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Flo lay on her back dangling her baby, Flint, above her in the sun. With one black-soled, thumbed foot she gently held her ten-week-old son’s wrist; with her hand she reached up to tickle him in the groin and neck. The pink-faced baby waved his free arm and kicked his legs with the same unfocused, reflexive delight as a human infant. He opened his mouth in a toothless smile.
Flo was then very old for a wild chimpanzee, probably thirty-five. Even in the early morning sunshine, her coat looked faded, a dull brown; her ears were scarred and torn, her teeth worn to the gums. But as she gazed at her son, her brown eyes sparkled bright with playfulness.
Flo’s five-year-old daughter, Fifi, stared at the infant, sometimes reaching out to touch him gently with the tips of her fingers. She craned her neck to observe her brother more closely. Nearby, Faben and Figan, Flo’s older sons, chased and wrestled with each other. They pant-chuckled, chimpanzee laughter. To Flo and her family, Jane Goodall owes some of the richest portraits ever gathered of chimpanzee infant care and development and family relations.
Jane was then thirty years old and a new bride. Her husband, Hugo van Lawick, crouched beside her as she watched the chimps. Westerners usually crouch precariously on the balls of the feet; but Jane and Hugo crouched African style, soles flat on the ground. Jane, who as a young girl had practiced a full English curtsy, had perfected the African crouch after she began studying the chimps at Tanzania’s Gombe Stream Reserve in 1960; not only is the stance stable, it also allows you to rise instantly. Hugo, a Dutch baron born in Indonesia, had learned the crouch while working as a photographer and filmmaker in East Africa. It was this job that had brought him to Jane’s camp to document her work for National Geographic in 1962. They had found that their lives blended easily: their love of animals and the outdoors, their commitment to their work. Hugo had proposed to Jane by cable—WILL YOU MARRY ME STOP LOVE STOP HUGO—and she had accepted instantly.
They were married on March 28, 1964, in London. Their wedding cake was topped not with a plastic bride and groom but with a clay chimpanzee. The walls of the reception hall were decorated with large color photographs that Hugo had taken of the chimpanzees: Flo and Fifi and Faben and Figan; the gentle adult male, David Graybeard, one of Jane’s favorites; the powerful alpha male, Goliath.
Three weeks before the wedding Jane had received word from her camp cook, Dominic, that Flo had given birth. So the couple cut their honeymoon short—only three days—and rushed back to Gombe to see Flo’s new baby.
By the time they arrived, Flint was seven weeks old. Jane will never forget the first time she saw him. “I can even recapture six years later the thrill of that first moment when Flo came close to us with Flint clinging beneath her,” Jane wrote in her 1971 book, In the Shadow of Man. “As his mother sat, Flint looked around toward us. His small, pale wrinkled face was perfect, with brilliant dark eyes, round shell-pink ears, and slightly lopsided mouth, all framed by a cap of sleek black hair. He stretched out an arm and flexed the minute pink fingers, then grabbed Flo’s hair again and turned to nuzzle and rootle with his mouth until he located a nipple.” Flo cradled him beneath her, adjusting his position so he could nurse more easily. He suckled and then closed his eyes. Finally Flo got up, gently supporting her sleeping son with one hand under his back as he clung to her belly, and walked away carefully on three limbs.
Jane had first met Flo when Fifi, only two, was still riding jockey-style on Flo’s back. Jane had watched Flo shelter her young daughter from the rain: Flo would hold Fifi close, folded in her great, hairy arms and feet; when the clouds cleared, Fifi would emerge from her mother’s embrace perfectly dry.
Often Flo would share fruit with her young daughter; she would allow Fifi to take food from her lips or would hold out fruit to her with her callused black hand. Jane had seen them fishing for termites together: Fifi would watch intently as Flo inserted a grass probe into the mound, waiting for the termites to cling to it, to be withdrawn and eaten. Flo would then wait while Fifi inserted her own stem, imitating her mother, to fish for the juicy insects. Jane knew that Fifi slept with her mother in the leafy night nest Flo built each evening in the tall trees, comfortable, warm, nestled in her mother’s arms.
