II

Beginnings

(November 1967 to June 1968)

1.

“Dr. Leakey?”

Leakey, white-haired, gray-mustached, full in the face, looked up from the mess on his desk and scowled. For a second Carole imagined herself through his eyes—this tall, young, eager American girl interrupting the great man’s important paperwork, whatever it was—and she blurted out: “How can I get in touch with Jane Goodall? I want to work for her.” She hadn’t even introduced herself, and now she was feeling graceless.

Leakey: “I’ll give you her phone number, and you can call her up.” He scrawled a number on a scrap of paper, handed it to Carole, said, “Here. Call her.”

Carole wasted nearly all her change on the museum pay phone, and it took an hour before she finally managed to reach Dr. Jane Goodall at the Grosvenor Hotel. But Dr. Goodall had a calm, melodious voice projecting an open personality, and Carole nervously explained that she was a third-year student at the Friends World Institute, an itinerant, Quaker-run experimental college from America that was based for the year in Nairobi. She wanted to volunteer for work—any kind of work, any kind whatsoever—having to do with Dr. Goodall’s chimpanzee research, since she really loved animals. It was a friendly, polite, and positive conversation; and by the end of it, Carole had begun thinking of the person at the other end of the line as Jane. Not Dr. Goodall or Baroness van Lawick–Goodall. Baroness!

Jane had wanted to know if Carole could type and whether she liked babies. They needed a typist to support the chimp researchers at the reserve, as she called it. Occasional babysitting would be welcomed as well. Carole responded affirmatively to such queries and comments, and by the end of their talk, Jane had invited her to come visit them, her and her husband, Hugo van Lawick, at their home. She said, “Hugo and I always like to meet people before they go out to Gombe.” Carole could spend a few days there, in fact, and since Carole had felt obliged to mention the interest of her roommate, Emma, in the same project, Emma was invited, too. Jane thought they could use a second typist at the reserve.

Carole spent another hour walking back to the FWI center, which was time enough to float in a billowing excitement snagged by a frustration that focused on her roommate, Emma. Or Em, as she was usually called. Carole had made the contact with Jane Goodall. Of course, the only reason Em hadn’t was that Carole had, and only one person was necessary. Still, the frustration at having to share this glorious, life-changing opportunity with someone else, someone who was not passionate about animals in the way Carole was, took some time to dissipate.

•  •  •

Carole and Em spent a week with Jane and Hugo at their home in Limuru, which was several miles outside Nairobi. Jane and Hugo had begun renting the house in late February, only a few months earlier, whereupon she settled down long enough to deliver, on March 4, a baby boy named Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick. By the time Carole and Em arrived, in the first week of November, the baby was called Grub. That was an abbreviation for Grublin, a nickname the infant had acquired in the previous summer when, while the family stayed at the chimpanzee research camp, he displaced in reputation an infant chimp named Goblin Grub as the messiest eater in East Africa. The chimp returned to his original and simpler name, Goblin, while Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick became Grublin, then Grub.

Carole had heard about Jane Goodall and the Gombe chimpanzees before she went to Africa. She was on Christmas break during her first year in college, spending time with her second mother, who said something like: “Oh, we must watch television this evening. It’s Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees.” That was the first National Geographic television film about Jane Goodall, broadcast by CBS on Wednesday evening, December 22, 1965. Carole was, along with 20 million other American viewers, entranced by that shimmering vision of the brave young Englishwoman. Leggy. Blonde hair pulled into a ponytail. Smart. Brave. Graceful and understated. Living in a simple tent in an African forest with all those wild apes wandering in and out of camp.

As it turned out, Jane looked just like the young woman whose image Carole had seen on television in California not two years earlier. It was strange: meeting someone for the first time who was already familiar, like an old friend or a relative. The real person was glamorous enough, though. She was young (only a dozen years older than Carole, more or less), but also self-confident, good-looking, married to a sophisticated European aristocrat, and living an exciting life with animals in Africa. Carole could never convince herself that she was capable of being glamorous like that, since she was tall and big, with big legs and a sensitive personality. It was hard not to feel awkward in Jane’s presence.

The two-story house at Limuru was built of stone and covered by a red-clay tile roof. It included a cat named Squink and two German shepherds named Jessica and Rusty. It was graced with a couple of vegetable gardens, an expansive front lawn with flowers, a rear stable large enough to hold four horses, and an eighty-mile view out the front windows. Jane and Hugo slept in a master bedroom upstairs. Carole and Em were given their own rooms at the first floor level: one in the recently built guest wing, the other behind the kitchen at the back of the house.

Her first morning there, Carole was surprised by a six o’clock knock on the door. Outside the door, she discovered a tray with hot tea in a cozied pot along with milk, sugar, and buttered biscuits, which was Carole’s introduction to a tic of civilized Englishness. Jane’s Englishness, in fact, produced not only tea twice daily but also her finely modulated speech and reserved manner, which at first made Carole feel boisterous in the American way, with a little naïveté thrown in for good measure. During a casual conversation that week, as Carole would later remember, she asked Jane what her favorite reading subjects were, and Jane said she had “very catholic interests.” Carole, puzzled, said, “You mean religious?” Jane said, “Oh!” She laughed, then said, “No, it means just kind of widespread or universal.”

Limuru was in the Kenyan highlands, which meant cool evenings. After dinner, they all warmed themselves in front of the fireplace, talking and drinking scotch. Hugo was a Dutchman by birth, a wildlife photographer by profession, and by inclination a raconteur who enjoyed holding forth on the adventures and dangers of life in the wild. In between Hugo’s wonderful and often hilarious stories, they conversed generally about subjects of mutual interest, such as animals, conservation, tourists, and poaching. As Carole also learned during these conversations, Jane and Hugo, along with baby Grub, were now spending much of their time in the East African savannas—the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania—photographing and researching vultures and various carnivores. The vultures used stones as tools to break open ostrich eggs, which was Jane and Hugo’s new discovery of animal tool-use that would be featured in an upcoming National Geographic article. The research on carnivores was for a book being financed by advance money from a British publishing house. That was Hugo’s project. He had signed a contract to write it and take the photographs.

But they were a family, and all three—including Grub, of course—would be heading out to their work in the savannas, so Carole and Em would have to travel to the chimpanzee reserve on their own. Once they got there, they would not be alone. Jane had established a routine for the chimpanzee observations, and that routine was now managed by trained observers who were supported by a first-rate African staff. Jane and Hugo would drop in whenever they could. Fly down, most likely. They would also keep in touch by radiotelephone and then come to stay for the whole summer. There would be cooked meals, a private place to sleep and bathe, other Americans to keep them company, and enough typing of the daily scientific record to keep all their fingers and thumbs fully occupied. Jane wondered whether the girls were prepared for the isolation, but there was only one way to find out. She mentioned, also, that they should bring two of everything, including clothes and, since both Carole and Em admitted to being nearsighted, prescription glasses.

So long talks of romantic adventures and legendary places, of vultures and hyenas and chimpanzees, of impractical visions and practical necessities enlivened the evenings in Limuru. During the day, Hugo would drive off to Nairobi to shop and attend to other chores in preparation for the next photographic expedition, while Em and Carole visited with Jane and the baby and endeavored to make themselves both agreeable and useful.

One afternoon, Jane handed Carole the baby, saying, “Can you take him? I need to sleep.” Carole took Grub out into the warm sunlight and bee-kissed flowers of the front yard, where he was fine for about two hours. Then he began to whimper. Carole tried to cheer him up. She bounced him, lifted him up and down. He laughed for a moment, cheered up, but started whimpering again, which was followed by crying. Carole thought Jane could hear them through an open bedroom window, and finally, when she could no longer do anything else, she took Grub back inside, carried him up the stairs, and knocked on Jane’s door. Jane said, “Oh, bring him in. I think he just wants me. He’s hungry.”

That was that, but Carole also knew she was being evaluated, and she felt she had, in handling baby Grub that day, passed part of the test. Indeed, as Jane confirmed by the end of their visit, both Carole and Em were accepted. They would be given the chance to work as volunteer typists at the reserve during a three-month trial period.

•  •  •

On November 14, 1967, therefore, Carole and Em packed their bags—Carole pressing into the middle of hers the last of her marijuana stash, which was ten rolled joints—and were flown in a small plane south. They passed out of the big city and suburbs and moved over miles and miles of dry savanna, with hard waves of heat rising up unevenly from the flat, dry earth and making the flight bumpy, before at last dropping down at the town of Tabora, in Tanzania. They spent the night in a rundown hotel waiting for the next day’s evening train headed west.

That train tumbled through the night and brought them, on the morning of November 16, to the end of the line, which was the town of Kigoma on the edge of Lake Tanganyika. They stepped into a daylight so fierce it made Carole reel, and they were greeted by two young white people, Americans both, who introduced themselves as Patti Moehlman and Tim Ransom. They were from the reserve. She had a Texas drawl and straight blond hair. He had a restrained manner and unrestrained dark hair and beard. Carole soon learned that he was from California, or at least had been a student at Berkeley, in California, and she liked his sweet smile, as well as the bushy dark beard and long hair, the beaded necklace he wore, and the beaded belt. Carole had seen that sort of beadwork in Nairobi, sold as a Maasai design, but perhaps it was better to imagine American Indians. It was a romantic style, in any case, and she understood it that way.

Kigoma was sleepy, dusty, and hot, with the train station down by the harbor and, running up from the harbor, a single paved street lined with small shops and one or two rough hotels on either side. Patti and Tim had planned their weekly supply trip to coincide with the arrival of the train, and there was still shopping to do. Once that was finished, they hauled everything—including a week’s worth of food and other supplies—down to the harbor and climbed into the Pink Lady, which was a sixteen-and-a-half-foot white fiberglass Boston Whaler with a forty-horsepower outboard. Tim started the engine, and soon they were speeding out of the harbor and slicing a curve to the right and onto the open lake, heading north and following a scalloped shore.

Lake Tanganyika was as clear as glass yet soft, too, as if the glass were coolly molten. You could see right down into the water, far down, until the clarity turned into a pristine blue before slipping into a shadowy blue obscurity. Looking to the left, miles to the west on the far side of the lake, Carole could make out the distant green hills of the Congo, which rose and rolled back inland in waves, merging as they did into a faint haze and turning from green to blue to gray.

The sun pasted itself on bright and hot, but the heat was drawn away by the wind and a cooling spray of water. Sitting in the boat, Carole was not thinking so much as feeling: about how life was serious and how her three months in an African game reserve would draw her closer to the core purpose of her life. The nearby shore on her right was slashed with red erosion scars and marked by villages and rectangular patches of cultivation. After a time, the villages and cultivated patches stopped; and then the boat passed a narrow, jutting peninsula, a headland, and Patti shouted over the sound of the engine that they had just passed the southern boundary of the reserve. The brown hills turned to green, and instead of hot, barren, and sometimes eroding land, there was cool air and dark vegetation.

After another hour or so the engine was cut, and the boat crunched onto a pebble beach. Three Africans appeared and helped drag in the boat and unload the supplies. Then the four of them picked up their personal luggage; passed through a brief zone of fishy stink; and slipped into the shade of forest, a sizzle of insects, and the rank scent of moist earth and organic decay.

2.

The next morning began as a speckled rectangle of light seeping into a room. Carole, raised from sleep by rustlings and whisperings—and seeing Patti at the door—got up, threw on her clothes, grabbed a quick breakfast (toast with margarine and jam, instant Nescafé), then left the cabin to join Patti outside for the first shift. Shift. It sounded like factory work, an assembly line.

It was chilly and wet outside, drizzly and gray and not yet dawn, and Carole paused to take it all in: the tree-studded grassy meadow and two cabins, both made from bolted-together aluminum panels fixed on top of concrete slabs, the bigger one about fifteen by thirty feet, the smaller one the same width and half the length. Both cabins opened to the air and light through wire-mesh windows—no glass—and were protected from the weather by gabled roofs darkly insulated with a thick grass thatch held in place with chicken wire.

The bigger cabin, where Carole and Em had slept, was called Pan Palace. Aside from the large central workroom with chairs and two long tables with two typewriters on top, Pan Palace had a small bedroom to the left and another small room on the right that served as a minor kitchen where people could make coffee or tea and prepare their individual breakfasts in the morning. This kitchen contained a table, two chairs, a gas-bottle two-burner hotplate, and a kerosene-powered refrigerator.

The smaller cabin, called Lawick Lodge, consisted of a single room and served as the directors’ office when Jane and Hugo were there, a storage depot for all duplicate records, and a retreat when the presence of too many chimps and baboons outside required it. Lawick Lodge also contained general supplies and a mimeograph machine for spitting out hand-drawn maps and other documents.

Then there were the boxes: about forty steel boxes embedded in the earth with concrete and scattered around on the ground like forty treasure chests, which was what they were, having been discreetly filled the previous night with chimp treasure. Bananas. The boxes were locked shut. The latches, Patti explained, could be opened remotely by pressing buttons on four panels inside Lawick Lodge. Battery-powered. Couple of car batteries. The juice running along buried wires. Very clever, very smart, but then you had to be smart to outsmart chimps. They went into Lawick Lodge, and Patti showed Carole how the banana boxes worked. Patti looked out through the open, mesh-covered window. She pressed a couple of buttons, and Carole heard the click of latches remotely withdrawn. The boxes were fixed in ways that allowed gravity to do the rest. Lids dropped open, exposing the treasure inside. It was a way, Patti explained, to keep the chimps coming into camp but still under control. No person was allowed to handle bananas in front of a chimp. That way, the chimps, who were far stronger than most people could imagine, wouldn’t learn to associate bananas directly with people and, therefore, would not on a bad day kidnap someone.

The two of them went back outside into the continuing drizzle and waited: Carole standing next to the old steel oil drum on the front lip (the veranda, Patti called it) of the concrete slab for Pan Palace, Patti standing higher on the grassy slope, her tape recorder in a leather case strapped on her shoulder, microphone in hand.

