During one season, I took some time off from the baboons to visit the researchers in one of the other national parks in the country. I made the rounds, seeing the baboon people and the ecology people and the elephant people. I’ve never known much about elephants, but they are inspiring and moving, as is the devotion of elephantologists. Such researchers are renowned for being as obsessed with their animals as are most primatologists, and it is understandable when you consider elephants—large, smart animals who live for three quarters of a century and fill their days with familial complexity and caring. When I visited them, the elephant people were amid a week of distress that all wildlife biologists immediately empathize with. One of their best-studied, most beloved animals was missing; a matriarch, the mother of a dependent seven-month-old. They had been searching for days, becoming frantic for the panicked and weakening child. We all fretted and imagined bad scenarios.
A few days later, we stood over the body of the missing elephant. The search had not been all that difficult. She died about a quarter kilometer outside the garbage dump of the main tourist lodge. She had eaten considerable amounts of the garbage—no doubt fruit and vegetable remains, chunks of various starches being the main attractants—left the dump, collapsed, and died. The vultures had already transformed someone the elephant people had known for years into a gaping carcass—skull sticking out, most of the really yummy organs already eaten. Her stomach and bowels had been ripped open, the contents scattered over ten square feet in front of her torso: mounds of grass and leaves having nearly finished the process of being transformed into elephant dung; the leafy top of a pineapple, courtesy of the garbage dump. And the cause of her death: shards of broken glass, a broken soda bottle, bottle tops, bits of metal, all also courtesy of the garbage dump. The elephant people had been begging the lodge for months to make the dump inaccessible, had helped make a fence for them, which the lodge never bothered to close, had appealed to the warden to do something. At the point when I left the park, the fate of the child was uncertain.
I will not tell the names of the researchers or the park, and it is not clear if mentioning the name of the lodge and its scum owner will make it more or less likely that he will act responsibly in the future. I will leave it to the elephant people to decide what the best strategy is to avoid repeating that particular tragedy. But I have decided that it is time to tell how my baboons ended. I have tried throughout this book to give some attention to the style of writing, to try to shape some of these stories. Here I will not try. Things unfolded in an odd, unshaped way. There were villains, but they were not quite vile enough to satisfy. There was no showdown. These are not a crafted, balanced set of events, and the telling of them will not be particularly crafted either.
It was a season when I was mostly alone—Lisa’s professional obligations had caught up that year, and she had stayed back in the States, Richard had an extended family illness at home, Hudson was still working at a baboon project at the other end of the country. Soirowa, Laurence of the Hyenas, Rhoda, and Samwelly were around, but I was alone most days.
Over the previous years, I had come to avoid Olemelepo Lodge. This was not the lodge where Richard lived. His was a small tented camp, secluded in a river’s bend, some five kilometers away. Olemelepo was “town,” one of the bigger lodges in the park, a big sprawling mess of a place. It held hundreds of tourists, had three times that many workers and related people—staff, spouses, children, teachers of children, nurses, wardens, rangers, prostitutes, endless cousins and nephews looking for work. In my first year, 1978, it had been the place to hang out. My mail was sent there, which made the place the emotional center of my life. You could waste time there with the invariably unsuccessful goal of trying to get some group of tourists to buy you a meal. There was also an odd pleasure in getting to know all the staff there, becoming a regular, feeling comfortable dropping in for tea in the staff quarters. And over the years, most of the charm had worn off, as I had indeed become a regular. Now, whenever I stopped there, I was embroiled in people wanting loans, wanting to know where was the stereo they had demanded last year that I bring from the States, could I drive them immediately sixty kilometers for an important ceremony at their village, could I sell them my watch and jeans right this minute. People wanted driving lessons, jobs for their kid brothers, scholarships to my university. All perfectly understandable, given the general dire economic straits, but still, after a while, the charm had worn off, and I had taken to avoiding the place.
Thus, I procrastinated for many days when the pilot of the tourist balloon offhandedly mentioned to me that there was a sick baboon behind his house. I had other things to do, I didn’t really want to have to spend time at Olemelepo tracking down a sick baboon; I assumed that it was actually a zebra who had been sneezing there one evening. But when he mentioned it for the third time in a week, flagged me down on the road to tell me, I decided to check it out.
Later that day, the pilot led me to the back of his house. The baboon had been there for days, hiding between the wall and some diesel tanks, coughing constantly. I nosed around each end of the row of tanks, couldn’t see anything, could just hear an occasional, dry, weak cough. Finally, I squeezed between two of the tanks and found myself a few feet away from her.
She was from the troop adjacent to mine, the troop whose territory encompassed the lodge. I knew some of the animals in that troop, but I didn’t recognize her. I’m not sure if I would have, even if I knew the members of her troop well. She was transformed. Nearly a skeleton, with huge patches of fur missing, large necrotic lesions all over her. And enormous, glowing eyes. We stared at each other from close range, and it occurred to me that she was delirious. Her eyes would rest on me, seemingly unfocused, and now and then, they would shift slightly, as if she were suddenly noting me for the first time. She’d tense a bit, pull her head back in consternation. She seemed not to have the strength to do more than that. Then she’d begin to cough and the eyes would lose focus again.
I decided to dart her—once I could examine her, I’d try to see if I could make any sense of her illness with my profoundly rudimentary knowledge of such things. I’d also take various samples—blood, saliva, mucus—to store for some wildlife vets who might actually know something.
I decided to try to anesthetize her by hand with a syringe, instead of trying with a blowgun in these close quarters, but she was a smidgen too alert and mobile. We spent some time with her laboriously moving away from me as I laboriously tried to squeeze close enough to inject her. Actually, I was probably trying to herd her out from behind the tanks in order to use the blowgun rather than to actually inject her—I was more than a little afraid that she might bite me and that, overnight, I would become necrotic and delirious myself. I noticed that she was coughing up a bloody foam.
She was out in the open now, as I prepared the blowgun. A crowd of gawking staff had developed. This was the last thing on earth I wanted: the crowd seemed on the edge of sufficient gawking enthusiasm as to trample her or me. And whatever she had might be contagious.
I darted her at close range under her dull, glazed stare. She walked away a few steps, and I noted that one hand was necrotic as well. She went down quickly, quietly, as I pulled on a scrub suit, gloves, and mask. Her pulse and breathing were extremely weak, her temperature was 105 degrees, and as I prepared a vacutainer for a blood sample, she died.
I felt it prudent not to advertise this. I covered her “to keep her warm,” announced I was taking her to my camp for an examination, and scrammed.
Laurence of the Hyenas was in camp, and he quickly joined in the planned autopsy. I’ll admit it—we were pleased and anticipatory. I’m perfectly capable of getting grossed out by dead things, but if you are a certain type of biologist, this is basically your idea of fun. You skin something, dissect it, study how the musculature works; do a good job cleaning a skull for display, articulating a skeleton; you practice a new type of surgery on a carcass until it’s a clean set of perfect reflexes. And this time, it was a mystery, even better—you got to combine scientific puzzle-solving with good old mucking around with something dead.
We decided to act like good, careful scientists. We laid out the ground rules for the game. We had some medical reference books with us, which we had made constant use of, trying to figure out the cause of the nonspecific fever or stomach crud of the week. But we decided not to consult the books, to first go through a full dissection, description, and whatever guesses we might have, so that we wouldn’t bias our subsequent observation to fit our book-based theory.
We opened up the belly with my Swiss army knife, the best instrument available. The whole abdominal cavity was filled with a yucky fluid. So sue me, I’m not a pathologist; it just looked yucky. We started slicing open organs. Normally, this is one of the more conflicting, assaultive olfactory experiences you can have. The intestines, naturally, smell like feces with an odor so thick and goopy that you are sure that the shit smell is forming a precipitate on your eyelids. But what is always surprising is the stomach, because it invariably smells like a garden salad—a fragrant mulch of leaves and grass and fruits and just enough stomach acids to give the ensemble a hint of vinaigrette.
