Wild Life

by Keena Roberts

  Laurana and I were a good team, as it turned out. We started each practice with two warm-up laps around the field and then a series of passing and shooting drills designed to teach us how to catch and throw quickly. While I carried us through the running drills, I had to give Laurana all the credit for the passing and shooting. The yellow rubber balls seemed magnetically attracted to her, and as we jogged down the field to where the goalie stood ready to fend off our attack, we snapped up every pass and tossed the balls back to our teammates with astonishing accuracy. So accurate, in fact, that after a week or so of practice my coach pulled me aside to ask if I wouldn’t mind playing with some of the more experienced players because they needed another person for their practice game.

  I was feeling extra chuffed (as Dad would have said) when I walked over to where the other girls were warming up on the field next to ours. I rested Laurana on my shoulder and tried to look casual. My God, these girls were all so tall and pretty. What was I doing here? I felt like the solitary wildebeest that mixed in with the herds of zebras and hoped the zebras wouldn’t notice how hairy and ungraceful he was. The sweat on the back of my neck grew cold. What was I thinking? The zebras always knew. The field was muddy from a rainstorm the night before and my legs were already splattered with mud from my warm-up run. I tried wiping some of the mud off with the back of my sneaker but succeeded only in smearing it across my legs.

  I was standing off to the side waiting for someone to say something to me, but the pack of girls turned and jogged away, leaving just one girl on the sidelines who was still tying her shoes. She looked up at me with piercing blue eyes. Her long, fine blonde hair had been whipped up into a messy bun with flyaway wisps framing her face. She was very tall and skinny but in a muscular kind of way that reminded me of an antelope. She was terrifying.

  “I know you,” she said. You do? I thought to myself. Oh my God, how? I know we’re in the same class but you’ve never spoken to me in your life. “You’re that girl from Africa.”

  “Yeah, hi,” I said, amazed that I could even speak. “I’m Keena.”

  “I’m Brooke,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Uh…my coach said you needed another player for your scrimmage game.”

  “Well, we don’t.” Oh.

  “Okay,” I said. “Sorry…I’ll just wait here for your coach then. I’m supposed to talk to her.” Brooke cocked her head and narrowed her eyes.

  “You really are new here,” she said. My stomach flipped. What had I done wrong this time?

  “I’m not new here,” I said. “I’ve been going to this school for a long time.”

  “You so are,” she said. “Those gym shorts look like they’re your dad’s”—they were actually my mom’s—“and your hair…” Here, she paused for effect. “Is that a bowl cut?” I reached up and pushed a lock of hair behind my ear. I was actually pretty proud of how my hair was growing out after another disastrous cut by my mother in Baboon Camp. It was now long enough to cover my ears and if I tried really hard I could put it up in a ponytail. My hands started to shake and I swallowed hard.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, though I didn’t know what I was apologizing for.

  “I’ll tell my coach you were here, monkey girl,” Brooke said and picked up her lacrosse stick from where it was leaning against the aluminum bench. “Go make out with some monkeys.”

  I watched Brooke join the girls in the middle of the field and then turned around to walk back to my own team, scrubbing furiously at the trickle of sweat that ran down my forehead. My insides felt like they’d been scrambled in a blender. How was it possible I’d screwed up so badly just by introducing myself?

  At the end of practice, I met Nat back at school. His mother was picking us up and I was going to have dinner at their house, since Mom and Dad would be working late and Lucy went to a friend’s house. This happened often enough that none of the teachers on pickup duty bothered asking me for a note. I felt sad and tired but tried to smile as Nat’s mom, Cathy, pulled up.

  Nat climbed into the front seat of the minivan and I settled into the seat behind him, in what he called the “captain’s chair.” Cathy turned around in the driver’s seat and said, “I’m glad you’re coming over, Keena. I have a pound of grapes that need eating and my kids won’t touch them.”

  I grinned. Grapes were my favorite fruit and we never got them in Botswana. They had been at the top of the list of foods I was looking forward to when we got back to America, right behind pizza. I loved it when Cathy unloaded all her family’s fruit on me, though I never understood why Nat didn’t eat it. As far as I knew, since first grade he had subsisted on the same diet of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chewy Chips Ahoy cookies.

  “What do you want to do at my house?” Nat asked, and we laughed. Obviously, we were going to do exactly the same thing we always did—go down to the basement to play Battle Masters.

  Battle Masters was a board game that pitted the forces of good (the Imperial Army) against the forces of evil (the Army of Chaos). Nat was always the Imperial Army because they had more complicated rules for attacking and defending, and I was always the Army of Chaos because they had wolf riders. Nat won every single game we ever played, but I didn’t mind. I enjoyed the game, but even more so, I valued the hours of silence I knew I would get in Nat’s company. As he quietly slid units of infantry soldiers and archers across the big vinyl mat toward the towers that I defended with my orcs and beastmen, I finally had the space to sit and think in a way I wasn’t able to do anywhere else. Nat demanded nothing of me other than that I take my turn on time.