A chimp appeared from out of the forest, the dark shape emerging from the deeper darkness and moving quickly and silently on all fours, galloping like a quiet horse into the clearing. More shapes emerged, appearing as if from another dimension in the oneiric shadows, from behind trees, from inside bushes and thickets, growing larger and becoming fuller and more real in the quiet, trickling morning. They were quick, and although Carole saw that she was taller than any of the chimps, especially when they were down on all fours, the chimps were still bulky and thick-limbed and, in truth, frightening. Especially the big males, who often, with raised hair on their arms and backs bulking them up like Olympic weight lifters, came racing, galloping, careening in, screaming and sometimes throwing rocks and branches. It was mostly display, Patti said. Typical male stuff you see anywhere, chimps or humans. Big ol’ country boys coming into town and showing off, making a big fuss, announcing themselves, showing what big strong hulking macho men they were.

The chimps, Carole saw, were not beautiful, noble, or romantic. In fact, and being entirely honest with herself about it, she thought the chimps were ugly. They looked squashed and degraded. They had short squat legs. Arms long and muscular like a person’s legs. Those huge and ridiculously dangling balls on the males! God! And the puffy pink pudenda of the females. Ugh! So big-mouthed, so explosive, so noisy: grunting, hooting, whimpering, screaming. Carole was thrilled to be there in a real African wilderness, but she really wished that the chimpanzees were lions.

The chimps had come into camp thinking bananas!—and it was Patti’s job, speaking into the tape-recorder mic, to identify who was there and who was not, who was friendly with whom, who was good and who bad, who sick and who healthy, and to describe the comings and goings and interactions of everyone. Carole listened to Patti’s steady commentary. She was like a baseball announcer on the radio, one with a mild Texas drawl giving a dutiful play-by-play description of the game: Mike works up a pant-hoot, displays down north slope. He attacks Flo and Flint. Flo, screaming, carries Flint up a tree, and Mike runs back up the hill and beats on the oil drum. Worzle works up a pant-hoot, runs off into a tree west of camp. Sophie and Sorema arrive from northeast. Leakey and Hugo come in from the east. Flo and Flint now in a tree grooming. Pepe comes from the southwest, sees Mike, begins to pant-hoot and shriek, gives a fear face, goes up and puts a hand on Mike’s shoulder, and Mike begins to groom him.

To Carole, they all looked the same, except for the obvious differences between male and female, young and old. They were just big, scrambling, hairy lumps. Hairy and scary. The males at least. The females, not so much. Carole did her best to stay out of the way. She stood next to the oil drum on the concrete slab, the veranda of Pan Palace, out of the line of action. When Patti told her to, she would duck inside the door and watch through the open window. Yes, sometimes they could be frightening, those big apes, and after she had been outside for only two hours, she was hit, accidentally to be sure, by a stone thrown randomly by one of the males showing off. She wasn’t hurt. And she was lucky that Patti, another time, shoved her out of the way as one of the males came hurtling down a path in her direction. It was dangerous out there, Carole saw, but she also thought that the danger could be good. If you lived with it, adapted to it, became part of it, then you wouldn’t need to live in fear of it. You would face it and begin to see that you’re stronger because of it.

She also discovered, that first morning, another side to the chimps. A male youngster—Patti called him Flint and said he was one of Flo’s children (whoever Flo was)—came right up to Carole and began hitting her on the legs. He wanted to play, and then, after she didn’t respond to the invitation, Carole watched in amazement as little Flint began playing with one of the grizzled old males; together they tumbled and wrestled, both of them laughing as they raced about in a playful mock fight. Laughing! Carole never knew chimps could laugh, but there it was: the breathy, voiceless ah-ah-ah-ah-ah of a person laughing so hard he’s about to pee his pants. They didn’t vocalize much, so it sounded like someone sawing wood.

During that first day, Carole spent much of her time sitting inside Pan Palace alongside Em, both of them in the workroom pounding at the typewriters, transcribing the observation tapes, using both hands to type and one foot to press a pedal that could stop and start the tape. But she was still learning, and Patti kept her outside a lot of the time as well, so that she could learn about the chimps, and when she did that she hardly noticed the time passing. She was fascinated. Maybe twenty chimps showed up that day. Patti said there were about thirty-five regular visitors, but they didn’t all come every day.

Carole and Em type away inside Pan Palace, while Pepe, Charlie, and Hugo groom in the doorway.

A couple of chimps sat on the veranda and gazed at Carole, but mostly they concentrated on themselves and went about their business, which was grooming, displaying, hooting, attacking, retreating, reassuring, nursing babies, and—as the latches clicked and the boxes were strategically opened one by one—gorging on bananas. Patti did her best to introduce the chimps. Flo was the old lady, she said, and Mike was the alpha male. Charlie was the pugnacious one. Worzle was the grizzled one with whites in his eyes, like a person. And Olly was the female with the droopy lower lip.

Then there were the baboons, a whole troop of them, maybe fifty, hanging back in the trees and bushes, careful to keep safely away from the dangerous apes but watching and waiting for an opportunity to steal a banana or two or five. The baboons were a kind of monkey, and the young ones were cute and playful, often jumping and splashing in the swaying, cushiony trees the way little monkeys will do. But, all things considered, these were not your standard attractive monkeys. They spent a lot of time walking on the ground. They had monkey-style fingers and thumbs on their hands and feet, but doglike snouts. And the big males had white eyelids. It looked like a bizarre makeup job, as if someone had painted bright white stripes on their eyelids. Big? The adult males were twice as big as the adult females. They were the size of German shepherds, and they had canine teeth that looked like small daggers, maybe three or four times the size of a dog’s canine teeth. The males would lazily close their eyes, and so the exposed eyelids would flash white, like bright semaphores. Then they would yawn, give a long, lingering, wide-open yawn, and instead of looking sleepy they looked vicious, showing off those daggers. The male baboons were another thing to watch out for, another danger, Carole realized. At the very least, she saw, the baboons were an enormous nuisance, upsetting the chimps, getting in the way. They were creeping, crafty, scrappy, snatching, opportunistic thieves.

•  •  •

People described the main camp—the little meadow in the big forest where the two aluminum cabins stood, where the banana provisioning and all the action took place—as being upstairs. To get downstairs, you walked down a long and twisting trail for a mile, more or less, until you reached the beach. Tim lived in a hut—tin roof, walls of stick and thatch—down at the beach. That was called beach camp.

Halfway along the twisting trail between downstairs and upstairs, between the beach camp below and the main camp above, was ridge camp, where a cooked dinner was served once the day ended. The African staff, meanwhile, lived with their wives and children in their own camp, which was like a small village, located above the beach and a short distance south of Tim’s beach hut. One of their standard jobs was to prepare the evening meal for the researchers and haul it up the trail to the ridge camp. It was a nice place to gather for dinner, in fact: a natural clearing with a panoramic view of the lake.

When it was wet, the researchers ate dinner inside a small pavilion—concrete slab, four poles, corrugated tin on top—at the ridge camp. There was no furniture other than a couple of foam mattresses tossed onto the concrete floor, with a dim, unsteady light provided by a single hissing lantern. When it was dry, they ate dinner outside the pavilion on a concrete patio, sitting on the same mattresses in the light of the same lantern. Nothing fancy. You helped yourself. Found a convenient spot on a mattress. Relaxed. You might be visited quietly by one of the two catlike creatures, a civet and a genet, who hid trembling in the woods there. Emerging from the folds of darkness at dinner time, they expected a tithing from dinner and sometimes tolerated a pat on the head. But they were wild animals, of course, and always ready to bolt.

People chatted with each other. On Carole’s first night, that meant: Tim the baboon man, Patti the chimp lady, Alice Sorem another chimp person with a long braid hung like a brown rope down her back, and Patrick McGinnis with short hair who was yet another chimp person. And Em, of course, who like Carole had just gotten there.

A cool breeze rose up from the lake. The sweat soaking Carole’s shirt dried off. People talked about what they were doing or hoped to do, and because, from the ridge camp, they could look over and across the lake, they watched the sun turn red and settle behind the purple mountains of the Congo. The ridge they were perched on was bathed momentarily in a warm flash of red, and the lake before them turned indigo, then black, while the moon became a pale, distant eggshell floating over a glistening obsidian expanse.

Patti seemed to be a cheerful sort, and Carole liked her, but she also imagined that perhaps Patti’s cheerful manner was not such a good thing. Patti seemed to get irritated more quickly than the others, and she controlled it under a false smile. Carole also thought maybe Patti liked awkward and self-effacing Em better than herself, but that, of course, was a matter of taste. The others—Alice Sorem, Pat McGinnis, Tim Ransom—seemed old-fashioned. Carole was nineteen, and they were all in their twenties. They also were more conventional and had done real academic work at legitimate colleges, rather than mostly nonacademic things at a nonlegitimate noncollege like the Friends World Institute. Or FWI, as she usually called it. Tim was a psychology graduate student from Berkeley. Alice and Patrick had been friends—had dated, briefly—and zoology students together at San Diego State. Alice also had done baboon work at the San Diego Zoo. Everyone had a college degree. They all had practical plans, schedules to enable the rational progress of their lives, and Carole did not. They were regular, normal people, she thought, open and friendly and without any visible neuroses. That, too, made Carole feel different. Such thoughts and observations flitted fitfully in her mind like the insects orbiting the lantern that lit up the last of the dinner, and they temporarily flew out of her mind when Tim the baboon man leaned over and said, in what seemed like an ironic manner: “And how was the first momentous day with the chimps?”

She answered him as directly as she could, but as she would later comment in her journal, her deeper reaction was irritation. She was irritated both by the question and the way it was asked. She wrote, Why does everybody have to ridicule anything valuable and serious? The irritation receded, and she regretted being so quick to judge, understanding that Tim did not really intend to ridicule her. He was just afraid of seeming serious. But then: Why are people like that? Being serious is much more important than being silly all the time.

3.

The rule was this: Any chimpanzee who came into the provisioning area would be identified and observed, and his or her activities would be recorded. All the records were typed, organized, and assembled into what people called General Records. Patti was the senior person in charge of observations and General Records, but she was going to leave in about a week, having finished her time at Gombe. After she left, Patrick McGinnis was next in line. He would be in charge. Then there was Alice Sorem, who had been at Gombe longer than either Pat or Patti, more than a year all told. But once you proved yourself for a year, you were allowed to move on to specialized research, to do your own project, which Alice was now engaged in. She was studying mothers with infants.

So Carole and Em were the two typists for Patti or Patrick, either of whom would be for the next several days in charge of observations—and always backed up by the other. On a long day there could be twelve hours’ worth of chimps. Since the official observer couldn’t leave during that time, Carole or Em had to fix food and carry it out to that person. Food that was uninteresting to the chimps, of course. Not apples or bananas. Scrambled eggs and toast, maybe, and cups of coffee.

The observer, Patti or Patrick, would finish a tape out there, hand it through the open window to Carole or Em inside Pan Palace, where they sat at the typewriters, and get a fresh tape. So they typed a lot, Carole and Em did, and they were also supposed to keep up the big charts that summarized the whole shebang: the operatic scenario of chimp society as it unfolded each day at the station. On the big charts, the chimps’ names were abbreviated—HH for Hugh, HG for Hugo, and so on—and the nature of the behavior was color-coded. One color for aggression, another for play, and so on. But then, when the chimps had finally left for the day, and after the typing and charting were finally finished, they could all relax. Think. Read. Talk. Or catch up on the typing and records.

Soon enough Carole began to learn the routine, but she still was not resigned to having Em along on this big adventure, and the ambiguous nature of their relationship puzzled and rankled her. Maybe she knew Em too well, was too familiar with her habits and quirks: the unkempt hair, the bit lip, the evasive eyes. Maybe she saw Em as competition or an unhappy reminder of the embarrassing Quakers-in-a-Van school they both came from. And in spite of the reasonable voices coming from her better self, Carole was secretly hoping that Em, who was, after all, comparatively small and possibly fragile, would tire of the job and leave, at least by the end of their three-month trial period. Indeed, Em had already privately admitted to Carole that she was terrified of the big male chimps and couldn’t bring herself to stand outside when the males were making their grand displays. So Carole considered that a good sign.

These were not thoughts to be proud of, and one afternoon, as the two of them sat in front of their typewriters inside Pan Palace, Carole decided to try breaking the shell of bad feelings by confessing everything. Perhaps the mortification of making such a confession would exorcise the feelings, and indeed, at the start of their conversation, Carole did feel relieved. But then the calm way in which her former roommate accepted all that anger while expressing earnest claims to understand and not be hurt by it soon made Carole more irritated. The lack of a real response to her petty feelings began to make them even worse, and so she became more emphatic in her assertions. Finally, it was late in the day and Patti suddenly appeared at Pan Palace, suggesting they all head down to the dinner hut at ridge camp. Em jumped at the suggestion, and her quick departure with Patti left Carole alone and feeling humiliated, since it showed that Em had gotten bored by the confession.

•  •  •

Patti had been living in a hut, an old rondavel down at ridge camp that was close to, but not quite visible from, the dinner pavilion. It was called a rondavel because it resembled a round hut of the South African style, but it was really octagonal and made of bolted-together aluminum pieces. Still, when Patti showed the hut to Carole after dinner that evening, Carole thought it looked sweet. It was big enough to hold a bed, desk, and chair. It had once been used for storage, and people said to watch out for scorpions, but when Carole saw it, she realized she wanted to sleep there. Patti said that as soon she was gone, Carole could move in.

Within the week, Patti was gone, and that’s how Carole wound up sleeping alone in the middle of an African rain forest. It was a thrilling idea, although she stayed awake for a long time on her first night there, writing in her journal and then, after she had turned off the lantern, watching the final pinpricks of fading light dance and scatter, and being frightened by the well of darkness outside. She had grown up in a suburb of Pasadena, California, which was not a wild place, not many wild animals of any significant size, and yet she still knew she loved animals. Whatever the mysterious, original source of that attraction, it had been stimulated when she began reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring series, which she loved because of the talking trees and the various creatures and people. She also read King Solomon’s Ring, by Konrad Lorenz. That was a very different sort of book, of course, being nonfiction and science, but Lorenz was still a lot like Tolkien. The book made her feel that animals were not radically different from people, and that you could get to know them and even, possibly, communicate with them in a marvelous way. Had her early life been simpler, she might have followed that emotional interest in a more methodical and traditional fashion.