The stomach always smells kind of good, except this time—there was no Mother Earth salad smell and no stench in the intestines either. She hadn’t eaten in days.
There were small, dark nodules all over the place, in her gut, stomach, liver, pancreas. We cut down further into the groin, and they were in the lymph nodes also. They were hard and compact. Following the tendency of pathologists to, perversely, use food descriptions for the rankest of things possible, it struck us that they looked like watermelon pits. Maybe she ate too many watermelon pits, we theorized wryly. We continued in this vein—“Ah, but note that there are pits in the lymph nodes. How did they get there, Herr Professor?” “So she must be suffering from ectopic watermelon pits” (“ectopic” is the term used for things that are in the wrong place. If you grew six fingers coming out of your forehead, the savant who described it first might call it ectopic polydactylism or something). “But, my esteemed colleague,” we continued with each other, “where did the watermelon pits come from, since watermelons do not grow here?” “Ah, thus, I diagnose she is suffering from idiopathic ectopic watermelon pits” (meaning watermelon pits in the wrong place for god knows what reasons); case closed. We were having a fine time.
We cut open some of these nodules. The inside was granular, powdery, lighter colored. We took careful notes and couldn’t think of anything clever to glean from that. I started drawing the whole thing—the nodules in the gut, stomach, beadlike sequins throughout the veil of connective tissue. We rummaged around with the knife and managed to cut out two vertebrae. Nodules in the spinal cord as well—central nervous system infection. It occurred to us to begin to feel a little bit spooked. We put on another pair of gloves and noticed how damn warm it was under the masks, dissecting out in the sun. She was beginning to stink a smidgen as well, especially the necrotic hand.
We started to open up the chest. We cut through the skin and then sawed through the rib cage with tools from Laurence’s auto mechanic’s toolbox. And normally, if you slice through the diaphragm, the whole rib cage should just lift off, like magic, displaying a luscious pair of lungs and heart below. We cut along all the dotted lines, but the rib cage wasn’t budging. We pulled at all sorts of angles until we could see—the lungs were completely adhered to everything—to the diaphragm, to the rib cage, to the heart. This was drastically wrong. We yanked at the rib cage, cut underneath a bit, yanked some more, and suddenly it pulled loose along with all the adhered lung.
We leapt back. Jesus fucking Christ. Fluid was oozing out every which way. It was thick and milky and smelly and fibrous and splotched, with pieces of things in it. If you were to find yourself in hell and you got thirsty and ordered an ice cream soda with blood and cherries thrown in, this is what you would get. Then we realized—this wasn’t some fluid oozing out of the lungs. This was the lungs themselves oozing away. Her lower lobes had just melted.
Our bravado was gone. We procrastinated before getting up the nerve to examine the remnants of the lungs. There were the nodules everywhere, in the chest wall, the trachea, the tracheobronchial lymph nodes as well. But the lungs. Nodules. But also splotches, hemorrhages, explosions of blood and pus here and there, implosions, and more lung melting away all the time. We eventually touched them. The lungs were bony. Maybe not even bony. They had some sort of cartilaginous superstructure, pockets of rock hardness, other parts that were like hard eggshells that then burst, dripping away more of the lung. This was insanely wrong, as wrong as eating yogurt and having to stop to pick the bones out of it. We began to dissect out and cut open and palpate and scrape. There were chunks of cartilage-type stuff connecting nothing to nothing. There were white parts and black parts and hemorrhaged red parts and garish yellow-green parts. There were hard spheres that split open to release thick yellow ooze that left behind little soft kernels of coagulated hemorrhage with gray powdery centers. And then spheres of things in which the layers seemed to be just the opposite. The remaining lung was adhered to everything, there was no definition to the lobes anymore. There were gaping holes in the trachea, a plug of blood and sputum and yuck clogged at the bottom. It was a mess, and we flailed and wrote down and drew and had no idea what we were doing. Eventually, we decided we were finished, buried her at the far end of the field, left our scrub suits hanging in a far tree and the dissection knife sitting in the tree’s crook, far from our camp.
It was Laurence who first mumbled “tuberculosis.” Once we had washed, we checked our books, and the description of terminal-stage TB matched perfectly. Anyone who works with captive primates gets the willies from TB. You can’t even set foot in most primate centers without passing a TB test, people are so scared of outbreaks. The disease will jump from cage to cage, room to room, will wipe out entire colonies. It doesn’t work like in humans, where Hans Castorp can malinger for years, jotting down his prolix philosophic thoughts. It just tears through primate labs. I hadn’t a clue whether it moved that quickly through wild primate populations. And as the start of an answer, a few days later, a ranger flagged me down to say that there was a sick baboon at Olemelepo Lodge.
The second case was much like the first. This time, it was a prime-aged male, from that same Olemelepo troop. He lived through the darting and, with next to no reflection about it, I overdosed and autopsied him out in the field again. With him, there were even more nodules throughout the digestive system and liver, maybe a bit less disintegration of the lungs.
The third case was a few days later, a crazed, wailing, coughing female behind the water pump house at the lodge. The symptoms were the worst yet—her back was arched, her hands were so necrotic, so stinking and putrefied, that she walked on her elbows when she tried to get away from me. Apparently, the back arches in an attempt to increase lung capacity. The hands decay because, as the lungs rot and oxygen exchange plummets, the amount of oxygen delivered to peripheral tissues declines. She died within a minute of darting, and an hour later, her lungs were melting away in the corner of my field. That night, I had my first nightmare about being unable to breathe.
These were all from the Olemelepo Lodge troop. They had always shared the forest with my troop, and in the mornings, they would go their separate ways, this troop foraging around the lodge. This was the troop that had pushed my guys out of the forest during the unstable years. As Olemelepo grew, the lodge started generating more garbage and got sloppier with their garbage dump, and soon the lodge troop was spending its time eating among the refuse. And soon, they had moved their sleeping site to the trees above the dump, and they passed their days eating garbage. Their behavior was distorted, their foraging nonexistent, and I had washed my hands of them in disgust. As of late, they had been getting into trouble. Some tourist would toss them food from the verandah in order to get a picture, and when a more aggressive animal would then lunge for food that was not necessarily being offered, there’d be nervous shrieks from the tourists. Later that day, a ranger would shoot a couple of baboons. Or some mama in the staff quarters wouldn’t feel like walking over to the garbage can to toss out the leftover maize meal and would toss it to a waiting baboon instead, and the next day, the same male would lunge for her maize meal as she prepared it outside, not yet having mastered the subtlety of distinguishing between maize meal before and after humans have decided they’re done with it. An uproar would ensue, and the ranger would go and shoot a few baboons. The previous season, one of the prostitutes at the staff canteen had given birth to a deformed child, and the rumor ran around that she had been raped by one of the baboons. I kid you not. And the rangers shot a couple more.
So this was the troop, and now they had something like tuberculosis breaking out everywhere. As I noted, I had no idea how TB moved through wild primate populations, and the sense I was getting from my cursory reading in the prior week was that no one else did either. It appeared as if I were about to find out. Already, I was spending half my nights wondering how long the TB would take to reach my troop.