And now, with her gold wedding band still gleaming new, Jane watched Flo, a mother half a decade Jane’s senior, with her perfect new infant. Jane might well have imagined pink human fingernails, tiny and perfect, and blue eyes, and the joy of coaxing from her own child, one day, a smile.
Flo was among the first chimps Jane named at Gombe. In the early days the males were the boldest. David Graybeard would wait for Jane to catch up as she followed him through the forest, tripping over vines, ripping her clothing from the catch of thorns. But Flo, of all the female chimpanzees, tolerated Jane’s presence best. With her deformed, bulbous nose, tattered ears, and lower lip that often drooped open, Flo seemed an ugly old matriarch; but when Jane looked into Flo’s eyes she saw deep wisdom and calm.
Flo was confident and relaxed even in the company of the most dominant adult males, who would sometimes groom her. One female, the wobbly-lipped, long-faced Olly, was so fearful of adult males that she would nearly choke on hysterical pant-grunts if a dominant male approached her. Some female chimpanzees will flee from their own adult sons. Occasionally an adult male chimpanzee will become so caught up in a charging display, intent on showcasing his male vigor and power, that he will attack or drag anything in his path—even tiny infants, whom the males normally treat with tolerance and affection. Much later, when Flo’s son Figan was about twenty years old, Jane would see him perform such charging displays: hair erect, hurling himself down a slope, running frenziedly as if propelled by some inner demon. One time Flo sat directly in his path. All the other chimps in the area scattered, but Flo stayed put. She simply ducked as her huge son leaped directly over her head.
Not all mothers would have been as calm and tolerant as this. Flo and her family sometimes traveled with timid Olly and Olly’s young daughter Gilka. When Gilka begged for food, her mother usually ignored her requests; another mother, Passion, would just get up and walk away from her two-year-old, without waiting for her daughter to hop onto her back.
So Jane was astonished when calm, tolerant Flo attacked Olly’s son, Evered. He had been playing with Flo’s son Figan, and the two had begun to squabble. When Figan screeched, Flo rushed to her son’s side, hair erect. Jane was stunned at the viciousness of the attack: furiously Flo slapped at Evered, rolling him over and over until, screaming hysterically, he escaped. For many years Jane did not understand this behavior. But Flo understood many things that Jane did not.
Flo, in her advanced age, embodied a sense of history: she had known decades of suffering, birth and death, triumph and grief that Jane could not yet imagine. The old chimp was battle scarred; her tattered ears hinted at past accidents and disease, fights won and lost. “Flo,” Jane said admiringly, “was a survivor, tough as nails.” She remembers wondering, what does Flo remember from her youth?
Jane was only twenty-six when she began her study. With her blond hair gathered into a girlish ponytail, her pale legs bared in shorts, Jane was an innocent in the Garden of Eden, a portrait of youth, new womanhood, and human vulnerability. She did not come here prepared by a Ph.D. or armed with theories; she came propelled by childhood dreams.
When Jane was eighteen months old, her mother gave her a toy she would cherish for the rest of her life: a stuffed chimp doll commemorating the first chimpanzee born in captivity at the London Zoo. Neighbors warned Jane’s mother that a young girl would surely develop nightmares from sleeping with such a frightful toy; but Jane loved Jubilee, as the toy was named. She still has it.
Jane’s father, Mortimer, was an engineer. Her mother, Vanne, was a writer and homemaker. For most of her childhood and adolescence, Jane lived with her parents, her younger sister, Judy, and her two aunts in a large old brick house called the Birches in Bournemouth, an English seacoast town.
Jane had always loved animals and nature. When she was two, her mother discovered with dismay that the child was sleeping with earthworms under her pillow. When she was four, she spent five hours crouching in a hen house, waiting for a hen to lay an egg. “I had always wondered where on a hen was an opening big enough for an egg to come out,” Jane remembers. That day she made the discovery.
By the time she was seven, she had read The Story of Dr. Dolittle seven times, as well as The Jungle Book and the Tarzan series, and had firmly decided that she would one day study wild animals in Africa. Her guidance counselor at school proclaimed, “No girl can do that!” But Vanne, Jane remembers, “brought us up never to take no for an answer.” Once Jane, hiding in a tree, overheard her mother telling her uncle about Jane’s plans. “She doesn’t have the stamina,” her uncle said. Jane had begun to suffer migraines when she started school, but from that day forward, Jane never again complained of migraines.
