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Biruté Galdikas sits cross-legged by the female orangutan, Supinah, who is lying spread-eagled in the dirt. “Poor Supinah. Make you better, it will make you better,” Biruté croons.
Though a circle of American volunteers stands by, and a tame gibbon spies on the scene from a tree, it is as if Supinah and Biruté are the only two beings on Earth. Two large, powerful, rounded female forms. Both have auburn hair, though Supinah’s is redder. Biruté’s hooded gray eyes do not leave the orangutan’s face, and she offers her high, light voice like cool water.
Supinah, a one-hundred-pound adult, has been anesthetized so that a young American radiologist can remove the maggots from the orangutan’s infected vagina. “I got all the way through medical school without seeing a maggot on a bum’s leg,” Judy Weinstein murmurs into her white face mask, “and here I am fishing them out of an orangutan’s vagina.” The doctor scrapes another pale, squirming larva off her surgical tweezers, leaving it on the dirt.
Ants crawl to the blood-stained maggots and carry them away. Though it is only midmorning, the heat presses palpably, drawing beads of sweat to forehead and lip. Soon it will be 90 degrees in the shade, humidity 90 percent—hot enough to melt film in a camera, so humid that film and cassette tapes swell and jam. Biruté has lived here, among the orangutans and the heat, the fire ants and the leeches, the pit vipers and the sun bears, since 1971. Lithuanian by heritage, Biruté was born in Germany, grew up in Canada, and was educated in the United States. But Tanjung Puting National Park, a swamp jungle in southern Indonesian Borneo, is emphatically her home.
The doctor makes an incision with the scalpel, cutting away dead flesh. With infinite gentleness, Biruté runs the long red hair of Supinah’s face through the teeth of an outsized, Day-Glo-green comb. “When people do bad things to Supinah, we comb her hair, and she feels better.” Biruté says this less to the gathered crowd than to the unconscious orangutan.
When Supinah first came here to Camp Leakey in 1981, having been confiscated by the Indonesian government from an illegal owner, the orangutan immediately attached herself to Biruté. By then Biruté had been living here for ten years; though she had come to study wild orangutans, she had also mothered dozens of orphaned ex-captives like Supinah, nurturing them, teaching them, until they could be released into the rain forest. Biruté guessed that Supinah might be six years old; Biruté herself was then thirty-five.
During Supinah’s first year in camp, her home range was confined to the few hundred feet between Biruté’s small wooden house and the staff dining hall. “She wasn’t particularly clingy,” Biruté recalls, “she just wanted to be with me.” She would wait for Biruté on the front step of her house, lurk under the pilings of the dining hall, or watch for her from the dining hall roof.
At first Supinah showed no interest in other orangutans. When one of the dozen or so ex-captives in camp attacked her, Supinah would run to Biruté, who would soothe her, combing her hair with the big green comb.
But soon after that first year Supinah grew livelier and more mischievous. She began to play with other orangutans, wrestling and cuddling. She would leave camp for weeks at a time, foraging for fruit in the forest. But her enjoyment of human company did not diminish. Eyes gleaming, she would lurk behind a tree and wait for a passerby, leap upon the unsuspecting visitor to grab camera gear or notebook, then retreat to a tree to examine the prize and mouth it. She would wait on the dock to wrestle with visitors, spreading her lips in a play-face as she took their pale hands in her long black fingers for a game Biruté calls “handsies.”
Biruté judged Supinah to be particularly intelligent. The orangutan quickly worked out the social hierarchy among the ex-captives who roamed the camp and made peace with the dominant females. Supinah learned how to break into the dining hall to retrieve warm Cokes and how to remove the bottle tops with her teeth before drinking the sweet contents. Several times she broke into the generator and dismantled it in a few hours.