I radioed the primate research center in Nairobi. They were in the process of turning from a charity plaything for colonial matrons, an animal orphanage for cute abandoned pet monkeys, into a first-rate research institute. Their director was an American vet, Jim Else, a man with miraculous organizational skills. I liked and respected him and hoped it was mutual. I explained the situation to Jim within the maddening format of the radio call, filled with static and fadings in and out and the necessity to push a button and say, “Over,” each time you finished a statement. I shouted the symptoms, the autopsies, the emerging pattern, and amid the static and the metallic monotonie voice, I heard Jim being concerned. Yes, he said, it sounded like TB, but it was absolutely imperative that they be able to culture the lungs to confirm that, and to find out what kind. Absolutely imperative. I was enough of a scientist to recognize the scientist’s edge to his voice—“This is imperative, because this might be really interesting and informative” (i.e., neato, this is going to be fun). I’m no clinician, so I couldn’t tell if I was also hearing his vet’s voice saying, “This is imperative because you might have the start of a plague.” Regardless, it was clear what he was asking. They had to be able to culture a piece of the lungs. Therefore, I had to get a live, sick baboon to them in Nairobi.
It had to be an animal who was sick, but was early stage, so that it would survive the transporting. I thought I was getting good enough with the symptoms to spot an early case, but the whole thing still seemed difficult. I had no idea that the difficulty was about to be with the humans involved.
Everyone at Olemelepo knew that something was up with the baboons. People began to ask me whether the baboons were dangerous, whether we shouldn’t be killing them all. Then, in the time-honored tradition of shooting the messenger, people began to decide that it was somehow my fault that the baboons were sick—after all, they were my animals, they were sure I could do something about it, and thus I must have decided not to do anything and to let everyone be endangered. I started spending a lot of each day explaining that these were not my animals, that not all of them were sick, that it was not clear yet if it was dangerous to people, that I was trying to do something, and so on.
Another case popped up, someone too far gone to survive the drive to my camp, let alone Nairobi. The next morning, while surveying the garbage dump for a candidate animal, I spotted Saul, Shem, and Jonathan feeding there—they would apparently slip away from my troop for a quick run on the garbage, where they were big enough to hold their own for scraps among the bloated garbage dump males. I got the chills—now there was a vector for carrying the TB into my troop. That afternoon, I discovered a group of the staff at Olemelepo flinging stones at the baboons, trying to drive them away from the lodge.
By the next day, the shoot-the-messenger philosophy had been taken one step further. The manager at Olemelepo had let it be known that he didn’t want me on the grounds anymore. A security guard acquaintance met me at the entrance and apologetically explained that I wasn’t allowed to dart the baboons there.
I switched vehicles, I took to lurking there only at dawn and dusk, just outside the grounds, hoping to spot a possible animal. The third day of this, I found one, an adult female with a definite arch of the back, a cough, and one hair patch, but not much else wrong.
I darted her on the edge of the stream that ran into Olemelepo. She remained stable and seemed likely to survive a trip to Nairobi. And now began the utter misery of getting permission to take her.
The difficulty revolved around one of the basic animosities in national parks the world over, namely between park officials and researchers. The two groups occupy fairly different worlds. The former are government bureaucrats who, when based in the field, wear uniforms or, when based in government offices, suits and ties; the latter, by contrast, tend toward torn jeans. The former think about issues like how to increase the flow of tourism in their park, while the latter would just as well get rid of those irritating tourists entirely, so that they can study their one species of ant in idyllic peace. The former tend to be pragmatic realists who function in a realpolitik world; the latter tend toward hysterics and causes and pride themselves on having no social skills. The former typically have wildlife management degrees, while the latter tend toward more prestigious degrees from fancy-ass universities and then, in a way that the former seem to find to be almost viscerally offensive, choose to live like Luddite pigs in leaky tents. And most of all, the former seem to exist merely to cite restrictive rules, while the latter seem to exist merely to shit on the spirit of every park regulation they can get away with.
Thus, the two groups don’t typically have much fondness for each other or go out of their way to cooperate with each other. This knowledge should have prepared me for what happened next.
On two consecutive days, I went to the warden’s office to get permission to transport the sick female to Nairobi, and both days, a sullen ranger with a rifle told me that the warden was out patrolling and I should come back the next day. On the third day, the same ranger informed me that the warden was actually home for a week on leave. The female, meanwhile, sitting in a cage in my camp, had developed more lesions, a cough that kept both of us awake at night, and the start of a fever. I had bought a few cabbages and was hand-feeding her through the cage. She was clearly terrified of me, and not all that hungry, but she was gradually beginning to take the food from me.
I could not wait for the warden to return. I tried the head of the antipoaching unit, who assured me that he would give me permission to take her out of the reserve if I brought him a gift the next day. I obliged, at which point he cheerfully informed me that he had just discovered that he really did not have authority to let me remove her. That afternoon, I returned to my camp to find a group of the rangers standing around, laughing, poking at the female with sticks through the cage bars. By that evening, she was looking less panicked by me, whether out of habituation or delirium, and she was readily taking cabbage and allowing me to groom her. Her left hand had become too necrotic to use.
The next day, I tried the warden’s again, by chance, and discovered that he had actually returned two days earlier. This was told to me by the same ranger who had been giving me the resentful, incorrect information earlier in the week. This time, I actually knew that the warden was there. He kept me sitting for an hour before sending a message that he was too busy to see me; throughout, I heard him and some other men laughing behind his closed door, the sounds of bottles being opened. By that night, the female was losing the use of her right hand and was coughing up blood.
The next day, grinning and scraping and bowing copiously, I saw the warden and begged him for permission to drive the female to Nairobi. With a straight face he said, Of course not, that would be depleting Kenya’s parks of its wildlife. Are you serious, I said, she is going to be dead in a few days. No, he said, if you remove her, you are poaching, and then we will get you. This from a man who had already been arrested twice for poaching in his illustrious career and would be busted a year hence for rhino poaching (and who, because of his superb marital connections with the Masai political leadership in the district, would receive a promotion as a result). That night, she was slumped against the side of the cage, delirious.
Finally, Jim Else came through. I had been radio-calling with each daily setback, and he was working frantically at his end through the labyrinths of power and inertia. I believe he got his boss, Richard Leakey, then the head of the National Museum (of which the primate center was a part), to get the head of the Game Department to grant permission. A critical radio call was made, the warden balked until it was in writing, a document empowering me to transport up to three sick baboons to Nairobi arrived on that afternoon’s flight.
The road out of the game park was too dangerous to drive at night. By evening, she was comatose, and I doubted if I would reach Nairobi before she died the next day. I raced out before dawn, and in a final piece of misery, I was stopped by an impossible ranger at the wildlife checkpoint on the border of the district. Why, you have a baboon there, he exclaimed. Yes, yes, she is sick and dying and here is the permit. He examined it and suddenly noted, Why, it says here you are supposed to have three baboons, where are the other two? No, no, it says I can bring up to three baboons. No, it says that you are supposed to have three baboons, but two are missing, what have you done with them, bwana, have you sold them, this is serious. Jesus Christ, she was sinking fast, and I was contemplating killing this guy, who was gleaming at me sideways with slack-jawed malevolence. Finally, he makes it clear what he wants. “Bwana, you have the wrong permit. It says three baboons, and it is supposed to say one baboon, so now you must pay me the fine for the wrong permit.” Fine, you corrupt shitbag, why didn’t you ask for your bribe earlier. I paid, roared off, drove far too fast, got caught in Nairobi rush-hour traffic, all the while hearing her irregular, labored breathing next to me stop now and then. I argued with the security guard at the gates of the lab, who did not want to let me in because I was not on that day’s appointment list, and finally reached the pathology building.
For reasons I don’t understand, I felt compelled to clean away from her lips the last flecks of cabbage that I had fed her, and I dried her eyes that had become teary from the dust of the trip. I had a brief, anthropomorphic thought: Because she’s from the garbage dump troop, instead of from my own, she’s never had a name. Then, I carried her in my arms into the building and, a few minutes later, helped to remove her rib cage. And again, the lungs melted away.