When Jane went to Gombe, her life was all future, all questions, all eagerness. In Flo, Jane found the wizened old wise-woman; Jane was her initiate. To Jane, as to no other human, Flo would pass on her experience of sexuality, of motherhood, of the wisdom that comes with maturity. As the orangutan Supinah learned from Biruté, a human, how to be an orangutan mother, Jane learned from Flo, a chimpanzee, how to be a human mother. And in turn, Jane’s own unfolding life deepened her understanding of Flo’s life.
———
Jane learned much about chimpanzee sexuality when, early on, Flo’s receptivity resulted in a stunning exhibition. Never before and seldom since has Jane seen adult male chimpanzees so excited by a female of any age. In response to Flo’s large, pink sexual swelling, nearly every male chimpanzee Jane had ever seen at Gombe followed her into Jane’s camp: old Mr. McGregor, Goliath, the irascible J.B., David Graybeard, young Mike, Leakey, Hugh, Humphrey . . . and one by one, Flo approached each of them to present her fabulous swelling.
Each male, squatting in an upright position, would mate with Flo, sometimes with a hand laid gently on her back. Intercourse was brief—the couple would remain joined for only ten to fifteen seconds—but quite obviously pleasant; sometimes Jane saw the chimps close their eyes in ecstasy.
Although no fighting erupted over access to Flo, all the males seemed almost frantic with fear that she might walk away and they would lose another opportunity to mate with her; they followed her every movement with eager, hungry eyes. For nearly six weeks she was followed everywhere by this retinue of up to fourteen males. One day Jane counted Flo copulating fifty times.
During these weeks Flo conceived Flint. Of course Jane would never know who Flint’s father was, but almost certainly it was someone she knew.
Jane recognized their faces, some of which were as dear to her as her own family’s: Mr. McGregor; scheming, round-faced Mike; David Graybeard, whose eyes she considered the most beautiful she had ever seen; ancient, wrinkled Mr. Worzle. The females were equally recognizable: long-faced Olly, tattered Flo, taut-faced, pointy-eared Passion.
When Jane first arrived, only three years earlier, all the chimps had simply looked like black spots in her borrowed binoculars, a thousand yards away. If excited or frightened, chimpanzees seem to move frenetically, like a film run at high speed. The baboons at Gombe move with a haughty elegance, holding the base of their tails erect, like a pinkie finger extended outward from a teacup; but chimpanzees seem at first to be mumbling their movements, careless, sloppy, compared to the stiff precision of human motion.
But when they move suddenly and powerfully, chimpanzees can be terrifying animals. Although a male chimp stands only four feet tall, he weighs nearly as much as a woman—100 pounds—and his strength is greater than that of two men. Early in her study Jane once watched chimpanzees displaying during a thunderstorm. As the rain lashed, the chimps leaped into trees, swaying the branches, their black hair bristling with excitement. Like shamans drugged to superhuman frenzy, the black apes broke off branches in their hands, jumped to the ground, and ran, dragging the branches. To the booming thunder they added their voices, pulling back their lips to expose white teeth, pink gums: they screamed and called, drumming on trees with hands and feet. The vigor of their thrashing and swaying echoed the force of the lightning-split sky.
Jane watched this not with terror but with an almost religious awe. “With a display of strength and vigor such as this,” Jane wrote, “primitive man himself might have challenged the elements.” The chimps’ rain dance recalled man’s most ancient longing: to become one with the forces of the gods.
Comparisons of DNA now show that the chimpanzee is our closest living relative, sharing 99 percent of man’s genetic material. In fact, chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than they are to either orangutans or gorillas. “Chimpanzees are so like us—intellectually and emotionally—in their needs, their expectations, their outlook on life,” Jane points out. When two chimpanzees greet after a separation, they may bow or crouch, hold hands, kiss, embrace, or pat one another, much like two people meeting on a street. After two chimpanzees have fought, almost invariably one will return to embrace his opponent, to lay an arm on the victor’s back, to offer a hand to be kissed—just like a couple who have fought and now must make up. The games of young chimpanzees are almost identical to those played by human children. Chimps will use round fruits as toy balls, and little ones will often pirouette around and around, spinning dizzily with arms out, just the way human children do; they will use sticks to probe imaginary termite mounds, much as children use cups and saucers for imaginary tea parties.
