s kid scampered toward Miriam’s, who scampered away and ran back to Miriam. A first dominance interaction had just occurred, and it shocked me to think that I could go away that instant, go live decades of my life and return middle-aged, and that asymmetry would probably still be in place.
Meanwhile, on other fronts, Jonathan, a young guy who had recently joined the troop, was barreling into adolescence and had developed a bad crush on Rebecca. She was the prepubescent daughter of beautiful, bound-for-tragedy Bathsheeba. She lacked the classic looks of her mother but had a fresh baboon-next-door quality to her. This appalling anthropomorphism was aided by the fact that I had recently darted her and given her a pair of yellow numbered ear tags that stuck out like barrettes for her nonexistent pigtails. She was cute and bouncy and played with her many friends, including her closest pal, Sarah, of the Naomi-Rachel-Sarah clan. And naturally, she had no idea that Jonathan existed. He, a shy young beast, was unable to pull off the suave worldly strategy that had worked so well for Joshua in wooing Ruth back in 1978 (i.e., patiently following her each time she sprinted off in one of her nervous states). Instead, Jonathan just sat and moped, face on his arms, gazing at Rebecca from a distance.
There were also changes with David and Daniel, the two kids who’d transferred in together a few years before and had become inseparable buddies. Daniel happened to reach his growth spurt about a year before David, and the former soon was absurdly decked out in shoulder muscles, a cape of hair, an expanded chest. He looked like a junior high school kid in football gear to me, but the whole thing was impressive enough that he was beginning to make some waves in the hierarchy. Perhaps most impressed by the change was Daniel himself, and suddenly he had no time for wrestling and chasing up and down trees with David. He was too busy with important stuff.
This was also the season when Isaac, a heretofore obscure young adult, became friends with Rachel. Naturally, I applauded this, given my feeling that Rachel was the nicest baboon in the troop. Now, a male and female baboon might best be defined as friends if they hang out together and don’t happen to be having sex. Barbara Smuts, a primatologist at the University of Michigan, wrote a wonderful book a few years ago on the subject—who are the rare baboons that manage to establish friendships, what traits does it take, what are the rewards and heartaches (the heartache for the male mostly being dial he has to restrain himself from beating up on the female anytime he has a frustrating day, the reward being that she would actually choose to have something to do with him)? So Rachel and Isaac became friends. Isaac was someone who, in the last year, had emerged as one of the most unique animals I ever knew. At first glance, at the first two years of glances, he seemed to be somewhat of an underachiever and had a silly flat forehead to boot. Prime-aged, perfect health, he shoulda been a contender. Instead, he kept walking away from fights, showdowns, provocations. In your less charitable moments words like “coward,” “sissy,” “mama’s boy,” would flash, but you’d realize he wasn’t running away with a tail flag and fear bark. He was walking, disinterested, unruffled. He wasn’t losing fights—he simply was choosing not to be part of them. If it took giving someone a subordinance gesture, crouching on his belly, for example, he’d do it and then remove himself from the unpleasant situation.
He had an interesting sex life. A very attractive female would come into estrus. “Very attractive” to a male baboon usually means she’s had a few kids already who’ve survived (proving that she’s fertile and a competent mother), but not so old that her fertility is declining. In the case of such a female, the high-ranking males compete ferociously, and number 1 is likely to be with her on her most likely day of ovulation, number 2 for a day on either side of that, number 3 for a day on either side of that, and so on. Very young females, like Ruth and Esther, having their first few estrus cycles, were probably not yet fertile, and of little interest to the high-ranking males. Instead, they would wind up with an earnest young Joshua or an ancient Isiah. Or, as was beginning to be the pattern, the canny Isaac. Isaac would have nothing to do with the crazed, canine-slashing competition for the prime females. Instead, he’d be willing to shove aside a very young or very old male and thus spent an extraordinary percentage of his time in consortship with young females in their first cycles. Sure, they would almost never conceive, but if they did, he would be 100 percent certain of fatherhood, instead of the “I was with her for eleven hours the day after her peak swelling, so there’s a 17 percent chance he’s my kid” calculations. If Isaac had had that strategy sorted out in 1978 when Ruth was having her first nervous cycles, Obadiah would probably have looked like him instead of like Joshua. But it wasn’t until late 1980 that Isaac hit his stride with that style.
