by Maurice
The Orange Bridge was suspended by thick metal vines called cables. Caesar sent chimpanzees up them, climbing high into the obscuring fog. He sent orangutans beneath the bridge, to swing on the girders below; he tasked me to lead them. Some chimps went with us as well, scampering on the tops of the metal beams.
The air did not swarm with flying machines. There was only one, but it was deadly enough. As we prepared to fight our way through to the forest, it arrived. It began shooting at the apes on the cables above. I saw the first of us fall, tumbling past me, vanishing into the gray waters below.
Caesar led some chimps and the gorillas straight ahead on the bridge, just as the humans expected, and soon the humans on horseback arrived, clubbing apes from their higher vantage. Rather than be driven, Caesar and Buck turned some apes around to fight them.
The gorillas reached the bus. But instead of going over it or around it, they did as Caesar told them. They pushed it over and then forward, using it as a shield against the humans who waited beyond it, with their guns.
And when it was close enough, pushed all the way to the human position, Caesar led us into battle, mounted on a horse he had taken from the humans. As he and those on the bridge charged, those of us below it came up, and those above came down.
The humans, crouched behind many of their cars for shelter, expecting us to come from only one direction, were surrounded. We overwhelmed them in moments, and they fled.
But then the flying machine rose up as we orangs had, from beneath the bridge, and the big gun on it started spitting the death we now know so well. You cannot see the bullets coming; it is as if they are invisible. Imagine dying without knowing what is killing you. We knew to run, to hide from the unseen murder in the air itself. But that was not enough.
The machine moved closer. Caesar found a weighted chain in one of the cars. He threw it, knocking the men with the big gun from the machine. But another man with a smaller gun kept shooting. And he was shooting at Caesar.
Buck did not kill a hundred men. In fact, he spared one at Caesar’s command earlier in the battle. He hurled one over the side of the bridge. That human probably died.
What Buck did do was push Caesar aside, shielding him with his body. Then he sprang through the air toward the helicopter. Toward the gun. It was a mighty leap. Bullets hit him, but they did not stop him.
Buck brought the machine down. The man with the gun died. So did the man making the machine fly. Buck killed three men.
But the man with the gun killed Buck. Caesar was with him as he took his last breath.
There was another human in the helicopter who was still alive. Jacobs, the man from Gen-Sys. The human Koba hated above all others, the one who supervised his torture. He remained in the flying machine as it teetered on the edge of the bridge. I watched Caesar rise from beside Buck’s body and walk over to the machine. The man begged for his help, but Caesar turned away.
But he didn’t just turn away. He nodded at Koba. He gave Koba permission.
And Koba pushed the helicopter and the man off the bridge.
Caesar told us not to kill humans if we could help it. But for this man he made an exception. I can understand his decision, and it helped seal Koba’s loyalty to him. But that loyalty was tainted from the start. Koba thought he and Caesar were more alike than they really were.
With the defeat of the flying machine, the way to the woods was clear, and Caesar led us there.
As soon as we entered those trees, it seemed as if we had entered a different world. A place far from men. A place for apes. Not the Forest of Fruit, but good enough.
Our First Days in the Forest
But, of course, we were not in another world, or far from man.
One of the humans on the bridge that day was Will. He had come to find Caesar, so when we went into the woods, Will followed us. He was determined to bring Caesar back to his house to live with him. While the rest of us clambered among the trees, reveling in our freedom, Koba noticed the human following us. He didn’t know who Will was, of course. He had no reason to believe any human could be good, so he attacked Will. He knocked him down. And Will would have died then if Caesar hadn’t also noticed him. He struck Koba away from Will and forced a reluctant submission from him. Koba was confused, angry, and hurt by this. Caesar had just let him kill one human. Why not another?
We watched as human and ape embraced. We came nearer, not certain what was happening. I feared your father would go back to the City with Will and leave us leaderless.
Everything was very quiet, and I heard Will ask Caesar to stop what he was doing and return with him. To come home.
And then Caesar spoke for the second time. Not “no” yelled in defiance, but something much quieter. The noise was so little I barely heard it.
“Caesar is home,” he told the human.
Then he joined us, and we left, moving deeper into the woods.
Many of the apes thought we were free. That our troubles were over. But of course, they were just beginning. We were in a place strange to us. Food did not come in little boxes, and water did not come from tubes. We were exhausted, and many of us were wounded. We needed rest, and time to heal. We thought we would have that time. Even Caesar thought so. He didn’t believe they would come after us immediately.
At first it seemed that we were right. We heard a helicopter in the distance, but then things grew quiet.
Caesar led us to a place he knew—a stream of cold, clear water. There we drank for the first time in untold hours. We washed our wounds. We laughed when one of the little ones fell in and screeched in surprise.
The stream was sheltered by a small canyon, and the canopy above was thick. We made our first camp.
As the first night fell, Caesar gathered us together. He chose guards and lookouts to warn us of approaching danger, but before he sent them out—before the last of fading sunlight was gone—he stood in a clearing. He lifted his hands and clasped them together.
