It perhaps wasn’t surprising then that slowly, over a period of time I can only guess at, I began to stop hoping to be rescued. Instead I found myself blocking out all thoughts of home and concentrating on my strange new jungle life.
Each new day turned out to be exactly like the last one. The jungle would wake at the hot insistence of the sunlight, the steam rising in fragrant clouds as the light shafted down through the branches. I would watch the monkeys – being careful not to annoy them – and follow them to find food, then watch them some more. This would continue till the sun disappeared beneath the trees and the night suddenly dropped its curtain of blackness. I’d then find shelter where I could and crave sleep.
The only break in this routine in the early days was when one day (without warning, as I was so sheltered by the canopy) the heavens opened and my world was full of rain. I’d seen rain before, of course, but now it took on a whole new significance. It danced on the leaf tops, made the forest floor jump and jive, and created enough noise to drown out almost every other sound. It provided a ready source of water for me, creating a small pool from which I could drink, and soaked through my heavy matted hair and ran in urgent streams down my limbs. It felt almost magical: a fierce and cleansing force.
But apart from that marker, I really was losing all sense of time – of the hours and the days and the weeks and how to measure them. What I remember most clearly from that period is the feeling of incredible loneliness, the like of which I never hope to feel again. As the monkeys were the only jungle animals that didn’t scare me, it was perhaps natural that I felt drawn to them. They seemed so like me that I felt a need to try to understand them better.
Doing so didn’t just involve watching them. It involved listening as well. They communicated with one another using a great number of different noises and, starved of human contact (particularly the comfort of human voices), I would sit and listen avidly to these sounds.
I was also starved of the opportunity to speak and somehow communicating through my voice was a powerful and instinctive need. At first I imitated the noises the monkeys made for my own amusement, though probably also for the comfort of hearing the sound of my own voice. But I soon realised that sometimes a monkey – or several monkeys – would respond, as if we were having a conversation. This galvanised me. It felt like I had been taken notice of, finally. So I practised and practised the sounds that they made, always desperate to get a reaction.
It’s impossible to represent monkey-speech using letters, and it’s extremely difficult to reproduce, too. Even with my high-pitched little girl’s voice, there were some sounds I wasn’t physically able to copy. I do, however, remember the first sound I seemed to be able to imitate was one they made often – a warning call. It was a kind of guttural scream – a loud, urgent noise. Which it needed to be – it had to alert the whole troop. And it soon became clear that they made this call often. They were constantly alert, constantly on the lookout, vigilant all the time in case of anything abnormal, and reporting almost anything that moved or entered their territory. They had a particular stance that went with this as well. They’d pull a face – a sort of open–mouthed stare – before they did it and would rise up on their hind legs, almost on tiptoes. Then they’d start by making low sounds, presumably while assessing the level of threat. Then, once they’d identified an intruder and deemed it threatening, they’d move on to screeching, often swinging their heads from side to side. They were no different from children – or any human, really – in that, the scarier the threat was, the louder they’d scream at all the others.
If the danger was immediate, the call would be even higher – a sharp, high-pitched scream, which was usually accompanied by them slapping their hands on the ground. When this happened, the rest of the monkeys would join in, and they’d all scamper up to the safety of the canopy, leaving me (now I’d learned what the calls were about) scared and panicky as I rushed about trying to find a place of safety on the ground.
But I quickly learned that I didn’t always need to be frightened. Perhaps because I was such a small child myself, I soon picked up on the fact that the little ones in the family would make the ‘immediate danger’ call just for the fun of it, and that the adults seemed to know when to ignore them. That too was a comfort in those early days.
Less comforting would have been to know that I would be there so long that I would have time to learn the meaning of almost every monkey sound. If I had known that then, perhaps I would have died of despair. But thankfully I didn’t. Every day dawned with at least a thread of hope to cling to, and, fragile as it was, that was enough to keep me going.
*
After my first night-time brush with what I’d thought might be a snake, I was terrified of encountering another. But my fear very quickly abated. Snakes were actually among the most timid of the jungle creatures. They liked to do what they did without anyone noticing them. Though I had always been afraid of them, thinking they wanted nothing more than to bite me, I soon realised they didn’t even like to be seen. Most of them had markings that made them blend into the background – looking like the leaf litter on the forest floor, or the bark of the trees – and they seemed altogether more scared than I was. The smallest noise would send them anxiously slithering away for cover, and, watching the monkeys, I learned to whistle whenever I saw one, which would invariably send them on their way.
Timid too, were the spiders, which were almost all huge and hairy. If I’d seen one in my bedroom at home I would have been sobbing in terror, but in the jungle they were so different – so sweet and so shy. I found them fascinating and would watch them for ages, wanting to reach out and stroke their lovely silky legs. I’d watch how they’d scuttle into little hidey holes if you dared to come near them, then look out at you, their little black button eyes peeking out, as if pleading ‘Please, please don’t hurt me!’ It wasn’t long before I thought them really cute. I still do.