In the chimpanzees Jane saw the beginnings of what would make us define ourselves as human, those characteristics we hold so precious about ourselves: our imagination and playfulness and our connections to one another, forged by touch. In the lives of the chimpanzees at Gombe, Jane saw our heritage, saw deep into the past of our lineage. And in the mirror of Flo’s dark eyes, Jane would glimpse her own future.
Before he was five months old, Flint took his first tottering steps. For several weeks Jane and Hugo had watched Flint standing on three limbs, one hand clutching at Flo’s hair. But one morning Jane saw Flint suddenly let go of his mother and stand on four legs by himself. “Then very deliberately,” Jane recalls in In the Shadow of Man, “he lifted one hand, moved it forward safely, and paused. He lifted a foot off the ground, lurched sideways, staggered, and fell on his nose with a whimper.” Instantly Flo reached out and gathered him into her arms.
Fifi watched Flint’s progress with fascination. From the start she had found her baby brother irresistible. She tried to touch him with her hands, her feet, her lips. As Flo held him, Fifi would fondle his minute fingers. Once Fifi was nibbling at Flint’s fingers while Flo was holding him in her arms; the infant issued a whimper of distress and Flo gently pushed her daughter’s hand away. Fifi rocked back and forth, twisting her arms appealingly behind her head in frustrated surrender. She continued to stare petulantly at the baby, her lips in a humanlike pout.
Flint was thirteen weeks old when Fifi finally succeeded in stealing him away from their mother. Jane watched entranced as Fifi’s plot unfolded. As Flo intently groomed Figan, Flint clung to Flo’s hair. Seeing that her mother’s attention was elsewhere, Fifi began to stealthily pull at the infant’s foot. By inches, she slipped his body toward her, then suddenly pried him free. Fifi, on her back, cuddled Flint to her belly, wrapping her prize in her arms and legs. At first neither Flo nor Flint seemed to notice; but then, with a soft plaintive hoo, Flint called to his mother, who then took him to her breast.
After that success, Fifi would pull her baby brother away from her mother every day, sometimes carrying him up to ten yards away to play with him privately, grooming him, tickling him, carrying him in her arms as she walked upright, just like a child with a beloved doll.
As Flint grew more independent and vigorous, Flo seemed to regain some of her youth; once, while Flo was playing with her family, Jane saw the old mother actually turn a somersault with youthful glee.
Older chimps would walk by to greet the youngster; several times Jane saw the powerful Goliath approach Flint and gently chuck him under the chin. And just as Flo had gradually allowed her daughter to play with tiny Flint, now she permitted Jane, too, to touch him. Sometimes Jane would hold Flint’s hand as he walked bipedally. He would reach out to Jane as he dangled from a low tree limb or as he tottered on the ground. Hugo took several photos of Jane and Flint together. In one, Jane crouches, making herself small. She extends her right arm, her wrist rotated so her thumb hangs down, her fingers curled like young leaves unfurling from a branch. Flint reaches forth his right arm, his hand open to grasp hers. Jane’s expression is soft, her lips parted in awe.
Hugo and Jane recorded and documented every event in Flint’s early life—his first attempts at riding on Flo’s back as he graduated from clinging to her belly, his first climb up a tree, the first time Fifi held him—with the wonder of first-time parents.
“For Hugo and me,” Jane wrote in In the Shadow of Man, “the privilege of being able to watch Flint’s progress that year remains one of the most delightful of our experiences—comparable only to the joy we were to know much later as we watched our own son growing up.”
———
When Jane became pregnant, she wrote, “I watched the chimpanzee mothers coping with their infants with a new perspective. From the start Hugo and I had been impressed with many of their techniques, and we made a deliberate resolve to apply these to the raising of our own child.”
Flo, Jane had long since decided, was a model mother. Observing her with her offspring, Jane had seen the pattern unfolding. Throughout their childhood, Flo was always with her children, ready to rush to their side at the slightest whimper or call. She was endlessly patient and would try to distract her children, often with tickling, when they were about to get into mischief. Flo constantly held, cuddled, and groomed her children and always reassured them with caresses after the occasional disciplinary tug.