After Biruté’s work had been made famous by National Geographic articles and TV specials, Western volunteers streamed into her camp. Earthwatch, an organization based in Watertown, Massachusetts, recruits teams of laypeople who pay to assist with scientific field projects; the Orangutan Project became one of its most popular two-or three-week expeditions. The Earthwatchers dubbed Supinah the camp mascot. Some wrote poems and myths and ascribed the words to her. One story, “as told to Mark Rosenthal by Supinah,” went:
In the beginning the Great Orangutan created the rawa, the primordial swamp of cabernet-colored water. And in the rawa he hid all things nasty and mucky and oozy and told them, “Be still and bide your time.” And to his people, the forest-men, he gave great long arms of such power that they could swing freely from the arches of the canopy so as to never dip their shiny red coats into the foul waters. But his people were without joy and went to the Great Orangutan and beseeched their lord, “Give us cause for laughter in our forest.”
So, the myth continues, the Great Orangutan created
silly Americans with puny arms and stubby legs, and let them travel many days to the rawa to trip confusedly over hidden logs and into dark holes, and let them cover their bodies with rashes and bites. . . . And that is why orangutans have such wide mouths: so they can laugh at Earthwatch volunteers in the rawa.
Supinah seemed to enjoy a good joke. She frequently masterminded raids on the guest house, working holes in the chain-link mesh over the windows to steal volunteers’ towels, malaria pills, sunscreen. Once she found a can of paint in a room she had broken into and poured it over a bed in another room. She was often the first orangutan to greet visitors as they arrived by sputtering wooden motorboat up the Sekoyner-Cannon River from Pangkalanbuun, five hours away. She would wait on the dock and rush to newcomers with her long hairy red arms upraised, or poke her head under their raincapes or up the skirt of a sarong.
But then one year, after Biruté returned from her annual trip to British Columbia to teach at Simon Fraser University, she found that Supinah’s bright eyes had turned haunted. In Biruté’s absence Supinah had given birth to her first infant. It had died within days, for Supinah had no milk. Biruté tried to comfort the orangutan, grooming her with the comb, but Supinah would simply turn away. She no longer played with other orangutans or with visitors. And one day, said Biruté, she recognized the look in Supinah’s eyes: it was the same look she sometimes saw in the eyes of one of the American volunteers. This woman’s eldest son, a teenager, had committed suicide. “All of a sudden I realized the look was the same,” said Biruté: “just pain, pure pain.”
Biruté knows that as orangutans age they, like many other animals, tend to become less playful; adult orangutans are the most solitary of the great apes. A young adult female will sometimes spend more than a month alone without seeking contact with other wild orangutans. “But I don’t think it was just that; it just wasn’t typical of Supinah.
“I think,” said Biruté, “that she understood the death of her infant.”
Once Biruté was following a wild mother orangutan whose infant was dying. “As soon as that infant died, I have never seen such tenderness,” she recalls. The mother groomed the corpse. She ate the maggots off it. She sucked the eyeballs. She carried the corpse gently, clinging to it for such a long time that the eyeballs finally popped out. Only many days later did she lay aside the mummified baby, leaving it behind in the treetop nest where she had slept the night before.
Biruté knows, in a sense, what it is like to lose a child. Her first baby, Binti, was three years old when Biruté had to give him up to live with his father in Vancouver.
Rod Brindamour and Biruté had been married for two years when they first came to Indonesia in 1971; he was a young college student with dreams of becoming a helicopter pilot. Long-term use of an antimalarial drug was causing his retinas to detach. He realized that living in the jungle was doing nothing to advance his career. And besides, he had fallen in love with Binti’s baby sitter, a young Indonesian named Yuni; Biruté formally thanked her for her help with the doctoral thesis she submitted to the University of California at Los Angeles in 1978. In the middle of the following year Rod flew home to Canada with Yuni. Binti joined them six months later.
Biruté didn’t particularly blame Rod for leaving. For more than seven years, while Biruté was out observing wild orangutans, Rod was cutting trails through the sweltering, leech-infested swamps, or conferring with Indonesian officials. And within months of their arrival, the couple began to use their camp as a rehabilitation center for the captive orangutan orphans confiscated by the Indonesian government. From then on Biruté and Rod shared their bed with up to five clinging, biting, screaming infant orangutans at a time. The orphans ripped up their mattress to search for edible seeds in the stuffing. They tore apart the thatched roof of the house. At the table the orangutans would cram their mouths with rice and, while the humans weren’t looking, spit the bolus into their tea. They would drink the shampoo, eat the toothpaste, and suck fountain pens dry. When Rod left Biruté, he said she loved orangutans more than she loved him.