So Isaac passed his days in tremendous numbers of uninteresting (in most other males’ view) consortships. When he wasn’t consorting, he hung out with Rachel, his friend. Oh, lascivious gutter-minded reader, you’re probably wondering if they ever got it on. He consorted with her a few times. Never on peak days, as he would relinquish the consortship at any sign of interest from a more dominant male. Mostly, they were friends. They sat together, fed together, groomed endlessly. Idyllic. Just Rachel and Isaac and all the peripubescent young things he was screwing around with. The strategy paid off in many ways. Yes, only a few of the young females conceived, but as the years passed, Isaac, still in fine shape, would be surrounded by their occasional offspring, eventually hordes of kids with flat foreheads, to whom he would be abundantly paternal. And by then, almost all of his peers were dead or decrepit, burned out by their more competitive lifestyle. And he just kept going. An impressive individual.
Benjamin, ah, my Benjamin, had not improved his lot much by 1980. His hair was, if anything, more disheveled, and his jaw didn’t fit any better. We had one moment of rather unsuccessful cross-species communication. A male baboon, when faced with a formidable adversary, will occasionally be able to coax another male into forming a cooperative coalition. And when such pairings prove stable, they constitute a force to be reckoned with. There’s a whole series of gestures and facial expressions that a male gives to get a potential coalitional partner to join him in the glory of the fray. One day, Benjamin was about to be trounced by some bruiser, who was bearing down on him with a look that meant business. Benjamin, in a growing panic, glanced around every which way for a coalitional partner and saw nothing but infants, zebras, and bushes. In a moment of desperate inspiration, he turned to me and solicited my partnership. In the name of all my professional training and objectivity, but to my perpetual shame, I had to pretend that I didn’t speak the language and had no idea what he was talking about. Another drubbing for Benjamin when, no doubt, he was hoping I’d run the guy down with my Jeep.
This was also the period when I discovered why the baboons napped so much during the day. It was Benjamin’s fault. He kept everyone awake at night. When baboons are lost, they give this two-syllable “wa-hoo” call. “Where is everyone?” in effect. This was the call that Benjamin gave the day in 1978 when he and I both lost the troop together. I had recently begun to camp out occasionally in the forest beneath the trees the baboons slept in. It turned out that on an amazing percentage of the nights, with everything peaceful and quiet, Benjamin would suddenly start bellowing wa-hoos at the top of his lungs. “Wa-hoo! … Wa-hoo! … Wa-hoo! Wa-hoo! Wa-hoo!!” Eventually, Daniel would give some cranky, half-asleep wa-hoo back from the next tree, then Joshua, Bathsheeba, so on, until everyone would be out of control, wa-hooing their heads off for half an hour in the middle of the night. My theory was that Benjamin would have a bad dream, suddenly get the willies, and want to know that everyone else was still there.
It was in the early 1980s that Nebuchanezzar really hit his stride. He was mean, stupid, and untalented. He had only one eye and a disturbing rotty socket. He had a flinty face. And he had bad posture. He spent years in the troop, never made a friend. He just bullied everyone. Actually, he was no fool—he didn’t threaten higher-ranking males, he didn’t push, never went anywhere in the hierarchy. But as a prime-aged male, there were still a lot of occasions where he could throw his weight around, and he invariably did.