When Hugo and Jane’s son, Hugo Eric Louis, was born in 1967, a time when most English women bottle-fed their infants, Jane breastfed her baby on demand for a year. She was with him almost constantly, cradling him, carrying him, caressing him. Until he was three, little Hugo, who by then had acquired the nickname Grub, was never away from his mother for a single night.
Jane and Hugo would rush to their son at his first cry of distress, as Flo had always reached out to Flint. In an album Jane and Hugo put together for their parents there is a sequence of photos showing Jane and Grub in almost exactly the same situation as Flo and Flint when he, taking his first steps, fell on his nose with a whimper. Grub, imitating the adults, is trying to pound a tent stake into the ground, using a mallet about half as large as he. Unable to control the immense tool, the little boy hits himself in the nose. His hand flies to his face and he begins to cry. Instantly Jane is beside him. Sitting in exactly the same posture as Flo, her knees drawn up in front of her, Jane gathers her son into her arms and presses her face to his. A vein in Jane’s temple stands out. Her eyes close to kiss him, as if to black out the pain of his hurt with the sheer force of her love.
Jane first brought Grub to Gombe when he was only four months old. Sometimes the chimps would stare at the human baby through the windows of their house on the beach. On two occasions in the 1940s African babies had been seized by chimps in the area. One of the babies had been killed and partially eaten. The other baby was rescued by his six-year-old brother. The chimps had eaten part of the baby’s face.
Once at Gombe two adult male chimps, hair bristling, shook the protective welded mesh of Jane and Hugo’s windows and stared at the infant with tight-lipped ferocity. “There was not the slightest doubt in our minds,” Jane wrote in a National Geographic article, “that had they been able to, they would have snatched little Hugo away for a meal.”
For this reason Jane and Hugo built a special cage for their baby. They painted it light blue and hung colorful birds and bright stars from its ceiling. Their friends were horrified. Jane remembers that they predicted, “Surely he will have a complex for the rest of his life.” Jane and Hugo explained that there really was no danger; Jane was constantly with Grub, and no harm could come to him. But still their friends were not satisfied. Baby books at the time counseled parents to foster independence in their children by sometimes leaving them to cry alone—“surely Grub will be a clingy, dependent child,” they fretted.
But Grub was a cheerful, active, somewhat precocious child. He was able to crawl at five months—about the age when Flint had taken his first tottering steps—and by holding on to the wire mesh of his cage, he learned quickly to pull himself to his feet. Hugo and Jane used to joke that their son was determined to keep up with the baby chimps.
Grub quickly learned to walk and to swim. Frequently he ran about naked at Gombe. Some now worried that Jane was raising a “wild child.” One American friend was horrified when, while Jane and Grub were visiting his Washington home, the diaperless toddler urinated on his couch. But at Gombe, with the air and water so warm, Grub needed few clothes, and Jane could revel in the touch of her baby’s skin when she hugged him close to her.
Together they explored Gombe’s streams and forests and beach, holding hands. If Grub reached out carelessly to grab a thorn or tried to wander beyond her reach, Jane would not scold or spank him; as Flo had done with Fifi and Flint, she would distract Grub with a new sight or a new game. When Grub grew old enough to understand, Jane would rebuke him for careless or thoughtless behavior, but then she would hold him close.
To stay beside her child, Jane gave up all-day follows of the chimps. “That was the sacrifice,” she said years later. “I’d learned enough from the chimps to realize that the early years of my own child’s life were very, very important, and if I didn’t give him that time, I might as well not be studying chimps. What point watching an animal and believing something you’ve seen is beneficial to humans, and then just doing the exact opposite, and saying in my case it’s fine, I’ll just leave my child aside and go on with my study? That’s a nonsense. Then how can I stand up and say what I believe about the importance of the early mother-child relationship?”
“Now watch here how gently the mother fends off Fifi’s hands,” Jane tells her audience at the National Geographic Society. The audience is watching a film Hugo made of some of Fifi’s first attempts to touch Flint. “I think many human mothers under these circumstances might hit their children,” Jane tells the crowd, “but Flo only gently pushes her hands away.”