Biruté agreed that North America would be the best home for her blond son. The couple had constantly worried that Binti would be eaten by Bornean bearded pigs. His main playmates in camp were ex-captive orangutans. The child’s facial expressions, posture, and sounds became increasingly orangutan-like; on occasion, Binti bit people. A visiting psychologist gave this advice: “You’ve got to get him out of here.” But as Binti and his father boarded the plane that would carry them both away from her, Biruté stood on the runway with tears streaming down her face.
Biruté fell in love with a former employee, Pak Bohap bin Jalan, a man of the Dayak tribe seven years her junior. They married in 1981, and with him she had two more children: Frederick, born in 1981, and Jane, named after Jane Goodall, born in 1985. Biruté shared joint custody of Binti with Rod, and every year she visits him when she teaches at Simon Fraser.
At Camp Leakey, her children with Pak Bohap have human age-mates to play with. No more an isolated jungle outpost, the camp houses and employs dozens of Indonesian helpers and their families. Biruté is deeply involved with people, but she remains bound to the lives of the orangutans; the rhythms of their lives are part of her own.
Three weeks before Supinah’s operation, the orangutan again gave birth, in a small glade near camp. Biruté was with her, so close that they were touching. Birth, she believes, can be painful for an orangutan; she was the first primatologist to witness the birth of a wild orangutan, which occurred high in a tree. The mother animal moved about in her nest in obvious discomfort during labor and sometimes clung to the trunk of a tree as if to stop the pain. Biruté herself has given birth twice without painkillers; Binti and Frederick were born in Indonesian hospitals, where anesthetics aren’t provided for laboring women. When she groaned in pain, the nurses hushed her angrily for making noise. An Indonesian woman, she says, gives birth in silence; in the hospital labor and delivery room you can tell a woman has delivered when the silence is broken by a long, loud sigh. Then you hear the baby cry.
Supinah’s second birth seemed easy. Her labor appeared to last only minutes, and then the little female slid out all at once. The one-pound infant was premature. And again Supinah had no milk. After three days the infant became feverish and dehydrated and fell into a coma. Swaddled in towels, she was nursed around the clock by American volunteers and Indonesian assistants. Finally her fever broke and her appetite returned.
Now it is Supinah’s life that is in danger. Biruté was hesitant to have the operation performed because the risk from anesthesia is so great. In zoos up to one in five sick orangutans may die from the immobilizing drug. None of Biruté’s orangutans have died from anesthesia, perhaps because she uses it so rarely. She is very worried now, as Supinah lies in the numbing grip of the drug.
Biruté’s face is usually as smooth as a calm lake; normally she does not give herself away. Perhaps she was easier to read when she was younger, more angular, when she first came to the forest of Tanjung Puting in 1971. Then she was a twenty-five-year-old newlywed on a great adventure. But now, when Biruté looks at the old photos of herself in National Geographic, she notes that she was never smiling. She was supple and shapely, with the face and figure of an ingenue, but her heart-shaped face, framed with auburn hair, always bore a look of almost grim determination.
Today her hair is a bit gray at the temples. Her figure and features are rounded by childbirth and maturity. She radiates a Buddha-like serenity, seldom smiling or frowning, issuing words only. The words sound pleasant; the syllables are rounded with the open vowels of the Indonesian language, like stones worn smooth. Yet you can seldom tell what she is thinking.
Biruté is not a sentimental woman. She and Rod never celebrated their birthdays at Tanjung Puting, and she cannot remember the date of her marriage to Pak Bohap. But at this moment tiny dents burrow into her brow above her oversized plastic-rimmed glasses. This is not sentimentality; this is the expression you see in an emergency room when a mother holds a sick child’s hand, when a wife wipes the brow of a pain-stricken husband. It is a deeply feminine expression; her own panic is subsumed by an overriding need to soothe.