  I didn’t tell Nat about Brooke or how sad she made me feel. I had tried confiding in him once when I was getting the prank phone calls, but all he did was blink and tell me that sometimes people were mean and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. He was right, of course, but I didn’t sense that he really understood the nuances of girl drama. I didn’t particularly want to talk about it anyway. There was already too much talking in my world, and if Nat could offer peace and quiet and wolf riders, I would gladly take all three.

  I didn’t tell Mom and Dad about Brooke either. In Baboon Camp they knew everything about my life. If something happened to me during my day, they were probably right next to me watching it happen (save that one lion encounter I still hadn’t told them about). Except for reading in the afternoon or taking the boat down to Xaxaba, we were part of each other’s lives in a way no one in America seemed to be with their families.

  But in Pennsylvania, I only saw my parents and Lucy at dinner, and everyone was always in such a rush to get back to their work or homework that we never talked much beyond “How was your day?” and “What did you do in school?” I knew they cared how my day was and whether I was happy, but unless something really big happened, it didn’t seem worth sharing. Would they care what we talked about in English class or whether Laurana and I had a particularly good day on the lacrosse field? Would they care about the mixed-up-blender feeling I got in my stomach whenever I saw the high school girls playing lacrosse on the field next to mine? Maybe, maybe not. It wasn’t that interesting to me what a student had said to Dad after class or whether Lucy’s friend had invited her to a sleepover on Saturday, so I assumed that the minutiae of my day weren’t worth reporting either.

  Whenever Mom asked me how my day was, I answered, “It was fine.” And my days really were fine: school was fine, lacrosse was fine, and Nat was fine. Besides the occasional monkey-girl remark from Brooke when I practiced with the more experienced players (their coach had asked me to come back after all), nothing bad really happened to me. No large animals ambushed me outside math class and no baboons broke into my locker to steal my lunch. Latin class wasn’t interrupted by the moans of a dying buffalo in the hallway and we didn’t have to go without water because elephants ripped up the water pipes behind the girls’ bathroom.

  Happier out with the baboons than basically anywhere else

  “
Why don’t you write in your journal?” Mom asked me. I had some free time in the evenings now that the school year was winding down and Mom was getting tired of me pacing back and forth in the hallway like a dog waiting to be let outside.

  “What would I write about?” I said. “Nothing happens here.”

  I missed being outside and didn’t understand why no one else seemed to crave sunshine like I did. When our English teacher said we could have class outside, my classmates squealed and fussed about having to sit on the grass where there might be bugs and dirt. Like most Americans I knew, they acted like they were at war with nature. Instead of enjoying the seasons, even when they were unpleasant, they constantly complained about the weather and aggressively climate-controlled everything from their cars to their patios. Wild animals were always pests, even when they weren’t doing anything wrong, and that I really didn’t understand.

  One morning in early May, a few weeks before school let out for the summer, I was walking into school after being dropped off in the morning when I saw a fat raccoon bumbling through the woods behind the gymnasium. Since I was early, I sat on a rock and watched him for a while before going inside. Seeing me smiling, my homeroom teacher asked me what made me so happy and I told him about the raccoon. I later found out that instead of letting the raccoon go about his business, the school called animal control and had the raccoon shot, claiming that since it was out during the day it “might have been rabid.” I was heartbroken.

  At the end of the school year, I received an academic prize—Mrs. Graff gave a speech about each kid who won, and in mine she pointed out my “strong sense of fairness,” as well as my “childlike worldview.” I was already uncomfortable standing in front of my class in a dress for the awards assembly, and this remark made me instantly defensive. The speech made me sound like a little kid (Meghan’s words about not growing up still thundered through my head). Mom said later that Mrs. Graff was just trying to say I had a strong sense of how the world should work, particularly when it came to nature and animals. Though I allowed myself to be angry with Mrs. Graff for the “childlike worldview” part, I agreed that she might have been right about fairness, especially if she meant respect for other creatures. I already knew that was true, but it was yet another example of something I cared about that no one else around me seemed to. Go ahead, I thought angrily. Tell the whole world how different I am. I am already out of place, so why not separate me even further? I didn’t care anyway. I already knew there was a place in the world where I did fit. I just had to wait a few more weeks to go back.

  CHAPTER 13

  Finding the Moon on Earth

  When we finally flew back to Botswana in early June, I knew I only had three months to absorb as much Baboon Camp as possible before going back to school. Mom and Dad decided that I was getting too old to homeschool and self-teach and that once I entered high school, it was time for me to be more serious about my academics. Even though I would only be a freshman, college was on the horizon and I couldn’t afford to waste any opportunity to set myself up to go to a good school, or so I was told. Though I disagreed and said I was doing just fine teaching myself, I lost that argument almost immediately—which shouldn’t have surprised me considering my parents were both college professors. Already apprehensive about high school and now feeling the additional pressure of this college thing, to which I’d never given any real thought, I decided my only escape would be to go out with the baboons as much as possible—to try and hide from the American responsibilities circling my head like a whining mosquito I couldn’t slap away.

  In a marked change from previous years, we weren’t alone in Baboon Camp that summer. We were joined by my parents’ new postdoctoral fellow, Dawn, and her husband, Jim. Dawn was from the Midwest and had been studying black howler monkeys in Belize, focusing on what the males could tell from each other’s calls. The only thing I knew about black howler monkeys was that they yelled a lot. Dawn, it turned out, fit right in.

