as she grooms Snub.
Snub tries to get up,
but the soreness in her throat
becomes a sharpness,
and the world goes white again.
The pain blooms white from her collarbone
whenever Snub moves,
so she holds perfectly still
and eats the sight of Orphan.
Snub does not feel here.
She is in her body and outside of it;
she is not Snub looking at Orphan,
but some bird looking at Snub
looking at Orphan.
Breath appears in front of Snub’s eyes,
looking at her with fear and also longing.
Snub curls her lips in
acha
even though no sound can come out.
Breath sprawls along the ground,
pressing his back against Snub’s thigh as hard as he can.
Even that small pressure causes the edge of her view
to go white,
but the comfort of Breath
is worth it.
Mother has her nose down
as she sifts through uprooted greens.
She hasn’t gained any weight
since her time in the cavern.
Her shoulder blades rise from the
back of her rib cage
like fins.
Mother will never be fat again.
With her back against a tree trunk and
her head cradled in vines,
Snub can watch the magpies.
They are hopping about their nest.
Something inside it has them occupied.
This nest has eggs in it.
Eggs open into baby birds.
Maybe there will soon
be tiny magpies.
Those eggs are cozy and motionless.
Breath and Orphan are asleep.
Snub hears Mother eat
while she watches
the nesting magpies.
hoo.
Snub wakes to sunset drumming.
Maybe the not-gorillas are looking
for the corpse of their child.
Orphan startles and gets to her feet
while Breath clutches hard to Snub,
sending white lances down her side.
The sounds get louder.
The not-gorillas are coming.
Snub has always known they would.
The only option is to flee.
Snub cannot flee.
Mother cannot flee.
Orphan can flee.
Breath can flee.
Snub stares at Orphan and Breath.
Snub memorizes Orphan and Breath.
Orphan stands in the clearing,
gaze flicking between the drumming
and Snub,
understanding her kind and understanding Snub.
Breath presses his back tight against Snub,
as if to get all the way inside of her.
Mother eats.
Mother doesn’t seem to mind the drumming.
Snub knows what she must do.
She raises the hand of her uninjured arm.
She pushes Breath away with all her might.
Breath squeals as he rolls in the dirt,
getting to all fours and glaring at Snub.
amrcha.
Snub bares her teeth at Breath,
makes a swiping gesture with her hand
toward the far side of the clearing.
Go.
I do not want you here.
Breath stares at her.
He is baffled.
Orphan is not like Breath.
Orphan can understand a future.
She steps toward Snub,
gibbering,
eyes wide and streaming water.
Breath takes a step toward Snub,
his body quivering.
Snub bares her teeth again
and waves him away.
If she could get to all fours
and chase him off,
she would.
Breath shrinks back from Snub.
Orphan, looking toward the calls
of the approaching not-gorillas,
reaches her arms out to Breath.
He ignores her at first.
Snub makes her sounds of
amrcha
even louder,
casts Breath away
even harder.
Breath allows his hand to be held by Orphan
while she tugs him to the far side of the clearing.
Breath’s head tilts awkwardly so he can peer back
at Snub as he goes,
tripping over vines
for looking backward.
Orphan takes another step.
Breath again allows himself to be led.
Once they’re at the far side of the clearing,
once they’re about to pass out of view
forever
Breath yanks his hand out of Orphan’s
and calls out
acha,
staring wildly at Snub.
Mother looks up, confused, then returns to her foraging.
Orphan takes Breath’s hand back in hers,
tugs him out of the clearing,
away from the not-gorillas.
One more step, one more longing look back,
then Breath and Orphan have disappeared.
The last thing Snub sees of either of them
is two hands clasping,
gorilla and not-gorilla.
Breath is gone.
Snub makes an anguished cry,
and at the sound of it Mother
clicks and steps,
clicks and steps
until she’s beside Snub.
Mother lowers herself to the ground,
joints creaking and protesting.
Mother grooms Snub.
Snub grooms Mother.
The earth and sky take turns
growing and shrinking
and ringing in Snub’s ears.
She looks to the last place
she saw Breath and Orphan,
hoping for them to return.
But Snub knows that Orphan
will fight to live,
and that this means Orphan
and Breath
will not return.
The edges of the world remain white,
even when Snub keeps herself still.
She feels like she is floating again,
that she is like one of the magpies
watching Snub watch Mother.
She thinks of the nest,
looks up to see the birds
tending to their
home of sticks and spit,
which contains
the eggs
that contain
more magpies.