That first night spent alone in the forest, Carole found the leg-and-wing machinery of insects chirping and grinding and whirring to be a reassuring kind of background noise, but it would be interrupted by erratic bumps and thuds. More disturbing were the silences when the insect machinery paused for no obvious reason. And there were snakes to think about, a stirring tessellation of them weaving in and out of visibility like the evil spirits they probably were: pythons sixteen feet long with folding teeth as big as dogs’ teeth, night adders, burrowing adders, bush adders, puff adders, sand snakes, vine snakes, boomslangs, glossy black-and-white forest cobras, lemon-yellow spitting cobras, and six-foot-long black mambas with coffin-shaped heads. There was a lot to think about, and Carole felt afraid, although once she realized that she could bolt the door from the inside, and did so, she felt less afraid. The fear did not simply evaporate, however, and the next day, when she thought about it, she understood that there really were things to fear. She was afraid of the chimps and afraid of the forest, and yet she longed to go out into it, too. She wanted to be a wilderness person, but she was just a city kid from Pasadena, and now she had become a typist, spending most of each day typing up records inside Pan Palace.

•  •  •

Once Patti Moehlman left, Patrick McGinnis was in charge. Pat was on the conservative end of the spectrum. He was nice. He was uncomplicated, kind, and responsible, and Carole looked up to him. He knew what he was doing. But he was also conventional. You could see that in way he trimmed his hair and how he dressed. Even his body and facial hair seemed to follow rules, while his handwriting, which was microscopic, told Carole that he kept himself under a very tight regimen.

Meanwhile, Carole spent her time next to Em, the two of them inside Pan Palace and poking away: tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-ding. And yet all the action was happening outside. That’s why when Patrick asked her if she knew how to work a camera, she said, “Yes!” She had taken pictures during her time at FWI, and she had also learned to develop her own photos. And now because of her supposed facility with a camera, Pat said he wanted her to take pictures of the females’ pink bottoms, which included at the center their sexual parts, their vulvae, their pudenda. All the words for the subject seemed unpleasant, Carole thought, and of course there were much uglier words to consider, so maybe bottom was good enough.

Patrick soberly explained that the female chimps’ bottoms changed shape and color in relation to their monthly cycles, with the greatest period of fertility being marked by the greatest swelling and brightest color. Maximum fertility meant maximum visibility, with the females’ rear ends inflating until they resembled big pink pillows and functioned like big pink flags. The flags were being waved at the males, naturally, who all went a bit crazy in response. It was chimp pornography, but the problem for a scientific human watching the chimps and wanting to recognize fertility cycles was to know as precisely as possible which phase a female had reached. They were like phases of the moon. Was she fully swollen? Half swollen? Three-quarters? What did her fully deflated condition look like? The female chimps were individually about as different in that department as individual women were different in, say, hip or bust size. Patrick explained all that, and he said he wanted a photographic record, a simple way to document what the various stages of swelling looked like for each individual female. He handed Carole a Nikon with a split-image focus.

For her, it was an excuse to leave the typing for a while and go outside: following one of the females until she was about ten feet away from a pink bottom, then sighting and focusing and pressing the button. Carole did it with some distaste, imagining what it would be like if an alien from outer space went around taking pictures of human female bottoms, but she was young and glad to learn anything new, and it meant that she was outside with the chimps.

•  •  •

She was warned about the dangers. You had to show the chimps that they couldn’t dominate you. People were mostly irrelevant to the chimps. They generally treated people like harmless bystanders who were not really there, were mostly invisible nonentities. But the chimps had this amazing strength, while people in comparison were absolute weaklings, just blobs of soft butter. When the chimps did notice people, they could be dangerous, and if they ever learned how weak people really were, realized how easily they could dominate a person, then everyone working there would be less safe. That’s what Patrick said. So you did not want to give the impression of being afraid or weak. Patrick told her that the most dangerous chimp of all was old David Greybeard. Yes, he was Jane’s favorite, and he was actually gentle. But he would wrap his steel fingers around someone’s wrist or arm and not let go, thus taking that person hostage until a ransom in bananas was paid. Pat worried that one of the other chimps would figure out what a successful enterprise kidnapping was and start to do the same. But aside from David Greybeard, Patrick said, the only other ones Carole really needed to worry about were Hugh, Charlie, and Rix. Any of those three males would charge her and maybe slap out casually with a hand and knock her down.

“What do I do?” she asked. He said, “Don’t run away if they charge. You have to stand still and face them.” “But if they hit me?” “You jump sideways at the last minute, and then keep your feet and don’t show them that you’re afraid. Make sure they see that you can stand up to them.”

So Carole knew about that. And during her first couple of weeks, she was periodically able to leave the typewriter and go outside with the camera, photographing pink bottoms. She saw no sign of any of the four males Patrick had warned her about, because they didn’t appear often.

During that time, though, Carole got to know Mike, who did not charge people, even though he would come in making a grand entrance, displaying. There was that big empty oil barrel on the veranda, and Mike would scramble over, pounding across the ground with his feet and knuckled-down hands, maybe dragging a palm frond while galloping on all fours, the hair on his back and shoulders and arms ruffled up like turkey feathers as he reached the veranda. He would swing one of his great arms and slap that oil barrel with an open hand to make an enormous BOOM!!!! Or he would scramble over and hammer on the side of Pan Palace itself—BANG BANG BANG BANG!!!—and the metal building would shake. If it was early in the day and someone was still sleeping inside, it was like being inside a giant metal drum. A good wake-up alarm for the lazy. The late sleeper would drag on her shorts and shirt, get her shoes on, and go out. Patrick would already have started the observations. He was always ready.

Mike displays at the oil barrel in front of Pan Palace.

Then one day Hugh showed up, and of course Carole didn’t recognize him, since she had never seen him before. Patrick was standing on the upper part of the slope, looking over the meadow, and he saw past Carole to the southeast, where some big shadow had just emerged from the forest. He said, “That’s Hugh coming.” Just as Pat said that, Hugh spotted Carole, and his emotions possibly registered some message like: There’s a new human being! It’s time to test! He rose up from a crouch, stood up on his hind legs, and lifted his long arms. Stretched out like that, Hugh was the tallest chimp of the whole crew, and he ran at Carole with his arms up. They looked huge. With his arms up high, he seemed to be about as tall as she was, but he had those enormous muscles.

When she first saw him, Hugh was maybe thirty feet away but picking up speed. He was running directly at Carole. She could see his small black eyes, and they looked like shiny marbles in the head of some malevolent being. She knew she was supposed to stand still, but she just could not stand in the line of fire, so she started to creep sideways. He adjusted and kept running straight at her. There was no doubt he was aiming for her. Patrick yelled, “Don’t move!” And so she stopped and waited for Hugh to get her. Then at the last minute, when she couldn’t hold still any longer, when he was about to get her, she closed her eyes in terror, bent her knees, and jumped up and sideways. She had jumped two or three inches off the ground, but it felt like slow motion, as if she were in a dream and couldn’t move fast enough. She had been sure he was going to get her, that his huge leathery hand was going to grab her face and maybe tear it off or grab her arm and throw her down. That didn’t happen. She landed, opened her eyes, and he was gone. She was amazed. She turned and looked, and he was running up the hill. He had run right past her, and she had passed the test. She was amazed to have passed the test.

That kind of testing continued to happen over the next several days and then weeks, and Carole continued to pass the test. Each time she did, she gained more confidence. At the same time, once Patrick saw she could do it, he let her come outside more often. Em was smaller and slighter and not as athletic as Carole. Em could never get a good setup and a good jump. She was lightly hit once and that made her fearful, and then she ran. She had been intimidated. She began to come out mostly when the smaller and less aggressive chimps were present: the females or the males who didn’t charge people. She preferred not to be out when the action took place. Carole was different. She used to play sports. She was a tall, strong tomboy, and she got a thrill out of being able to deal with the aggressive chimps.

4.

When Patti was still there, Carole had talked to her about trying to follow the chimps out in the forest, studying them away from the camp without the banana feeding. Patti had said, “That’s what I’d do if I were going to stay.”

Soon after her first month had elapsed, Carole asked Patrick: “Is there a chance that I could follow a chimp into the forest?”

He was discouraging. He said it wasn’t possible. He said the chimps wouldn’t like it. Trying to follow them would make you seem like a predator who was stalking them. They’d leave. “They’d just ditch you,” he said.

Carole didn’t know what to think, because she respected Pat, but she kept in mind what Patti had said before she left. Carole liked Patti and admired her courage.

On one of her days off, Carole decided to try it. The mothers caring for babies or dealing with juveniles were usually the slowest, since they had that extra burden, and Carole found a slow group: a mix of mothers, infants, and juveniles. She saw them wander out of camp, and then she followed them until they were just far enough out of camp that she could no longer hear any human voices. They stopped and sat down inside this wonderful little opening, a cave really, inside a thicket. The cave in the thicket reminded Carole of a childhood hideout. Not high enough for her to stand up in, but plenty of room to sit.

She sat down in there with them, and she relaxed completely, forgetting all the comments from Patrick about whether a person could follow the chimps anywhere. Then she realized how magical it was to be sitting there with those animals and to have them so comfortable with her, so trusting that even when she sneezed and made a sudden, awkward movement they weren’t disturbed. They already knew her as a creature they’d seen, albeit faintly, in all kinds of situations, and now she was less faint. She was there. She was real and in their world. She thought, This is wonderful, and it’s so different from being in camp. She really loved it: sitting with that small group in that wonderful hideout, the little secret forest place that was so peaceful.

Carole was by then accustomed to the sometimes frenetic pace of activity in camp. The chimps in camp had become used to her, and she was used to them, too. It was getting easy for her to deal with, say, one of the wildly displaying males. She had learned how to jump out of the way at the last minute, and she was learning to have eyes in the back of her head, to have that high level of alertness during high-pitched social events. It was thrilling. Of course, there were plenty of extended periods of quiet in camp as well, times when the chimps simply relaxed and socialized peacefully with each other, rather in the style of humans gathered at a picnic. But ultimately, what happened in camp was never completely real for Carole.

The chimps coming into camp didn’t care about the people. The chimps came for the bananas; and when they got there, they played out their own social drama and then they left. And the people there—jabbering tersely into tape recorders, typing tappingly inside Pan Palace, sneaking furtively about in order to photograph females’ private parts—were never partners in the chimpanzees’ personal drama, not part of their lives. The people had tricked the chimps into coming into the clearing. Bribed them with bananas, and who could resist? The chimps played the game, but they didn’t care about the creatures who had set it up. The people were faint and pale and mostly irrelevant, part of the scenery and close to invisible: dim figures perceived briefly behind a film of smoke, distorted reflections glimpsed fleetingly in a dark pool. The people were ghosts, actually, sometimes irritating ones to be sure, and sometimes a chimp had to put them in their place: show them who was who and what was what. But they were still ghosts.

Charlie, Faben, Flo, and little Flint relaxing together.

You don’t have sex with a ghost. You don’t groom a ghost, not really. You don’t seriously punch or pummel or punish a ghost when serious punching, pummeling, or punishment might otherwise be called for. You don’t have an actual relationship with a ghost. Carole saw the truth of that, as strange as it might at first have seemed, and she saw that she had always been looking at the chimps from a different plane of perception and understanding. But now, sitting with them in that little bushy cave, she wasn’t. Or so it seemed. And she didn’t have to argue in her mind with Patrick about following them or not following them. She didn’t have to worry about being ditched because here she was. Here she was! The chimps scratched itches on themselves, under their arms, behind their legs. The juveniles played. The mothers held their babies. At first they avoided looking at Carole, and then they didn’t. They looked at her from time to time, then they looked away again. Mostly, they acted as if the situation were entirely normal: sitting in the cave with one of the strange ghosts from camp. For Carole, too, the experience felt normal, and wonderfully so. It really touched her, and she found herself thinking, Wow, look at this! I get to be here in this wonderful world with these people I know.

She had begun thinking of chimps as people. They were not people, of course, but they were so like people, and she was visiting their community, becoming part of it. The humans at Gombe were her community in one way, but in another way the chimps were her community, too.

•  •  •

On another of her days off, Carole followed Pooch. She was a young female who, at the time, had a terrible wound that had been plaguing her for a long while. It was a festering, open sore, and the wound made her less fit. She limped. So Carole thought Pooch would be slow enough to follow, and indeed she was. Pooch was stopping periodically to touch her wound and then sniff her fingers. She then would touch her genitals and sniff her fingers after that. She had not had a sexual swelling for as long as she had had the wound, and it seemed to Carole as if the two conditions were related, as if her body was trying to conserve energy and heal the wound.

After about three hours, though, Pooch just slipped away. Carole searched and searched, looking on the far side of Kasekela Stream, crawling through vines and undergrowth until she was scratched and bleeding. It hurt. She was also afraid, worried about putting her hand in the wrong place and touching, or stumbling across, snakes. But her long search for Pooch took her all the way to the Kasekela waterfall and the pool at its base; and when she saw where she was, she threw off her sweaty, dirty, torn clothes and splashed into the deepest part of the cold, limpid, wrinkling water. She dropped into the water and let the waterfall thunder around her ears. She floated naked and face down, dipping her hot, sweaty head under the surface and feeling the cold water reach into her hair and slide against her body. The coldness burned at first, and then it became cool, and she opened herself up to the experience of the water, which turned into feathers. She was feeling touched all over by the elements—the water and the air and sun—touched on her breasts, her thighs, being tickled and caressed, and she luxuriated in the feeling. She flipped over onto her back, laughed out loud, and let the current wash her downstream until she drifted into the shallows.

She stood up and allowed the sun to dry her off and warm her up, and she sat on a warm rock, leaned back, and took in the heat of the sun. She watched butterflies scatter above the banks, and she saw the sunlight skitter brilliantly on the water. As she would recall for her journal that evening, she felt completely and utterly at peace, wanting nothing more than the perfect paradise she had experienced at that moment.

