Because the lagoon was one of the few places in the jungle where trees didn’t block the moonlight, I was able to see better once I arrived home. Drummer and Mango and I sat at the bank. Our toes dragged in the water as Mango sprawled across her brother’s lap.

The other chimps were already in their nests; it would be the next day before I’d know how many of them had been injured. Gradually I skirted the edge of the lagoon, noiseless as I could be in the dim light, and unzipped the tent tooth by tooth, praying that my chimps wouldn’t hear me. I didn’t want them to call out in case the escaped hunters returned.

Once I’d gotten the tent open, I slumped to my belly, half in the tent and half out.

After a moment, I sat up and sifted through one bag of supplies. There was dried meat inside, a few coins, a water skin, and Beggar’s hide, light and limp. When I draped it out on my knee, it no longer felt like part of the old, dead chimpanzee, but a temporary layer of the jungle, like soil or bark. I stroked the pelt and held still for a long time, thoughts circling.

I recognized Mango first by her breath, a familiar sweaty and fruity smell, a pleasant warmth not so different from the night breeze with its scents of life and rot. I opened my eyes slowly, so as not to surprise her.

She crept forward into my lap and curled tight, her long lashes tickling the exposed insides of my wrists, eyes inky in the moonlight. It was like she’d returned to the younger Mango I’d first met, pressing into her ailing mother’s embrace.

Because, unexpectedly, her mother had come back.

It seemed cruel that I’d inadvertently played with a young orphan’s emotions. But Mango was so calm. She didn’t have a permanent sense of Beggar’s being alive or dead, I guessed; this moment in her dead mother’s embrace was possible simply because it was happening. Or maybe she thought I had somehow combined with Beggar, that our two beings had tied up neatly and therefore had never been separate. I had no idea what she was feeling, and I was pretty sure Mango didn’t, either.

Beggar’s pelt still between us, I reached my arm around Mango to hold her tight. Sighing, she relaxed even deeper into my lap. She didn’t look up at my face, just seemed to enjoy the strange familiarity of hair and skin.

So I stayed there as Beggar holding her daughter. Only when Mango was making quiet snores against my forearm did I slowly get up, sleeping chimp in my arms, and let the hide fall away. I laid Mango on the floor of the tent, pillowing her head on my only remaining shirt. In her sleep, she looped her fingers through the holes in the seams and drew it near, her nose pressed into the fabric.

Cautiously, I took Beggar’s hide and crept through the night to the tumbling river. I held the skin over the water, then dropped it in and watched the black empty space it made among the moonlit waves pass around a bend and disappear.

Mango was drooling into my shirt when I returned. Drummer had made himself a nest, but Omar joined Mango and me in the tent. The bent pole made it vulnerable to the weather, and as the rain started to fall the corners grew wet. I huddled around them both. Mango sighed into my chest. It would be crowded in our little home that night, but I didn’t mind. It seemed none of us did.

I spent much of the next day going through the hunters’ possessions, finding among other things a knife, pills in a small oily sack, and a snare-making kit: rusty iron shears, a small tool with an eye of metal at the end, and pliers. It felt funny that these men no longer had these possessions. That I did have them.

I remembered the bushbuck. I’d left her body back at the hunters’ camp, and didn’t want to leave it there to rot. If I went back to where I’d last seen the hunters, I might also be able to see if there was any sign of their return. I could find some peace that way.

The daily storm had only begun, though; I’d have to wait until it finished. Rather than wait out the rain in the tent, I embraced it, stripping and diving into the lagoon, giving myself a surface-eye view of the drops that studded the water like hurled pebbles. The chimps stared at me while they got soaked beneath the trees, fascinated by their crazy naked ape friend. As I splashed around, unease began to spread. I kept looking into the tree line, waiting for a human face to peer back.

I knew I should have waited for morning to go back for the bushbuck, waited until the whole day was still spread ahead of me. But I was exhausted by the cringing fear that had come to stay. The moment the rain stopped, I tied my last ragged shirt around my midsection to cover my most thorn-sensitive areas, then swiftly picked my way to the hunters’ camp. I went without shoes so I’d be quieter, and avoided the more exposed sections of the river.

It was even farther than I remembered, and the sun was already setting when I arrived. I cursed my foolishness, realizing that I’d be returning to the lagoon at night, this time without a rush to distract me from the snakes and meat-eating fish in the river. That, or I’d be spending the night in a strange place without a fire, with the corpse of Monsieur Tatagani for company.

When I was growing up, even the good Christian people in the village loved to tell stories of spirits that lived inside all things. It had been a while since I’d heard talk about spirits, but now, as I crept down a small path in the lost section of a lost jungle, I was sure I saw one.

Something was glowing in the middle of the woods. The small light appeared and then vanished. It came back, and then disappeared again. This time it stayed away, the ghost gone.

Was the spirit something summoned by the hunters to get revenge on me, left here to possess me if I was foolish enough to return? When the jungle stayed dark I realized it might not be a spirit at all, that maybe I was seeing some tool the hunters had left behind. Some new sort of trap. My heart tightened. Careful to make no noise, I pressed myself low to the ground. Something with many sharp legs skittered from under my chest as I lay flat, but I didn’t risk moving my head to see what it was. Much as I concentrated, I could hear nothing that wasn’t insect or bird. If the hunters were still nearby, they were being extraordinarily silent.

Finally I risked lifting my head. I couldn’t see anyone, nor was there any glow. Edges of upturned earth were rimmed in twilight; the giant X I’d traced on the ground the night before was unmussed, with no footsteps near it but my own.

Then I saw it again — an illuminated rectangle. But no one was holding it; it was lying on the ground. A buzzing sound. Suddenly another rectangle lit up at the other side of the clearing. I started to recognize the lights and the noises, and started thinking less and less of spirits and more and more of foreigners at the hotel bar.

I crept forward and stared down at one of the rectangles. The space that had glowed was blacker than the char color of the surrounding soil. It lit up again, making a cheeping sound. I darted my hand out and grabbed it. My fingers glowed blue before the light disappeared.

I held the device high in the dusk to catch the remaining light. There was a place to speak on one end, and to hear on the other — it looked like a phone, but from what I’d picked up at the bar, I thought I was probably looking at a radio. My shoulders released. If the men hadn’t come back for these precious devices, they were probably gone forever.

I left the radios and hurried about the clearing, searching the ground. Leaning against a tree, I found something far more precious than a radio: a machete!

It would be foolish to travel back to the lagoon in the darkness. I’d be vulnerable to any predator that chose to attack, or I’d step on something sharp or fall down a ravine or improvise some other way to die. So I did like a chimp. Using my prized new machete, I hacked ferns from the ground, slicing upward to make less noise. I selected a tree, kicked out the magpies that had been using it, and lay the soft ferns where two branches formed an almost-basket. I sat back. I might not manage to sleep, but I’d certainly find rest — and I’d keep out of the way of the predators that roamed the jungle floor. I smiled, pleased with myself.

Once I’d survived the evening I could rest tomorrow, sharpening my machete so I could chop down the first trees I’d use to build my hut. I’d be eating palm heart for my next meal.

As the night deepened, doves and parrots intensified their songs. Distant monkeys squealed. Even after the other animals had quieted, cicadas droned on. I lay out on my branch and watched as, in a jungle clearing many days from human civilization, little screens lit up and cheeped.