The magpies will stay with Snub and Mother.
Everything that exists in the world
has started to lull her.
Snub tucks Mother in closer,
treats Mother like she is Breath.
Mother does not seem to mind.
She gives out a long sigh
once she is fully in Snub’s arms.
There are motes in the air,
bits of seed and pollen and feather
that catch the sunlight.
The air is thick with them,
a column of unsettled debris
that rises toward the sun.
The motes seem to throb
to the sound of the cicadas.
Over their drone,
Snub hears the
easy shallow breathing of Mother,
Snub’s own pulse
sometimes quiet,
sometimes as loud as the drumming of the not-gorillas.
Snub’s eyes have shut and will not open.
She does not want to open them.
In her mind is the image of Orphan and Breath,
leaving the clea
ring hand in hand.
That vision is all she sees,
and Mother is all she feels.
There are voices,
voices of strangers,
of not-gorillas,
both right here
and
far in the distance,
voices
that are everywhere
and
nowhere at all,
are now and before and to be.
One hand in another,
fingers gripping fingers,
Snub holds Mother,
Mother holds Snub.
Orphan and Breath are
young and agile,
small and strong.
By now
they will be far away,
finding a new home.
Q. It’s not so often that a book’s set in the paleolithic era. What inspired you to write this story in particular, rather than a book about modern gorillas?
A. I knew from the start that this book would feature gorillas, but everything else was up in the air. Orphaned is the last entry in a quartet of novels about the great apes. It all started with Endangered (a girl crosses wartime Congo while taking care of an infant bonobo), then Threatened (a boy survives the jungles of Gabon only by working his way into a group of chimpanzees), followed by Rescued (a boy is raised alongside an orangutan, until he breaks his ape brother out of confinement and goes on the run). As I was writing these books, I knew I would save the gorillas for last. There’s something so noble and dignified about their calm demeanor—they’re sort of like ape royalty to me.
I live in Manhattan, and the Bronx Zoo is just a subway ride away. I learned that if I got up early, arrived right at opening, and wore my running shoes, I could be by myself with the gorillas for about forty-five minutes before the rest of the zoo visitors got there. They’re a rambunctious and charming family, and in those misty early-morning hours it felt like I was the out-of-place one, not the family of gorillas living in the big city.
At that same time, I was sitting on a book award jury, and my home was filled with teetering stacks of books. Amazing, beautiful books—but they all featured humans or animals that acted just like humans. I’d come home from those visits with these gorillas, with their specific and vivid personalities and their complicated emotions, and look at those books and think novels are almost always about people! I mean—obviously that’s true, but it suddenly struck me as interesting.
This impulse to focus on the stories of our own species seems highly related to the ecological devastation we humans are wreaking on the planet. We are so dominant now that our actions can and do cause mass extinctions of species like the great apes. In the early years, though, our preeminence was far from a foregone conclusion. We were once pitiful compared to animals with strong teeth or fast legs or virulent poison or tough hides. What changed is that we learned to use tools, and use them well. Once we could use weapons to kill animals and eat meat, we got a surge of daily calories, which we could use to fuel our explosive brain growth. Brains are expensive organs—our 1450 cubic centiliter brain uses up 25 percent of our daily calorie intake.1 (Gorillas, by comparison, have a much less costly 530 cc brain—despite having an average body mass that’s twice ours.)2
The early human story is thought to have involved a mass migration from Africa into Europe and the Middle East millions of years ago, followed by a return to Africa as tool-users around the time this book takes place. What culminated in our total dominance today started with a more neutral interaction hundreds of thousands of years ago. At some point, stronger gorillas must have had their first interaction with smarter humans. That first encounter really happened, somewhere, and once I realized that, I got fascinated by all the ways it might have played out.
Q. So Orphan and the “not-gorillas” were part of Snub’s story from the very beginning?
A. Actually, no. Originally my idea was that a tool would accidentally come into the gorillas’ possession, and that using this valuable object would become divisive and cause the gorillas to fracture, until a young gorilla goes on a journey to get rid of it and save her family. All well and good, except for a big problem: Once I started researching gorillas, I realized such a thing would never happen. Chimps, sure. Those clever and aggressive animals, so like us in all their competitive hysteria, would be perfect for a story like that. But a gorilla would look at a weapon, shrug, and go take a nap. They’re far more interested in the important business of grooming and eating.