•  •  •

Carole thought she did considerate things, such as always fixing breakfast for Patrick, from the thorn of guilt rather than the blossom of generosity. She did it because she wouldn’t otherwise be able to enjoy her own breakfast. She would think Patrick was condemning her. Meanwhile, rather than feel angry at Em (who would get up late and fix her own breakfast at a leisurely pace, never offering to fix anything for Pat or Alice or Carole, all three of whom had been working since first light and were exhausted and starving), Carole found herself amazed. How could she do that without feeling crushed by guilt? Em’s lack of guilt was impressive. Really, it was admirable. On the other hand, sometimes it was not.

They all depended upon each other to keep the work going, after all; and when, on one surprisingly clear day in January, Em took the best two hours of real warmth for her own swim, thereby leaving Carole as the single typist upstairs supporting Pat in the chimp observations, she was furious. When Em finally showed up to relieve her, Carole leapt up and began running down the path. She raced down, driving herself, killing herself, ran past the banana storage hut, through the palm tunnel, up the trail to ridge camp and finally up to the door of her hut. Out of breath but still angry, she tore off her sweaty clothes, yanked on her bathing suit, grabbed a mask and snorkel, then ran out and down to the lake.

Was it too late? The air was still warm. How was the water? She dove into the clear, clear water, felt the shock of cold turn into a caress of cool, kicked and kicked, and saw that she had entered the pale mansion of the underwater world. The surface wavered silver above while, below, the water gathered into sheets of blue and a hundred tiny fish flicked and darted and joined tightly in a seeking cloud. She was alone, and she felt the water breaking into silver bubbles. She was remembering then forgetting about the people she wished she were closer to, forgetting them and forgetting the pain that people always seemed to bring. She swam parallel to the shore until, after twenty minutes or a half hour, she stopped and stood up, waist deep, to blow out her nose and clear the fog on the mask. The light had changed and an evening breeze had moved in, and it tingled and chilled her skin. She let the mask float on the water, and she recited out loud a few lines from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock that had insinuated themselves in her mind. The recitation made her feel happy, and it cleared her mind. She walked out of the water and sat on the shore to let the water roll off, and then, when she was chilled, she ran back up to her hut and changed into dry clothes. After drying off and feeling clean and fresh, she walked back down to the beach to visit with Tim the baboon man and Bonnie, his new and newly arrived wife.

Tim and Bonnie at beach camp.

Carole thought Bonnie was lovely. She was short, sharp, opinionated, and she wore muumuus. She had a beautiful face that was sensual and warm. Her lips were full, her eyes brown, her skin tanned a deep brown. Her hair, which was a rich dark chestnut, fell into windblown wisps around her ears. Watching her in the fading light, Carole could see how beautiful Bonnie was.

They talked about Aldous Huxley, and Tim read a passage from Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception. The passage went on and on about the need for a philosophical mystic to maintain perpetual vigilance against the ego. Carole didn’t like Aldous Huxley, even though she considered herself a philosophical mystic, but she was careful to restrain herself, not to say anything negative, because she could see how much Huxley’s words meant to Tim and Bonnie. And after Tim had finished reading, she left them in good spirits, then met up with them again at the ridge camp for dinner.

At the ridge camp dinner pavilion Carole was able to look out over the lake, look far off and see little cells of weather drifting here and there—storms, mostly, moving around like private floating tents with crazed activity inside: frantic twitches of lightning and furious debates between wind and water. Tim and Bonnie had brought up their tape recorder, so everyone listened to music that evening. Carole found the music poignant. When they played the tape of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, she could only think of the previous summer when she was with her friends, the FWI kids in her group, driving around Switzerland in a blue VW bus for ten days, playing Sergeant Pepper, laughing and loving each other in their lonely way before separating at the end of it all to go on their different journeys. Thinking of those friends made her cry, and she hid the tears, letting her hair fall across her face in a curtain.

But when the music became cheerful and funny, she marked the beat with her fingers and sang the words, thinking how full her life was and how much like a character in a book she was. Somehow she always blamed herself for things—always believed, for example, that she was guilty of her own bad circulation and the unflattering ways in which her flesh adhered to her bones. She tortured herself into thinking she was a glutton because she had big legs. And yet there was no way, except starving herself and hiking ten miles every day (something she had tried and found impossible to maintain) that she could have thin legs. In spite of her body being not perfect, though, it was still a lovely body, and she had a handsome face. She was an individual, she thought, one of those young people who are filled with passion and living on the edge.

5.

Geza’s first hours in Africa were bewildering. The bewilderment could have been partly the fault of his mother, who, laboring under the mistaken impression that her son had taken a sudden leave from his graduate studies in anthropology at Penn State University because he was headed to Africa to work for the famous Dr. Louis Leakey, wondered in a worried maternal way why Dr. Leakey had not informed her son in detail about the arrangements. She enlisted the help of a Teleki relative living in Europe, Lady Listowel, who phoned Dr. Leakey’s office at the Centre for Prehistory and Paleontology in Nairobi two days before Geza was due to arrive and demanded to know what was going on.

Louis Leakey was still in the States at the time, so the long-distance call on Thursday, February 8, was handled by his secretary, Mrs. Crisp, who was already upset from having been swarmed by wild bees on Tuesday. That apiarian attack—twelve bee stings, seven to the head—had led to a ‘peculiar feeling round my heart,’ as the secretary soon wrote to her boss, and her condition was not improved by the call from Lady Listowel, whose sharp, superior tone had seemed simply rude. The voice on the phone had requested to know precisely who was going to meet Mr. Teleki at the airfield when his flight came in on Saturday. And why had no one reserved a hotel room for the young man?

Once she was informed about the impending arrival of this unrecognized individual, Mrs. Crisp did her job as she knew Dr. Leakey would have expected. She arranged for Mr. Teleki to stay at the Ainsworth Hotel for a week. Then she dashed off a letter explaining everything and had it delivered to the airport’s customs officer with instructions to hand it over to the young American upon his arrival. Having done all that to the best of her abilities, Mrs. Crisp intended to rest over the weekend and recuperate from the bee attack. She had a “natural resilience” to such trauma, but the Teleki person’s impending arrival was still an inconvenient and troubling mystery. “How all this muddle occurred,” she wrote to Dr. Leakey, “and where Lady Listowel got the information that you had engaged him for 1 year, I don’t know.”

Meanwhile, Jane and Hugo’s factotum in Nairobi, Mike Richmond, had asked his secretary to book a room for Geza in another hotel, the Devon; and, probably since Geza’s flight was several hours late, neither Richmond nor anyone else met him at the airport. So Geza had no idea where to go or what to do after he stepped off the plane and into a heavy blanket of tropical air. Encumbered by two bulky suitcases and the normal disorientation of long-distance air travel, he spent several hours in the airport, smoking cigarettes and dropping Kenyan shillings into the pay phone while reviewing hotel listings in the phone book, hoping to find out which hotel he had been booked in. At around two o’clock in the morning, he learned it was the Devon. The taxi driver taking him into town spoke only Swahili. The night watchman at the hotel—grizzled, ancient, carrying a stick—also spoke only Swahili. They exchanged a few useless gesticulations in the lobby, after which Geza spied the board behind the check-in desk, retrieved a key, retreated to a room with a number on the door that matched the number on the key, and fell asleep with his clothes on.

The next day, Sunday, he met with some family friends in Nairobi and, in the evening, wrote a short aerogramme to his best friend back in Washington, DC—George Rabchevsky, a graduate student in the geology department headed by Geza’s father—describing first impressions of Kenya and commenting on tourists, safaris, bikinis, and miniskirts. He promised to write again soon and ended with: “Please notify Ruth in case her letter got lost. Mails not too good here.”

On Monday, he went shopping. He bought boots, a canteen, sleeping bag, plastic poncho, two sets of bush shirts and shorts, a rucksack, and twenty-eight rolls of film. The camera store owner was so happy with the big purchase that he had one of his assistants give Geza a ride back to his hotel. There, later that afternoon, a journalist phoned from the offices of the East African Standard, saying that he hoped to get an interview for an article, which he soon did. The article appeared a day later under the heading “A Second Teleki Explores E. Africa.”

“Romantic escapades and noble sacrifices are a familiar part of Europe’s aristocracy during this century,” the piece began, noting that Geza’s great-great-uncle, Count Samuel Teleki, had walked across East Africa during 1878 and 1888, becoming the first European to see Lakes Rudolf and Stephanie, which he named, honoring a couple of royal pals. He left his own name on the Teleki Valley of Mount Kenya and the Teleki Volcano farther north. The article then focused on the family’s present scion, who had just arrived in Kenya and was now coping with time change and sunburn. “The story of Mr. Teleki’s early life reads like a plot from an Eric Ambler thriller,” the journalist wrote, “and he assured me that the reality is grim for someone who had to participate.” The journalist went on to describe the dramatic family escape from Hungary after the war, their arrival and establishment in America, and young Geza’s future plans. Geza’s photograph, pasted in the upper-right-hand corner of the printed article, shows him seated and unsmiling, a bright sun placing his eyes in shadow and emphasizing the lean lines of a handsome face, aquiline nose, and dark mustache. He wears a dark sport coat and tie, and his thick, dark hair has been combed neatly back in a gleaming pompadour. He could pass for a young pop star from the late fifties or middle sixties, one of the Everly brothers, perhaps. But is that uncomfortable grimace caused by lingering fatigue and bright sun, is it a complacent glare, or is it the awkward expression of someone suddenly exposed as the untested descendant of a heroic figure from the past?

Geza had worked hard to grow up normal in America. He had learned to stop thinking in Hungarian, to master American English and baseball, and to become a maturing member of the postwar middle class. Following the example of his father, he refused to make much of the family’s lost fortune, title, and status. That was ancestral baggage. The old stories were interesting, but in the bright and modern days of 1968—the promising new world where he was twenty-four years old and all grown up—little from the family’s past was relevant. On the other hand, a title didn’t mean much without the person behind it, and Geza’s grandfather and father were intelligent, industrious, and bold men who had proved themselves in the blood sport of mid-twentieth-century middle-European politics. As for Count Samuel—the ancestor who walked through East Africa for thousands of miles while his contemporaries in Europe were busy dusting their wigs, and who survived the heat, rains, snakes, whirlwinds, wild animals, hunger, desolation, and cutthroat crosscurrents of intertribal wars and hostilities—he did so because he had the nerve, self-confidence, determination . . . the balls to do it. It took something along those lines to accomplish what he did. Geza could look back at some of his genetic predecessors and wonder if he had something to live up to. It was confusing, if you wasted time thinking about it: Do you ignore or admire your ancestors?

•  •  •

Early Thursday morning, he took a taxi out to Wilson Airfield, boarded a small, twin-engine plane that flew south, crossed the Rift Valley, and slipped over an outstretched knee of Mount Meru. The pilot then drilled a hole in the clouds and slipped into a miraculous netherworld: a two-thousand-foot-deep, one-hundred-square-mile sinkhole caused, two to three million years previously, by a cataclysmic volcanic explosion. It was Ngorongoro Crater, an ancient pock at the southern end of the Serengeti ecosystem.

Geza looked down and saw, far below, the flash of a pink-edged lake. A scattering of trees that were gathered into wrinkled, dark clumps. The dark vermiculation of a stream or two. A broad stretch of grassland occasionally slashed with stripes of pale brown and dotted by irregular spots and clumps of black. The spots and clumps turned out to be, as the plane spiraled lower, zebras and wildebeests, antelopes, buffalo, and God knew what else. The stripes of pale brown became artificial dirt tracks, of which one in particular, as they continued turning lower and lower, resolved itself into a crude airstrip interrupted by grazing zebras and wildebeests and marked by a flag at one end. The pilot passed low over the airstrip several times to drive away the zebras and wildebeests before dropping down to land.

Geza unbuckled himself and climbed out. The pilot helped unload Geza’s two suitcases and one rucksack, and the pair of them stood there. It was quiet, nothing to replace the ringing roar of flight except the tick tick tick of cooling metal, the whistling of the wind, and the chomping chewing mooing sounds of grazing animals. Geza stood away from the plane to smoke a cigarette. The pilot smoked a cigarette. The wind blew. The animals ate. Then the pilot went through his checklist of wings, struts, tires, fuel levels, so on, and, after reassuring Geza that he would buzz over the van Lawick camp on the way out, he strapped himself in and pressed the button. The twin engines kicked in and started up. The props rattled and spun. The vibrating plane turned about, bounded down the dirt track, and took off.

A half hour passed, with Geza entirely by himself and standing next to his suitcases and rucksack, listening to the wind and the animals, smoking another cigarette. Then he saw a cloud of dust and heard the rumbling of a Land Rover that, as it hove into view, identified its master with bold letters painted on the side: BARON HUGO VAN LAWICK. Why would anybody do that? Geza asked himself. It was ridiculous, this European obsession with titles. And of course, he knew exactly what baron meant. The title happened to mark the lowest spot on the aristocratic totem pole. That was the last thing he would have painted on his own car, not that he would have painted anything else on it. The vehicle came to a stop, and a short, sunbaked, long-haired, unshaven, rather raggedy-looking man stepped out, shook Geza’s hand warmly, and introduced himself as Hugo.

They drove on to the camp, where Geza was introduced to the Baroness Jane van Lawick–Goodall. Or Jane, as Hugo called her then, and as she clearly expected to be called. He was then introduced, in an abbreviated fashion, to Grub, an eleven-month-old baby with yellow hair, grubby face, and a few little white teeth starting to appear. Also in camp were Hugo’s mother, Moeza, come to babysit; an artist friend of the van Lawicks named Bill, come to paint; Moro, a tall and pleasant-seeming African, who was the camp cook; Thomas, who was Moro’s assistant; and Ben, a young American volunteer there to help Hugo with the cameras. Ben came from some kind of itinerant, international Quaker school temporarily headquartered in Nairobi, Hugo explained.