He excelled at kidnapping. This is one of those behaviors that provoke endless debates among primatologists as to what they mean, whether human terms should be used. A male is about to get trounced by someone. The high-ranking male approaches, and the impending victim, in a panic, suddenly grabs a terrified resistant infant from its mother, clutches it conspicuously. Miraculously, he then is not beaten. An old, starry-eyed ethological explanation for this was that infants are so cute and vulnerable, and everyone knows this so innately, that clutching the kid inhibits aggression. Who would want to hit a guy holding some kid? Any abused child can tell you that it is nonsense that kids automatically inhibit aggression. Careful field study showed that to be nonsense as well—in some circumstances, males will systematically murder infants. So much for the “kids make adults gentle” explanation. Sometime later, the sociobiologists came up with a far more Machiavellian scenario. The alpha male is about to pound you. You don’t grab just any kid, you grab someone who he thinks is his kid. Mess with me and your kid gets it. Kidnapping, hostage taking. Pretty clever. The idea generated all sorts of predictions. The kid grabbed should be the most likely offspring of the attacker. A terrifying, high-ranking male who only recently joined the troop should never be kidnapped against—he hasn’t been there long enough to have fathered (or to believe that he’s fathered) anyone. You’ll note that all of this depends on the actors being able to remember who mated with whom back when, what your species gestation period is, and so on. Not recommended for beginners or small-brained species. The sociobiological model has been supported only to some extent by the data. Appendices have been added on to the theory. Sometimes it’s Machiavellian kidnapping, sometimes the guy is grabbing the kid for comfort in his frightened moment, sometimes he’s grabbing his own kid, to get it out of the dangerous situation.
The debate rages on, keeping primatologists off the dole. Whatever the reasons, Nebuchanezzar was an inveterate kidnapper. He’d be off raising hell, and some higher-ranking male would come by, and Nebuchanezzar would instantly set upon and chase and pummel some screaming female until he’d wrested her infant away. Oh, you can bet he never tried that with the high-ranking Devorah’s child. But lowly Miriam was a different story, and her daughter was always getting wrestled away from the screaming Miriam. And, as was inevitable, one day Nebuchanezzar broke the infant’s arm while flailing for her. The whole troop mobbed him, chased him around the field for a bit, maybe, although unlikely, taught him a lesson. But the damage was done, and she has limped ever since.
In retrospect, the thing I’m least willing to forgive Nebuchanezzar for was what he did to Bathsheeba. Oh, I had a crush on her, if that’s not obvious by now. The tip of her tail was wondrous, snowy white, unlike any baboon I’ve ever seen. She was elegant and understated, like Ingrid Bergman. She was not an especially attentive mother to Rebecca, mostly hung out with Devorah, had a particular fondness for euphorbia fruit, always trying to lead the troop to such trees. Okay, so she didn’t have a particularly striking personality, but there was the tail tip. Her downfall was in a classic baboon social interaction. Among baboons, when the going gets tough, the first thought is to find someone else to pay for it. A male loses a fight and spins around and chases some subadult who, cheesed off, lunges at an adult female who swats an adolescent kid who knocks an infant over. All in about fifteen seconds. “Displaced aggression” is the term for it, and an incredible percentage of baboon aggression consists of someone in a bad mood taking it out on an innocent bystander. Just ask the endlessly put-upon Job or Benjamin. So this time, Nebuchanezzar was hassling Ruth and her kid Obadiah; Joshua, Obadiah’s likely father, came to their rescue. He and Nebuchanezzar fenced a bit, lunging at each other with their canines, and the fast maturing Joshua trounced him. Nebuchanezzar sprinted off, badly in need of someone weaker to take his defeat out on. He lunged at the screaming Job, chased some kid, and then bit Bathsheeba on the flank as she leapt to get out of his way. Typical displaced aggression, if on the somewhat escalated side, but what else would you expect from Nebuchanezzar? Except this time, the bite went septic. Maybe Bathsheeba had a crummy immune system. More likely, Nebuchanezzar had a particularly fetid mouth. But she went septic and died, horribly, two weeks later.
