Male baboons are not renowned for their self-discipline. Or their capacity for gratification postponement, or their communal spirit. Or their trustworthiness, for that matter. The wonderfully cooperative junta that had overthrown Saul lasted all of a morning before it disintegrated into factionalism and both metaphorical and literal backbiting.
All hell broke loose for months afterward. Joshua, Menasseh, Levi, Nebuchanezzar, Daniel, and Benjamin were clearly the upper-ranking cohort now. For example, in a social interaction, any one of them dominated a subadult like David, Daniel’s old buddy. But they didn’t have a clue where they stood with respect to each other. Ranks flip-flopped daily. Levi would beat Daniel in a fight and supplant him a dozen emphatic times that subsequent afternoon, but by the next day, the direction of dominance would be reversed. Over the course of months, Menasseh might turn out to be dominant to Nebuchanezzar, but he’d be winning only 51 percent of the interactions, instead of the 95 percent you’d see in more stable times. Chaos reigned. Everyone was scheming, spending hours forming coalitional partnerships that would collapse within minutes of their first test. Nearly 40 percent of the time, when it did collapse, the erstwhile partner would wind up on the other side. The number of fights went through the roof, as did the rate of injuries. Nobody ate much, nobody was grooming, sex was forgotten. Public works projects were halted and mail service became unreliable.
By later that year, things had sort of straightened out, and the dominance hierarchy stabilized, but the next three years saw a series of weak alpha males who held on in their position for only a short time. You want to know how bad things were then? Benjamin actually wound up on top of the hierarchy at one point. It was some sort of fluke, and for a short period, he held sway, had one consortship with Devorah when she was at the peak of her swelling, won one fight with Menasseh that seemed to have been an accident. Not surprisingly, being in the thick of the competitive world turned out not to be his forte. He was a wreck, constantly in a hysterical state. He would threaten someone and then run away. He hid behind Devorah in a moment of crisis. Once, he showed how poorly versed he was in evolutionary theory by trying to kidnap the Valkyrian Devorah when threatened by Menasseh. Devorah responded by slapping him. Benjamin chased zebra petulantly, and after one particularly tense interaction, he spent an afternoon up in a tree, bouncing up and down on branches until they’d snap. One day, he marched up to Menasseh, who was facing the other direction, napping, and Benjamin threat-yawned at him real close from behind his back. And then ran away in panic when Menasseh shifted and looked as if he would catch him at it.
Benjamin hardly inspired much confidence. One afternoon, the troop was on the move, coming through a narrow opening between two thickets. Benjamin was in the lead. Now, male baboons, of any rank, rarely lead troop progressions or, to state things more accurately, are rarely followed. They don’t know what they’re doing, they’ve only been in the troop a short time. It’s the old females who are followed. So Benjamin comes marching down the opening between the thickets, never glancing back. Meanwhile, the two old matriarchs, Leah and Naomi, decide to veer into the thickets, and everyone else follows. Benjamin marches past the Jeep, proud as can be, finally looks back. Freakout, where did everyone go!? He runs around a bit, hyperventilating, and then in a moment of inspired cognitive addledness, Benjamin walks over and looks for sixty-some baboons underneath my vehicle.
To bolster his rank, Benjamin formed a coalition with Joshua, who supported him in the alpha position. Benjamin’s lack of élan proved to be infectious, and soon both of them were weaving around the neighborhood in a hysterical, disheveled state. Menasseh was the main challenger breathing down their necks, and unfortunately for him, it’s extremely difficult for a single baboon to take on a stable coalition, even this discombobulated a one. In some classic confrontations, Benjamin would be in a consortship with a female, and all the while, the silent, calculating Menasseh would circle the pair, in ever tighter circles. And one step tighter in the circle throughout would be the stumbling, hyperactive Joshua, somehow pulling off his role of getting in Menasseh’s way. Eventually, Menasseh’s pressure would become too much, and Benjamin and Joshua would flee the scene, barely holding on to their proverbial straw hats and cardboard suitcases, herding along the unimpressed female, to try to resume someplace else in the forest. And a few days later, Joshua would be in a consortship, with Benjamin giving the less than stellar tactical support.