Jane was much as Geza had expected: gracious, barefoot, and slender, wearing khaki shorts and shirt, her blond hair clipped back into a ponytail. He hadn’t imagined, however, that she would be so direct and uncomplicated, and he quickly concluded that they would get along. He liked her. He was also impressed by the camp, which was bigger and better-equipped than he had anticipated: with a wooden cabin and a stick-and-bamboo hut, six green canvas tents, and three vehicles (two of them VW buses belonging to Jane and to Bill the artist, the third being Hugo’s Land Rover) parked to one side. Behind the camp gurgled a meandering stream ambitiously called the Munge River, and standing in the middle of the camp was an enormous fig tree, broad and thick enough to spread a pleasantly subaqueous light over the cabin, the hut, and the tents. The fig tree also hosted a troop of baboons, mostly invisible, who were eating ripe red figs.

The cabin had been modified for the baby’s sake: protected outside against baboon incursions with a wrap of wire fencing, furnished inside with a playpen as well as a scattering of bright toys and a stack of clean diapers. There was also a bed for Jane and Hugo, plus a cupboard, shelves, and a grass mat cast over the stone floor. The tents had been divided between utilitarian and residential. One big tent Jane used as her office, with table, chairs, books and papers, a typewriter. Another big tent was the dining hall and sitting room. Four smaller tents were inhabited by Moeza, Ben, Bill, and now Geza. Bill had extended the veranda of his tent with a tarp, so he had an open place to paint. The two African workers, Moro and his assistant, Thomas, slept in the stick-and-bamboo hut, which also served as a kitchen, with the actual cooking done over an open fire outside.

It was a busy camp, with Jane, Hugo, and the baby often at the center of things. Geza joined Jane and Hugo for lunch in the shade of the open-walled dining tent, sitting back in a canvas chair and gazing lazily over a gorgeous vista that consisted of rolling grassland covered with animals, then a distant glittering lake followed by the rising wall of the crater rim. After a time, Jane retired to the work tent to resume typing, and Hugo, inviting Geza to come along, headed for the Land Rover.

•  •  •

They spent the better part of the afternoon passing and being passed by hundreds of animals: wildebeests and zebras, gazelles, elands, hyenas, jackals, a few elephants, and the occasional rhino, along with vultures and eagles and dozens of other birds of all kinds. Geza could barely absorb it all. Little more than a week ago he had been staying at his father’s house in a chilled winter in the middle of Washington, DC, concrete and brick all around, cars whizzing back and forth, and now he was enjoying a hot summer within a walled kingdom of animals in the middle of Africa. It was astonishing!

Hugo sat across from him in the front of the Land Rover, regularly stopping to reach back into the open aluminum suitcase on the car floor behind them and pull out, from one of the baize-lined compartments, the right camera. Then he would find the appropriate lens and screw it onto the camera, screw the camera onto a camera mount fixed on the door, and take a picture or several. Both front doors of the car had camera mounts, in fact; and when the situation was good and the light just right, Hugo could drive—thoughtful slow or crazy fast, it didn’t matter—while steering with his left hand, changing gears with the same hand, and holding a camera in his right. Hugo was good at multihanded behavior. It even seemed as if he could hold a camera, steer, shift, smoke a cigarette, and drink coffee simultaneously. Hugo smoked a lot, the old butts piling up and overflowing like a little waterfall from the ashtray, and in the same expression of ambitious excess, he gulped down his coffee, which was instant and spooned out of a can, sweetened with three spoonfuls of sugar.

Hugo had a coiled intensity that Geza soon began to appreciate, since he possessed some of the same nature. Hugo was also a talented and determined photographer, which was another thing Geza appreciated, since he considered himself a serious amateur photographer. Nothing like Hugo, of course. But Geza liked cameras and photography and had brought to Africa his favorite and only camera: an East German 35 mm, single-lens reflex camera with a 55 mm lens. He had bought it secondhand in Washington a year earlier and was eager to apply it to photons in Africa, but now he took pictures sparingly: partly because film and developing were so expensive and partly because he had the sensitivity to imagine that Hugo might not fully appreciate another camera-using person in the car.

Hugo was then concentrating his photographic efforts, he told Geza, on jackals and hyenas. He was doing a book. Photographs and text. He was not much of a writer, he confessed, especially in English, which was his second language, but maybe Jane would help with that. In any case, he wanted this book to be more than pretty pictures. The text would explain the animals, describe them as individuals with names and personalities and life histories, clarify how their societies worked. Fortunately, Hugo had just the previous month gotten out from under the thumb of the National Geographic Society, which for several years had kept him on a retainer. It had been steady work, but Hugo knew he could do better. The trouble with the Geographic Society was that when you worked for them, they owned you. They claimed rights to anything that came out of your camera, which for a professional photographer like Hugo amounted to being owned himself. It was unpleasant, restraining; and since Jane was the National Geographic magazine cover girl, his own subordinate role—merely the photographer, only the husband—was galling. It was hard to be always in your wife’s shadow.

So now, while it was true that he no longer had a steady income, Hugo was free to be his own man. And he still had, for as long as it lasted, a decent advance against royalties given him last summer by his British publisher. The book was going to be called Innocent Killers, and Hugo hoped it would be a big success. The phrase innocent killers meant wild predatory animals—East African carnivores—who killed for their food. They didn’t kill for fun or sport, as people did, so they were in that way “innocent.” The book would feature six carnivores, Hugo imagined—golden jackals and hyenas first, then wild dogs, lions, leopards, and cheetahs. He had already done the photography for a couple of Geographic articles on hyenas and cheetahs. He couldn’t use those photographs, but at least now he knew something about hyenas and lions, which was a good start.

Toward the end of the day, Hugo set up his system for night photography. He fixed to the outside of the car door a board with three flash bulbs powered by a battery and synchronized through electric wires to the shutter of his camera. He attached the wires, flicked a switch that connected to the battery. All he had to do after that, he explained, was find the action, spin the car around in the right direction so that the light would be aimed just so, wait for the precise instant when the action peaked—predator leaping to prey, for example—then press the camera button and, poof, a flash would peel open the dark world to reveal its bright white essence.

It was the wildebeest birthing season, and the hyenas would be out. Hugo hoped to photograph a kill. After the sun and moon traded places, therefore, he and Geza harnessed themselves in, strapped on crash helmets, and drove around without headlights under a creamy round moon, looking for hyenas until they sighted a racing pack of them, ghostly and giggling in their strange hyena way and bounding through the tall grass like a slavering pack of big dogs. Hugo took off, racing right behind the pack, banging and bouncing and swerving across the grasslands at thirty-five miles an hour. But the hyenas gave up the chase after a while, as did, eventually, Hugo and Geza.

•  •  •

As the days and then weeks of his introductory visit to Ngorongoro passed, Geza eventually came to appreciate above all Hugo’s practical competence. If you were lost at night, stuck in the mud, and threatened by elephants, Hugo would find and extract you. If you were in danger from a pride of lions, he would drive them away, even if it took a day’s effort. He knew what to do, and everyone else in camp would have been helpless without him. True, the Baron painted on the Land Rover was silly, but Geza came to see in him a capable, talented, determined man, a crack photographer who worked hard to photograph animals and who cared about them. From that perspective, then, the episode with Princess Margaret was unfortunate.

It happened late one afternoon while people were relaxing in the dining tent. A pack of Land Rovers raced up, stopped, and people got out. Geza didn’t know who they were at first, but the van Lawicks must have had some warning. Jane, Hugo, and Moeza went over to the Land Rovers immediately, leaving Geza, Bill, and Ben still sitting in the tent. Geza saw an excited gathering next to the cars, and it soon became clear that Princess Margaret had arrived, along with some friends or family members. There were also secret service personnel in the front and back cars of the entourage.

Geza, Bill, and Ben were visible from the cars, and Jane waved to them and said, “Come on over.” They went over. Hugo was just then introducing himself to Princess Margaret, saying, with a deferential bow, “How do you do? I’m Baron van Lawick.” After that, Geza stepped forward and said to Princess Margaret, “How do you do? I’m Count Teleki.”

It was something he had wanted to do for ages, particularly now that he was in East Africa where a previous Count Teleki’s explorations were still well-known. It had seemed like a wonderful opportunity to introduce himself that way, to try out for the first time in his life that perspective of himself, and he did it in a positive spirit, thinking that Hugo would be amused. Hugo was not. His jaw dropped, his eyes narrowed, and for at least a week after that he hardly spoke a word to Geza.

6.

Carole and Em had both volunteered for three months. Em left early that February, while Carole settled in for a much longer stay, having typed out a long letter to the director of the Friends World Institute, passionately explaining herself and requesting that her three-month volunteer project be extended to at least a year. The director wrote back quickly, giving her official permission to continue at Gombe for the year, an extension that was soon seconded by Jane and Hugo. Carole was delighted by such developments, and thus, with her hopes raised so high for the future, she must have felt doubly betrayed by the illness that suddenly struck.

Yes, the Gombe mosquitoes have a lot to answer for. So does Gombe’s hothouse environment, especially during the rainy months, when, as the atmosphere lowers itself down like a heavy lid on a simmering pot, warm combines with wet to create a nourishing soup for pathogens, including those that, after Carole began scratching at her mosquito bites back in early December, found a congenial home in the integumental disruption.

The bites became infected, in other words. Patrick gave Carole penicillin in ointment and tablet form. No effect. Pat then said she should go into Kigoma to the Baptist mission there and see Mrs. Owens, the missionary wife of the missionary preacher. She was from Tennessee and trained as a nurse. So one day in late December, Pat took Carole in the boat to Kigoma on the weekly supply run, and she was examined by Mrs. Owens, who said, as Carole would recall the words some forty years later, “Oh, this has become septic. It’s in your bloodstream, so putting ointment on it and taking tablets is not going to do the job. You need an injection of penicillin, and I can give that to you.” She added, “You wouldn’t be safe taking an injection from the Egyptian doctor in the town clinic, because they don’t have any sterilizing equipment, and they share their needles. But I have my own syringe, and I boil it up on my own kitchen stove every time.” Carole liked and trusted Mrs. Owens. She had a big steel-and-glass syringe. She boiled it up and gave Carole an injection of penicillin.

By the end of January, Carole was back at Gombe and pleased to learn that she had graduated from mere typist to general researcher. She was good at the chimpanzee observations, and Patrick could use her help. Em, who hadn’t left yet, was then the only full-time typist, while Carole and Patrick took turns outside, speaking their notes about chimpanzee behavior into tape recorders. Then Em left for good, going back to FWI in Nairobi, and Patrick and Carole began spelling each other with the observations and typing up their own notes afterward—until, on February 9, she became seriously ill.

She was still living in the ridge camp hut, and she walked up to the main camp early that morning as usual, ate breakfast, and started her observations. About halfway through the morning, she felt strange. She had no idea what was happening, but she asked for a break. Patrick took over, and Carole went into the kitchen of Pan Palace where there was a big plastic bowl. She leaned over and vomited into the bowl.

Too sick to do any more observations that day, she headed down to her hut and tucked herself into bed. During the night, she felt feverish, her skin burning, and then she felt cold and began shivering. A storm appeared, with explosions of thunder and searing flashes of lightning, and the bright flashes lit up the inside of her hut and etched the table, chair, and bed into her brain as perfect silhouettes, while she lay naked and shivering under her blanket and beneath her mosquito net. She got up, paced around, stood at the door, wanting, but also unwilling, to go outside into the rain; she watched, in another bright white flash, the palm trees outside being whipped by the wind. She slipped back under the mosquito net and the blanket, then sank into a lonely night of strange dreams and memories torn from childhood.

She remembered her mother. Her parents got divorced when she was very young, and then her mother was diagnosed with cancer when Carole was twelve and died when she was fourteen. That was her first major sorrow. She had another family—friends who felt like family—the Danas. Martha Dana was a dear friend of Carole’s mother, and when she was in the hospital for two months around Christmas time with her first cancer surgery, Martha came to visit. Martha, talking to Carole’s mother, learned that Carole did not enjoy being with her father, so she invited Carole to spend Christmas with the Dana family. Carole discovered that it was a wonderful family, very different from her own, with both a mother and a father and four happy daughters. They sang Christmas carols, and the environment was warm, friendly, and full of laughter. It seemed like the ideal family, and she began to think of the Danas as her second family and Martha Dana as her second mother. This idea took on a greater significance after her first mother one day said, “You know, Carole, I’ve got cancer, and it’s possible I could die from this. Where would you want to live? Do you want to live with your father?” Carole said, “No, I don’t want to. I want to live with Martha Dana and her family.”

The Danas agreed to take her, but her father fought that plan in court after her mother’s death, and so she was forced to live with him. Under those circumstances, her grades plummeted, which meant that when it came time to apply to college she didn’t get in anywhere except some obscure New Hampshire college and that experimental Quaker college called the Friends World Institute, where everyone spent their time traveling around and learning from experience rather than from books. Life was funny that way, with the bad so unaccountably mixed up with the good.

•  •  •

Carole stayed in bed for a week: miserable, feverish, throwing up all the time. She reached a point where she could not even keep water down. Within a half hour of drinking water, she just threw that up as well. Patrick was by then giving her quinine, thinking she had malaria, but that wasn’t it. Nobody who had malaria at Gombe threw up the way Carole did.

Finally, he took her in the boat back to the Baptist mission in Kigoma. Mrs. Owens was good as a nurse, and Carole liked her and also liked being mothered. She gave Carole sips of chicken broth. Carole had not been able to hold anything down, and Mrs. Owens tried to calm her stomach, give her just enough so that she could start retaining fluids. After two weeks she was eating chicken noodle soup and saltine crackers, and she had a small lettuce salad. She felt comforted by the chicken noodle soup and saltines because they reminded her of being home and being taken care of as a child.

Mrs. Owens gradually began to give her various bits of bland, solid food, and one day gave her a piece of doughnut, saying something like: “I fried this in my own oil. It’s very good. Totally fresh. See how you like it.” Although she never openly speculated about the possible connection between her patient’s current condition and the general degree of sterility in that old steel-and-glass syringe in her kitchen, Mrs. Owens had begun to suspect that Carole might have liver problems caused by hepatitis. She had been giving foods that wouldn’t stress Carole’s liver, but she wondered if the doughnut would, since it had been fried in fat. Sure enough, as soon as Carole tasted that fresh donut, which was delicious, she threw up violently. It was the first time she had been sick like that in a week, and it led Mrs. Owens to conclude that her patient probably had hepatitis.

