Wild Life

by Keena Roberts

  Out with my baboon friends

  Balo didn’t do much for the first ten minutes, but then she, Barbara, and Domino seemed to relax and began to forage with another small group of baboons. The sun rose higher and it got warmer, and I began to relax along with the monkeys. After I finished with Balo I did a follow on Jeanette, who was nearby, and then on Comet. We weren’t technically supposed to do follows back-to-back like that because it overrepresented the amount of time the baboons spent with each other, but I was being lazy.

  After I did the follow on Comet, I finally looked up from my notebook and realized we were completely alone. My little group had wandered far, far off toward the north and I couldn’t see or hear any other baboons. It seemed like my little group realized this at the same time too, and they began lost calling and running around trying to find the rest of the group. I was a little scared being all alone, but I decided the best thing to do was start tracking the group and listen, as Mokupi taught me, for birds, branches, monkey coughs, and all the other things that could tell me where the baboons had gone and where they were headed next.

  In the end it took us more than three hours to find the rest of the group, tracking them slowly, slowly across the molapo to Airstrip Island, and then all along the island through leadwood trees and palm groves to a clump of jackalberry trees almost three miles from where we’d lost them. It was getting close to noon when I finally found Dad untangling his recording equipment from a bush and talking to Mokupi about something having to do with acoustics. They hadn’t even noticed I’d been gone, and I didn’t say anything about it. If they hadn’t noticed, then what did it matter?

  Even though that was plenty of excitement for one day, it wasn’t over yet. After my group of baboons rejoined the rest of the troop, they all decided to take off running west toward White Island. I hated when they did this because I couldn’t do any work at all; I just had to tighten my backpack straps and run along with them until they decided to stop. I also didn’t really like White Island because there were fewer trees and less shade. The sand was also deeper there for some reason, and soft, as if it had been mixed with ash. It coated our feet in white, clumpy dust that inspired the island’s name.

  I had just started a follow on Cleo when I saw a honey badger appear out of some thorny scrub about ten feet away. It obviously hadn’t seen me or Dad, who was standing nearby, and was rubbing its head against a tree stump. It started trotting toward Dad, who dropped his microphone and yelled, “OH SHIT!” really loudly. Honey badgers can be very dangerous because they’re so strong and often attack animals more than ten times their size. When Dad yelled, the honey badger stopped, realized it was standing pretty much at Dad’s feet, and then hissed, screeched, and bared its teeth. I was trying to think of something to do when out of nowhere the alpha male baboon, Power, came barreling through the troop, headed right for the honey badger. The honey badger hissed and screeched again and took off into the scrub with Power on his tail. I asked Dad if he thought Power was protecting him, but Dad said that, while it’s a nice thought, he doubted the baboons thought about him that way.

  Finally, around 2 p.m., it was time to begin the long trek back to camp, swatting a never-ending swarm of tsetse flies. It was the end of the dry season and the temperature was just beginning to be uncomfortable, reaching probably the high eighties in the afternoon with not a cloud in the sky. My back was sweating and white foam appeared under the straps of my backpack. When we were in radio range of camp, Mom called to say two things: first, that she scared up a pair of male lions near the swimming-hole crossing when she took the car out to check on the buffalo, and second, that the buffalo herd had split, half moving north toward the swimming hole and the C15 crossing and the other half feeding in the molapo between Camp Island and Airstrip Island, where we were. This presented a major problem for the three of us; from where we stood on the shore of Airstrip Island, we could see not only the herd of buffalo between us and home but also several elephants moving into the molapo from the south.

  There were only two ways onto Camp Island by foot: the crossing from the north by C15 Island and the swimming hole (lions and buffalo), or the molapo between Camp Island and Airstrip Island (elephants and buffalo). And Mom couldn’t drive the car out to get us because the water was too deep. Dad and I had different ideas about what we should do at this point; I said we should go to the swimming hole because there might be fewer buffalo there, but Dad said there was no way in hell he was knowingly walking into a group of lions—he’d rather die.

  “You WILL die,” I said, but he didn’t think it was funny. Eventually we decided the best option was for Mom to take the Land Rover out to the edge of Camp Island, drive back and forth along the shore, doing what she could to scatter the buffalo, and then drive out into the molapo as deep as the car could go to pick us up. As Lucy was listening to the radio Mom had left at camp, the last thing she heard from any of us was me saying, “Okay, we’re just going to make a run for it!” and then silence. She was sure we’d all been trampled by buffalo or killed by lions, but it actually worked out fine—Dad, Mokupi, and I did our best to run through the deep water, holding the recording equipment above our heads and trying to stay out of sight from the buffalo until we reached the car and could jump in the back to be driven to camp. We were soaked and covered with mud but made it home safely, if a little dazed and beat-up by the whole experience.

  By the middle of August, my parents were preparing the camp for the arrival of their new postdocs, who were actually going to be there sooner than expected. It was very clear that their intentions for me were solidly fixed on college and nothing else. I was deeply disappointed, though not particularly surprised. As much as I wanted my secret plan of living alone in Baboon Camp to work, I knew deep down that my parents would never have allowed it. They took their work, and academia in general, extremely seriously and college application time was not a time to play around with adventures.