Jim had warned me that it would take weeks for the microbiologist to confirm whether it was TB from the lung cultures. But the vets were unanimous about the diagnosis the second her lungs began pouring out, from the examination of the lesions, from the first histology slide that they made. All the microbiologist would let us know was what kind of TB it was and, for the moment, that was irrelevant.
We sat around the next day, Jim, I, and a group of his vets. It was TB, that was certain, and everyone knew it wasn’t a general threat to the humans there. Humans are relatively resistant, anyone in good shape around Olemelepo—well fed, well clothed—would be fine. Anyone who wasn’t probably had TB already; the disease was endemic in Kenya. Jim would use all his powers to get the word out to everyone in the game park that there was no human threat.
But it was a shitter of a threat to the baboons. It was disastrous for them. We sat debating for hours. If this were going on in a primate lab, the procedure would be obvious. Every monkey in the room in which the TB was found would be killed that day. Every animal in the colony would be tested, and every time someone came up positive, everyone in the room would be killed. Otherwise, it spreads like wildfire. A sickening word popped up over and over. To stop a wildfire, you need a firebreak. Kill every monkey in that room, anyone who is in the slightest bit suspect, who has breathed the same air. Form a gap, a firebreak, keep the disease from reaching the rest.
But this wasn’t in a primate lab with animals in close proximity. As I had guessed, no one knew the first thing about the dynamics of tuberculosis in wild primates. Hooray for us, we were about to find out. Maybe it spread more slowly, because animals weren’t jammed into a single room with a high population density. Maybe it spread more quickly, because the animals in the wild could actually come in contact with each other. Maybe more slowly, because they weren’t immunosuppressed by the stress of captivity. Maybe more quickly, because they weren’t as well fed.
We went around in circles and didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t treat the disease in the sick ones—tuberculosis requires daily medication for eighteen months. The only option was to try to contain it. It would help if we knew where it came from. There had been no obvious baboon die-off in the Mara reserve recently, this wasn’t the tip of an iceberg of a plague that I had stumbled on. The most plausible thing was that some male baboon had migrated up from Tanzania and brought the disease with him when he joined the garbage dump troop. They were only one troop away from the border, and things were chaotic enough in Tanzania that no one would have noticed a baboon die-off there in theTanzanian side of the plains.
If an émigré male had brought it into our park, and I had already observed a vector to carry the disease from the Olemelepo garbage dump troop to my own troop, it could spread throughout the whole reserve. On the other hand, suppose an alternative scenario: maybe the tuberculosis had been sitting around in reservoir in the Mara population for years, coming out now and then, with most baboons having a natural resistance. This wouldn’t be some novel disease breaking out, but rather a flare-up of an old, familiar one. On the other hand, in laboratory colonies, TB doesn’t sit in reservoir, and there is no such thing as natural resistance. But, on the other hand, this wasn’t a laboratory colony.
Circles and circles. We didn’t have a clue. The vets, trained in lab animal medicine, with all the appropriate fire alarms going off in them at the mention of tuberculosis, were pushing for an aggressive approach. “Firebreak” was said more and more. Kill all the baboons in the garbage dump troop. Kill all the baboons in the adjacent troops. Form a no-baboon’s-land to stop the disease before it runs amok in the whole reserve. But these were my animals they were writing off as a firebreak. And even though I’m not a vet, not a clinician, knew nothing about TB, I was enough of a scientist to know that there wasn’t any science here. Biology in the laboratory is not biology in the wild—that was the scientific justification for my studying baboons in the wild in the first place—and no one knew anything about TB in the wild.
I won a temporary victory. We wouldn’t do a firebreak. We would make this somewhat of a scientific investigation, in addition to its being a clinical intervention. I would go back, start darting every damn animal everywhere that I could get hold of in the reserve, give them a TB test, hold them an impossible four days in a cage waiting for a result. If the garbage dump troop was running anywhere near 50 percent positive, then they would be on the edge of an explosion of the disease, and a firebreak would make some sense. But there was an alternative bit of information to look for that would allow a much more optimistic interpretation: if I could find a single positive case of TB in any of the remote troops that I had seen around the reserve for years, troops that I knew were not undergoing a catastrophic population decline, then we would have proven that the disease doesn’t always take off like wildfire in the wild. It would mean it works more slowly, like in humans, infecting vulnerable individuals, instead of wiping out whole populations. If it was not spreading like wildfire, a firebreak would not be necessary.
The vets were not too happy. Science is fine, they seemed to be saying, but believe us, we know about TB, if it takes off, you’re going to lose every baboon in the Mara, you’ll be sorry. They and Jim forced a logical promise from me: if any animal came up TB positive, I would kill it, even if it was one of my own.
My research was forgotten, all I was doing was darting. I promised that I would start TB testing in my own troop, but for starters, I was concentrating on the garbage dump troop, to see just how many were infected, and on a troop at the other end of the reserve, in the desperate hope of finding the one positive animal in a troop without an overt plague.
You don’t realize how well you know some baboons until you try to dart strangers. You don’t know their personalities—you don’t know who will jump up, look around, and sit back down again after darting, who is going to climb a tree or sprint a kilometer or try to kill you. You don’t know the grudges within the troop, who you have to protect from whom when they pass out. You don’t know their body weight or the vagaries of their metabolism when you are guessing how much anesthetic to put in the dart. You don’t know the neighborhood, where the buffalo or the snakes hang out. And the baboons don’t know you, so you can’t get as close.
Nevertheless, I slowly started the dartings. I hauled back a bunch of cages from the primate center and some tuberculin for testing. The latter required refrigeration, which was a problem, since I didn’t have any—the dry ice was too cold, the Styrofoam box buried in the ground too warm. Fortunately, thanks to Jim’s reassurances about the lack of human health risk, Olemelepo was welcoming me again, and the assistant manager let me put the vial in his refrigerator. So I’d go dart someone, run back, get a smidgen of tuberculin, and inject it in the eyelid. When you are checking for tuberculosis in a human, you can examine them closely afterward, so you inject under the skin in the arm. If it is some monkey that is going to rip you to shreds at close quarters, you inject into the eyelid, so you can check it at a distance. Four days later, if the animal has been exposed previously to TB and formed antibodies, there will be an inflammatory response. Even from twenty meters away, the eyelid is visibly swollen closed. Swollen eye, you’re dead.
It was a nightmare. You would dart some happy, healthy baboon while it was in the middle of grooming some relative or friend. Then it would sit there in your camp for four days, jammed in a tiny cage, one of half a dozen animals screaming and barking, shitting everywhere, making an incredible stench. Rotting cabbage, pools of urine, animals moaning at night in fear and unhappiness. Then, each morning there would be a couple due for their judgment. Maybe their eyes would be fine, and a moment later, they would be free, sprinting back to whoever had been grooming them, with an unlikely story to tell. And if the eyes were swollen shut, I’d somehow have to anesthetize them while they were flailing inside the cage. And then it would be to the other end of the field and the knife.
I was running out of everything. There weren’t enough masks or gloves for the dissections; even though humans are pretty resistant to TB, it’s not advisable to be passing your days with your face unmasked an inch from someone’s terminal-stage lungs, and I was getting worried for my own health.* There wasn’t enough anesthetic to overdose the animals and, sickeningly, I was beginning to have to give them just enough to anesthetize them and then slit their throats. My nights were now filled with the memory of the wet, sucking, heaving noise of baboons with no throats, trying to breathe. Then my knife disappeared.
I had continued to leave it in the crook of the tree that shaded my mortuary. I didn’t have enough disinfectant anymore to clean it between animals, so at least I would sequester it to that corner of the camp. And one afternoon, it was gone.