Sociobiology is often faulted for the Machiavellian explanations it gives for some of the most disturbing of social behaviors. And for the suggestion that some of those horrendous behaviors are highly rewarding to their skillful practitioners. Less noticed is that it also generates just as valid (or invalid) explanations for some of the most selfless, altruistic, caring of behaviors and shows the circumstances under which those are highly rewarding behavioral strategies to follow. Yet, nothing about that science at this stage can begin to explain the individual differences—why did Isaac take the strategy that we recognize as being such a “nice” one, while Nebuchanezzar behaved in a manner that was vicious and rotten? At this stage, as a trained scientist, all I can conclude is that Nebuchanezzar was a shit on some fundamental level. And during 1980, the troop would have agreed heartily.
And what happened to Uriah, young behemoth, inheritor of the throne of Solomon, vanquisher of the invincible? The kid never had it in him, couldn’t possibly last. After Solomon went, Uriah hung around for a while, but he just didn’t have what it takes. He didn’t stand a chance when Saul came in from the wilderness.
Saul had been in the troop since 1977. His entry was worth noting. He had been in the neighboring troop, a subadult there, when the two troops met by the river. As usual, everyone hollered and craned their necks and looked at each other and got bored and went back to what they were doing. But there was magic in the air that day. Boopsie spotted the striking Saul; Saul spotted the slinky Boopsie and flashed his eyebrows at her, meaning roughly the same thing that it does among primates like us. She ran over to the riverbank and presented her rear end to him. Delighted, Saul crossed over and approached her. Boopsie ran about ten meters and presented again. Saul approached again. And Boopsie ran again and slowly reeled Saul into the troop. He never left, although I might add that he never had a particularly sustained relationship with Boopsie.
Within about six months, though, Saul became a hermit; he simply stayed by himself. He slept with the troop, but in the farthest branch of the last tree. I’d never seen anything like it. He was the first one down in the morning, first one out, way out on the edge. If anyone approached, he moved away. He was not frightened, he was not low-ranking. When he did interact, he was a fairly forceful, high-ranking male. He simply wanted to be by himself most of the time. I had two years of behavioral observations of him that consisted of his sitting alone. My belief is that from early 1978 until late 1980, he principally passed his time watching and thinking. He watched Solomon in his prime and in his downfall, the pairing of Joshua and Ruth, Isaac’s benevolent strategizing, Nebuchanezzar wreaking havoc. He would do his day’s eating in a frenzy while everyone else was just yawning at the base of the trees and spend the rest of the day on the edge, sitting and watching. Eventually, he must have decided it was his time, because he came in from the periphery of the troop and deposed Uriah in one day.
That first afternoon, he beat Isaac in a contest that the latter had little stomach for, demolished Nebuchanezzar in a sustained fight, dispatched the aging Aaron. Joshua, Benjamin, Daniel, a few others all stood around nervously. By sunset, he had threatened Uriah, and they had had a series of ambiguous interactions, showing that neither was quite sure where things stood. And by dawn, with everyone looking kind of frazzled and sleep-deprived, Saul descended from the trees as the alpha male, and Uriah descended with two deep canine slashes, one splitting his nose down the middle. He spent the day moping alone on a mound.
So ushered in the reign of Saul. He had an astounding proclivity for extremes. He could be explosively violent. Alpha males, especially early in their tenure, will occasionally be challenged by other high-ranking males. The response could be to ignore the guy, to make a threatening facial expression, maybe lunge, even chase the individual halfheartedly. But it quickly became apparent that even the most trivial of provocations would be answered by Saul with an attack of the highest intensity—ferocious chases with canines bared, slashing at the flanks of the fleeing male. It was not long before no one challenged Saul about anything, and everyone got out of his way instantly. Yet, on a certain level, he was not really a very aggressive individual. He did not start rights, he did not seem to hold grudges or harass animals pointlessly. Most strikingly, he never attacked females with displaced aggression, never chased them when he was feeling cranky. For a male baboon, this was extraordinary behavior, akin to the lunatic fringe forms of pacifism where the loinclothed adherent abstains from eating certain fruits for fear of inadvertently killing the flies festering therein. There was a yin-yang quality to Saul, an imperturbable serenity about him, a mandarin-like calm, until someone messed with him in the slightest and he became insanely retributive. It was as if, in his meditative isolation for two years, Saul had developed this amazing capacity to generate behavioral extremes and never to do something pointlessly. If everything about Isaac’s uniqueness led him to reject typical male baboon values, walking away from every possible conflict and spending his time in undesirable consortships and in friendship with Rachel, everything about Saul’s uniqueness made him succeed at those values brilliantly. Saul was what most males aspired to, if only they had a stitch of smarts or discipline or energy.