  “It’s about choice,” Mom said for the thousandth time. We were in the laundry area on a hot Sunday morning, only a few days before leaving to go back to the States. Mom was washing clothes and I was using a bullwhip to beat the dust out of the small rugs we kept in our tents. Beating rugs was by far the worst chore in Baboon Camp, but today I was frustrated and grouchy and taking out all my pent-up anger on the rugs. “You need to go to the best college you can so you have more choice over what you do after that. Better colleges equal more choices, whether we like it or not.” I’d heard this argument before and it was doing nothing to cheer me up. It pissed me off that I had no choice over something that was supposed to give me choices.

  “So I can’t just stay here with Thore and Jacinta?” I asked finally, referring to the new postdocs, a husband-and-wife team who were coming from the Ethiopian Highlands, where they’d been studying gelada baboons for several years. I was covered with dust, panting and sweating, and even the thought of going to college was making my throat close up. Absently, I wondered how long I’d been clenching my teeth.

  “No, you can’t,” Mom said, leaning an elbow on the faded pink sink. “I know you want to, but you can’t. You aren’t on our research grant, so you would be living here illegally. Without a work permit, the government could kick you out and refuse to let us come back at all. When your dad and I go, you have to go too. That’s just how it has to be.” She turned back to the sink and began wringing out a pair of jeans. “Just think of it this way; your dad and I have to leave so we can come back.”

  But that has nothing to do with ME, I wanted to scream. You can come back here whenever you want but I don’t know what MY future here is going to be if it’s all tied up in what YOU’RE doing. College may have a summer vacation but that is SO FAR AWAY and I can’t wait that long. I’ll suffocate.

  But Mom couldn’t hear my silent screams. As far as she was concerned, the question of college was now settled. She began making me practice writing college application essays after I came home from the baboons. I
already had decent grades, she told me, but the essay was where I could really “let my personality shine through.” She had printed out a few sample essay questions from the admissions office at Penn for me to practice with—because of course she had—and finally, during our last week at camp, managed to make me sit down to talk about them.

  “Write about what you love!” she said. “Make yourself seem as witty and complex as possible.”

  “You want me to be witty and complex in 850 words?” I had plenty of time once we got back to the US to think about college, and I deeply resented tarnishing my last few perfect days in Baboon Camp thinking about school. School made my stomach flop and acid rise in the back of my throat, and that had no place in Baboon Camp among the birds and sunshine.

  “Just try, okay?” she said. “You have to do this anyway. Might as well do it while you’re here and your inspiration is all around you. Why don’t you write about that day when you and Dad had all those crazy animal encounters?”

  “That wasn’t witty or complex,” I said. “We saw a lot of animals. Just like most days.” She was pissing me off, and I wanted nothing to do with this new project of hers.

  “Okay,” she said, pushing. “But didn’t you get separated from the group for a while? What happened when you were out there alone?” I sighed. There was a jacana building a nest on a lily pad in the lagoon and I wanted to watch him work, not think about this.

  “Um…I ran into some lions.”

  Mom started. “You did? Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Well, nothing really happened to me. I ran into some lions, I climbed a tree, and I waited until they went away. That’s not really an incident.”

  Mom blinked. “To everyone else in the world, that is an incident. Write about that.” And she went back to her tent to copy her data from the morning into the computer.

  Keena’s Stupid College Essay Draft

  August 21, 2001

  Sample Essay Prompt: “Write page 72 of your autobiography”

  I looked up from my notebook and realized I was lost, far in the north of the baboons’ home range. There were no other monkeys with me except my small group; the rest of the troop was long gone.

  I was sitting on a log under a big tree having a drink of water and thinking about what I should do next when I suddenly realized that the songbirds weren’t singing anymore. The only sound in the woodlands around me was the harsh krak-krak-krak of the francolin birds calling out in alarm. This wasn’t particularly worrisome—francolins are unbelievably paranoid and alarm call at virtually everything—but the silence of the songbirds was unusual. I stood up slowly and looked around. The baboons lazed about, seemingly unconcerned, but Balo walked over to the log where I’d been sitting and climbed up next to me. We both looked out across the plain in front of us, seeing nothing except grass blowing in the wind. Balo grunted.

  “I don’t see anything, do you?” I whispered. I knew she wouldn’t answer but Balo is one of the smarter baboons in the troop and it felt reassuring to confer with an adult. She continued to stare at the plain, flicking her tail back and forth.

  The chattering bark of a vervet monkey brought us both to complete attention, and Balo stood up on her hind legs on the log. Vervet monkeys don’t alarm call unless they can actually see a predator, and if whatever they saw was a threat to them, it was likely a threat to us too. I shrugged off my backpack and stepped onto the plain, trying to figure out where the vervets were looking. I was staring intently at a patch of bright yellow grass when I saw the tiniest movement against the wind: a round, tawny ear.