I had another knife, that was not the problem. The disaster was that it had been taken by the Masai goat boys, passing through camp the day before. They were aware of what I was doing, had watched a dissection from afar, and had no doubt decided to filch it at some quiet point. It would be a great find for them, with a major use for the Masai—a good sharp knife was perfect for cutting the vein on the cow when bleeding it. Perfect, except that the knife was coated with tubercular lung, and cows are extremely susceptible, and those kids had just shoplifted a plague on their village.
So now, in addition to feeding my baboon prisoners, killing each day, and darting at two different ends of the reserve, I began negotiations. Rhoda and Soirowa quickly convinced me that no kids from their village had taken the knife. Instead, I was dealing with people from the adjacent villages, whom I didn’t particularly know. I didn’t care about the knife, I wasn’t angry that someone had taken it, but they must understand me that it was dangerous, it could kill all the cows. I didn’t even want the knife back, but they must throw it away. And the villagers indignantly denied it—steal something? Why, we Masai would never dream of something like that. Around and around, each day pleading with them to throw away the knife. It became a backdrop to the events, another layer of problems and anxiety.
After a week, there was yet to be a TB-positive animal in the distant troop, while the garbage dump animals were running around 50 percent positive. Firebreak, more and more inevitable. I was killing every day. Some just had nodules; others, nodules and lung decay. None as advanced as the initial horror cases; after all, these were all animals that looked healthy. Oddly, every one of them had the nodules in the digestive tract, sometimes even when the lungs were still clean. That was atypical, according to what I was now reading.
One day, I screwed up a garbage dump darting badly. I got a big male, and he crossed a stream before passing out, and, not knowing him, I had no idea how many enemies he had. By the time I had forded the stream and gotten to him, he was ripped open in a dozen places by canine slashes. I hauled him to camp and, overwhelmed by what a mess he was, I used some of the dwindling anesthetic to overdose him. And then, as I dissected him, I desperately hoped there would be pathology. Thank god, a small lesion in the left lung and the intestinal nodules—he would not have survived the judgment at the end of his four days in my cages anyway.
That night, acutely aware of the risks in darting strange animals, I resolved to finally start on my own troop. The next day, I darted Joshua and Devorah, along with two garbage dump animals. In the latter case, I wouldn’t necessarily know who the animals were or just where to find them again, so they had to sit in the cages for the four days. With my troop, I would easily find the individual again, so there was no need to put them through the four days of waiting in captivity.
Instead, I waited. The next day, I got Jesse and Adam. The day after that, Daniel, and after that, Afghan and Boopsie. That night, I could barely sleep, waiting for the verdict about Joshua and Devorah, imagining what it would be like to have to slit their throats the next day, to saw through their ribs, to bury their bodies.
But they were clean. As was everyone else in my troop. I was euphoric, smiled for the first time in weeks. It took a few days to note that, suddenly, all the garbage dump animals were coming up negative as well on the tuberculin test. Even one female who festered with the undeniable symptoms of TB over the course of the four days in the cage. Something was wrong.
The next day brought an explanation. I barreled into the house of the assistant manager at Olemelepo to get the tuberculin and discovered the room steward cleaning the place, including the refrigerator. Sitting on the windowsill, baking in the equatorial sun, were the milk, the cheese, the bottles of beer, and, of course, the tuberculin. He was new, had just started that week, would clean there every day. The tuberculin and the test results were useless. I waited for an airlift of more drug and dreamt of lava flows of lung.
I resumed darting, and the garbage dump positive rate climbed to close to 70 percent. I was being overwhelmed by autopsies. Two of the vets from the primate center, Ross Tarara and Mbaruk Suleman, came out to help and, probably, to try to convince me of the firebreak strategy. I prepared for their arrival—their help, their company, their commiseration, their professional insight into TB, which I sorely lacked. Then, the day before they were to arrive, Shem came up positive, the first of my animals to do so.
It is one of the sights that will always be with me. I had just had the nerve to start again on my troop, had darted Isaac, Rachel, then Shem. The first two were negative on days that garbage dump animals were positive, so I trusted the result. That morning, I entered the forest and immediately ran into Shem, sitting with an eyelid completely closed. I had wondered if there could ever be a borderline, disputable test result, but this was not it. He was TB positive.
I gave up on darting that day and spent the day with the baboons, my first quiet observational day with them in too long. I followed them, took distracted, mediocre behavioral data, sang to them, and felt near tears every time I saw Shem interact with someone—greet a male, groom a female, twist around to look at the goings-on in the neighborhood. All for the last time. And I kept passing up opportunities to dart him and slit his throat.
That night I fled to Laurence for advice and solace. I can never overemphasize how, during this insane period of my life, he was a constant source of sanity and big-brotherly stability. He listened and listened and did exactly as he should have—he reworded what I was telling him, and told it back as a command.
“Look, you know as well as I do that these vets don’t know shit about TB out here, no one knows. If they’re right, all of your animals are going to die anyway, so there is nothing gained by killing this guy now. And if they’re wrong, maybe you’ll save a few of the positive ones, maybe there is some resistance. Don’t kill this one.”
The next day, as I drove to the Olemelepo airstrip to meet Ross and Suleman, I spotted that Jesse had just come up positive as well. And I didn’t say a word to the vets about him or Shem.
We went to work, and they were a tremendously positive force. Both Ross and Suleman were sweet, jovial men whom I already liked, and they readily fell into the “gee whiz, lookie what a mess those lungs are” mode of scientists having a good, detached time. I expected that this would infuriate me—my tragedy as their clinical pleasure—but it was surprisingly calming. Our pace increased as I shifted more to darting, something they didn’t know how to do, and they did more of the autopsies, their specialty. We ground through more and more, I avoided questions about my troop, the distant troop continued with a 0 percent rate and the garbage dumpers about 70 percent. I would slip off during the day to do secret dartings and inspections of my own animals, and more positives there popped up—David, Jonathan. I darted Benjamin one day and found I did not have the resolve even to test him with tuberculin.
We worked in a numbing, distracting way, for which I was grateful. There was an analgesic effect to the sheer magnitude of the work, the repetition, the sleep deprivation. Darting, feeding the caged animals, reading test results, anesthetizing, cajoling at the Masai village, killing, dissecting, recording, passing the evenings discussing firebreaks. In some ways, that was academic, at least as far as the garbage dump animals were concerned; whether piecemeal or as a premeditated final solution, we were getting around to killing most of them anyway. The animals passed with exhausting labor, and each day’s work ended with a sight that I now recall with the nostalgia wasted on long-ago nightmares that eventually end—a massive hole we had dug and the burning of baboon bodies doused with gasoline.
The repetitive peace of my death camp and crematorium, the calming sadness of smelling the burning, was suddenly interrupted by a radio-call from Jim Else. The microbiology result was in, and it was a shocker. It was bovine tuberculosis, not human.
TB is actually a hodgepodge of diseases. In all cases, it is due to a bacterium that runs amok in the body. Overwhelmingly, it lodges initially in the lungs, thanks to inhalation, after which it can be carried elsewhere via the bloodstream or lymphatics. You can have secondary TB in essentially any organ—central nervous system, genito-urinary system, bones. But it is usually the lungs. Most of the time, it is due to one type of bacteria, Mycobactenum tuberculosis, or human TB. But there are other, rarer kinds. M. kansasii, M. scrofulaceum, M. fortuitum, M. bovis. Some of them are “avian,” some “bovine,” some “soil” TB. The name does not indicate what it infects exclusively, but rather what species it was first found in or is most readily found in. There is even M. marinum, which is found in infected swimming pools. But mostly, it is M. tuberculosis, and mostly it is in the lungs. But now, we had M. bovis, bovine tuberculosis, and it was primarily in the guts. The baboons weren’t breathing TB from one another. They were eating it.