During a time when women’s liberation was an idea still new to Western consciousness, Jane chose to launch a crusade: in lectures in the United States and England, Jane, a woman who to so many was a symbol of women’s independence and achievement, championed women’s traditional role in human society: the gentle, supportive, full-time mother. “I never, ever, ever put my career before my child,” Jane told a New York Times reporter. Jane considered delivering this message “my central mission.”
Mothering, Jane believes, is the single most powerful force in chimpanzee society, not in terms of establishing a dominance hierarchy, but in terms of sculpting the outlook and experience of each chimpanzee infant. “I have come to appreciate the importance of early experience in the life of each chimpanzee,” Jane told audiences and reporters over and over.
Jane observed that good chimpanzee mothers raised confident, socially adept, competent offspring. She often compared Flo’s mothering styles with those of other Gombe mothers: look at Flo, Jane told her audiences, who would distract her offspring with play and grooming instead of cuffing them when they misbehaved, as Olly sometimes did with Gilka. Flo would always run to her sons or daughter at the slightest distress call, unlike Passion, who ignored daughter Pom’s whimpering. And look at Flo’s family: her older son Figan eventually became the alpha male of the community, and Fifi became an exceptionally efficient and loving mother. Olly’s Gilka became a timid, sickly adult; Passion’s Pom became a wildly aberrant female, an infant-killing cannibal.
“Flo taught me to honor the role of the mother in society,” Jane wrote in Through a Window, her sequel to In the Shadow of Man, “and to appreciate not only the importance to a child of good mothering, but also the joy and contentment which that relationship can bring to the mother.”
Over and over Jane emphasizes that human and chimp babies develop similarly. “The human baby has a program built into it,” she says. “It wants something, it cries. The human mother is programmed to respond to its needs.” But if the mother isn’t there with the child, or if she allows the child to scream unattended in its playpen or crib, “these things destroy the trust built into the child.”
For this reason, Jane frowns upon “mothers who dump their children at day care centers and go off to pursue their careers.” Day care, she says, can seldom provide a child with the comfort and solace it needs. “They are understaffed and the people are underpaid. There is such a turnover of staff that the child’s trust is stifled. The biggest issue any government should face is doing something for the children of people who have to work and can’t afford an expensive day care center.”
Not everyone is eager to accept the chimpanzee as the role model for women in human society. After giving a lecture at Yale University in 1972, Jane was interviewed by a Sunday New York Times reporter, a woman. “You’re suggesting that for the chimp female it is adaptive to be so submissive?’ she asked Jane.
“Well, yes,” Jane replied. She smiled. A student, she said, had recently asked her the same question. The young man had told her that he was studying primate behavior and had concluded that females were submissive. His conclusion had made him, he complained, “unpopular” in his group. Jane had told him that if we were looking for “women’s lib” in the animal world, the chimp was not the animal to show it.
Some of Jane’s comments made her unpopular with feminists, who saw her as reinforcing the stereotypical female role just as they were succeeding in enlarging women’s horizons. But Jane best remembers the comments of young mothers who would come up to her after her talks. “Thank you,” she remembers one young woman saying, “for giving me the courage to spend time with my children.”
After Grub turned three, Jane and Hugo hired two African nannies to watch over him in the mornings so he could play on the beach safely while Jane wrote or spoke with her students, and Hugo worked on photography. Jane’s afternoons were reserved for her son. Though he never whimpered when she left him with his nannies, Grub would always greet her at lunch with delighted cries of “Mummy, Mummy!” and jump into her arms to hug her neck.
Grub, an outgoing little boy who learned KiSwahili and KiHa along with English, found many African age-mates to play with. They came from a culture that relied on witchcraft and ritual to keep evil spirits at bay, to bring rain and children, to ensure the harvest of fish and crops.
And Grub knew some magic of his own. He remembers instructing his playmates in a peculiarly Christian magic: just as lion fat and ritual prayer could heal sickness, just as amulets worn around the neck would protect against evil, Grub discovered after a Christmas holiday in England that hanging an old sock at the end of the bed would yield a rich harvest of toys. He couldn’t wait to share the news.
“I was onto a good thing here,” Grub, now grown, remembers. “I told them, ‘It’s very simple: if you want lots of presents, here’s what you do. Wait till Christmas, write out a list of the things you want, and put it in the fire and wish for it, and then put a sock at the end of your bed. You’ll get all the stuff you want.’ ”
Grub pauses and laughs. “Then of course it came to Christmas and my stocking got filled, and they came complaining theirs were empty. And I always wondered, why not them?”