Suddenly Supinah rouses. The doctor pauses cautiously—she should not be coming out of the anesthetic this early. Dianne Taylor-Snow, acting as surgical assistant, freezes. Supinah doesn’t like Dianne; the orangutan once bit a chunk out of her knee for no apparent reason. Biruté is always quick to champion Supinah’s good disposition, but she admits Supinah has “a thing” about Dianne. The circle of onlookers steps back as suddenly as a shudder. Orangutans Supinah’s age and size can easily push over a dead tree and are capable of ripping off a human arm. Magnified by pain, her tremendous strength could turn against us. No one knows what she will do next.
Supinah draws her lips back in a wince and grits tartar-stained teeth. “It’s all right, Supinah, make you better,” Biruté says gently, still stroking her hair with the big green comb. The powerful animal lays her head back down. Her eyelids, vulnerably pink in a blackened face, close gently. The operation resumes. By the end of the operation, more than a hundred maggots have been removed from Supinah’s body. The infection was severe; this may have been why she delivered prematurely. Supinah, semiconscious, is carried by her arms and legs to a wire and wood quarantine cage to recover.
Her baby, SiDyDy, is carried in a sling by Mr. Merciman, the chief park ranger at Camp Leakey. People talk to SiDyDy, croon to her; a man offers a finger for her to grip, as people do with a human infant. And when her caretaker rests, in a hammock strung between two trees, she nestles on his chest and sleeps.
Few wild orphans are as pathetically vulnerable as a baby orangutan. In the wild an infant clings constantly to its mother’s coarse orange fur for most of its first two years. It nurses until age eight. You cannot put an orangutan baby down as you would a human infant. A healthy infant orangutan hangs on so tight with its four-fisted grip that it leaves bruises on your flesh; any attempt to dislodge the infant from your body, even for a moment, brings high-pitched, pathetic screams until it begins to choke on its own terror.
Biruté’s first infant was not her own Binti; it was Sugito. The year-old male orangutan arrived only days after she and Rod had set up camp. Sugito had been taken from his mother in the wild and had lived in a tiny wooden crate until he was found and confiscated by Indonesian government officials. Determined to mother him as a female orangutan would care for her baby, Biruté slept, ate, and bathed with the wide-eyed infant clinging to her side, legs, arms, or head. Only three times in the first year did she force him off her body.
Shortly thereafter followed Sinaga, Akmad, Siswoyo, Sobiarso, Gundul . . . at the time of SiDyDy’s birth, Biruté has mothered more than 80 ex-captives. Most arrive worm-infested, stunted, diseased. Many have died in her arms. But those who survive their infancy are then free, like Supinah, to roam through camp and its outlying forests until they voluntarily leave for life in the wild.
Before Frederick and Jane were born, Biruté would often trudge off to the swamp forest to study the wild orangutans with an infant orangutan clinging to her side. Once, carrying Sugito, Biruté was watching a wild orangutan mother and baby in the forest, high in a tree. Sugito tried to climb the tree just as the wild baby decided to venture down it. “There we were,” remembers Biruté, “this female orangutan and I—both tugging at our baby orangutans!”
Biruté mimicked orangutan mothers; her human child imitated orangutans. And in turn the ex-captive orangutans began to mimic human behaviors.
“Sometimes,” Biruté wrote in a National Geographic article in 1980, “I felt as though I were surrounded by wild, unruly children in orange suits who had not yet learned their manners.”
Sugito would occasionally alarm Biruté and Rod by using a knife and fork at their table. He loved to blow out candles at night. Another orphan piled a mound of rice onto a large, concave piece of bark and then handed the “plate” to Biruté. Once, while I was visiting Camp Leakey and preparing to bathe in the river, a young orangutan sitting with me on the dock unzipped my cover-up, pulled it off my body, and slipped it on over her own head. Ex-captives in camp have even been observed wiping their backsides with leaves. They are imitating humans who thought they had been attending to nature’s call unobserved.