Work ground to a halt and we sat and scratched our heads. I poked around, asked some questions, had some wild theories that grew more plausible by the day. And then, one afternoon, a friend at Olemelepo suggested that I take him for a ride around the reserve a bit. Once we were away from the lodge, very circumspectly, he confirmed my suspicions.
He was frightened at being an informant, and I will not reveal his name or his identifying profession. He was of a tribe that was an enemy of the Masai and he was delighted to finger some of them. And, an educated man who had once worked as a veterinary assistant long ago, he knew what he was talking about.
It was obvious. The bovine tuberculosis was occurring in the bovids. The Masai could instantly spot when an occasional cow was becoming tubercular. In the old days, cows were never killed. They were kept for blood and milk to drink, were honored, sung to, caressed, pampered. And if they became sick, they were nursed to the very end, at which point they might be eaten, but with great reluctance. But the Masai, pragmatic and adaptable even when it came to their beloved cows, had devised something new. All throughout Masai land surrounding the reserve, whenever a cow would get the first hint of TB, it would be loaded into a pickup truck that day, carted off to Olemelepo, and sold to Timpai, the Masai butcher at the staff quarters. After an appropriate bribe to the Masai meat inspector.
My friend knew what a tubercular cow looked like. He saw Timpai take the sick ones out to the far field, cut out the lungs and other infected organs, and toss them to the garbage dump baboons that would cluster around for scraps. And the remnants would be sold to the staff. Eventually, I would be able to observe the same ritual myself out in the field, take furtive, poor telephoto pictures. I would watch Timpai, a beefy, avuncular man with massive butcher’s forearms, whack away at a carcass, happily elbow deep in blood and gore (and no doubt tubercles and lesions), rummage around inside with the help of his bush Masai helpers, and toss something unsightly to the baboons waiting there. Big males would fight for the major chunks, females would rush in in between for pieces, scrappy infants would lunge for a snippet or two. Ensuring their deaths. And inevitably, now and then, I would spot Shem or Saul or Jesse, freelancing to try to grab a piece in the fray.
I indulged myself in a murderous anger at the Masai. I dropped any thought of going there to warn them about the tubercular knife they had stolen. Coals to Newcastle, they could go to hell. I was simply returning the bovine tuberculosis they had inflicted on my baboons. Mostly, I felt an odd relief. We had an explanation for the odd TB variant, the odd symptomatology. Mostly, we had an answer as to what to do. Get rid of the meat inspector, clean up the operation, and maybe the TB would be stopped, maybe some animals could be saved. I edged on euphoria—an answer, an option, a hope.
Ross and Suleman had to leave, to return to their regular duties. I gave them a letter for Jim. In it, I detailed the butchery connection, outlined the obvious—we, maybe with Leakey, had to go immediately to the head of Safari Hotels, the chain that operated Olemelepo, get them to clean up their act, threaten a little bad publicity if they didn’t, solve the problem.
The letter went off, and I was excited to get a radio-call from Jim by that evening, telling me to come to Nairobi immediately. I departed the next day, ready for us to leap into action, seeing the solution falling into place. And the next day, behind closed doors, Jim told me that nothing of the sort was going to happen.
Tourism is the biggest source of foreign currency in Kenya. It is bigger, proportionately, than the steel, automobile, and gasoline industries are in the United States, put together. Safari Hotels, owned by a prominent British-colonial family, was one of the bigger chains in the country; Olemelepo was one of their flagship hotels. And this was a region of the world where people with power did whatever they wanted. Where the widow of one government official was generally known to run the elephant poaching, where rangers with guns would shake down the hotel staff each payday, where a government minister once used his forecasts of a crop shortfall to buy up the entire crop with his own money and hoard it, engineering a profit-making famine among his own people. And, Jim informed me, neither I, nor he, nor even Richard Leakey, Kenya’s best-known citizen internationally, was going to go see the head of Safari Hotels and tell him to clean up his meat operation. And we were not going to seek publicity about Olemelepo peddling tubercular meat. I pleaded, we went back and forth, and he told me to go back to the reserve, continue doing the TB science there, and he would see what could be done at his end.
Never in my life have I felt closer to drowning in anger, felt more poisoned, more lost in a corrosive sense of betrayal. I returned, as requested, withdrew into my fury, confided in no one except Laurence. I passed each day obsessing over fantasies of vengeance at everyone. I even began to lay the groundwork for some of the fantasies. I was going to protect my baboons, save them, I was going to protect myself, I was going to have my revenge. I went back to darting and methodically documenting the further spread of the disease for the data notebooks that seemed destined to sit in Jim’s desk. But I also began doing other things. I photographed the animals clustering around the butchery, fighting over the refuse at the garbage dump. I spent a furtive morning shooting another roll of film, following one of the sick, terminal-stage baboons as he staggered along the edge of the stream that watered Olemelepo. He eventually passed out, and I photographed him lying there with the lodge in the background. I paid for a lodge lunch, the type of meal I would endlessly maneuver to get invited to by tourists; I sat there, barely eating, finding unlikely instances to spirit away pieces of the reddest beef to put into a small vat of formalin I had in a box with me. I bought meat for the same purposes from Timpai, left vats of formalin with my nervous informant for him to do the same when he spotted a particularly tubercular cow coming through. I was going to prove it, envisioned some headline in the States, “Premiere Kenyan Tourist Lodge Feeding Tubercular Food to Orthodontists from Akron”; I was going to have the information to save my baboons regardless of whatever powers that be, or, if I was going to lose my baboons, I was going to take everything down with them—Olemelepo, Safari Hotels and their owners, Timpai, the Kenyan tourist industry, the whole fucking country and its economy; my baboons were going to be avenged.
I tried a few of the logical things. For one, I went to talk to Timpai. If any one man single-handedly typified some of the stronger, more contradictory traits of Africans, it was he. He was a sweetheart of a man, charming, cherubic, the Tevye of the Masai community at Olemelepo. He was vastly too strong to be called fat. Instead, he had an anomalous, jiggly belly, an impish round face, and a chest and arms made of slabs of pig iron. He conjured up Thomas Hart Bentonesque images of capitalist realist men who carry anvils or railroad sidings or cows on their backs. Rare in the community, he had a full, well-shaped beard already shot through with flecks of white.
He was sweet, giggly, generous, one of the elders of the Masai community, always giving a place to stay to various Masai from the villages stranded at Olemelepo for lack of rides home, always serving tea to everyone. Incongruously, he even hugged people hello, an atypical gesture in those parts. He was the archetypally generous warm village character, the respected and required butcher, sage, and tea dispenser. Also, in a way that ultimately seems very African, he was utterly corrupt in a completely guileless, amoral fashion. His official job at Olemelepo was as the meteorologist, which meant he was supposed to check the rain gauge daily and write down the results. He had not done a stitch of meteorology in years, instead dumping the work on the minions of assistants that he had acquired through tearful letters to the government office. He devoted his working hours to his illegal butchering. He would happily cheat you and, conspiratorially, admit to it later with as much happiness. In one of his most flagrant outbursts of corruption, he came near to poisoning half the lodge staff. Some Masai out somewhere were bringing in an old, senile, near-comatose cow to meet Timpai s knife. They loaded the cow into the back of the truck they had hired, drove in, and, upon reaching their destination, discovered that said cow had died two hours before. It was already stiff. No problem. The Masai dropped their price for the cow, gave a little cash back to Timpai and the meat inspector, and the stiff was “slaughtered” out in the field. The meat was dutifully sold, everyone became sick. The police came to investigate and it was all straightened out after Timpai and the meat inspector paid the appropriate bribe.
