I didn’t much like Nick, and neither did the rest of the troop, in that he had one of the most unappealing personalities I’d encountered in a long time. This was around the time that I was starting to pay attention to personality in a formal, scientific sense. For all those years, I had been focusing on the idea that rank helped determine the health of these animals, that lower-ranking males were more at risk for a variety of stress-related diseases. Rank was destiny, case closed. But my more recent studies suggested that there was more to a baboons life than his rank. Your physiological profile was indeed influenced by rank, but, it turned out, even more important than that was the sort of society in which the rank occurred—for example, the hormonal profile of a high-ranking male in a stable hierarchy was extremely different during die unstable years. And while rank was important to physiology, an even more significant factor seemed to be whether you had the means to cope when times were tough, whether you were socially affiliated. Thus, independent of rank, males who did the most social grooming and sat in contact with other animals most frequently had the lowest stress hormone levels. This was the realm of an Isaac or a Nat. And, perhaps most importantly, personality was turning out to be crucial. For example, how type A were you?—if your worst rival in the troop showed up and took a nap fifty yards away, would you just keep on doing whatever you had been doing, or would you see it as a crazy-making, in-your-face provocation that would leave you in an agitated state? If you were the kind of baboon for whom a rival napping was a personal affront, you averaged twice the resting stress hormone levels of a male who took it all in stride, after controlling for rank.
So I was thinking a lot about personality, and Nick had a pretty sour one. Basically, he was the meanest baboon to show up since Nebuchanezzar, but, unlike the latter, he was also smart and disciplined and fearless. He was small and slight, which should have made me root for him, but he had a flinty meanness about him that canceled that out. He made you think of taut little guys with tattoos and prominent veins on their arms, the type who in bar fights demolish the big heavy sloppy guys with vulnerable beer guts. He didn’t have tattoos, but he had a distinguishing nick on his lopsided face.
Nick joined the troop during the unstable years. He was still an adolescent, and you could almost read the contempt on his face as he watched the foibles of his elders playing Keystone Kops. Just gimme a coupla years, he seemed to be saying. Meanwhile, he dominated his age group. When he began to make his move into the upper echelon, he was confident and unflinching and played dirty. In a fight one day, he trounced the easily intimidated Reuben, who, in a gesture of submission, stuck his ass up in the air. Now, every baboon on earth knows what that means. It means you give up, you’re conceding, uncle, no mas. And every baboon on earth knows that at that point, the winner is supposed to merely examine your bottom or mount you, or something conventionally demeaning like that, and it’s all over with. Those are the rules, posted everywhere, just like three outs to a side. So Reuben sticks his ass up in the air, Nick comes over as if to examine his bottom, everything going fine, and at the last second, Nick leans over and gives him a deep slash in the ass with his canines. Those happy-go-lucky unstable years were over with a vengeance.
The guy simply wasn’t nice. None of the females seemed especially crazy about him, particularly when circumstances put them in a consortship with him for a few days. He harassed the females, swatted at kids, bullied ancient Gums and Limp. On one memorable day, he took exception to something that poor nervous Ruth had done and chased her up a tree. Typically, at this point, the female takes advantage of one of those rare instances when it pays to be smaller than the males—she goes to the farthest end of a flimsy branch and hangs on for dear life, depending on the fact that the heavier male can’t crawl out to where she is and bite her. And, typically, the male, thwarted, positions himself to at least trap the female, keeping her screaming on the precarious branch until he gets bored. So Ruth gallops up the tree, Nick after her, and Ruth leaps out to a safe edge. Nick promptly climbs onto a stronger, thicker branch directly above her. And then urinates on her head.
To make matters worse, Nebuchanezzar was in his prime now and had not mellowed over the years. He wasn’t challenging Nick for the alpha position but was merely up to making lots of other baboons miserable. There were few saviors in sight. Reuben might have been a match for Nick, but he kept chickening out in every critical fight and even slunk past Nebuchanezzar. Shem, a muscular new transfer kid, was still a few years away from the big time, as were the other new transfers, Jesse and Samuel. Adam was pathetic and hadn’t a hope in the dominance game. David, Daniel, and Jonathan could each fight Nebuchanezzar to a draw but didn’t have a chance against Nick. Isaac and Nat were disinterested, Benjamin and Joshua were no match, Saul was a crippled spectator from afar.
About the only hope for the troop was Gideon, but it was going to require some pretty clichéd script writing for him to save the day. Gideon was Nat’s kid brother and had recently joined the troop. I had spotted him years before in the neighboring troop—a strikingly muscled kid hanging out with his big brother, the then adolescent Nat. Nat had done his migration years before, had had his brief disinterested reign over the troop before retiring to star in Father Knows Best. Then, just as Nick and the Reign of Terror was settling in, Gideon transferred. The scenario was set: Gideon, the young Jedi knight; Nat reluctantly comes out of retirement to be Obi-Wan Kenobi; they form a coalition, overthrow Nick, truth and justice triumph, Han Solo and Princess Leia have a consortship as the movie ends.