Unlike the early days, by the time of my visit, in 1988, Biruté discouraged allowing orangutans in her house or dining hall. But the more than 50 ex-captives she had then released into the wild, as well as the twenty-five or so still under her care, continued to define Camp Leakey. As I walked the neat dirt paths connecting the visitors’ dormitory with the dock and dining hall, at any moment an orangutan might leap onto my back, grab for my camera, or gently take my hand in a hairy hand or foot and stroll beside me as casually as a lover.
To have an orangutan choose your company is an honor few humans can imagine. Shortly after the operation on Supinah, Dianne Taylor-Snow and a visiting veterinarian decided to sit out a rainstorm on the dock. As they huddled beneath their shared rain-cape, Kusasi, a two-hundred-pound immature male ex-captive, and Tut, a large adult female, approached from the edge of the forest. Orangutans do not like rain; they are the only apes that make roofs over their treetop nests. The two orangutans lumbered over to the two women and ducked under the raincape. The four sat together silently, the orangutans’ backs to the women’s chests, for fifteen minutes, until the storm’s end.
And yet, even in this seemingly Edenic community of ape and human, there are misunderstandings—seldom grave but often deep.
Mr. Merciman, now caring for SiDyDy, is exceptionally gentle with infants, and Biruté is delighted with the care he provides. But sometimes, she admits, he “goes overboard.” The first orphan he cared for was an infant named Dianne, who arrived in 1986. He carried her everywhere with him. One day he took Dianne on a trip to the riverside town of Kumai for supplies. When he returned to camp, he brought tiny yellow dresses, little hats. To Biruté’s horror, he had bought the baby clothes for Dianne to wear.
One Earthwatch volunteer spent much of her time with Siswoyo, who is the dominant female ex-captive. Whenever the woman saw her, she would throw her arms around the adult orangutan and begin to groom her fur. Then one day she saw Siswoyo on the dock. The woman went to hug the orangutan, and Siswoyo slammed her to the ground and bit her arm.
The woman, explained Biruté, did not know that Siswoyo was having a bad day. Her infant had been whiny; she had sat all morning on Biruté’s doorstep waiting for a treat, and Biruté, busy writing, had pretended she wasn’t in.
Of course these are circumstances in which two humans may find each other—one may simply be in a bad mood. But there is a social pact implicit between humans; it is a pact we begin to seal in infancy as we clothe ourselves with the garments and language and customs of human culture. These agreements, however, are different from the understanding negotiated between a human and a free-living orangutan.
One of Biruté’s graduate students once came to her frustrated and hurt. He had been at Tanjung Puting only a few weeks and had grown fond of an ex-captive male called Richo. “You can’t trust orangutans!” he complained to Biruté. “I thought Richo was my friend, and then when I turned my back on him, he stole my soap!” He was genuinely insulted.
“That isn’t what it means to be friends with an orangutan,” says Biruté. “Not at all.”
Biruté grew up as a child of several cultures. Born in Wiesbaden, Germany, she was two when her Lithuanian parents, with her sister and two brothers, fled Europe after the Soviet occupation. She came with them as a small child to Ontario, where her father found work as a miner, a machinist, and a painting contractor; her mother worked as a nurse. Biruté’s first language was Lithuanian; she remembers that on her first day of kindergarten, in Toronto, she could understand nothing that the teacher or children said. But before first grade she was fully bilingual. She was beginning to learn, as she knows now, that “there is more than one way of looking at the world”—a view that would later serve her well.
From the moment she could read, Biruté’s interests were science and history. She remembers the first book she checked out of the Toronto Public Library in first grade: Curious George, about a monkey. Biruté loved nature. As a child she would roam Toronto’s enormous High Park, collecting tadpoles in Grenadier Pond, looking for salamanders under rocks. And in the evenings, while her mother bathed her, Biruté would listen to her describe the progression of human civilization.