Peace descended on the troop, and the trains ran on time. Saul fathered many kids, dominating reproduction to as great an extent as any alpha male I’ve seen, although he was not especially paternal. He had good affiliative relations with almost all the females in the troop, although he was never particularly close with anyone. Years passed, and no doubt Saul was beginning to contemplate the building of grand commemorative cathedrals and endowing of monastic orders in perpetuity with florins. For other males in the troop, watching their prime years come and maybe go amid Saul’s stranglehold, it must have been a trying time indeed. As it turned out, it took extraordinary measures to topple this extraordinary individual.
Usually, there is an heir apparent or two, waiting for a bit more nerve, for the alpha’s reflexes to slow a bit. Uriah breathed down Solomon’s neck in 1978, as had Solomon and Aaron down the mythic 203 s in 1975. Now there was no obvious number 2, just a bunch of young males in their prime, none of whom would dream of messing with Saul. Finally, they did the logical, if rare, thing; they formed a cooperative coalition.
Joshua and Menasseh, another big male, soon bound to be enemies, teamed up first. They spent a morning making coalitional appeasement gestures to each other, cementing a partnership, and finally worked up the nerve to challenge Saul, who promptly kicked their asses, slashed Menasseh’s haunch, sent them both running. By most predictions, that should have settled that. Instead, the next day, Joshua and Menasseh formed a coalition with Levi, a fireplug of a young male who had been around for a few years. Saul dispatched the trio in seconds. And they came back the next day with the vile Nebuchanezzar in tow. Nebuchanezzar and Menasseh managed to hold their own for a few seconds fencing against Saul before he scattered them.
The next day they were joined by Daniel and, as a measure of how much they just needed cannon fodder for this grand enterprise, Benjamin. Six against one. I was betting on Saul. He emerged at the edge of the forest, and they surrounded him. I was on top of the Jeep, trying to follow everyone at once. It seemed like the assassination of Caesar.
I’m sure the six were wetting their pants. I suspect Saul was not, despite the fact that all the males were conspicuously grinding and displaying their canines, half-lunging forward and slapping at the ground, things baboons do when they try to ruffle you big time. Saul seemed markedly unruffled and still. I can’t conceive that the six had it together enough to have a strategy. Baboons are simply not up to that. They must have happened on their strategy by accident. Levi and Menasseh were the two most physically likely to be able to inflict damage, and they wound up on opposite sides of the circle. Saul couldn’t face one without putting his back to the other.
Saul made his decision, launched himself at Levi and Joshua. I’m sure he would have gotten away with it, scattered the six, but Menasseh got in a lucky shot from behind. He lunged at Saul’s back as the latter leapt, managed to hit Saul’s haunches. It knocked him off balance, and he missed Levi and Joshua, landing on his side. And everyone was on him in an instant.
For three days afterward, he lay on the forest floor. Why he wasn’t killed by hyenas then, I’ll never know. When I darted him a few weeks later, he was covered with half-healed canine punctures. He’d lost a quarter of his weight, his shoulder was dislocated and his upper arm broken, and his stress hormone levels were soaring.
He recovered, although it was iffy for a while. He learned how to walk with three limbs, could eventually run for short stretches, looking like a fullback in a three-point stance, his useless arm at his chest. He was never in another fight, never mated again, disappeared to the bottom of the hierarchy. And he returned from whence he came, back to the wilderness. Unlike in years before, he was no longer the first one out, rushing ahead to keep a distance between himself and the others. Now, in his crippled state, he was the last one out. He kept to himself, moved away if anyone approached, sat and watched from the same distance as in the past.