He was happy growing up at Gombe. He remembers the sound of the lake. “You always remember that. I always liked the rainy season, because you get a lot of tropical storms. I liked the lightning and thunder. Usually the rain is almost warm. You can go out in it. You get a certain smell, and the sound, and—I don’t know what it is exactly—you get a kind of spiritual feeling.”
At Gombe the only problem was that he didn’t like the chimpanzees very much. “I wasn’t jealous of the chimps,” Grub says. As an adult, he’s given that idea some thought. “People have asked me that. But at that age I was frightened of chimps, yes.”
Flint was Grub’s particular nemesis. When Hugo used to walk though the forest with Grub on his shoulders, young Flint would hide in a tree and then suddenly reach out from a branch and pull the child’s hair. Jane saw this a few times, and she remembers being “overcome with quite irrational anger.” And it was then that she finally understood what Flo had felt and why she had so viciously attacked Evered when he had been squabbling with Figan.
At this point Jane had begun to consider Flint a bit of a spoiled brat. When Flint was five, his mother gave birth to a pretty little female Jane named Flame. Flint became increasingly demanding. He would ride on Flo’s back, “looking like a ridiculous big baby” while Flame clung to Flo’s stomach. Flint would throw tantrums, hurling himself on the ground, screaming in frustration, when Flo suckled Flame at her breast. He would hit and bite and kick his old mother. Once he actually pushed her out of a tree, making her fall to the ground. “At times I felt like slapping him,” Jane confessed.
Yet Flo seldom punished her son. Her patience seemed infinite. Again and again she would gently push his hands away when she was suckling her daughter, or try to distract him with grooming or play. Sometimes, when Flint threw a particularly violent tantrum, Flo would bite or cuff him, but she always held him close at the same time, as if to reassure him.
When Flame was six months old, Flo became ill with a flulike disease. She left the camp, and Jane didn’t see her or Flint for six days. When Jane’s students finally found Flo, the old mother was so weak she could hardly move. Flint was with her, but Flame had disappeared and was never seen again.
As Flo recovered, Jane began to supplement Flo’s diet with hen’s eggs, a favorite treat. Fresh food for the research staff was often hard to come by at Gombe. Fresh vegetables, meat, and eggs had to come from Kigoma, a day’s boat trip away. But whenever Jane saw Flo, she would stop what she was doing, go to the kitchen hut, and hand her friend a precious egg. Flo would pop the egg in her mouth and chew it with a wad of leaves.
One of Jane’s assistants found Flo’s body on an August morning in 1972. She was lying face down in Kakombe Stream as if she had dropped dead in midcrossing. Jane came to the scene right away. She turned the body over and looked into her old friend’s face: it was, Jane remembers, “peaceful and relaxed and without sign of fear or pain. Her eyes were still bright and her body supple.”
Jane sat vigil over Flo that night; she says she did not want the body violated by marauding bush pigs and did not want Flint to discover his mother’s body in shreds. But surely, also, in the bright moonlight, Jane wanted to pay homage to her friend, to honor and mourn her, and to remember the stories they had shared. She had known and loved Flo for eleven years.
Even a month after Flo’s death, Jane confessed, it was hard for her to believe that her friend was really dead. She wrote an obituary for Flo, which was printed in the London Sunday Times.
Flo has contributed much to science. She and her large family have provided a wealth of information about chimpanzee behaviors—infant development, family relationships, aggression, dominance, sex. . . . But this should not be the final word. It is true that her life was worthwhile because it enriched human understanding. But even if no one had studied the chimpanzees at Gombe, Flo’s life, rich and full of vigor and love, would still have had a meaning and a significance in the pattern of things.
Flint spent many hours hunched on the bank of the stream near Flo’s body. From time to time he pulled at her hand as if begging her to come back to life. Three days after Flo’s death, Jane saw Flint climb slowly into a tall tree near Kakombe Stream. He walked along a branch and then stopped and stared. Jane followed his gaze: Flint was staring down at the empty nest he had shared with Flo a few nights before.