Then he began signing.
Free, he signed. Apes are free now. Apes no longer do what humans want us to do. Apes do what apes want. This is freedom. He lifted his arms, as if embracing the trees and the sky. “Apes together strong.”
He said those words aloud. Tired and wounded though they were, our new troop lifted their voices at that. After a moment, Caesar motioned for us to be quiet.
“The humans may look for us,” he said. “If they do, we will not fight them. The woods will hide us. Eventually they will give up. But not if we bring harm to them. Not if we kill them. If we kill them, they will never stop hunting us. We must be quiet, and careful, and wait.”
Most of them didn’t know what he was saying. Many of those who had Changed didn’t know how to sign, although many of them had already picked up a few of the gestures. Very few of the zoo apes knew how to sign. Caesar was talking to those who did the hand talk, so that we could guide the others. The newcomers at least understood that there was something different about us, and they recognized that Caesar was our leader instinctively.
The first night was long and cold, and we huddled together for heat. But the stars came out. Some of those apes had never seen the stars, as hard as that might be to imagine.
Yes, that first night was cold and frightening. All of us did not live through it. A chimp named Mbwé who was shot in the stomach finally succumbed to his wound.
But it was also a good night.
Morning finally came; I awoke to discover I had not been dreaming of escape, but that it was real. The lookouts and scouts hadn’t seen any evidence of humans nearby. Caesar, Rocket, and Koba led small groups to forage for food and get a better idea of what lay around us. Caesar left me with instructions to begin teaching sign, and so I gathered a sizable group and began.
As some of them began to catch on, one of them—Musang, an orangutan born in the Forest of Fruit—asked what the sign for tree was. I told him. Then he pointed at another tree and asked the same question. I told him that it was also a
tree. He looked agitated. He pointed at the leaves on the first tree and then at the leaves of the second tree. At first I didn’t understand, but then I saw they weren’t shaped the same.
Cornelia, who already knew some sign, was watching.
Not the same kind of tree, she told me. The kind of tree matters. Some make fruit or nuts that are good to eat. Others make fruit or nuts that are not.
I thought through some of the signs I knew. Circus. Car. Tricycle. Those would be of no use in our new home. And I now realized that there were many things in the woods I had no names for.
We will have to make new signs, I said. But we start with the old. Do either of these trees make good fruit?
I don’t know, your mother said. These trees are all different from those where I was born. Very different.
Both of these trees were of the shorter sort that grow in the shade of the Great Trees. Cornelia and the other ape examined them. From beneath one, Cornelia found an acorn (we did not have that word then) and from beneath the other a small green nut. Cornelia examined the round fruit, nibbled at it, peeled it, and took another bite.
Hard, she said. Maybe not ready to eat yet. It may ripen. Then she tried the acorn.
Sharp tasting, she said. She made a face but finished it. Might be poison.
How can we know for sure? I asked.
Wait, she said. If I get sick, it’s poison.
She didn’t get sick. The acorns didn’t taste good, and sometimes made our bellies hurt, but they were food. We later learned the green fruit was delicious, but only for a few days when the weather begins to cool. It’s the one we call “little avocado.”
Caesar and the others returned with more substantial food. All of it was human food, found in abandoned buildings or camps. It still wasn’t much given the mouths we had to feed.
They also had a better idea of what our situation was, and it wasn’t good news. Roads into and out of the woods were blocked. At most of these places, several, or in some cases many, humans with guns were camped. Some had begun moving into the woods. Helicopters were searching the edges of the forest but moving in deeper.
We’ll keep the main troop here for now, Caesar told us. We’ll send out scouting parties to leave signs for the humans to find, make them think we’re someplace else. Keep them busy hunting where we are not.
Rocket and Koba nodded.
That’s a good plan, I said. For now. But eventually they will figure out where we are by where we are not.
Yes, Caesar said. And then we will have to move.
The Humans Hunt Apes
The next day, we put Caesar’s plan into action. We hunted for humans in the forest far from the troop, revealed ourselves, then fled away from where the others were hiding.
It worked for five days. On the fifth day, one of the other orangutans—Percy—heard a helicopter coming and hooted an alert. Caesar and Rocket went up to the treetops and saw it was coming straight for us. The morning fog was nearly gone, and Caesar feared we would be seen. He came back down and ordered me to lead the troop away, out of the path of the machine.
Caesar and Cornelia had their first argument then. She had taken it on herself to nurse the injured, and she insisted they should not be moved, that they would suffer if they were, and when he told her they must move anyway, she persisted. He barked at her then, and she submitted, but not as quickly as Caesar might have liked.
Caesar had not grown up around female apes, so he had only his instincts to go on, and his instinct told him that females should submit to the troop leader. Cornelia confused him, and Caesar was never comfortable with being confused.