Charming though they may have been, this arrangement couldn’t go on for long. Within about three weeks, Benjamin and his coalition with Joshua went down in neurotic flames, more from exhausted abdication than from an overt overthrow. Menasseh emerged as the alpha male, followed shortly thereafter by the thoroughly premature Daniel. Things flip-flopped even more indecisively after that, opening the way for Nathanial’s brief ascendancy after he joined the troop. Nathanial was this huge monster of a baboon, the biggest, heaviest animal I would ever dart—without a glimmer of aggressiveness or ambition in his soul. Everyone was terrified of him simply because of his size and essentially handed him the alpha position. In actuality, he was a big woolly bear who seemed best designed for doing things like enveloping sleeping infants in his huge arms or carrying baskets of gumdrops for all the children who’d been good. In many ways, he was the soul mate of Isaac, Rachel’s friend who habitually walked away from any unpleasant social encounter. He had a quick series of successful consortships with females, gave up on this male-male competitive nonsense immediately after. He voluntarily walked away from being alpha male, retiring to spend his time playing with his kids. While I never subsequently spotted him giving out gumdrops, he became very adept at tossing babies in the air and catching them, and was often in danger of having his massive self pinned to the ground under the weight of the kids climbing on him.
So went the succession during the unstable years. It was a wonderful period to take advantage of, if you were a savvy female. An obvious question in watching all this baboon mating is whether the female has any choice as to whom she winds up with. Early in the primatology business, the guess was no. In the strictly linear models of the ’60s, if there was one estrus female in the troop, the alpha male would mate with her. If there were two females on a certain day, the alpha and number 2 would; if three females … and so on. This would not necessarily be great amounts of fun for the female. Who would you want to spend your time with—the (by now, moderately high-ranking) jerk Nebuchanezzar or the low-ranking Isaac? No question. Female baboons turn out to have perfectly rational preferences for males, like not enjoying hanging out with ones who beat on them, for example. But there are limits to what you can do when males are twice your size. If the alpha male is a strongly dominant, entrenched individual and is interested in the female, she’ll probably wind up with him, like it or not. But if there are any weaknesses to exploit, a clever female will spot a way. For example, you refuse to stand still when the male tries to mount you. Or you begin walking away whenever the male, famished and exhausted from maintaining a vigilant consortship with you, tries to rest or eat. Or the most obvious war of attrition: one day, Rachel had a peak swelling and was in consortship with Joshua, while Menasseh harassed and Benjamin weaved in between. Clearly, she was not interested in any of these guys. So for hours, she methodically marched over to Menasseh, forcing Joshua to scamper in between her and Menasseh, Benjamin in between Menasseh and Joshua, until Joshua would move her away or Menasseh would back off to decrease the tension. And then she’d march over to Menasseh again. Inevitably, the trio would eventually get haired out enough by all of this that they’d wind up off in the field fighting. And Rachel would wind up happily with Isaac.
It was also a wonderful period to take advantage of if you were the neighboring troop. Half the males in my troop were injured, moping, off strategizing, or too cheesed off about the morning’s fight to possibly cooperate with anyone. The neighboring troop moved in now and then to shove them out of the forest, for no obvious reason other than spite. It would be an amazing sight, if a dispiriting one if you were partial to my team—150 baboons tearing through the forest, screaming, barking, chasing, feinting, fencing. The troop did not do very well for itself in the face-offs. Nebuchanezzar and Menasseh might be making a credible showing of ferociously driving two or three of the invading males out of the forest when they would decide they’d much rather fight with each other. Joshua might abandon his consortship with Devorah briefly to join in the fray, causing Nat to veer off from his chase of a neighboring male to try to herd Devorah over to the quiet end of the forest. There was little evidence of communal spirit, and one morning, the troop was emphatically driven out of the forest by the marauding neighbors by 8:30. They stood around, eventually went and foraged listlessly out in the field all day, and that night, for the first time to my knowledge, they slept elsewhere, perched crankily and precariously in some wispy acacia trees a mile away. A few days later, they were able to regain a foothold in the forest, but for coming seasons, the neighboring troop pushed them around mercilessly.
There were some notable comings and goings during that time. Old Aaron and young Uriah and Levi all disappeared. Levi turned up two years later in a troop thirty miles away, faring quite well; I suspect the other two found new homes also. Weird pathetic Job also disappeared, and my guess for him was eaten by hyenas. Menasseh vacillated between this troop and the neighboring one, never quite distinguishing himself in either. In their place came a number of new faces. Reuben joined, a big strapping male who was destined to go nowhere in the hierarchy. For years to come, he’d maneuver into precisely the confrontation he’d need strategically and, at the critical moment, would flee in panic, tail in the air. Once, when some hyenas were passing near the troop, to no one else’s consternation, he crouched down in the grass, to avoid their notice, except for his rear end and tail sticking up conspicuously. One was forced to admit the fact that he was a coward. An ancient decrepit animal with a mangled back leg whom I named Limp also joined the troop. His life was made miserable by every displacing bastard in the troop who would make him pay for their problems. A short time after that, the troop was joined by Gums, who was, if imaginable, even more ancient and broken down than Limp, and had no teeth to boot, which made his survival near miraculous. Gums wound up being slightly lower ranking than poor beaten Limp, who immediately lost any sympathy he may have engendered previously, by beating up on Gums whenever he had the chance. You’d look at these two ancient animals, still being competitive and cagey and maneuvering, albeit at half speed, and you’d have to wonder, Who were they, what are their stories? What part of the Serengeti did Limp terrorize years ago? Did old drooly feeble Gums ever kill someone in a fight? Did the two of them know each other back when, are Limp and Gums the last survivors of some extraordinary event? Can they even remember it anymore?