“I was fascinated by prehistory,” Biruté once said. “Not just the written history, but all of it. Human history and beyond . . . back. I remember thinking that if we understood our closest human relatives we’d understand our origins . . . maybe our own behavior.”
Fifteen million years of evolution separate Biruté from Supinah, as the woman stands by the quarantine cage waiting for the orangutan’s eyes to open and meet hers. It is the eyes that have always drawn Biruté to orangutans; unique among the eyes of apes, the irises are surrounded by white, like ours.
Fifteen million years ago orangutans and humans shared a common ancestor, a being whose experience of the universe we can only imagine. It probably loved and protected its young, lusted for the opposite sex, enjoyed a good meal; it may well have possessed a sense of humor, guarded its memories, mourned its dead.
The people of Malaysia and Indonesia recognize this kinship and honor the orangutan with its name, which is Malay for “person of the forest.” Biruté pronounces the name with reverence: orongoo-tahn. Never does she call one an “orang,” which would mean “person.”
People and orangutans have traveled separate evolutionary paths for fifteen million years. The path the orangutan took was arboreal, and it is in the leafy world between earth and sky that their social agreements have been worked out.
Once Biruté followed a wild female orangutan who was moving through the trees for thirty-one days. She met up with other orangutans only five times. Sometimes the female didn’t even glance at them. The total time spent in association with other orangutans, besides her dependent offspring, was perhaps six hours in a month.
Harvard primatologist Peter Rodman, after completing a fifteen month study of wild orangutans at Kutai in Borneo, commented that “orangutans are hardly more social than any mammal must be.” Because orangutans eat mainly fruit, a resource widely scattered through the forest, the large, slow-moving adults do not travel in groups or bands like gorillas or chimpanzees or humans; a large group would quickly eat all the ripe fruit in a given area. Adult females usually travel with only their dependent young. Adult males seek company only to mate with a chosen consort. They will battle bloodily with invading males. They are solitary, serene in their aloneness, “their only company,” their inner universe, Biruté says. But she has found another side of orangutan life. She has discovered that subadult orangutans, particularly females, are quite social, sometimes spending days together foraging and traveling through the canopy.
One of the wild females Biruté has long studied is Fern, whom she first encountered as a juvenile traveling with her mother, Fran. Mother and daughter traveled together through Fern’s first pregnancy. But after Fern gave birth, Biruté did not see her associate with her mother for ten and a half years.
Sometimes, though, the two orangutans would be in nearby treetops. “From the lack of interest each paid the other,” Biruté wrote, “I would never have guessed, had I not known, that this was a mother and her grown-up daughter . . . just moving by each other with not so much as a blink of the eye to signal overt recognition.”
This solitary life is the heritage for which Biruté prepares the orphans with whom she has slept and bathed, cuddled and fed. Unyuk, one of Biruté’s favorite orphans, would scramble into her arms as to a mother. She used to give Biruté French kisses. And then one day Unyuk went into the forest and did not return for two years.
Biruté remembers the day Unyuk returned to visit camp. “The only sign she recognized me was, she just looked at me. She looked at me, and her eyes locked into mine. And then when I came real close to her she made a little squeak. And for an orangutan, that’s a big thing. That’s all there is for an orangutan. That’s the nature of the animal, the nature of the being.”
It is far more difficult to establish a relationship with a wild orangutan than to make friends with an ex-captive. Food is not in the equation; and they show no interest in our cameras or clothing or culture. Their world—leaves, bark, fruit, sky, earth, swamp—is complete without us.
Yet Biruté has forged a friendship with a wild adult male orangutan. She calls him Ralph. From the sides of his dark face swell two enormous, fleshy cheek-pads, each the size of half a dinner plate. A deflated air sac, used in producing the male’s bone-chilling, soul-shattering, territorial long call, droops above his chest. His body is shaped like a sumo wrestler’s. He weighs close to three hundred pounds. Each of his three-foot-long arms embodies the strength of perhaps five men. Biruté once saw him pluck a fair-sized tree from the ground.