So now I offhandedly asked Timpai, over his tea, whether it was possible that the cows were ever sick when they were slaughtered. Oh no. How do you know? Because the meat inspector tells me when they are good. How does he know? Oh, he knows. Then gesturing toward the glinting, half-naked Masai inspector, who was sitting on the floor in an alcoholic glaze, Timpai said one of the more memorable lines to nurture my black-humored moments. “When the cow comes here, he will look at its heart and stomach and liver and lungs and brain and intestines, and if there is anything wrong, then he will not let me kill the cow.” Timpai gleamed happily. “That inspector is a good man and brings us much business because god is blessing he and the cattle to be so good.”
So Timpai wasn’t about to give up any of his business just to keep from killing some baboons. Perhaps even more logical would have been to make a stink at Olemelepo, to get everyone else to shut down the butchery. Climb up on a soapbox, folks, there’s trouble here in River City, do you know your neighbors Timpai and the meat inspector are giving you TB? Frenzied vengeful crowds would develop, and that would be the last sick batch of meat foisted off on the community. You know what? It wouldn’t work, because no one would give a damn. When Timpai poisoned everyone by slaughtering the dead cow, there was irritation, but little more than that. Nothing remotely resembling outrage. I would ask people, What happened then, aren’t you upset? And they would say, “Well, Timpai and that inspector have learned, now they know that if they do that to us, they must be paying the police a lot of money, so maybe they will not do it again.” Yeah, but he poisoned you, he could have killed you and your kids. “Yes, that is not good,” and then they would say the archetypal resigned Swahili word, “dunia.” “That’s the world, that’s how it is.” Amid my wrestling during that period with the image of Timpai as pure evil and of Timpai as an old, generous acquaintance, I was aided by the insight implied by “dunia.” It is not a notably evil thing to poison your neighbors if they themselves do not consider it to be much more than an irritant. People wouldn’t give a damn if it turned out that Timpai and the inspector were giving them TB; it was almost as if they expected as much from them as part of their job.
At some point during this sickened period, I found something important. One of the healthy-looking lodge females came up positive. I slit her throat, did a dissection, and found nothing. There were no nodules in her gut or stomach. There were no lesions in the lungs. Alert, excited, I went over every inch of the lobes, and in the upper right corner, I found a single dried tubercle. There was no caseation, no liquefication, no adherences. It was a small pocket of rot, encased in a sort of cartilaginous package, sequestered from the rest of the lung. There was nothing else in her. It was possible to be exposed, to have the start of pathology, and to recover—there could be natural resistance in the wild.
I filed it away with all my other pieces, too cautious and soiled by now to feel hopeful about any particular fact. And it was time to go. It was the end of my season, I was due back for another nine months in the lab, everything would now have to run its course without me.
I collected my belongings and my facts:
I spent a last morning with the baboons and, as always, with startling speed, I was back in my own world. As was the case each year, I luxuriated in the hot showers I had been missing, gorged on any food that was not rice and beans and mackerel, saw friends, whom I regaled with stories about the season’s adventures while failing to mention tuberculosis. Slowly, life returned to normal; I began to analyze the blood samples from the baboons, I figured out the cheerful explanation I would give my funding agency to explain why I had gotten so little accomplished that season without mentioning the tubercular distraction, I managed to recall the muddle of experiments I had been doing in the lab prior to Kenya and got them going again. And I stewed with Lisa about the TB.
There was no news. Jim would respond to my barrage of letters and transcontinental phone calls with the occasional message that Leakey was working on it, but nothing had happened yet. My informant sent letters now and then, which, belying his role, were not informative. He made little mention of baboons or butchery and instead waxed poetic about the radio he wanted me to bring him.
I learned about tuberculosis, read the primate literature on the subject. The pathology papers focused on which types of lesions developed first where and taught me the technical terms for the rot I’d seen. The epidemiological papers were of the “As part of the Colonial Veterinary Survey of’47, we sampled [i.e., shot] umpteen monkeys in the upper Zambezi district and found TB in X percent of them” variety. These just confirmed that no one knew anything of the dynamics of the disease in the wild. The experimental papers focused on how a lab monkey gives TB to another one: take a primate and expose it to the food, or the water bottle, or the air of a sick animal; does it then get sick? These led irrefutably to opposing predictions: in the wild, TB should be less virulent than in the lab, because of the lower population density of the former. In the wild, TB should be more virulent than in the lab, because of the more intimate social interactions in the former. Who the hell knew.
Jim and his veterinarians and I began work on our own TB papers, detailing the pathology and epidemiology, with drafts sent to Leakey for approval. Exquisite care was given to the writing so that it was never clear what precise part of Kenya was being discussed, that there was a tourist lodge involved. The papers eventually appeared in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases and in the Journal of Medical Primatology, two publications that, no doubt, grace every coffee table in America. I imagined that a careful reader would be able to detect the real story between the lines, that they would trigger outrage and action in the scientific community. Given that, instead, perhaps half a dozen readers bothered to glance at the title and summary of these obscure papers, the silence just confirmed my corrosive sense of anger and isolation.
I continued to spend far too much time obsessing on my revenge. In my fantasies, I managed to murder the meat inspector, to blackmail Safari Hotels into compliance. This was one of the lodges that the British royal family stayed at while on state visits (back in the jolly colonial days, the area had been one of the royal family’s hunting grounds), and I considered trying to enlist Queen Elizabeth as an ally. I even had the first sentence of my letter planned: “Your Royal Highness might be interested to know of the possibility that you were fed tubercular food whilst on your recent visit to British East Africa.” I knew damn well that her lunches weren’t catered by Timpai the Butcher, but figured that would be a catchy opening anyway. I would offhandedly establish my credentials in order to get the letter past her minions of secretaries; she would be horrified and moved with compassion by my story (I became a Royalist during this time), she would command that the British owners of Safari Hotels and the meat inspector be placed in the Tower of London. I actually made drafts of a letter.
I had other plans. Laurence of the Hyenas’ work had recently been profiled by a science writer for the New York Times. Now I planned to go to her and tell my story; I fantasized about the headlines. But I didn’t go see her, I didn’t write to the queen. I didn’t do anything other than fret and call Jim for the news that there was no news. More and more, I had the restraining sense to realize that my baboon tragedy was pretty small change. Baboons are not endangered, they’re no one’s favorite species. The tubercular threat to the humans was minimal, and Africans are already rife with TB without the West being concerned. And the story was nothing more than a minor little piece of corruption in a very corrupt country. Instead, I waited and hoped and festered and, eventually, it was time to return for the next summer’s season.
I always writhe with impatience when I am returning. I rush to the airport, I rush through my good-byes. Somehow, sitting in the airplane for endless hours, I manage an air of rushing. I barrel through the necessary chores in Nairobi, drive too fast through the outskirts of town and the Rift Valley and the dusty track leading to the reserve. I rush through the required hellos and endless handshakes and repeated conversations at the checkpoint and at the various lodges. I rush to finally smell my tent again and marvel that the mountains of the previous year are still there and to see the baboons.
If you are lucky, they oblige you the first day and move out into an open area, where you can gather them all in at once, revel in them. Just before, you wonder strange things—were there ever baboons here, did I imagine them, did I imagine this location? You decide you have forgotten critical but basic details in your time away—do baboons have tails, do they have antlers and I’ve forgotten? You wonder if you will recognize any of them and if any of them will recognize you.
