This is a book about African and Indonesian apes and the women who studied them. But the book began to take shape, for me, not in Africa or Indonesia but in Australia, and not with apes but with giant flightless birds.
I was squatting, alone, amid a dry sea of angry-looking Bassia on a wombat preserve in South Australia. It was July, the dead of Australian winter, and the most challenging part of my task that day was to keep my equipment from blowing away. I was assisting with a study, sponsored by the Chicago Zoological Society, of the nitrogen cycle in this area. My scientific equipment, besides a case knife and a meter-square metal measure, was a bunch of thrice-reused paper lunch bags. I was supposed to lop off the plants in the sampling area, stuff them into the bags, and label them with the species names; later the plants would be dried and weighed. I looked up from my work at one point and saw, twenty-five yards away, three birds, each nearly as tall as a man, staring at me. Emus.
Emus are an ancient, flightless species, ostrichlike, with eight-inch stumps for wings, long black necks topped with periscope heads and goose beaks, and powerful scaly legs that can carry them over the outback at forty miles per hour. The emu stands beside the kangaroo on Australia’s coat of arms, a symbol of that otherworldly continent.
After a few minutes the three who had been watching me strolled away, lifting their backward-bending legs with careless grace. Once their brown-feathered haystack bodies had evaporated into the brown bush, I realized I was sweating heavily in the forty-degree cold. I was stricken. I thought them the most alarming, most painfully beautiful beings I had ever seen.
For the next six months, whenever I saw them, I followed these three birds, recording their behavior and diet. After a few weeks, I was able to locate them daily, and I could approach and follow them within fifteen feet. I learned to recognize the individuals, and I named them. I never knew their sexes—it is impossible to discern sex by appearance alone—but I knew they were subadults, for they lacked the turquoise neck patches that characterize the mature animals. They always traveled together. Probably all three had hatched from the same clutch of giant, greenish black eggs, incubated by their father.
During this time I thought often about Jane Goodall, the most famous of Louis Leakey’s “ape ladies.” In a way our studies could not have been more different: she was studying chimpanzees, animals so closely related to man that blood transfusions between the two species are possible. I was studying beings more closely related to dinosaurs than to humans. She worked in a jungle, I in a scrub desert. She has continued her study for three decades; I knew I had to return to the States in six months. Nonetheless, I modeled my approach on hers. I reminded myself that although I had no formal scientific training, neither did Jane when she began her study. I remembered how she acclimated the animals to her presence, and I did the same: each day I wore the same clothing—jeans, the shirt I slept in, my father’s billowing green army jacket, and a red kerchief, so they could easily recognize me. Like Jane, I approached the animals only to a point where they were clearly comfortable; I never wanted them to feel I was pursuing them. I did not want to steal from them, not even glimpses; I asked only that they show me what they chose to. I would enter their lives on their terms.
In doing this, I began to think about the relationships that are possible between a human and a wild animal. A relationship with a wild animal is utterly different from the bond one shares with a domestic animal such as a dog or a cat or a horse. As Vicki Hearne writes in her wonderful book, Adam’s Task, over the centuries that man has shared the company of domestic animals, we have worked out agreements, a sort of common language, with them. Whether we like it or not, our pets and livestock are dependent on us; we are the ones in control. Our agreement is that I, the “master,” will provide X (food, water, shelter, and so on), and you, the animal, will provide Y (companionship, transportation, sentry duty, and so on). The animal does not have the choice to live without us.
But with a wild animal we have no such agreement. Several kinds of relationship are possible with a wild animal. One is adversarial, like the relationship modern man has had with the wolf. Another is the relationship in which the animal is “tamed” through the provisioning of food, as children do with squirrels in the woods. Again the human writes the contract. And there is the relationship, if you can call it that, that so often exists between a field worker and the animals studied. He observes the animals from a hidden location or drugs them and outfits them with radio collars so they can be followed with tracking devices. The animals do not come in contact with the human willingly. The relationship is forced upon them independent of their own will.
But the relationship that Jane Goodall has with the chimpanzees of Gombe—and that Dian Fossey had with the mountain gorillas she studied, and Biruté Galdikas has with the wild orangutans of Tanjung Puting—is different. There is a trust between human and animal, a privileged trust unlike any other. The contract for that trust is not written by the human: the animals are the authors of the agreement. The relationship is on the animals’ terms.
The trust I came to share with the emus was no contract for my safety. This is not the kind of trust you have, for instance, with your dog: most medium-sized dogs could kill a person, but we have an agreement with dogs—one that we write and enforce with our food and care—that they will not kill us. I did not have this assurance with the emus, nor did Jane or Dian or Biruté with their huge, powerful apes. The emus’ legs are strong enough to sever fencing wire with a single kick. They could have killed me if they chose. Though I knew this, I didn’t fear them. My trust was simply this: being with them was worth a great price.
Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas modeled their approach on Jane Goodall’s: they began their studies by relinquishing control. In the masculine world of Western science, where achievement is typically measured by mastery, theirs was an unusual approach. It was no accident that Louis Leakey, the paleoanthropologist who launched these long-term studies of the great apes, chose three women to lead the research. Although certain men have also learned how to relinquish control, the approach seems particularly feminine. This approach allows choice and the nurturing of a relationship on the Other’s terms.
As I followed the three emus, I imagined myself walking in the footsteps of three women who had been my heroines. For six months, with joy indescribable, I simply recorded what the birds did all day: they rested, preened, grazed, browsed, played, traveled. They nearly always stayed within a hundred yards of one another, these three youngsters. When one wandered farther, it would look up, seem to suddenly realize the others were too far away for comfort, and jog nearer to the other two. I loved watching them preen; when their goose beaks combed roughly through the twin-shafted brown body feathers, it recalled for me those sunny, sofa-bound afternoons when my grandmother would brush my hair. I imagined this activity comforted them; it certainly comforted me.
Soon I could approach the birds within five feet, close enough to examine their massive toenails in detail, close enough to see the veins of the leaves they were eating. I could look them in the eye, pupils black as holes, irises mahogany; when our eyes locked I felt as if I was capable of staring directly into the sun. I collected a lot of data, but no scientific breakthroughs came out of my study. The revelations were private ones.
One revelation came when I was on a fossil dig I was committed to help with, which forced me to leave the birds for a week. Each night as I lay in a sleeping bag soaked with rain, I wondered what the birds were doing. Were they sleeping, their beaks tucked under their stumpy wings? Were they wandering in the moonlight? Would the volunteer I had trained to take data in my absence be able to follow them when I was not there with her? Each night I grew increasingly miserable. I left the fossil dig a day early, worried, I thought, about losing data.
My first evening back at the park, I found that my volunteer had filled more than a hundred sheets of data. I merely glanced at them before leaving camp at dusk to look for the emus. It was windy and raining, and they were jittery, as they often were in such weather. I always had trouble keeping up with them in the evening, and this night I lost them as they faded into the darkening bush. I broke my own rule and ran after them, desperate to stay with them. But they ran away. Soaked and miserable, I embedded myself in a Gigera bush as the rain turned to hail, and I wept. I realized it was not just data I wanted. I wanted to be with them—and they had run away from me.
Only a few days later I would have to leave Australia. On my last day, of course, I went out again to the emus. They seemed to be looking for me. I followed them all day, and toward evening they stopped to graze on some wild mustard. Then I thought: I wish I could tell you what you have given me. How could I express to creatures whose experience of the world was so different from mine what they had allowed me to feel? I said aloud, in a low voice: “You have eased in me a fear more gripping than that you feel when you are separated from the others. You have given me a comfort more soothing than the feel of your feathers passing through your beaks under the warm sun. I can never repay you, but I want you to feel my thanks.”
This speech was one of those expressions like laying flowers upon the graves of the unknowing dead. The recipient doesn’t know or care. But the human species is like this: we have to utter our prayers, even if they go unheard. So while I sat with them that night, deep in the bush, I whispered over and over: “I love you. I love you.”
Five years after I left the emus, I began the research for this book. The relationships Jane, Dian, and Biruté have had with the great apes they studied were far deeper than that I had with the three birds I studied. Jane has studied generations of chimps for decades; she has known many of them from birth to death. Dian lived among the mountain gorillas for eighteen years; Biruté will doubtless live with the orangutans even longer.
All were passionate about the apes. Before Dian’s murder I saw all three women together at a symposium in New York. I was warmly amused at the way each one tried to outdo the others in showing how her ape was the “most human”—trying to win the audience over to favor her animal. Orangutans, Biruté said, seemed the most human because of the whites of their eyes. Dian insisted that her gorillas were most humanlike because of their tight-knit family groupings. And Jane reminded us that chimps are the apes most closely related to man, sharing 99 percent of our genetic material. I was reminded of kids who insist “my dad can beat up your dad,” or of grandmothers comparing their grandchildren. None of the women would ever think of disparaging the others’ work, but each is firmly convinced that the animals she loves are the best. For they do love them. It is a love as deep and passionate as the love one has for a child or a spouse or a lover; but it is a love unlike any other. The bonds between the women and the individual apes they studied are complex, subtle, and almost universally misunderstood.
Some scientists who specialize in animal behavior believe one should not be emotionally involved with one’s study subjects. But the relationships that these women dared share with the apes were the crucible in which their achievements were forme the relationships informed their science, inspired their commitment, and transformed their lives. It is through their relationships with these animals that the women have transformed our views of ape and human, of animal and man. And it is to illustrate and honor these relationships, their power and their outcome, that I have written this book.
May 1990
Hancock, New Hampshire