The only problem was that Nat was having none of that. Gideon had read the script perfectly, would challenge Nick, and, in the heat of the strategic moment, would barrel over to Nat and solicit a coalition. And Nat, distractedly, would groom Gideon, paying no attention to the hubbub and assuming his kid brother was there merely to reminisce about family picnics. Another day, Gideon would be midbattle with Nebuchanezzar, the outcome seesawing, our hero needing only a hand from his elder brother at a critical moment. Gideon would sprint over, try for a coalition, and Nat would earnestly hand him one of the infants clamoring all over him, hoping Gideon would just settle down and discover how much more rewarding fatherhood was than this fighting nonsense. More than anything, Gideon seemed disillusioned. What had happened to his idolized big brother? Nat, who had taught him everything he knew, goes off to a new troop for a few years and now just look at him—not eating red meat, attending antiwar rallies, hanging out with these girls with no bras. His bewilderment was palpable.
So Gideon seemed unlikely to take over the dominance hierarchy just yet, although he still seemed a shoo-in for Rookie of the Year. A far less auspicious debut in the troop was made by Absolom. He was a meek, squirrely kid who seemed way too young to have already made his adolescent transfer. I didn’t recognize him from any of the neighboring troops, suggesting that he had wandered in from a long way off and had spent quite a long time by himself before gaining the most peripheral of footholds in this troop. His open, guileless face was marred by a large abscess next to his muzzle, which must have been painful, as he chewed only on the opposite side of his mouth. Absolom was atypically friendly, spending an inordinate amount of time eyebrow-flashing and face-pulling at all and sundry. With the exception of Benjamin and of Rachel’s family, his greetings were generally ignored. Once, in a particularly adventurous moment, he face-pulled at me; I returned the gesture, clearly a surprise to him that I was conversant in baboon. He face-pulled again, I reciprocated, and we established an almost daily interspecies ritual.
As of late, Absolom had discovered girl baboons and festered in an adolescent voyeurism. The troop had grown accustomed to a certain degree of this obsessiveness in recent years. Jonathan still had a bad crush on Rebecca (who showed increasing foolishness in disdaining him, as he was growing into an impressive young baboon), Adam was still a follower of Short Tail, such that when either of those females was in consortship with some other male, Jonathan or Adam would shadow them at a discreet, forlorn distance. But Absolom took this to new heights. Any consortship in the troop, and he would be lurking around in the bushes nearby, trying to catch sight of the good stuff. Daniel would be in consortship with Miriam, who had never really made any of the males’ blood run hot, and Absolom would be ten feet away, craning for a view of the action, holding his tail throughout. And let someone who was really hot stuff in the troop come into estrus—Devorah or Boopsie, for example—and Absolom was beside himself. One afternoon, Nick and Devorah, who was sporting a huge estrus swelling, sat quietly grooming each other. They were peripheral to the rest of the troop, secluded, no doubt building steam for a moment of even greater intimacy, when Absolom, who had silently slithered his way out to a branch of the tree just above them for a really good view, collapsed it under his weight and came crashing down on top of them. Naturally, despite his obsession, Absolom had not so much as been groomed by a female since joining the troop, let alone anything more exciting, and when I darted him, he was covered with skin parasites.
While Absolom may have been wishing away a few of his years so that he would be closer to his intimidating prime-aged years, some of the other animals must have been feeling the shadows lengthening. Saul was now an old baboon and had taken to limping the quarter mile over to the tourist lodge to contest the local baboons there for garbage scraps in the cans and lodge dump—an easier diet than foraging for hours a day. Aaron, even older and worse off, had retired to that garbage dump troop entirely. Inconceivably, the salacious and youthful Afghan was beginning to look tattered and worn by life, as were Miriam, who seemed to be aging fast from too many kids simultaneously throwing tantrums, and Ruth, no doubt done in by her constant skittish anxiety, which had only worsened with the years. Old Naomi was older than ever, and even middle-aged Rachel was beginning to look as tattered as her mother, sufficiently so that more than once I made the mistake of referring to her as Naomi in my field notes. And it was the season that I was shocked to discover that Isaac, and even Joshua and Benjamin, were beginning to get old man’s veins—their skin was getting loose and brittle, their veins rolly and difficult to hit with a needle when I was taking blood. And they were beginning to get age spots, of all the disturbing things.