Despite Cornelia’s warning, we moved the troop. Meanwhile, Caesar took seven others with him. These were the chimps Rocket, Koba, Dallas, and Sam, and the orangutans Keling, Musang, and Eastwood. Together they rushed into the upper canopy to distract the flying machine. They were almost too late; the machine had flown past them. Caesar got the humans’ attention by throwing a branch at them. The machine turned back and began shooting at the apes, but not with bullets like the one that killed Buck. Instead, they were firing the little darts that made apes sleep. The humans were trying to capture them, not kill them, Caesar realized. And he couldn’t allow either to happen.
He and his group led the machine on a long chase. By vanishing into the trees and then reappearing, they led the machine away from the slowly moving troop. Many of the wounded had become worse, not better over time. Their wounds grew hot and puffy. We had to carry many of them.
When darkness came, Caesar called off the chase and ordered those with him to descend. The chase had gone on long enough, and neither apes nor humans could see well at night. He expected the helicopter to leave.
Instead, more arrived and began shooting blindly into the canopy. This time it sounded like they were using killing bullets, so Caesar ordered the apes to go to the ground. There, they tried to creep away in the darkness and the fog.
But he had done exactly what the humans wanted him to do. He had led his apes into a trap.
He could not have known that humans had machine eyes they could wear to see in the dark, but he learned it then. The apes were met by both darts and real gunfire, and their only choice was to take back to the trees, although they were in danger of falling in the dark. We orangs are more sure-handed in the trees, so Caesar commanded that the orangs carry the chimps on their backs. Even with their machine eyes, the humans could not follow into the trees, and so Caesar and six of his apes escaped the ambush. Dallas did not, but they would not know that until daylight came again. Weary and somewhat discouraged, Caesar found his way back to the troop. What other things might the humans have that he didn’t know about?
The First Ape Council
Back at the shelter, Caesar had had a plan well thought through. He had executed it, and the apes were now free. But he realized now that he hadn’t planned beyond entering the forest. He still didn’t have a strategy that could keep them safe for more than a few days. That had to change. He had to think of something. We all trusted him. We all counted on him, and he knew it.
When he reached the troop, he was almost immediately confronted again by Cornelia. She argued again that the troop needed rest and food. Caesar wasn’t in the mood, and he snapped at her. She retreated, but still with that air of defiance.
Caesar later told me that he knew she was right. That was part of the problem. He had to choose between risking some of us to save the rest.
The next night, three more apes died of their wounds. I brought him the news.
Find Rocket, he told me. We three must talk.
That was when Caesar realized he couldn’t do everything on his own. That even a great leader needed others.
That was the beginning of the Ape Council.
Our first action was to divide the troop into three smaller bands. All of us in one place was just too much to hide. Caesar put me in charge of the females with young and the wounded, along with most of the wild-born apes who knew how to find food. The other two bands, led by Rocket and Caesar, would continue to engage the humans and draw them away from my band.
Their first action was to take the two chimps and the orangutan who had died in the night far from the troop, to a place where the humans would find them. Koba went with Caesar to carry the bodies, but when they were done, he sent Koba back to me. Koba wasn’t happy about this. He thought Caesar didn’t trust him.
Koba was right. Caesar had seen how much Koba hated humans. After the death of Dallas, Koba was even angrier. Caesar worried that if they encountered humans again, Koba would lose control. That could lead to a fight, which Caesar was trying to avoid.
Finding food was becoming a greater problem than avoiding the humans. Cornelia told us that in the Forest of Fruit, when lean times came, troops broke into ever smaller bands, spreading out in the forest. We had done something similar, but there was only so far we could spread, with the humans hemming us in. Furaha and Raphael, two chimps born wild, rem
embered their fathers hunting monkeys when there wasn’t much else to eat. They taught us how to hunt small animals. We also learned to dig grubs and other crawling things from the earth and rotten trees. This was good for the chimps, who liked meat, and for gorillas, who could tolerate it. For orangutans, however, meat is difficult to digest. The human food Caesar scavenged in the forest was all gone by then. We had discovered some leaves we could eat, but the long thin leaves of the Great Trees were inedible.
Once again, Caesar did what he had to do for his apes.
In the west, the forest came up against the sea. At night, high in the trees, we could see the lights of the City beyond the bridge. But that was too far, too dangerous. But in the east, we could make out the lights of smaller human settlements.
Caesar took his band of apes there, traveling by moonlight. He found the places where humans get their food—whole buildings full of food—and he took what we needed. This was dangerous, because the humans patrolled the limits of the forest. On their first trip to the town, they went unnoticed. But when they went again, they found humans waiting for them.
Or so Caesar thought at first. But then he realized the humans were fighting each other for the food in the building.
He had never seen such a thing before. But he knew what it meant.
It meant that the humans were starving, too. It seemed impossible. But it was bad news for apes. If there wasn’t enough food for humans, there would soon be nothing for us to scavenge.
On the way back, they did run into a human patrol that was clearly waiting for them to return. The humans had figured out what Caesar was up to—yet another reason that foraging human food was not a long-term solution. It would help us for a few days, but we would have to find something else to sustain us. But I did not despair. I knew Caesar would find a way.