Based on that conclusion, Carole bought a ticket at the Kigoma station and boarded the next train to Dar es Salaam. By February 23 she had flown from Dar to Nairobi, where she went to see a British doctor, who looked at her and said, “I think you have yellow in your eyes. Can you spend a penny?” Spend a penny was a quaint British euphemism for pee, which was a euphemism for a blunter word that meant “urinate,” which she did. After the doctor had tested her urine, he told her she had hepatitis and would have to avoid all fat and alcohol for at least six months. “And,” he added, “you should rest the whole time.”

She pleaded with him: “No, I want to go back to work. I just got the best job in the world.” He said, “I think that’s a bad idea. I think you should rest.” She said, “But I feel better.” She was nineteen years old and had just gotten a job in the best place in the world with Jane Goodall, and now she was going to quit? No way!

•  •  •

Geza’s sojourn with the van Lawicks at Ngorongoro Crater lasted longer than anyone had planned. One night the lazy little creek known as the Munge River turned into a torrent that threatened to sweep away the entire camp, tents and all. They moved everything through knee-deep water to a dry spot on higher ground. But the long rains had come early that year, and the rushing water soon eradicated the two dirt roads into and out of the crater and made the landing strip inaccessible. On March 10, however, a break in the weather enabled a plane from Nairobi to swoop down and pick up Geza and Moeza, Hugo’s mother, and carry them both to Kigoma. At Kigoma, the pilot traded Geza and his luggage for Patrick McGinnis and his, and then he flew both Patrick and Moeza to Nairobi.

Pat was planning a vacation. Moeza planned to fly from Nairobi back to her home in Holland. The thunderstorm that pounced so ferociously on their little aircraft as it pulled its way north along the edge of Lake Tanganyika challenged those plans, and for a time it challenged their sense of a stable reality altogether. The rushing water being chopped into pieces by their propeller threw a heavy gray shroud right over the windscreen, and it was impossible to see where they were going. Pat observed with growing concern that the pilot was tense and sweating. They made it to Nairobi, however, and upon stepping onto the tarmac at Wilson Airfield, all three headed straight for the bar. Didn’t even think to pick up their luggage. Time for a drink.

Back at Kigoma, meanwhile, Geza stepped into the supply boat and was taken north on the lake, then led up a winding trail to the main camp and shown his room in the aluminum building called Pan Palace. The next day, he went to work on general observations. Or at least on training to do them. Since Patrick was gone, Alice Sorem set aside time from her own research project on mothers and infants in order to train Geza. Carole had just returned from her medical leave and was, she hoped, properly rested and repaired, so she, too, helped out with the general observations, trading places now and then with Alice and Geza. Carole’s first impression of Geza? She saw a tall, lean, dark-haired young man in bush shorts and khaki shirt who acted sure of himself. He had a small mustache beneath a beaky nose, and she did not feel immediately glad to meet him. She reserved judgment. But she maintained in any case the notion that anyone who came to Gombe to study animals was going to be interesting almost by definition.

•  •  •

In the final week of March, Carole experienced a relapse. She was tired, couldn’t do much, and so she went to bed, which meant, in turn, that Geza was suddenly given a lot of responsibility. Alice still helped him, made sure he was identifying the chimps and their behaviors appropriately, but he was increasingly responsible for the observations and typing, not to mention keeping up the charts and even taking care of other camp duties, such as financial records, supplies, and general maintenance. Perhaps that heightened responsibility accelerated his learning, but it was also stressful, and the stress may have exacerbated a tendency to look for subterranean motives in others. He began to suspect Carole of malingering. Why did she do nothing but lie in bed all day? Carole was a strong-looking young woman. She had lost about fifteen pounds from the hepatitis, but she came to Gombe with a few pounds more than necessary, so now she looked normal. She did not look like a sick person who was wasting away.

Geza mentioned his concerns to Alice, and she set him straight, saying something like: “The liver is a vital organ. You really are underestimating the problem.” Bonnie, who overhead the conversation, relayed it back to Carole, and Carole appreciated Alice’s sticking up for her. She did not appreciate the circumstances that prompted the sticking-up-for, though, and she remained uncertain about Geza. He had a fragile male ego, she decided, and could sometimes be a thoughtless prick. Geza, in turn, was not won over by Carole. She was flaky. She was a hippie. When not in bed being sick, she spent her evenings down at the beach with Tim and Bonnie smoking marijuana, listening to rock and roll, and reading out loud from a tattered volume of Shakespeare’s plays.

The marijuana smoking was no secret, but Geza still disapproved. It was inappropriate at a scientific research site, and even if people hadn’t been trying to do scientific research, he would not have approved. He did not believe in taking drugs for recreation. He thought Tim and Bonnie were fine, however, aside from that one bad habit. At least Tim was fine, given that he was, in spite of superficial appearances to the contrary, working to become a serious scientist.

Tim had gotten an undergraduate degree in psychology back East at Williams College in 1965. Then he went to Berkeley to do graduate work in psychology. His advisor had a special interest in hormones and behavior, and Tim spent his first year and a half considering the sexual behavior of dogs and rats. But he began to think he was in graduate school mainly because it provided a deferment from the draft, and so he had one of those predictable crises: Why am I here? He liked California. He was excited to be in graduate school. But the research—dogs and rats fucking—was starting to get old. For a change of pace, he took a course in the anthropology department at a time when one of the professors, Phyllis Jay, said that Jane Goodall wanted someone to study baboons. Jay had earlier done a field study of monkeys in India, and she knew Jane slightly as a colleague. No one in the anthro department was prepared to go to Africa and study baboons, though, so Tim from the psych department volunteered.

He had flown out to meet Jane and Hugo at their camp in the Ngorongoro Crater near the end of September 1967 before proceeding on to Gombe. By then he had been thoroughly Californianized in the Berkeley style of the late sixties, which meant, among other things, that he arrived in the crater with a Smith Brothers beard and Jesus Christ hair. Jane, aware of some expressive new fashions in dress and grooming, was nevertheless shocked by the sight. Writing to her family in England that September, she announced, “Tim is a real, live HIPPIE!!!!! He is not wearing his beads, but he has them with him. He is nice none the less—but his hair is GHASTLY. And he has a beard. And he has just got married.”

The married part was in his favor, and by the time Geza appeared on the scene about six months later, Tim’s wife, Bonnie, had arrived, while Tim’s field study had, in another sense, nearly arrived. By then—late March and heading into April 1968—his study was starting to rival those of his only established predecessors: two or three earlier baboon watchers who had either contemplated the creatures while sitting comfortably in a safari car or, if approaching on foot, had seldom moved closer than twenty-five yards from their subjects. Tim was already getting closer than that, and within another few months he would be able to walk right in the middle of the troop and be mostly ignored by them.

Baboon meets mirror.

But Tim had not yet reached that level of trust with the baboons. He had just about figured out how to tell them apart, and even that was not easy. There were more than fifty individuals in Beach Troop. The easiest to identify were the adult males, because there were so few of them and because their personalities showed through quickly. He was identifying them on the basis of style and character, of personality, and he gave them names meant to reflect those personalities. Names like Harry and Myrna, Crease and Chip, Moses and Quasimodo, Will and Thug and Grinner. In fact, he and Geza had long discussions—arguments, really—during dinnertime about whether that was a valid approach. Do animals even have personalities?

At first, Tim found Geza mildly intimidating. The intensity. The divergent eye. The hatchet face. Tim’s arguments with Geza had mostly to do with the us-and-them problem: that whole stupid issue of anthropomorphism, the danger of overprojecting the emotion-laced minds of the observers (humans) onto an alien reality of the observed (baboons). Was Tim being scientifically objective? Was he imagining human qualities in his baboons that weren’t really there? Geza was ready to argue about those things, but Tim responded quickly and emphatically: The baboons had plenty of humanlike qualities. Baboons are primates. People are primates. Tim wasn’t about to draw a line and say they differed entirely from people in any particular behavior.

7.

Gombe’s isolation could give a person the sense of living in a world apart. The regular world, the civilized world and its steadily expanding catastrophe, could seem like a far-off dream, its reality marked as the faint and distorted signal sent by BBC World Service and Voice of America or inadequately summarized in the flimsy, tattered scrolls of Time and Newsweek arriving weeks out of date with the rest of the mail on the Kigoma supply run.

As a result of such imperfect communications, Geza heard about the April 4 assassination of the American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King two weeks after it happened, when he opened a letter from Ruth to read about the tragic event and its depressing sequel, the riots that raged in Washington and elsewhere in big cities across the country. There was a personal aspect to the news. Ruth, living as she did on the fringe of one of Washington’s bitterest neighborhoods, was hurt on her way home from work. Her letter was no more specific than that, which was typical of Ruth. Big private life, small public one. She was reluctant to describe the personal details, even for Geza. He had warned her about the dangers of where she lived, in that seventh-floor apartment of the Dorchester House on Sixteenth Street. But along with being private and self-contained, Ruth was also stubborn. She didn’t listen. She needed to save money, and the apartment was a decent place that rented for a good price because it was next to a bad neighborhood. He had told her to find another place. “I’m staying,” she said.

Even then, from the distance of Africa and the remoteness of Gombe, he could picture Ruth and the furniture and layout of the apartment. It was where he had stayed for days on end, after all, and where they said good-bye when he left for Africa. She didn’t want to go to the airport, so they parted at her door. They would probably never see each other again, or so it seemed. Ruth expressed no regret, no desire to hold on. She encouraged Geza in his going off to Africa, and she made it clear that she was not expecting a future relationship.

•  •  •

Ruth and Geza had both graduated from George Washington University by then, but while he went off to study anthropology in graduate school at Penn State, she stayed in the city hoping to save money for graduate school at some point in the future. She had been a geology major, and she wanted to do graduate work in the same subject. Now, though, she worked as a typist for a Russian-English translation service run by the father of Geza’s friend George Rabchevsky. She got the job because she was a skilled typist, but it didn’t pay well, and she had no promising prospects for the future. In sum, Ruth was living in limbo: perpetually short of money and believing that she might have to go back and live with her parents in Virginia.

But then, within a month after Geza’s flight to Africa, he was able to write her and hint at the possibility of work at Gombe. He was still staying with the van Lawicks at their camp in Ngorongoro Crater at the time. Jane and Hugo had been talking about their hopeful plans to develop Gombe as a major scientific research station and their need for more people. Jane was terribly overworked, trying to do several projects at once, and she wanted someone who could type. Ruth was, Geza claimed, the fastest typist in Washington. She was fast. And while she never did become a typist at Gombe, that was the premise on which the invitation was first made, although Jane also wondered if Ruth could handle babies. Would she babysit?

At first, Geza wrote to Ruth tentatively about the idea: “Do you think, if there’s a possibility of coming out here, you could come soon?” But before he got an answer to that one, Jane had confirmed the fact that she wanted a typist and someone to help take care of Grub. Geza wrote another letter saying, in essence, “If you’re willing to come, get ready to come right now because I don’t know how long this offer’s going to last.”

In speaking with Jane and Hugo, Geza had been honest about Ruth and the nature of his relationship with her. They were friends and lovers, and he missed her, but they were not ready to think about marriage. Jane accepted Geza’s description of the relationship, but, perhaps to satisfy other people’s sense of propriety, including that of her rather Victorian grandmother back in England, she persisted in describing Ruth as Geza’s fiancée.

Meanwhile, Geza was trying to reassure his mother and father, also George Rabchevsky, on the propriety of bringing Ruth out to Gombe. His mother was her usual impossible self: concerned above all with the undeniable fact that Ruth was not an aristocrat. His mother wrote to Geza in Hungarian, but “bloodline” and “breeding” were how the critical words in Hungarian translated, as if she thought they were all horses. His father and George were more reasonable if still irritatingly conventional, concerned as they both were that this new development might mean a premature parachuting into matrimonial territory. George’s reaction upset Geza the most, since George was a friend and ought to have understood. For the “sake of our friendship,” Geza wrote to him on April 18, trying to explain the situation and Jane and Hugo’s attitude. He had never “tricked” them into agreeing to take Ruth. They were looking for more volunteers to help with the chimpanzee work, and when he told them about his relationship with Ruth, they came up with the idea of bringing her there. It did not mean that he and Ruth were planning to get married, and there would be, after all, other people around, so it was not a matter of the two of them being alone together in the jungle!

•  •  •

Money had always been a concern for Ruth. When she started as an undergraduate at George Washington, her biggest problem was paying the tuition. She had taken various odd jobs, waitressing, and so on, in an attempt to do that. Once she became a geology major, Geza’s father arranged for her to take a half-time job in the department working for a mineralogist. She learned to peer beyond the limits of light by operating an electron microscope, and so she became a special assistant to that person. Although it paid poorly, the job qualified her for a tuition waiver at the university. It also brought her into the geology department for four hours every weekday.

Geza was by then coming to the department regularly, not so much because of his father, who headed it, but more because of his friends, who were graduate students there. Geza’s father took an interest in his students well beyond what a normal teacher would do. In a sense, he adopted people. He did things that helped them out in their personal lives as well as in their academic careers. These adopted students were usually people who needed help—some were impoverished foreign students from Russia, Germany, the Middle East, and so on—and several developed informal relationships with him. They hung out around the department, came to the house, had meals there, and so on.

His father had established a field station in West Virginia, where students came out for weekends to experience practical geological work. Geza’s parents had divorced years earlier, but then his father remarried, and his stepmother loved to cook. She would come along and cook for everyone for two or three days, and they’d all be sleeping in the same room. It was that kind of environment, and it produced a group of students with similar backgrounds and interests and a lot of camaraderie. Geza was younger than the others, but he had always gravitated to people older than he was. So he went along on those trips and made geologist friends; and whenever he was on campus, he was likely to drop in at the geology department. That’s where he met Ruth.