Some of the most remarkable behavior of that period was centered around aging as well. One actor was Gums, who, in his few years in the troop, had generated no anecdotes, seemed to have no notable traits beyond his vast decrepitude. The other was ancient Leah, mother of Devorah, number one—ranking female in the troop, no-nonsense, unlovable. Prior to that season, I am fairly sure I had never seen Leah and Gums so much as look at each other once. Nevertheless, I believe those two fell in love, or fell into each other’s hairy arms, or at least fell into a set of behaviors unlike anything I have seen before or since. First, they simply disappeared. The troop slept in the forest, a grove of trees covering a few acres, and it was easy enough for me to lose track of a few animals in the underbrush there, or when the troop would be out foraging on the edge of a thicket. But when the troop was marching across an open field, during the dry season when there was nothing growing but stubble, you couldn’t miss a soul. And Leah and Gums just up and evaporated one day. For an adolescent or prime-aged male, this would not be surprising—he was transferring, or at least checking out the possibilities of some other troop. Let one elderly animal disappear, and the hyenas or a lion would be the inevitable suspect. But the two oldest animals in the same day?
There was no sign of them in the neighboring troops, nor of them rummaging through the garbage cans of the tourist lodge. Neither was back in the forest, too sick to come out and forage. I checked the hyena dens for bones, dodged buffalo in the streambed of the forest searching for a fresh skull. Nothing. No one seemed to miss Gums (the fate for most males), but Devorah seemed distracted with the absence of her mother. Days went by, then a week, and I had given up on them, assuming that both had been predated on the same day.
Then, a few days later, I left the baboons midday and drove back to camp via a circuitous track through the backcountry behind the thickets that the baboons frequented. And at the far end, in a field the baboons would go to once in five years, I found the two of them. Together, neither foraging nor grooming, but sitting near each other. As I approached them, Leah, an animal habituated to humans observing at close range for nearly two decades, glanced up wild-eyed and stiffly loped off to the nearby thicket, followed by the equally wild-eyed Gums.
The next afternoon, as the troop took a route in the opposite direction, placing them ten miles away, I returned to the same remote corner, tracked them even farther up the back end of the thicket. And I spotted them in silhouette at a distance, sitting exposed on a windswept ridge in an area teeming with wildflowers and lions. I never saw them again.
Another event during that period would have been extraordinary with anyone as the protagonist, but was made even more so since it involved an astonishing display of heroism on the part of the unlikely Benjamin. It was midafternoon and the baboons were lollygagging along. Hot as hell, the time of day when predators were most likely sleeping, and everyone’s guard was down. The troop came over the top of a streambed and barreled right into a semi-dozing lion. Chaos, screaming, everyone scattering every which way, as the lion leapt up. The big males, naturally, did their thing, which was to high-tail it up the safest trees around. The females, in contrast, sprinted to grab their offspring before heading for the trees. The lion was acting somewhat like a kid in a candy store, starting to sprint after one animal, changing her mind and starting in another direction, overwhelmed by choices. The net result was that she managed to grab no one and stood in the middle of the field, exhaling in exasperation, surrounded by a troop of screaming, treed baboons.
Then all of us—the lion, the baboons, and I—noticed the two kids. They were yearlings, off on the edge, who had climbed up a tiny sapling of a tree, one that bent nearly horizontal within about five feet of the ground, one that would deter a lion for about ten seconds. They were Afghan’s and Miriam’s, and both moms had been cut off at the opposite end, the lion between them and their kids. General panic and hysteria, as the lion began toward the sapling. Now, the outdated primatology textbooks would go on about how the alpha male would now come to the rescue, as per his job description. And, as I’ve noted, what actually happens is that a genetic self-interest holds sway—someone will usually do something self-sacrificial only if it involves saving close kin, saving someone who shares lots of genes with them. Tough luck for these two, neither had a really obvious father who had been claiming them—in contrast to the paternalism of, say, Joshua, for Obadiah, Ruth’s child from their adolescent dalliance. Most of the big males wa-hooed their heads off at the excitement of having a good view of what was going to happen next, the females were alarm calling, Afghan and Miriam were running up and down the trees frantically, when, from out of nowhere, Benjamin comes tear-assing in. If during his brief reign as the alpha male he had shown how little he understood modern evolutionary thinking by trying to kidnap the adult Devorah against the menacing Menasseh, now he was showing a similar lack of scholarship—there was no way in hell either of these kids was his. But he comes roaring in, yelling, threat-grunting, gets to the base of the sapling before the lion, and plants himself there. The lion approaches, Benjamin begins snarling and lunging, canines bared. I’m horrified, stunned, mesmerized—as is everyone else. The lion approaches, Benjamin begins to back up the tree, and you can basically see him will himself forward again. He could jump down and run to safety in a second, but he lunges forward, snarling like a lunatic. And it’s working. The lion has stopped, now about five feet away, flinching each time Benjamin lunges. She tenses for a spring, lifts a paw … and paws at the ground a second and then walks off. Screw it with this crazy baboon in my face, and she returns to where she’d been napping. The two kids run down the tree to their moms.