For the next three days Flint became increasingly lethargic, then the researchers lost sight of him for six days. When he was next seen, he had deteriorated markedly. Two weeks later he died.
Flint was eight and a half years old when he died, long past the stage when he depended on his mother for milk. An autopsy on his body revealed signs of gastroenteritis and peritonitis. “It seems likely that psychological and physiological disturbances associated with loss made him more vulnerable to disease,” Jane wrote in her scholarly book, The Chimpanzees of Gombe. But in her heart Jane knew it was simpler than that: “Flint,” she said, “died of grief.”
Even Grub, then five, was saddened at the death of his young nemesis. “I was very upset when Flint died, actually,” Grub recalled decades later. “Although I didn’t like him, I was quite sad.”
When we met in 1989, I found Grub, twenty-two, well spoken, courteous, handsome, and adventurous. From his years on the lakeshore at Gombe, he has become an expert swimmer and fisherman, a keen observer, a fluent African linguist, an explorer in his mother’s mold. He had been invited to serve as ichthyologist on a research expedition to Zaire to search for a dinosaurlike creature reportedly living in a virtually unexplored 55,000-square-mile swamp. A German magazine commissioned him to research an article on chimpanzee poaching in Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Guinea. He was offered a job exporting tropical fish from Lake Tanganyika. “Every month I get a new opportunity,” he told me, “a new offer to do something else.”
“People thought it was quite peculiar, the way we raised Grub,” Jane says. “They were particularly concerned that he would be very clinging, that he would have no independence. I’ve always said that if you give them an early confidence, a sense of security, that would remain central, and that’ll spill over and they’ll become confident. Well,” she says with pride, “it worked.”
Somewhat gaunt but still supple, today Jane, who turned 75 on April 3, 2009, looks much as she did when I first met her more than 25 years ago. She wears her graying hair in the same characteristic ponytail. But her girlishness is gone. In place of eagerness, in her brown eyes you now see wisdom and calm. She is no longer a girl guide wandering wide-eyed in an unexplored Eden. She is a wise woman passing on her knowledge of a world as rich and intense as our own to her initiates: the humans who watch her films, attend her lectures, read her books, who consider with her what it is like to be a chimpanzee.
Jane has survived deep tragedy: the divorce from Hugo when Grub was seven, the death of her second husband from cancer in 1980, Hugo’s death from emphysema in 2002. Her mother—her greatest inspiration, closest confidant and most respected colleague—died in 2002 at age 96. Most of the chimps she knew when she first came to Gombe are dead now: Flo, David Graybeard, Goliath, Olly, Mr. McGregor are all gone. Flo’s daughter, Fifi, is gone, too. She disappeared in fall 2004 and is presumed dead. But like Flo, Fifi was a very popular and high-ranking female. Fifi gave birth to nine offspring—a Gombe record. Like Jane, Fifi lived to be a grandmother. Fifi’s two oldest daughters each had two strong, healthy sons before Fifi died at age 46, a ripe old age for a chimp.
Because the families live on, Jane’s sense of connection with her old friends never wanes. When I visited Gombe in 1989, Fifi—who had been born the same year I was—had just given birth to her fifth baby.
When I first saw him, Faustino was only three weeks old, and still unnamed. Fifi was cradling the infant in her arms, sitting partly in the sun, with Flossi watching from a palm tree nearby. The baby gave a toothless yawn, then formed his lips into an O. Fifi’s lower lip hung open, drooping, as she looked down into her baby’s pink face.
Freud descended from a nearby tree and began to groom his mother. She hunched protectively over her infant, then stood, raising a right leg, inviting her son to groom the back of her thigh. Frodo descended from another tree with an orange palm nut in hand, walked over to Fifi, and began to groom her head. Flossi came down from her tree, and Fanni emerged from the forest and greeted Frodo by presenting her backside for inspection. Fifi, reclining on her side with her infant at her breast, was surrounded by her entire family, and everyone was grooming. In the dappled sunshine in this parklike setting, it seemed like a family picnic on a Sunday afternoon.
When Fifi’s first baby, Freud, was born in 1971, one of Jane’s students reported something unusual, something the student had never seen a chimpanzee mother do before: Fifi, on her back, was dangling her son above her, holding him with her foot and tickling him with her hand.