Sometimes he felt he was being pushed to certain parts of the house without having consented. He heard the noise he made preparing his meals, hitting a knife against the chopping board, blasting water from the faucet, steaming pots on the stove. He kept turning round, as if expecting someone. By habit he cut vegetables to the left of the sink, never to the right. He sat at the same seat at the table, facing the wall, though it meant he had to turn to check the door. Watching the flow of his hands pushing and lifting pieces of food, it appeared that they were weaving, building, stitching something together rather than taking it apart.
The previous evening he had been distracted, and when he looked down he saw that he had set an extra place, that both chairs were pulled out, two plates laid, and that food had been prepared for another person. He waited a moment. A voice seemed to approach from outside, and he veered away, dismissing the thought. Who is it? Who is there? But as he packed the unnecessary portion into a container and left it to cool, he thought of the familiar tributes left for the dead, the meals prepared and deposited at gravesides, the anniversaries on which an absent person is accommodated at a table.
VIII
North gate communicated with us sporadically, a curt acknowledgement of our brief reports every few days. Selina had suggested that there remained a remote chance the doctor might join us, and though naturally this should be a good thing – it would help speed up blood analysis, for one thing – I instinctively disliked the idea. An addition to the group, at this point, when we had worked hard at achieving a kind of balance, risked upsetting us. Food distribution would also be a problem. I dismissed it – it was an unnecessary and unlikely worry.
After the first week of contact we were well practised in our routine. We had thirty-one individuals, an unnaturally small troop which still split into three fluid sub-groups foraging in the day, maintaining regular vocal contact, then regrouping in the evenings in defensive alliance to build new nests and sleep. Each of us followed our sub-group from ‘bed to bed’, noting blocks of activity at fifteen-minute intervals and building up a thickening profile in our small digital devices. Later, in the evenings, we went over our data, trying to infer meaningful patterns. Generally, we observed food gathering and repeated various sexual encounters. Incidents of genito-genital rubbing were, as expected, close in number to those of male–female copulation. Sometimes we heard them laughing. It was distinct from every other vocal sound, wheezy, chesty, sparked when grooming turned to tickling or when the juveniles played. One of their favourite plays was mock free-falling, dropping from a height near the canopy and rushing through the air until, at the last second, they reached out a limb and grabbed at a branch. However many times you saw this gravity-play, you couldn’t look away, heart in mouth, sure that this time they were going to misjudge and hit the ground, and that you needed to watch, to monitor them, as if your presence was somehow reassuring.
Though they had little curiosity about us, they remained extremely sensitive to cues in our behaviour. This was defensive. They would rather not watch us but couldn’t help being aware of what we expressed. Part of the reason, perhaps, I was so drawn to my group was the solicitation and concern I read in them after exhibiting my illness, two of the matriarchs coming towards me, inspecting me. I had the feeling I had never been read so rapidly or exhaustively. They didn’t like change, wary of anything that might have been a beginning, that might have led to new, unpredictable courses of events. This was why initial contact was so fraught. Moving forward, we had to act, to put on a front, to try to be the same person every day to reassure them. Regardless of how we felt, whatever new anxieties were moving through us, we had to appear uniform and unchanging. If on one day I walked slightly faster than on others, I might inadvertently antagonise the troop, who could read a purpose I didn’t intend, thus invalidating the day’s reports. It was difficult to maintain this front and also unlikely to work; fooling them wasn’t so straightforward.
We couldn’t move abruptly, and we had to keep measuring and re-evaluating our position – too close, we interfered and disturbed them, too far and they might wonder what had happened to us, whether our absence signalled something portentous. To the amusement of Alice and myself, the older matriarchs in Jane’s group were becoming especially protective of her, displaying maternal gestures, on one occasion even supplying her with food. When we mentioned it she dismissed us in a fit of awkwardness, shaking her head, her face obscured beneath her fringe but not entirely concealing the red glow.
One of the useful things in having Jane with us was precisely what we had been most concerned about, namely her naivety. Because she didn’t know much about the animals her eyes were fresh, and she saw some things Alice and I, more habituated, failed to notice. And she wasn’t afraid to risk open, disarmed questions. She was surprised how much, for instance, the animals smelled each other, touched each other, independently from grooming. Two of her group were particularly interested in smelling opened mouths; Jane was recording this behaviour in depth, tallying each incident and looking for patterns. Was it more frequent first thing in the day, did it follow food consumption, did it tend more often than not to develop into brief acts of intercourse? She matched this smelling with the relationships she had charted in her group, seeing how it correlated with seniority. I asked her to keep me informed of results – there were obvious potential applications regarding health and diet: were they measuring food consumption; were they inspecting the development of an infection in the mouth? – but I was wary of pushing the hypothesis too strongly. Obviously we would pay close attention to these animals – to their mouths – when we took samples of their blood.