  “Keena!” she shouted when we met her plane at Xaxaba. “Look where we are! Isn’t this fantastic? Where are the monkeys? Are there buffalo? Oh my God, I’m dying to see an elephant!”

  “This woman is going to kill us all,” Dad muttered, unloading a box of vegetables from the rear of the tiny plane. Jim shook my hand and looked around cautiously. He was very tall and had long hair that he kept in a high ponytail next to two shiny, round earrings. He didn’t speak much, but I guessed that it was rare for him to get a word in edgewise when Dawn was around. Jim worked for Big Brothers Big Sisters and had that aura of competence and calm about him that people who work with children often have.

  On the boat ride back to camp from Xaxaba, Dawn screamed approximately twenty-four times: twice to elephants we saw sloshing through the melapo on the side of the river, three times to crocodiles basking on the bank, and the rest of the times to every bird, fish, or interesting tree we passed on our way. I couldn’t tell if she was scared or tired from the trip, but somewhat to my surprise, I found I wasn’t annoyed by her incessant shrieking. However she was feeling, it was clear that Dawn was incredibly happy to be in Botswana, as I was, and I found myself looking forward to introducing her to Baboon Camp and the baboons, whom I could already tell she would love too.

  I began going out with the baboons every day, and since I could still recognize them all from the previous year, my parents immediately enlisted me again as their research assistant. Though Mokupi still went out with us, he had to spend most of his time teaching Dawn to recognize the baboons and wouldn’t be able to help with the playback experiments.

  Following up the research they did on the vervet alarm calls in Kenya, my parents did a series of experiments on the baboons’ vocalizations to see if they had different types of calls for different social situations. We already knew that the baboons had different types of grunts for “Hey, let’s move along here,” and “Hey, that’s a gorgeous new baby you have, mind if I grab its leg?” among many other varieties. Dad had already devoted an incredible amount of time to following the female baboons around and recording their vocalizations, and after many, many years he had finally amassed a database of every different kind of grunt from every individual female, as well as the distinctive grunts the baboons gave to threaten each other and their screams when they were attacked.

  The idea behind the experiments was to put the calls together in different combinations that either could happen in real life or that couldn’t and then see if the baboons recognized the manipulation. In one example, we would wait until Selo, Helen, and Balo were all sitting around and each of them had a baby about a year old—young enough to still need their mother’s protection but old enough to go play by themselves for short periods of time. Dad would wait until the three females were out of sight of their babies and then play the scream of Balo’s baby from a hidden loudspeaker a few meters away. Mom would videotape the three females’ reactions. What they found was that when they played the scream of Balo’s baby, both Selo and Helen would look at Balo, as if to say, “Hey, that’s your kid screaming.” These experiments proved that the baboons not only knew who their own offspring were but had the cognitive capacity to understand who everyone else was related to as well.

  In a more complicated arrangement (and my personal favorite), my parents manipulated the females’ social structure itself. We wanted to do another experiment on Balo, this time using the vocalizations from Selo (the alpha female) and Helen (a middle-ranking female), rather than their babies. Under normal circumstances, Balo shouldn’t react at all to a playback of Selo’s threat grunts followed by Helen’s scream; Selo was higher ranking than Helen and could attack her if she wanted to, and Helen would always scream. That made sense. But if my parents played a recording of Helen’s threat grunts followed by Selo’s scream, Balo should sit up and look around as if to say, “That is NOT right. What’s going on here?” In the hierarchy of the group, it would never be okay for Helen to attack Selo; my parents wanted to test if Balo u
nderstood that. As it turned out, she did.

  My parents did a huge number of these social manipulation playback experiments, both between families, like the examples above, and within families, where younger sisters were supposed to rank higher than older sisters. It was fascinating to watch, but also very stressful waiting for the perfect moment when the baboons were sitting still, near the right individuals, and close enough to a bush to hide the playback speaker. Sometimes it took all day to get the setting just right, only to be interrupted by an elephant or a buffalo strolling by and ruining everything.

  When we weren’t doing experiments, I was assigned a number of focal animal follows to do. These “focals” were twenty-minute periods of time in which I followed an individual around and recorded everything she did and everyone she interacted with. The goal was to get a representative sample of how each female spent her time and who she spent it with, so that my parents had something to use as a control when they watched what a subject animal did after a playback experiment. I enjoyed doing the focals because of the challenge they presented in recognizing the females. The downside, though, was that spending so much time with my head bent over my notebook meant that I tripped and fell into every thornbush and warthog hole in my path. I ended every day with bruised and bleeding shins from stumbling through the bushes.

  June 22, 1998

  Keena’s Journal

  Jim decided to make a walking stick to help with some of the deeper, muddier water crossings and spent many days trying to find the right kind of buffalo thorn acacia from which to get the stick. This was a smart idea, since when we walk through the floodplains we’re almost up to our waists in water and carrying a ton of very expensive electrical equipment that can’t get wet: not that we haven’t tried; I think my radio has been dunked several times and it still works.