She was quiet. Reticent. Not sociable on the surface. She had a way of looking at people, including Geza, with an absolutely direct, straight-on look. Not a stare, but more the look a chimp gives. No hiding. No eye-shifting. No tendency to act like she wasn’t looking. She would look with an open face that showed nothing more than curiosity. She also did not laugh or smile, except on rare occasions, when there would be the faintest expression of a smile on her mouth or in her eyes. But it would not be vocalized or expressive or outgoing. It was a private smile, as if the smile were meant for herself and no one else. You had to draw her out by asking something or directly approaching her. It was, in fact, a couple of years before Geza seriously interacted with her. And when he first really noticed her—small and trim with lustrous auburn hair—and began to see that she was attractive and interesting, and considered that he might try speaking to her, he was afraid to. He had gone to boarding schools all his life, which made him one of those socially delayed adolescent males. He didn’t know how to interact with females. Girls—or women—made him nervous. So it was a great surprise when, one day, he asked her to the movies and she agreed to go.

They went to see a Fellini movie at one of the art cinemas on Pennsylvania Avenue near Twentieth Street. It was a full-length black-and-white film called La Strada, starring Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s wife, along with Anthony Quinn, and it focused on the story of a small, itinerant circus peopled by crazy characters. At least Geza thought the characters were crazy. In fact, he couldn’t figure out which segments were meant to be real and which surreal. It seemed like an exercise in madness. He walked out of the theater shaking his head, convinced that they had just wasted time and money on nonsense masquerading as art. He said to Ruth something to the effect that a person had to be out of his mind to make a film like that. But Ruth had understood it entirely, and she spent the next fifteen minutes explaining the film to him. All the complicated psychological bizarreness in the film made sense to her, and her ability to understand it so easily and explain it so directly caught his interest. She, meanwhile, became frustrated with his incomprehension, which she dismissed at last with a wry smile and a wave of the hand. He would always remember the smile and wave, and he saw that he was dealing with someone unusual.

•  •  •

After that first date, they spent a year in a slowly developing relationship. You didn’t push Ruth, and the relationship was not initiated by sex followed by affection. It developed in the opposite way, as a quiet sort of mutual interest gradually followed by attraction and then intimacy.

They began doing social things with others from the geology department, most often George Rabchevsky and his girlfriend, Olga. George’s family were White Russians who had fled the Soviet Communists at the end of World War II, just as Geza and his family had, which was a formative experience the two men shared. Sometimes the four of them would take Geza’s dad’s 1962 Cadillac, with Geza at the wheel of that five-ton, two-toned, white-sidewalled behemoth. It was big enough to haul eight students and a trunkful of geologically interesting rocks back from West Virginia, and when Geza drove it he had trouble seeing over the steering wheel.

They might drive along the Potomac to Fletcher’s Boat House, rent a boat or a couple of canoes, and spend an afternoon on the river. By the time they got back, they were exhausted and sunburnt. Other times, they would head up to the Glen Echo Amusement Park, which was antique even then, with its art deco entrance and a roller coaster that, unlike any other in the country, carried you through the middle of a forest so you couldn’t see where you were going. The place also had rides like the Spinning Tub (you were supposed to sit down, but people kept trying to get up), the Whip (violently spinning carts), and bumper cars (hard-to-drive miniature electric cars that crashed into each other while the sparks sizzled above). Those were mainly rides for adolescent boys, and for Geza and Ruth, George and Olga, going to Glen Echo mostly meant walking around, participating in assorted games of chance, and eating terrible things like cotton candy. But Ruth also liked the old-fashioned carousel. That was her favorite. And there was a huge swimming pool with a wave machine, possibly the first such device in the country. Since the pool was usually not crowded, they might go there to cool off. Or they might try dancing at the dance hall. The hall had mostly big-band dancing from another era, though, which Geza and Ruth were not interested in.

Music. Geza first heard a Beatles song while sitting in a bar on Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Washington. It was strange and nervous with falsetto riffs yet light and positive: “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” But his musical tastes had already crystallized by then, and he never became much of a rock ’n’ roll fan. By just a tiny sliver of time, just a year or less of life experience, he was pre–rock ’n’ roll. Ruth had gone through a phase of being crazy about Elvis, but the music he and Ruth listened to together was mainly the old-style pop, a sweet and ultimately reassuring strain of harmonic fashion rising out of the postwar fifties and early sixties: the Kingston Trio and the Brothers Four, the Coasters, Everly Brothers, Harmonicats, Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass, Duane Eddie and his twangy guitar, Bo Diddley, Sandy Nelson, Julie London. That was the music they liked and identified with, the melodic memes implanted in their brains during the first fertile flush of sexual maturity.

They smoked cigarettes. Menthol brands for Ruth. Viceroys for Geza. But they never touched marijuana. Never thought about it. Drugs! They drank an average of about one bottle of wine a year. They were innocents learning to swim in the river of life.

•  •  •

Sex came slowly, intimacy at its own unprodded pace. The first time Ruth invited Geza into her bedroom happened more than a year after their first date. By then, she had moved from an earlier place in Georgetown to an apartment on Vermont Street near Thomas Circle. The apartment building, known as Crescent Towers, was just off Fourteenth Street. At the time, Fourteenth Street was the sleaze center of Washington: liquor stores, porno shops, hookers on the corners. She had left the Georgetown apartment because she could no longer afford it, and she was now renting something cheaper. It was her next-to-last apartment in Washington, the one before she moved into that final place on Sixteenth Street.

Ruth cooked a dinner for Geza at the apartment, and she was describing a new job she had taken, some kind of waitressing job. She told him about it but not with much detail, and so at first he misunderstood. It turned out that she was waitressing drinks in an imitation Playboy Club, and she had to wear a sexy outfit as part of the job. Geza said he thought he wanted to see where she worked. She said she didn’t think that was a good idea. He said, “Is it that bad?” She said, “It’s not always pleasant, but I make a lot of money.”

Ruth in her apartment off Fourteenth Street in Washington, DC.

She took out the costume, which was in her bedroom closet, undressed in front of him, and put it on to model. It wasn’t topless, just skimpy, like what Playboy bunnies were wearing in actual Playboy Clubs. Mostly front display. Some cleavage. Typical of the sixties, and Ruth filled it out perfectly. She had the body for it. There was no skirt. The bottom part was like a high-cut swimming suit, and mesh tights covered the wearer’s legs.

Ruth took risks that made Geza uncomfortable, and one of them was serving drinks in that imitation Playboy Club located in one of the worst parts of town. She did not act like a sexy doll. She was not flirtatious. But she could transform herself in a few minutes, in ways that were a total mystery to him, from an average schoolgirl to an attractive, full-blown woman. A twist of the hair, putting it a certain way. It was a trick she had.

So they embarked on the experience of physical intimacy, and their relationship after that became deeper and more stable. But it was still not easy to get to know Ruth. She was very much her own person, and for that reason some things she did really shocked Geza. One time, for example, she took him out to see a pornographic film. It was her idea, not his. She suggested it without any discussion or warning. It was just: Let’s do this. They walked from her apartment past Dupont Circle to a theater at the corner of Connecticut and R. The theater showed a variety of films, art and underground films, and this particular movie had been produced by the Playboy company as a mass-market film. In other words, it was pornographic but with a small pretense of respectability and some plot. It was based on a biblical theme.

Geza never learned to be casual or overt about sex, and it was with a mixture of curiosity and genuine discomfort that he walked into the dim theater. Ruth didn’t say a thing during the entire film. He would sneak sidelong glances at her at various moments, but she seemed completely involved in watching everything. The film was definitely hard-core, and he observed people do things on the screen that he had never before even imagined were done. Then they came out of the movie, and he was afraid to say anything. She didn’t say anything either, and they went back to the apartment, where she wanted to try some of the things they had seen in the movie.

8.

Some people said the baboons were a problem, but Tim Ransom never considered them such. Why should he? When you thought about things from a baboon’s perspective, you saw that they were living out their lives with passion and calculation. They made choices. They laid down plans. The baboons were not even very aggressive. Because a few earlier researchers had overemphasized the importance of aggression in baboon society, Tim began his research with that idea in mind, wondering what all this aggression business was about. He would think to himself: I better pay attention to who’s going to beat me up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It took him a while to realize that their aggression was situation-specific. There were different kinds of aggression, and it was all very stylized. True, cuts and fractures occurred commonly enough, yet these animals were all so quick and capable that only rarely did dire things happen. Usually there would be a slice from someone’s sharp canine or maybe a broken finger or two. Tim began to realize that male-against-male aggression was almost never done with the intent of engaging in an all-out fight to the death. Among the males, fights usually had to do with getting access to females and to friends. Fights among females were usually about access to babies or food.

Unlike the chimps, who never stayed in one coherent group but were always forming temporary subgroups, then splitting away to form other temporary subgroups, the baboons always stayed close together in their home troop. There were exceptions, the most obvious being when an adolescent or young adult male transferred from his home troop and joined another. This would be a major event and—as with a human late-adolescent leaving his home in, say, Berkeley, California, to do primate research in Africa and finding himself in unfamiliar territory surrounded by strangers—very stressful for the individual. At the same time, the arrival of a new young male would send ripples throughout the social network of the troop, with shifting relationships and alliances causing a readjustment in the matrix of power and status.

Aside from those periodic transfers, the whole troop, all fifty or more individuals, kept continuously in touch with one another. Baboons in a troop could always hear or see one another. They moved as a group, went through rambling perambulations that began in the morning at the twenty trees they slept in and ended in the evening at the same twenty trees. This daily stroll took Beach Troop along the beach; and it took the second study group, Camp Troop, through the banana-provisioning meadow at upstairs camp. In both cases, the baboons proceeded in an approximate circle, with the greatest unpredictability in their movements being whether they would do it clockwise or counterclockwise. This was Baboon Economics 101: the daily search for food and water, sex and status, family and community, and a safe tree to sleep in at night.

To know about the baboons and to live among them, you had to learn their language and thinking. Eventually, Tim came to imagine that the baboons regarded him as a strange version of a subadult. Subadult was what he called the older juveniles, those on the cusp of being physically mature but still considered youngsters by the others. They were gangly adolescents, tripping over themselves and making a lot of social mistakes. As someone slowly learning the baboon language—gestures, postures, vocalizations, and so on—Tim, too, was making lots of social mistakes, and so he began to see that the adults in the troop were treating him as just another bumbling subadult. They tolerated him because nobody took subadults seriously. He wasn’t a threat to the adult males, competing for access to the sexually receptive females. He didn’t threaten the infants and juveniles, so he never got into serious trouble with the adult females. And that’s how it went during his first year of hanging around with Beach Troop, slowly working his way in, bit by bit picking up the language and appreciating the immense complexity of those animals.

Tim on the beach with Beach Troop.

It was wonderful. So was being there on the beach all day with the Beach Troop. Tim’s father frequently got transferred as a result of his job when Tim was young, and thus Tim went to thirteen different schools before high school. The idea of staying in one place, getting to know what was under every leaf and rock, and learning to recognize each one of fifty nonhuman primates by name and personality, was an intense and reassuring thing. The relationships were fascinating, and the drama of the baboons became the most absorbing thing in the world. It was like watching the best possible TV series, although what Tim liked most about baboons was that they never lied. He was going through some personal issues having to do with trust, and that led him to think of baboons as his favorite people. You could always tell what they were up to. To be sure, knowing what they were up to was a consequence of recognizing their gestures and vocalizations and understanding their personalities. Knowing, for example, as all the baboons in the troop did, that when adult male David threatened he never intended to follow through.

•  •  •

Bonnie, Tim’s recently arrived wife and colleague, hiked upstairs to the main camp every morning to study the other baboons, the ones in Camp Troop, and she would have had a different kind of experience, one undoubtedly colored by the regular conflicts between baboons and chimps at the provisioning site. True, the banana operation was originally put in place to entice the chimps, and if baboons could read, someone might have put up a sign that said No Baboons Allowed. Since they couldn’t and no one had, who was to say the baboons were at fault? They had discovered a reliable food source and were naturally trying to exploit it.

But it was stressful for them to be up there in camp next to the chimps. Of course, baboon youngsters often played with the chimp youngsters, and those mixed playgroups, cute little stump-tailed apes and cute little whip-tailed monkeys leaping and spinning about, chasing one another round and round, pretending to fight with each other, were endlessly delightful to watch. But bigger chimps would sometimes mug smaller baboons and take their bananas, while the bigger baboons would sometimes gang up on smaller chimps and grab their bananas.

It was getting to be a free-for-all, with the worst part of it being a consequence of the dark truth that chimpanzees sometimes eat baboons. Baboons are a kind of monkey, after all, and the chimps were skilled hunters and ferocious predators of monkeys. The chimps loved meat, and they sometimes took great risks to get some. So it was odd that life could sometimes be so peaceful, with juvenile baboons and juvenile chimps playing together like two different kinds of primates frolicking in Eden, whereas at other times the younger baboons might suddenly become just one more entrée on the menu.

•  •  •

Once, at 8:15 in the morning in the middle of March 1968, it happened like this. Arwen Baboon was sitting on top of a closed banana box and holding in her loving arms her little infant, Amber. Nearby was a big tree, and sitting in that big tree, a few feet above mother and baby baboon, were three adult chimpanzees—Mike, Charlie, and Hugh—peacefully grooming one another.

Arwen the mother baboon was facing the tree as she sat, holding her baby while looking up at the three big chimps grooming. Nearby on the ground sat another chimpanzee, Leakey, who was steadily eating a clutch of bananas at one of the opened banana boxes. Leakey was still focused on the bananas when Figan Chimpanzee suddenly appeared out of the forest and approached with a big toothy grin that was probably an expression of fear. For unclear reasons, Leakey dropped the bananas and jumped on Figan, and the two of them began rolling down the slope in a wrestler’s clutch, with Figan screaming wildly.