I’m not sure what I was expecting next. That Miriam and Afghan would groom Benjamin for the rest of time, or at least organize a parade for him. That all the guys would slap him on the back. Everyone continues alarm calling at the lion for a while and then abruptly returns to feeding, while Benjamin bounces around up in a tree, breaking branches in some form of agitated displacement. The rest of the day passes without incident.
During the reign of Nick, most of the changes of membership in the troop were among the younger animals. Obadiah came of age and pushed off for parts unknown, never to be heard from again. Scratch, named for the deep gouge on his nose, was an awkward loopy subadult who joined the troop and went nowhere in the hierarchy, was even pushed around by the hapless Adam, and therefore contented himself to lethargically dominating Absolom and Limp. Jesse, another adolescent transfer, introduced a new behavior, giving credence to the notion of “cultural differences” among different populations of the same species of primates. He came from a troop two territories to the south, living along the river that formed the Kenyan-Tanzanian border, and had clearly spent a lot of time navigating streamlets. He introduced the habit of walking upright across water. Whether this was his own invention or a habit of everyone in his old troop, whether it served some obscure adaptive purpose like reducing exposure to water-borne parasites, or merely saved a baboon from the discomfort of getting his hands and feet wet, I never knew, but soon all the younger baboons were crossing streams bipedal.
It was the season that Rebecca had her first child (alas, almost certainly not by the heartbroken Jonathan, whom I never saw get close to her throughout that estrus period). Primiparous mothers—those with their first child—are rarely particularly skillful, but Rebecca was plain awful. She forgot the kid when she left a group of other females, slapped him frequently, couldn’t seem to learn how to position him to ride on her back, so that he sprawled sideways, clutching the base of her tail. One day, as she leapt from one branch to another in a tree with the kid in that precarious position, he lost his grip and dropped ten feet to the ground. We various primates observing proved our close kinship, proved how we probably utilized the exact same number of synapses in our brains in watching and responding to this event, by doing the exact same thing in unison. Five female baboons in the tree and this one human all gasped as one. And then fell silent, eyes trained on the kid. A moment passed, he righted himself, looked up in the tree at his mother, and then scampered off after some nearby friends. And as a chorus, we all started clucking to each other in relief.
So passed that season, with Rebecca slowly learning how to mother, Absolom lurking in the bushes, Nick harassing everyone. He put me in my place in the dominance hierarchy once, and in a particularly galling fashion. It was early morning in the forest, and I had just pulled off a particularly pleasing darting of Reuben. He had been plodding along in a sleepy, just-woke-up manner, and I timed the darting for the instant when he came through a break in the bushes—the dart caught him squarely in the haunch just as his front half disappeared behind the next bush so that he didn’t have a chance of seeing what happened. The plan then was for him to obligingly walk a few feet, sit down comfortably in a secluded spot, and pass out. Instead, Reuben lunged at the nearby Adam, zigzagged across the forest, and crossed the deep stream that cut through it, right past an unsavory-looking buffalo. Pain in the neck. I watched until I was certain he was beginning to go under to the anesthetic and unlikely to wander off further, and then began the five-minute drive around to his side of the stream, since the buffalo kept me from crossing on foot.
As I rounded a bend, with his now-prostrate body in view, I suddenly spotted a large male baboon moving toward him quickly. I tensed; it was Nick. It is essential to keep very close watch on a baboon when he is going down, not only because he is likely to wander off and get lost in the bushes when the anesthetic hits, or because he might hurt himself going under to the anesthesia, but for fear that a rival male might maul him during these vulnerable minutes. And now here was Nick barreling down on the semiconscious Reuben and there was no way for me to get to the latter and protect him in time.
I scrambled to get another dart ready to try to hit Nick, but I was too far away. I thought of leaping out of the car yelling and waving my hands. I hit the horn repeatedly, but Nick still kept coming. Reuben managed to lift his head and focus on Nick, now just a few feet away, and gave a barely conscious fear grimace.
Slowly, forcefully, Nick placed a hand on Reuben’s shoulder, the other on his haunch. Then, Nick leaned back and bellowed a wa-hoo call audible throughout the forest, one that would draw the attention of all the baboons still up in the trees. After holding his pose, Nick marched back into the underbrush.
I couldn’t believe it. That bastard had just taken credit for my darting.