That’s why the early humans became part of the novel. This ape quartet started with Endangered, about a human taking care of an orphan ape. I decided to take it full circle, and see how it might work the other way around, with a gorilla caring for a human. I wish we as a species could be nurtured by gorillas long enough to learn their greatest lesson: Take only what you need to survive, and leave the rest.
Q. And how about Snub in particular? How did you come up with her character?
A. Though young female gorillas leave their families to prevent inbreeding (just like in most every human culture throughout history), the gorilla herself would of course have no idea that was why she was leaving. Though natural selection is what gives Snub that drive, she’d have an emotional experience of it and not an intellectual one.
I started to wonder: What would be the gorilla’s-eye view of leaving home? What would Snub be feeling that would cause her to forsake everything she’s ever known and wander off?
She’s basically Belle in the beginning of Beauty and the Beast, wanting “much more than this provincial life.” Only she’s a prehistoric gorilla with no singing voice. Otherwise just the same.
Q. How about Snub’s name?
A. Gorillas all have distinctive nose-prints! It’s how zookeepers and researchers tell them apart.
Q. Where should readers look to find out more about the “not-gorilla” early humans in the book?
A. There is still some debate about whether there’s a meaningful distinction between the species homo erectus and homo ergaster. The two, previously thought to be genetically distinct populations, might actually be the same species of early human. In any case, they died out long enough ago (50,000 years ago at the latest) that it’s hard to piece together much about their lives from the fossil record. Consensus is that they would have had a fine covering of hair over their bodies, with more on the top of their heads. Though it’s unclear if the species had full language, they would almost certainly have communicated orally to some extent. They lived in collaborative groups, and might or might not have used fire—whether to cook (less likely) or to scare off predators (more likely). Anthropologists are pretty certain that they used simple tools in order to kill animals and also to skin them and wear their pelts, thereby avoiding the caloric cost of growing thick fur of their own—with the side benefit of allowing them to sweat more effectively, so they could run long distances to wear their prey down to exhaustion before the kill. Long-distance running is something we humans brought to the table.
The most famous homo ergaster is known as the “Turkana Boy,” a fossil discovered in 1984 and the topic of Episode 2 of Nova’s excellent documentary series Becoming Human. Scientists have used the layers of enamel on his teeth to date him, and discovered he was a very large 5′3″ upon his death at approximately age eight.
It’s important to remember that humanness also added some moving, lovely qualities to the primate branch of life. We’re not just jerks. The skeleton of an elder homo ergaster has been found that had been missing his teeth for two years before his death. Scientists postulate from that evidence that the others in his tribe might have chewed his food for him.3 Gorillas haven’t been observed doing similar; they will readily abandon other gorillas that get sick or infirm. Though humans have a higher capacity for interspecies violence than gorillas, they also have a higher capacity for caring, which I tried to capture in Orphan’s surprising (to Snub) compassion for Mother. It’s the paradox of humans: We really love animals e
ven while we eat them and destroy their environment.
Q. Scientists who write about the emotions of animals sometimes get accused of anthropomorphism, or erroneously assigning human qualities to animals that don’t actually have them. Were you worried about that while trying to enter an animal’s consciousness?
A. In researching gorillas, I leaned heavily on the writings of naturalist George Schaller, Dian Fossey’s predecessor in studying gorillas in the wild. He was fascinated by the particularities of gorilla nature, and one of his lines always stuck with me: Unlike chimps, gorillas “are introverts, who keep their emotions suppressed. They retain their outward dignity when in fact they may inwardly be seething with excitement and turmoil.”4 Is this anthropomorphism? Or is it useful scientific observation?
There’s a German word, umwelt, which, in the words of primatologist Frans de Waal, “stresses an organism’s self-centered, subjective world, which represents only a small tranche of all available worlds.”5 In other words, to look into another animal’s umwelt is to imagine how that animal sees the world. For example: A dog, with a nose more sensitive than its eyes, is getting more information about what’s upwind of her than what’s in front of her. Plenty of philosophers have tried to explore what another being’s umwelt would be like, most famously Thomas Nagel in his 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Most thinkers writing about umwelt agree that any attempt must fail, that it’s impossible to fully get over our own humanness. But I think it’s no sin to try, and that attempting to imagine the point of view of “the other” is the best way we have to expand our empathy. As Joshua Rothman put it, “In our efforts to imagine animal minds, there will always be a tension between sympathetic imagination and rational skepticism. Perhaps we should bend in the direction of sympathy.”6
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