This period saw two additional transfers into the troop that were pretty atypical—new females. Normally, females spend their entire lives in the same troop, building up a quarter century’s worth of complex relations with friends and kin and enemies. It’s a pretty good bet that if a female changes troops, she’s had some major troubles. Both of these had the air of political refugees or battered wives. One day, the troop encountered the adjacent troop as both fed along the riverbed. Everyone briefly yelled and barked and threatened and made a fuss about the neighbors, who did the same in return, until feeding was resumed. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted an adult female from the other troop dash along the riverbed and hide in a bush.
A while passed and she darted to another bush, closer to the troop. Her own troop was beginning to drift off, back up the ridge—it was a period where they were no longer contesting the forest. Another ten minutes, another scoot to a nearer bush, and her troop disappeared over the top of the ridge. And suddenly she sprinted into the middle of the thickest crowd.
She had a peak swelling, was probably ovulating. Significantly, she also had two fresh canine slashes on her—one on her haunch, one on her face. Another female who probably wished she had never heard of estrogen. Whatever she was escaping from in her home troop, I’ll bet it had something to do with the size of her estrus swelling, and something to do with male baboons being jerks.
Everyone reacted predictably. The females in the troop harassed her, the males came on to her. Ruth and Devorah chased her around, Boopsie supplanted her every time she tried to feed; Jonathan forgot his crush on Rebecca long enough to make the moves on her and got chased away by Reuben, who was pushed off by Nat. She stuck around for a couple of days of this nonsense, it presumably being vastly preferable to whatever grief she had escaped in her own troop. The third morning, her swelling had gone down, the steroid poisoning had abated, maybe she could return to her home and live in peace for a while. She disappeared whence she came, not heard from since.
The second female to show up was even more untradidonal. She stayed. Whatever she was running from, it must have been really bad, if she was giving up whatever rank, family connections, and friends she had elsewhere. She also was at the peak of an estrus swelling, had a shoulder slash. And her tail tip was freshly severed. Maybe that was why she decided she had had enough of her hometown. Short Tail joined the troop and, for lack of family or a known lineage to fit into, was shoehorned into the very bottom of the female hierarchy. Where she spent years, unperturbed by her subordinance. Not surprisingly, given the epic and unorthodox life she was leading, she was pretty tough. She regularly predated rabbits, something one rarely saw females doing, and she fought with males for scraps of meat on larger kills. In general, everyone seemed to think she was a weirdo, except for Adam, a new meek transfer male who showed up around the same time and spent the coming years following Short Tail with an unrewarded devotion.
So went the unstable years, amid coups and countercoups and general chaos. I was constantly reminded of a comment of a baboon-watching colleague, after we had seen a film entitled Chimpanzee Politics about the Machiavellian brilliance with which those animals went about making each other miserable. “Chimps are what baboons would love to be like if they had a shred of self-discipline.” One image stands out in my mind to typify the period. It was after the marginally successful coalition of Benjamin and Joshua had fallen apart, and they were somewhat at odds with each other, or at least nervous about each other. I came into the forest one day and spotted Benjamin crouched down behind a tree, holding on with both hands. He was intent on something, vigilant, nervous. Every now and then he would carefully, slowly lean over, peek out from behind the tree at something or other across the clearing. And then he would jerk back, safe behind the tree.
What’s up? I walked over to the other end and found Joshua, also crouching, hiding behind another fig tree. God knows how they got into this, but they were pinned down, each carefully hiding from the other, peeking out from behind their trees now and then, making sure the other wasn’t up to something before hiding again. Each seemed to have trapped the other there, but why and how, who knows. They seemed like two maddened, paranoid forest gnomes. They sat like that for half an hour, until Joshua fell asleep against the tree and the relieved Benjamin was able to tiptoe away.