Mike, still up in the tree and grooming with Charlie and Hugh, may have been upset by this event because he was the alpha, the big boss, and two of his subordinates—Leakey and Figan—had the nerve to challenge his authority by fighting right in front of him. He turned and began swinging down and out of the tree. He was about to display, to show off his mighty might by doing the weight lifter’s ballet. When he displayed, Mike liked to throw or flail things as a way of emphasizing the drama. On his way out of the tree, therefore, and while still hanging on to a branch, Mike reached down and grabbed with his right hand the nearest convenient thing, which was Amber, Arwen’s baby. He landed on the ground and went into a full display: standing upright, his hair raised and spiking out, then running while screaming and flailing at the ground with the object in his hand.

Baboons are communally protective of their babies, and so at the sight of Mike running about and hitting the ground with Amber, several of the big male baboons, their bright teeth bared, converged on the big, hairy ape from all sides: barking, screaming, grunting. Others in the troop added to the chaos with screams and squeaks and squeals. In response to the aggression of the baboons, some of the male chimps began to move in, barking and screaming, while the female chimps, some holding infants and grinning in fear, added to the commotion with their own screams and squeaks and whimpers.

Possibly in order to keep both hands free while defending himself from the sharp-toothed baboons, Mike put Amber into his mouth, gripping the limp infant by her back. Surrounded by a scrum of excited baboons and chimps, Mike then paused, placed Amber in his left hand, and began running downslope toward a thick patch of tall grass at the bottom of the meadow while reaching up to pull off a big baboon who was clinging to his back and biting his shoulder. In the process of ripping the baboon off his back, however, Mike whipped his left arm back and accidentally smashed his left hand into a tree trunk, whereupon Amber went flying and disappeared in the tall grass.

With the baby suddenly gone, the commotion quickly subsided. Mother Arwen, looking dazed, began wandering about, searching, it seemed, for her lost baby. Other baboons also began moving into the thick grass, apparently joining in the search. Some of the chimps did as well. Soon, in fact, individuals of both species were acting as if they had forgotten the entire uproar, and they milled around side by side in the tall grass, all of them seemingly intent on looking for little lost Amber.

There were still brief flashes of interspecies hostility. At one point, Cyrano Baboon grabbed the hair on Rix Chimpanzee’s back, yanked out a big clump, and barked aggressively. Rix turned around, stood upright with bristling hair, and slapped Cyrano on the head. Cyrano ground his teeth and slowly blinked, displaying his bright white eyelids. He bounced up and down on stiffened front legs. Then big Hugh Chimpanzee became more generally upset and began stomping the ground and flailing with his arms. He turned and, perhaps not seeing any better target, charged directly at the new human observer on the veranda—Geza—who jumped into the air at the last minute, so that Hugh missed contact and continued racing through the meadow.

An hour later, one of the human observers spotted Humphrey Chimpanzee, who had not taken part in any of the earlier melee, sitting peacefully by himself in a tree on the other side of the valley. Humphrey was chewing slowly on a sticky rag of meat that looked very much like the bloody remnants of little Amber.

9.

In the final week of May, Ruth, accompanied by a new short-term volunteer from the Friends World Institute in Nairobi, climbed into a small plane at Wilson Airfield in Nairobi. A few hours later, they were met at the Kigoma airstrip by two people from Gombe. Patrick McGinnis was one. The other was probably Mpofu, a young Tanzanian who had been hired as the Gombe boatman and general carpenter. After finishing the weekly shopping in town, all four walked down to the dock and loaded themselves and their luggage and supplies into the Boston Whaler. There was a bobbing passage through flashing sun and crystal water until, after a time, the boat stopped at a tree-shadowed beach where Geza stood. He must have looked leaner and darker than Ruth remembered. She may have felt weaker and lighter and become temporarily less stable in response to the repeated impress of shifting balance and the novelty of everything, including Geza standing at the edge of a vast African lake, Geza stepping into the water to catch the boat and draw it to solid shore, Geza catching her hand.

Mpofu attended to the boat, while a couple of other African workers who had run down to the shore lifted out the food and some of the other items bought in Kigoma. Patrick and Geza, carrying much of the luggage, turned and led the way upstairs, while Ruth and the new volunteer followed. They entered a flickering forest and were beckoned up a winding path by waving hands of light, arriving finally at the clearing and the main camp, which was glazed yellow by the late afternoon sun. Ruth noted two rectangular aluminum buildings resting on concrete slabs and covered by dark thatch.

No chimps or baboons were in camp, and so, without trans-species distractions, they all dropped what they had been carrying inside Pan Palace, and Geza began heating water for coffee and tea. Carole, who had been sitting at the table in front of a typewriter, introduced herself to Ruth and the new volunteer, promising to help the latter find her way to an empty hut that would be hers. Alice Sorem showed up, so now there were six of them, and they all sat down for a brief introductory chat before at last heading down to join Tim and Bonnie for dinner on the ridge.

After dinner, Geza helped Ruth settle into the extra room in Pan Palace, where he had been living, and he then showed her his new hut, which was a bright aluminum rondavel recently erected along a narrow, twisty path running into the woods away from the upstairs camp clearing.

•  •  •

Ruth was secretly terrified on her first morning there, which was a problem Geza would not recognize until, decades later, he read some of her letters home. She lay in her bed inside Pan Palace that morning for two hours, inert, huddled under a blanket, drifting inside the white cloud of mosquito netting, and listening helplessly to the histrionic racket of chimps outside. She thought about ways to catch a plane back to the States.

By the time she wrote her first letter home to her parents, on June 4, she had been there for about a week and, during that time, had overcome the worst of her earlier fears. “How remote the rest of the world seems!” the letter began, and then: “Here we are in the world of bananas and chimpanzees and nothing else seems real.” She was “slowly getting into the swing of things,” she added, and she had already spent time in the provisioning area when things were “relatively calm,” learning to observe behavior and tape-record notes. Still, she wasn’t sure that she would ever learn to tolerate a “banana morning” at those times “when there are 30 chimpanzees and 50 baboons fighting and carrying on like crazy!”

The chimps themselves created pandemonium enough, Ruth admitted to her parents, but stirring baboons into the mix was asking for trouble. The baboons squabbled with each other. They fought with the chimps. Altogether they made the situation tense. Those doglike monkeys with enormous snouts, bright white eyelids, and pug-ugly bottoms were simply “repulsive,” she wrote; but once they had wandered off for the day the chimps could settle down and enjoy themselves, and the whole operation was actually a pleasure to experience. She so wished her parents could see the chimpanzees. They loved bananas, even though most of them were surprisingly fussy: discarding fruits that were too ripe or too green, concentrating on ones that were just right. Ruth had tried the bananas herself. They came in an astonishing variety, and the good ones were tasty indeed, so who could blame the apes for being obsessed by them?

The regular food that people ate ran the gamut from excellent to “extremely gross.” For breakfast and lunch, they had eggs, jam, honey, cheese, sometimes bacon, and bread—with the bread being the best surprise, since it was baked fresh every other day by Sadiki Rukumata, the cook. They prepared their own breakfasts. The eggs tasted like sardines, since the chickens were fed the silvery, sardinelike fish that the lake fishermen scooped up; with the distant hope of masking that fishy taste, everyone scrambled their eggs and added a few drops of vanilla extract. Oddly enough, fresh fruits and vegetables were in short supply, although tangerines were just then in season and therefore plentiful. But the daytime food was the excellent and good part, while the more questionable and sometimes extremely gross part arrived in the evening. True, fresh fish was served on Thursdays, the usual day for a supply run into town. But on the remaining six nights of the week, dinners were structured around meat dug out of cans. Sometimes, it appeared as meat stew. Not too bad. Other times it was transmogrified into a meat pie. Remotely edible. But then the canned meat would finally be reconstituted in a spiced curry smothered with fried bananas, which was simply disgusting.

Everyone craved dessert, and since Ruth had recently been elected the dessert cook, she had just that day baked a cherry pie. Unhappily, Sadiki’s charcoal oven broiled rather than baked it, and the crust had been burned black in fifteen minutes. Ruth expected to develop her culinary skills over time, but for the moment she hoped her mother would send recipes for desserts that did not require baking.

•  •  •

Back in the United States, on the same day Ruth wrote that first letter home—June 4, 1968—Robert Kennedy, younger brother of the assassinated President John Kennedy, won the California vote in the Democratic primary for the forthcoming presidential election. Late that evening, Senator Kennedy effusively thanked his staff and supporters during a ballroom rally at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Some time after midnight, as the senator was being escorted out of the ballroom, passing through the kitchen and heading for a rear exit, an aggrieved if otherwise unremarkable young man pressed forward and at close range shot the candidate three times. He died a day later.

In her next letter home, written on June 10, Ruth referred to the second Kennedy assassination briefly, commenting that “I can’t imagine what the poor U.S. is coming to.” She then described her own sense of placid remove from the madness that had lately seemed to overtake her home nation. Living so close to the natural world, as they did at Gombe, made Ruth think that the life she used to live in the States was artificial, and she did not miss it. She missed only her dear mother and father, and it would be wonderful if she could fly home for a day or two, just long enough to see them and describe in detail “the wonders of this life.” Those wonders included the chimpanzees, of course, and Ruth now was becoming “so fond of them!” The chimps seemed to have such a thrilling existence, and indeed, she envied them. “How beautiful it would be to build a nest at night high in a palm tree and lie in it under the African sky with the lake below and only the sounds of the wild African night!”

In fact, Ruth continued, she loved living in the middle of an African forest surrounded by so many wild animals, and she was even delighted by the camp’s bathroom facilities, the most fundamental aspect of which was the choo. The choo was a horseshoe-shaped seat elevated above a hole in the ground and isolated on three sides by airy walls of stick and thatch. The fourth side was open, and there was no roof, so a person at night could contemplate a drifting moon or the bright sparkling dome of stars overhead and, during the day, enjoy a superb view. The bathing area of the facilities consisted of a cool, swelling pool near the bottom of the small stream that ran past the camp. The pool was clear and the place private, so taking a bath there was a “delicious” experience that made one want never to use an ordinary bathtub again.

•  •  •

Ruth wrote home again on June 22, describing in detail the nature of her work as an observer and adding the comment that “for reasons that I will elaborate later, our observation procedure has been altered somewhat in the past week or so.”

The procedure for researchers doing observations relied on using bananas as bait to get the chimps coming into camp regularly, and it seemed like an ideal way to keep track of the apes. It had started simply. When Jane first went into the forest in 1960, she managed to sight chimps only occasionally and from a great distance. She was getting closer within three or four months, and within a year, a few of the more curious chimps would occasionally wander into her camp. To encourage those cameo appearances, she once or twice tried leaving out a few bananas. That’s how it started. After a time, she left out more bananas, and the curious chimps began coming into camp more often. But then they began taking things other than bananas. Old shoes. Patches of canvas. Cardboard. And when Jane tried making the bananas more challenging to find, hiding them as if they were Easter eggs—in trees, inside various containers—the apes responded directly. Shoes were torn open and eaten. Coffee thermoses and flashlights were smashed to see what was inside.

After Jane and Hugo were married, in the spring of 1964, the two of them worked to regularize the banana provisioning. They brought in steel boxes with lids that could be opened or shut remotely, using levers and cables, with pins to fix the levers and cables in position. One of the chimps began breaking the cables. Jane and Hugo put them inside steel pipes, which were then buried underground. After a while, three chimps discovered how to remove the pins that kept the boxes shut. Jane and Hugo replaced the pins with screws, but the same clever trio figured out how to unscrew the screws. Jane and Hugo ordered better boxes, forty of them, which were made from steel, embedded in concrete, and locked with electrically operated latches activated remotely by push buttons.

Those were the boxes being used when Geza and Ruth arrived. By then the baboons, too, had discovered the bananas. At first, they had been afraid of people and kept their distance. It used to be that a person could threaten the dog-faced monkeys simply by looking at them directly with a meaningful gaze or an assertive stare. When that kind of threat lost its power, people learned to raise their arms into the air and lunge. When that wore out, it became necessary to throw stones. At the moment, only one person in camp was still able to control the baboons: Geza. Ruth was much smaller than Geza, and for her, being out on the slopes and surrounded by the baboons was no fun at all. In fact, she now had the distinction of being the only person in camp to have been attacked by one. That happened at the start of an afternoon when the banana feeding had ended. All the chimps had wandered away, so it seemed like a peaceful moment. Ruth was standing outside when a big male baboon swaggered past, perhaps only eight feet away. She thought nothing of it. But then he spun around and leapt on top of her. She started to fall, then regained her balance while throwing her arms up and lunging forward. At that point, the growly beast moved a few feet away, but he was still there, and it had been an exceedingly unpleasant experience.

Even before Ruth showed up, Carole and Geza had both started to recognize the seriousness of the baboon problem. Geza could throw a stone. Even with his one bad eye he had a better aim than anyone else. Carole once threw a stone at a baboon, who just watched the projectile spin his way and then, as casual as anything, twisted himself sideways at the last second. Carole didn’t have the muscle to throw stones fast and hard like Geza did, and she couldn’t use the camp’s slingshot now that she was an observer who tape-recorded notes, since she needed one hand free to hold the microphone.

Then came the attack on Ruth, so finally Geza approached Carole and said, “I think this banana feeding thing has gotten out of hand, and I want to shut it down.” He began to list, one after the other, several logical reasons why they should do it. Carole had been seeing the same problem he had, but she hadn’t had the sense that she could change it. The instant Geza proposed it, however, she said, “I’m with you. I agree. We should shut the feeding system down.” Patrick didn’t seem to like the idea. But Geza, Ruth, and Carole went downstairs to talk to Tim and Bonnie, who had also become critical of the banana provisioning, albeit from a baboon-watcher’s perspective. And that was that: a rebellion in the ranks. They shut the system down.

Patrick radioed Jane and Hugo to report on the week’s events, and they, having heard little or nothing about the developing problems with baboons, were surprised and upset. Geza then got on the radio and strongly argued his case. They would use up the last of the banana stockpile, he said, and then, instead of continuing the provisioning, they would try following the chimps into the forest. Jane and Hugo were about to come out for the summer, and so they all agreed to wait until then before attempting any further changes in the routine.