One of the frequent actions I noted was an animal approaching a conspecific while the latter was occupied in a task – eating, rubbing itself against a favourite tree bark, intercourse – and putting its hand over the other’s hand, simply for the feel of it, the sense of the second animal’s activity running through its body. It was difficult not to see such behaviour, historically, as instrumental to the development of empathy. This wasn’t an original observation, though seeing an animal press its hand first on the chest, then the throat, of a conspecific who was calling out, thrilled me with possible implications. Alice, when I shared this with her over the evening’s meal, was careful to stress the importance of objective, impersonal observation, how vital it was we remained detached at all times. As soon as we go in looking for something, as soon as we approach the work in anything other than a neutral frame of mind, the work is compromised. Obviously I knew this; obviously Alice didn’t need to tell me; and though she might have claimed she did so for the benefit of Jane’s education, it was difficult not to feel deliberately slighted.
The one thing, predictably, Jane had known about the species was that they were extravagantly and innovatively sexual. As with most new observers, however, she was surprised, even a little disappointed, at how ordinary, quiet and lacking in drama the sexual dynamics could be. Sex was casual, both in the lack of any lasting attachments and in its mundane functionality. The phrase Jane used, after a week’s observation, was ‘social hygiene’; it kept everything going in more than just the biological sense. Sex as greeting, sex as confirmation and reaffirmation of bonds, sex as a means of calming, defusing and recovering from a slight elevation of tension between two or more individuals. Duration was frequently a matter of seconds rather than minutes, and this brevity, together with the naturalness in which any of various non-sexual activities would transition into intercourse, made it unclear, sometimes, when sex was actually taking place. Intercourse was something like repeatedly interrupted but enduring activity, in the way that sleeping is, or eating, or defecating. Sometimes the acts stood out – Jane had skipped the part in her preparatory reading stating bonobos frequently assumed the missionary position, and that from various other positions too, in fact from any position in which it was possible, they would maintain eye contact for the duration, increasing, or heightening, the intensity of pl
easure derived.
Everything was going well. We continued to hear signs of disturbance in the night, calls from the troop suggesting alarm, but finding no evidence of any external source, we put this down to repetition, the memorial of a prior event. The animals appeared relatively healthy, certainly with no obvious signs of illness. This was when the miscount happened. We assumed it was caused by a simple transfer between sub-groups, a younger animal probably. This could happen daily, sometimes hourly. There were now ten instead of nine in Jane’s group (C). In counting the other two groups, one of them should reflect this and be down a number. But the numbers were constant. We went over this at night. We couldn’t blame her – she had virtually no experience and was doing the best she could. I’d been surprised how capable she was; she observed patiently and recorded simply and directly. Alice said she shouldn’t worry, it was the easiest thing in the world to miscount, they move so quickly, she would get the hang of it.
‘Start with identifying marks,’ she said, ‘soon enough you won’t have to try – you’ll know them by the way they move.’
‘No,’ Jane said. ‘I was careful. I know how to do it. I didn’t miscount. There’s one more, a new one.’
We went through all the checking procedures, counting and recounting, defining each individual with as much detail as we could. It was difficult, laborious work, irritating, and it set us back. We noted attributes by hand and recorded more video. In theory, the easiest time to make a total survey was in the night, when the sub-groups fused together, aligned in individual nests. But there were practical difficulties: too close and the whole troop scattered; too distant, in this darkness and obstructed by the foliage, and you never saw them to begin with.
I stopped, crouched, held my breath. It was late, that thick, heavy last light, almost gone. I’d been about to move on when I’d heard a snap and realised he was, not directly above me, but close enough for me to see, even in the poorer light. I’d lost him an hour ago. The trees between us were thinner, recently stripped, though I was evidently concealed from his position. With my lenses I could see up at him, his shifting black fur, close to the top of his tree, preparing his nest.
He was quiet – all I heard was the one branch snapping; the nest was tall and almost complete. He was young – perhaps he’d only been building one or two years. He shook the stems loose and gently, firmly popped the leaves from the branch so they came away intact. He scattered the leaves around the circular rim of the nest’s upper layer. He had come to the end, stopping but not yet lying down in the nest. He turned to his right side, and I was able to see, through my lenses, that he had stored a bundle of large, soft fig leaves along the rim of the nest. I’d never seen this before. He spat onto the bundle and pressed down on it. He was pasting the leaves, making a parcel. When he was finished this – only a few seconds; he had judged in advance how many of these leaves he needed – he sat back, peered at it and looked out beyond the forest at the sky. Almost dark; I could just see. He carefully placed the pillow inside and then, awkwardly, turned his body round, shifting it in the narrow enclosure of the thicker branches around him, and lay himself down inside.
My mind was racing. I tried to take it all in. Before building, he looked around him and projected the amount of space he would occupy. The same embodied self-knowledge the animals used in judging which branches were and were not strong enough to hold them. He looked around him, and in the base where three strong branches met the trunk he envisaged himself in it, blended with it, dark fur and wide bridge of nose set into the looping strings of leaves. He then stripped enough from the tree to model himself, making a bowl, a container, a place to be held in. But this wasn’t the end. He built a new object for his head and put it inside the nest. He carried an image of his head – its size, weight and texture – and modelled the new object on it. He looked around him – earlier, while foraging – and picked out the softest leaves he could find. He prolonged the foraging, risking the irritation of the others in his group, expending more of his energy, searching for the parts of the ground that best matched his perception of the demanding sensitivity of his head.