When she first saw him in the forest, Ralph was an adult male in his prime. Sixteen years later he seems not to have aged; orangutans may live longer than sixty years. Ralph is not old yet, though he has known many battles. His cheek-pads are notched, his back bears vestiges of a circular wound, and several of his long fingers are stiffened from repeated injuries. As far as Biruté knows, he has never lost a fight.
Once when Biruté’s daughter Jane was two, Biruté encountered Ralph unexpectedly near camp. Biruté was alone, holding Jane in her arms. Ralph stopped fifteen feet from her. He was on the ground between her and the trail to camp. He raised his jaw—a reverse nod, as if pushing her away with his chin. Biruté did not move. “It took your breath away, he was so close,” Biruté remembers. But still she stood her ground. Ralph looked her in the eye, then turned his back.
“I was so elated—that really shows how deep our relationship is. It’s so much deeper than it would be between human beings if that’s all there was between them.” For an adult male orangutan to turn away—to choose not to flee or attack—is a sign of deep trust, respect, and affinity. For Biruté it is as moving a gesture as an embrace between two humans.
The next time Biruté saw Ralph, she was walking in the forest, miles from camp. He was consorting with a female prior to mating. Both orangutans glanced down from the trees at her. “I knew I should be following them to observe their consortship,” Biruté said. “But for once I did as wild orangutans so frequently do with each other. I returned Ralph the favor.” She turned her back on him and walked away.
“When you have a relationship with a wild adult orangutan, it puts down the pompousness, it humbles you. I am in awe of Ralph and his power,” says Biruté. “And we’re friends—as much friends as a wild adult male orangutan can be with anybody who’s not his consort. Of course it’s different from a relationship with a human. Because they’re not human, their expectations of the relationship are totally different. The relationship is on their terms, totally.”
This is what it means to be friends with an orangutan. Friendship with an orangutan, not an incomplete version of something else.
One month after her operation, Supinah weakly tries to cradle her infant. SiDyDy’s head is cornered haphazardly between her mother’s arm and chest. Her eyes and nose are running. Her grasping feet flail about as she tries to suckle but fails. The baby’s skin shows signs of dehydration, and Biruté is worried about SiDyDy’s diarrhea. Supinah, still weak, is not lactating well.
Biruté kneels gently before Supinah and helps adjust the baby in her arms. The infant nuzzles and finds the nipple under Supinah’s armpit. “There, Supinah, that’s better,” Biruté says.
Supinah’s mothering skills are confused. She has been taking SiDyDy off her body and putting the infant on the ground. For the first six years of her life, before she came to Camp Leakey, she was somebody’s pet, with only humans as role models—primates who breastfeed and then lay their babies down.
Yet Biruté is moved by Supinah’s natural tenderness with SiDyDy. She remembers when Supinah used to play with Frederick, her dark-haired son. Frederick would jump on her, hit her with his fists, even bite her. Biruté has seen young orangutans act like this in the wild. Sometimes a youngster throws a temper tantrum while clinging to the mother’s side, screeching and grappling and biting. Usually this happens when the youngster wants something the mother is eating. The mother typically waits out the tantrum, then hands the youngster a piece of fruit as though nothing had happened. When Frederick hurled himself at Supinah, she would never fight back. She would simply tolerate his outburst, showing him a play-face.
Supinah, so gentle with human children, still inept with this infant of her own, waits, like Biruté, at the crossroads of two worlds: the world of cups and saucers, clothes and houses, and the world of rain forest, leaf and bark, fruit and sky.
Eventually, Biruté hopes, Supinah will return to the forest with her infant. SiDyDy, she hopes, will grow up as a wild orangutan. She looks at them and recalls other orangutans she has known: Unyuk, who left camp for two years and returned to greet her with only a look and a squeak. She thinks of Fern and Fran, who did not travel together or touch each other for ten and a half years.
Biruté does not pretend to know what orangutans carry around in their heads. But she knows they have memories. In 1987 she saw Fern and Fran again in the forest canopy. After a decade of separation, mother and daughter embraced and then traveled for four days together.