  Ever so slowly, I walked backward until I reached the tree, every muscle in my body screaming to move faster despite the voices of my parents in my head saying, “You never run from lions!” When I felt the tree at my back I kicked off my sandals and began to climb, endlessly thankful that the tree had thick bark with large nooks that I could jam my feet and hands into. The vervet monkeys continued to alarm, but the baboons hadn’t seen the lions yet and were mostly ignoring them—all except Balo, who was looking alternately at the plain and back at me. Why was that girl climbing a tree?

  Halfway up the tree, I paused. I had a good view of the woodland as well as the plain, and found a spot where I could sit with one leg dangling on either side of a thick branch. I was high enough to see over the tall grass and had a better view of the lions. There were five of them, all females, one with her head raised—it was her ear I’d seen twitch in the grass. I took a deep breath, since I knew I was safe in the tree. All I had to do was wait until the lions moved away, which I figured they would do sooner rather than later since it was now very hot, and lions, like all cats, hate to be uncomfortable.

  The lion stood up, and Balo immediately saw it and alarm barked. She leapt into the tree, followed closely by the rest of our little group. They climbed much more efficiently than I had and were soon clustered in the branches around me, screaming at the lions on the plain.

  “Oh, NOW you see them,” I said, looking at Balo. “You couldn’t have climbed this tree a little earlier and taken a look around?” The standing lion gave a big sigh and began padding through the tall grass toward our tree followed by the other four.

  In a few minutes, the lead lion reached the shade of my tree and stopped. She lifted her head and looked directly up at me. I gasped. Her eyes were beautiful, and the rays of sun shining through the leaves made them glitter ever so slightly. I wasn’t scared. I knew I was safe and the lions would soon be gone. I released my breath and smiled. I felt so proud of myself. I knew how to find the lions and what to do when I saw them. I knew where I was, generally, and even though I was completely alone (in terms of humans), I knew how to get home. I started to laugh. I was sixteen, trapped in a tree by five lions, and I was so happy I wanted to cry. Not everyone gets to have that kind of adventure!

  I waited for another hour before I decided it was safe to look for the rest of the baboon troop. I climbed down from the tree, strapped my sandals back on, picked up my backpack (a lion had stepped on it!), and headed off toward Airstrip Island, where I guessed the rest of the troop might be. Balo walked along right next to me.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Leopard Attack

  We returned to the US in the blazing humidity of late August, a week or so before school started. The yard around our house was baked yellow from the sun and it was clear that it hadn’t rained in weeks. The grass crunched under my sneakers at field hockey practice and the humidity filled my nose, making it hard to breathe. Since I was now seventeen, Mom and Dad let me drive myself to and from preseason practice in our old green Volvo station wagon. As we ran the interminable laps around and around the desert that was the field-hockey field, I dreamed of the moment when I would get to take my sneakers off and drive home barefoot. With the windows down and the South African singer Johnny Clegg blaring through the speakers of the CD player, I took the turns in the road just a little too fast and raced the sunset back to the house, imagining I was driving back into camp after a long day out with the baboons.

  The Friday afternoon before Labor Day weekend, I trotted into the house after practice and dropped my sneakers in the front hall next to the baboon carved from a palm tree. As I was pouring a glass of water in the kitchen, the phone rang and I saw the crazy long string of numbers on the caller ID that meant the call was coming from the Baboon Camp satellite phone. The sat phone was an expensive piece of equipment that Mom and Dad had recently purchased for camp in case of emergencies. We’d never used it before.

  I punched the button for the speakerphone and called out, “Hey everyone, Baboon Camp is on the phone!” Mom, Dad, Lucy, and I crowded around the phone and I leaned a sweaty elbow on the kitchen counter. “We’re all here, Dawn; what’s up?”

  “Dorothy?” Dawn said, sounding very far away and slightly out of breath.

  “Dawn? Are you okay?” Mom said.

  “Jim and I are fine…but I have to tell you something.”

  “What ha
ppened?” Mom asked. Dawn took a deep breath, and began talking. Her usually upbeat voice was subdued.

  The day before, Dawn and Mokupi had been out looking for the baboons on Airstrip Island. They were hoping to get an experiment done that day before letting Mokupi and Press go home early for the holiday weekend, so Jim and Press were bringing the playback speaker to her in a mokoro. When Dawn and Mokupi found the baboons, the whole troop was gathered around a bush, uncharacteristically quiet and vigilant. When Mokupi looked closer, he told Dawn that there was a leopard trapped in the bush.

  We’d seen baboons with leopards many times before but never a situation that was so quiet and tense—even the time when Mom and I had found them in a similar situation. Usually if the baboons found a leopard, they erupted in alarm calls and tried to attack the leopard and kill it. Watching close to a hundred large monkeys go after a leopard was still one of the scariest things I had ever seen, and always made me remember that even though I counted them as my friends, they were still potentially dangerous animals that deserved my respect. This time, though, the leopard was completely cornered and there was nowhere he could go. Oddly, Dawn said that the baboons didn’t seem concerned; they knew they had the leopard surrounded and just stared at him in the bush, where the leopard was crouched, growling. All the females with babies and young adults were there, including my buddy Domino. Every time the leopard moved, the baboons would leap at the bush screaming, pounding the ground, and lashing their tails.