I had never seen leaves sought out and collected in advance for the particular purpose of soothing the head. This was extraordinary. I crouched, now in darkness, which either made the insects seem louder or was the signal they took to amplify their call. He had displayed tacit acknowledgement of some special need to protect the head. I found this, presently, affecting: the determination of the gesture, the extra effort in fetching those especially soft leaves. He had carried them, even with difficulty, retained them; this was self-kindness, an effort towards a small satisfaction and a pleasure. Had he enjoyed even anticipating it? Displaying this care towards himself? Did he look forward to lying down, to the sensation of tranquillity and of the world drifting away?
We were more wary tranquillising mothers of dependent-age infants. Those under four years were practically inseparable from their mothers, so we had to dart both at once. The process for a single animal took between nine and fourteen minutes, depending on constitution and the effectiveness of the dose. Around half the time, after shooting the dart, we’d also need to shave a small area in order to find the vein. It was more likely in mother–infant lettings that one of them would wake mid-operation. Though the process could take twice as long, equivalently heavier doses were considered dangerous and weren’t permitted.
Jane’s words, her clipped manner of talking, her accent and the softness of her voice, made it particularly difficult to hear her underneath her mask. I was irritable because of the time sensitivity. I had the feeling, possibly having picked up some series of small details subconsciously, that this adult might wake sooner than the others, and that there was extra pressure to finish quickly.
‘Wait,’ she said, speaking up. ‘We’re sure we haven’t sampled her before?’
‘Of course.’
‘But look at this.’ She directed us to a neat circle of exposed skin on the underside of the infant male’s neck.
‘What – is that shaved? Can’t be.’
‘It’s recent, look, you can just feel the beginnings of the regrowth.’
‘And here, look – those are syringe marks?’
Inside the shaved patch, in the centre of a purple bruise, were two small red incisions.
‘The marks are too thick. It’s not us.’
‘The patch is circular, looks like it was trimmed by a machine. But not ours.’
‘It’s a bite, isn’t it?’ I leaned back.
‘Some animals do that,’ Alice said. ‘Vampire bats, I’ve seen them. They use their canine teeth to shave hair and help them lap at blood.’
I remembered the rumour, claiming piercings on the cadavers’ necks. ‘You’ve seen them?’
‘Not here, I don’t mean. Anyway, it’s not fatal.’
‘It must have attacked it in its nest, when they were both sleeping.’
‘Best time to see them would be at dusk. We should try. From the bite marks, I’d say they’re big. Look for prints by the stream, where they drink. Angled hind-prints from the curved thighs.’
‘They walk? Bats? On the ground?’
‘Rarely. They’re actually capable of running, too.’
‘The infant’s in your group?’
‘I’ll watch him, sure. You think something might happen?’
Our time was passing – there surely wasn’t long until the animals woke.
I passed Jane the file and she scratched out fungus from the molars, tapping it into her bag. She’d now found fungal residue in three animals, none of whom were showing any ill-effects. This residue was hard to age, but at least indicated they’d been eating from it recently. We finished up, packed our things away, and as we left I noted the animals beginning to stir.
Walking back, we discussed the possibilities. We agreed the bites were unlikely to be fatal; more of the group would have been affected. Our favoured thesis hadn’t changed: if the fungus had pois
oned the two animals earlier, then it had happened indirectly. What additional agent created the toxicity? And why would only some of them suffer?
‘What if we’re thinking about it the wrong way? What if it’s nothing outside?’ Jane walked more easily through the thicket than either myself or Alice. ‘Like, it’s not a diet thing, but it’s the way they eat it. Would that be possible?’
‘How they chew?’
‘Maybe if it’s digested too quickly it can become toxic?’
‘Or the opposite, a long-term effect. If they don’t scrape their mouths, say, the fungus turns, the stomach acid no longer neutralises it, it turns to poison?’
We’d arrived back at camp. Alice gathered a bucket from the stream and went to wash her vests. Jane retreated to her tent, bringing her samples. I watched her a moment and thought about psilocybin, the absurd hypothesis of fungus evoking hallucinations in animals. Though maybe hallucination wasn’t so ridiculous; there might even be a logic. If the animals were denied real space – enough matter to live inside – then false space was an alternative. Similar ideas had been used in zoos for decades. Sculpted water features and fibreglass trees were inserted into primate dens, mimicking the extinct home environment. Attractive plants were electrified to stop the animals eating them. Psychopharmacological supplements became a large part of the captive animals’ diet, individually calibrated according to behavioural observation and blood tests; the intention was to relieve visibly anxious and depressive states. Some keepers to whom individuals had become attached put ground Valium into the animals’ food thirty minutes before they left each morning to lessen the volume of their shrieks on departure. The animals couldn’t bear them going. Groups had been recorded consuming urine and faeces from those individuals fed the strongest doses.
Gathering Evidence Page 10