And suddenly they are all around you and you choke up and swim in them—who looks exactly the same, who has aged, who has a new scar, who has new pubescent muscles. You look at the new infants and try to identify who their mothers are—just by looks—when they are off playing without Mom. You see how fast you can identify the new alpha male. You see what alliances are still intact, what friendships have solidified further, who is feuding with whom. You see what child from the previous year is now tortured with puberty and making a fool of herself in front of the males, which pipsqueak kid is now in the vile aggressive male adolescent stage. You try to assimilate the new males who have transferred in, individuate them, and convince yourself that they are not all villains simply because they are new and unfamiliar. You spend the coming weeks visiting the neighboring troops to see where last year’s adolescent males have transferred to for their adult homes. And, of course, you see who is no longer there.
That year was no different. We shook hands at the lodge, sending greetings from every person in America, discussed the weather and crops at home, conversations that were endless and irritating and familiar and calming and necessary and delaying—rangers, wardens, waiters, mechanics, the assistant manager, the radio operator, the tour van drivers. And Timpai. And the meat inspector. We set up camp, fixed storage tents that had disintegrated in the previous year, dug the hole for the toilet, dug the drainage lines, tested the centrifuge, cleaned the blowgun, arranged the cans of mackerel, did all the conceivable chores until it was not possible to wait any longer.
The baboons once again gave me a return gift and marched at dawn infto the most open field. And that day and in the coming weeks I learned how the year had been for them. I learned pretty conclusively that there is little secondary baboon-to-baboon transfer of TB like in the lab. It really doesn’t spread like wildfire. And I gathered more evidence that there can be rare cases of natural resistance in the wild, just as my single case the previous year had suggested. And I learned that, nevertheless, tubercular meat as a primary infectious vector is rather virulent in olive baboons, Latin name Papio anubis.
And the plague took Saul, who died in my arms, as I described many stories ago.
And the plague took David.
And Daniel.
And Gideon.
And Absolom.
And the plague took Manasseh, who died writhing in front of a laughing crowd of staffers at the lodge.
And the plague took Jesse.
And Jonathan.
And Shem.
And Adam.
And Scratch.
And the plague took my Benjamin.
I write these words years later and I still have not found a Prayer for the Dead for the baboons. As a child, when I believed in the orthodoxy of my people, I learned the Kaddish. Once I said it in stunned, mechanical obeisance to my tradition at the open grave of my father, but it glorifies the actions and caprices of a god who does not exist for me, so that prayer does not come for these baboons. I have been told that in primate centers in Japan, Shinto prayers are offered to honor the monkeys that have been killed, and that the prayers are hybrids of the prayer for a dead animal offered by the successful hunter and the prayer for a dead enemy offered by the successful soldier. But even though I stalk these animals with my blowgun and I quicken at a darting, I swear that I have never been their hunter and they have never been my enemy. So that prayer does not come for these baboons. In a world already filled with so many words of lamentation, no words have come to me. And instead, these baboons only remain as ashes in my head. With the ashes of my father’s dementia and my science that moved too slowly to help him. With the ashes of my ancestors in the death camps. With the ashes of Lisa’s tears when I have been a monster to her. With the ashes of the rats dead in my lab. With the ashes of my depressions and my bad back that aches more each year. With the ashes of the hungry Masai children who watch me now as I type, wondering if they will be fed here today.
I have gained, as they say, some perspective with the years. I no longer rage at night with the memories of that period. I no longer keep mental lists of people whom I will hunt down someday. I do not write these words with the hope that they will collapse the Kenyan economy or destroy tourism there or even discomfort Olemelepo Lodge, whose managers still invite me to lunches and whose supply trucks still bring my longed-for mail and whose toilet paper I still steal regularly. As proof that I wish no malice, I have not even used the real names of Olemelepo Lodge and Safari Hotels. Both the meat inspector and Timpai have retired, and there hasn’t been a TB outbreak since. The tidal waves of AIDS in Africa and desertification and war and hunger make my particular little melodrama seem self-indulgent and small potatoes, a tragedy for a whitey comfortable and privileged enough to be sentimental about animals on the other side of the globe. But still, I miss those baboons.
I began work on a new troop, in a remote, empty corner of the park. Richard slaved to habituate them, soon Hudson rejoined the project. Predictably, that corner of the park is now overrun with a new lodge and tourist campsites and by encroaching Masai. Already, a first male in that troop has died of TB, the first few have been killed for sport by bored guards at the campsites when the tourists are away. And the Masai have found a new sport, from which I have yet to find an escape. Just this week, a Masai came to us, telling how some rogue baboon had just leapt out of the bushes and killed a goat of his. We questioned him closely and found many contradictory details and concluded it couldn’t have been one of our baboons and it probably didn’t occur at all. But by afternoon, a collection of elders had arrived to tell us of the seriousness of the incident and to hint at how they could dissuade the man from a reprisal spearing for only so long. And inevitably, I will have to pay for the imaginary goat to save some baboons, and even then, the kids learning how to use their spears will still be practicing on the baboons and warthogs after I leave. We bickered over the price, I walled off the sense of rage that echoes from the time of die plague, and by afternoon, I had gone back to my work. And still, despite this pragmatism and detachment, I miss those baboons.
This new troop has allowed me to do some interesting science. I like these animals, but not much more than that, and each year I do less behavioral observation on them and more physiology, in part so that I will not know them well enough to get attached. I am a different person now and at a different point in life than when I started here. Once I was twenty and I feared nothing but buffalo and I came here to adventure and to exult and to defeat my depressions, and I had an infinity of love to expend on a troop of baboons. Now, more than twenty years later, I am almost as afraid of not balancing the budget on my grant, and I come here to think clearly about my lab work and to catch up on my sleep and to escape the demands of the endless academic committees. And despite still missing those baboons, the infinity of love I have now is for Lisa and our two precious children, our Benjamin and Rachel.
The original troop still exists, a small band of baboons who forage in a tight cluster and have remarkably low rates of aggression among themselves. They are too few in number for me to do much research on them, and I don’t know who half of the animals are by now. Everyone from back then—Ruth, Isaac, Rachel, Nick—is gone, except for one last survivor from the beginning. Somehow, Joshua resisted the lure of tubercular meat and thus avoided the plague. And, except for his unlikely spring during the unstable years when he was briefly the alpha male and then supported Benjamin’s alphaship, he avoided the fights and canine slashes and the piling up of injuries that ultimately do in a male baboon. And now he is an ancient ancient animal whose oldest child, Obadiah, must already be over the hill himself in some distant troop. Joshua sits as the infants play around him, he distractedly greets each female, he is left alone by the aggressive adolescent jerks, and he plods along methodically at the very back of each troop progression, making us worry that he is too exposed to predators. In his old age, he has started to fart staggering amounts. He is far from decrepit, and his lifelong tendency toward calmness has deepened with the years.
This season, very trepidant, very guiltily, we darted him, as it would be vital to get data from him. We fretted endlessly over him as he recovered from the anesthesia, snoring and drooling a bit and continuing to fart copiously. And when it was time to release him from the cage, he did something extraordinary. Normally, when I leap on top of the cage to pull up the door, the baboon inside roars and hammers and whirls like a dervish. And when the door is opened, he either sprints off at top speed or, on rare occasions, comes back to try to leap murderously at me.
The cage was angled behind a tree, and as I approached, Joshua peered calmly at me from one side of the tree and then from the other, like the paranoid peeking game he had played with Benjamin so long ago. As I leapt on top and started undoing the bungee cords, he didn’t move, except to squeeze his hand out the side of the cage and upward in order to place his hand on my foot. And when the door opened, he merely walked out and sat down nearby.
Lisa and I did something rather unprofessional, but we didn’t care. We sat down next to Joshua and fed him some cookies. English digestive biscuits. We ate some too. He went about it slowly, grasping the end of each delicately with his broken old fingers, chewing with small, fussy toothless bites, continuing to fart occasionally. We all sat in the sun, warming ourselves, eating cookies, watching the giraffes and the clouds.