Not that they were completely defenceless. Within a very short period of time I learned that it was silly to tease them. I would sit for ages watching them go about their business, just as any small child with time on their hands would do. If you watched for long enough, you could begin to learn which spider lived where, and I soon got to know the location of all their little ‘houses’.
They were very private, of course, and there were periods when they’d all be inside and nothing much would be happening. So after a time, anxious for action, I would get myself a stick and try to tease up the little ‘lids’ that formed the entrances. Understandably, this made them very cross. They’d come bustling out to see who was interfering with their front door, and I noticed they’d often stop and shake their furry bodies, much like a wet dog would do. One day I also noticed that after just such an episode of irritation, the spider in question, having shaken itself, seemed to have a little cloud of something rising from its body.
It wasn’t water. It took the form of tiny particles that looked like dust and I soon realised this must have been the source of the painful stinging and itching that I suffered afterwards.
Not all the lessons I learned in those early days were about the world around me – some were about me, and the day-to-day business of taking care of myself. I was a little girl of not quite five. I was used to being looked after. Used to my mummy helping me to dress and undress, to wash myself, clean my teeth and brush my hair.
All these daily rituals were now gone. My pretty cotton dress was ripped and filthy, and within days I had no choice but to discard my white knickers, as the elastic around the waist had snapped and they kept falling down. And though not being made to wash or having a comb forced through my hair was no hardship, going to the toilet and cleaning myself afterwards became something quite distressing.
Again, I watched the monkeys for clues about what to do. They would go to the toilet whenever and wherever they felt the need. If they were high above me in the canopy, their poo would simply rain down onto the forest floor, or have its
progress halted by the undergrowth. On one occasion I saw a dollop of it land on a fat, tufty fungus, which immediately responded by puffing out a big spore cloud, as if to let me know it was fed up.
If the monkeys were on the ground themselves, they would bury what they’d done by covering it with earth or moss and leaves. They would also, I noticed – but by no means that regularly – clean themselves by sitting on their bottoms on a grassy area and sliding themselves along the ground. Alternatively they’d rub their backsides against a moss-covered tree trunk. That done, they would simply finish the job by contorting themselves and licking themselves clean.
This last part was obviously a physical impossibility for me, but I was desperate to feel clean and not smelly. On the first few occasions I had to go to the toilet, I remember I wiped my bottom on my dress. Once my pants had to go, I then used the material as a rag. But once that was no longer usable, I copied the monkeys or took to wiping myself with unfurled dry leaves. I soon realised, however, that if I grabbed myself handfuls of moss, its softness and moistness did the job all the better because it didn’t tear my poor bottom to shreds.
The rest of my body, on the other hand, grew filthier and filthier, and as the days passed I found myself scratching more and more. Like the monkeys, I became home for all manner of little creatures. Not only was my skin growing drier and scalier, I was also soon crawling with fleas. As beautiful as the jungle was, it was also very dirty. Flies buzzed unceasingly, clouds of them – all green-blue and jewel-like, and feasting excitedly on the many piles of animal poo. They buzzed around me too, which I found upsetting; was I as smelly as the poo all around me? I was certainly gathering more dirt and fleas daily, as well as crawling lice, beetles and strange, silvery-white insects that seemed to shimmer as they teemed on my skin.
Sometimes, initially, this would drive me to a frenzy. Scratching frantically all over, I’d weep with frustration, unable to work out how to stop it happening. It only took the briefest of looks around me to realise that I could not. If I sat down, I just became another part of the landscape – another piece of ground over which the relentless tide of insects could scuttle. Escarabajo (scarab beetles) and cucarron (small brown cockroaches) simply ranged over my limbs as if they had every right to do so, nibbling at my increasingly gnarly flesh as they saw fit. This was frightening. How could I stop it happening before they began to eat me all up?
The monkey’s solution was, again, to lick themselves clean. And if I physically couldn’t – and definitely wouldn’t – lick the poo from my own bottom, I thought that at least I could lick some of the skin on my filthy, crusted, bitten limbs. But my first lick was destined to also be my last. I had never before tasted anything quite so vile. I was so foul and bitter that I simply couldn’t fathom how the monkeys managed to do this all day.
My hair, of course, was faring even worse. Unwashed for so long now, and playing host to even more scuttling insects, it was literally alive with jungle animals. I knew from the itching that it played host to even more crawling wildlife with every passing day, as it matted and wound itself into lumpy black dreadlocks.
I would sit and watch the monkeys carefully grooming one another, desperately wishing they would include me. But for now they didn’t. I was allowed to be close, but not that close, and I would look up enviously as they sat in the cool of the upper branches, picking the nasties that they dug out of one another’s chocolate coats.
*
Wanting to be up in the trees with my adopted monkey family fast became a preoccupation for me – even more of a preoccupation, over time, than thinking about my lost human family. I was sleeping each night now in the hollowed-out trunk of an old tree, and though it felt safer, there were periods – long periods, sometimes – during the days when the whole troop would ascend to the top of the canopy. A place where I simply couldn’t follow.
I wanted to get up there so badly, yet the idea seemed impossible. The trees were almost as big a problem to master as the Brazil nuts they unwittingly flung down for me to eat. With the latter, I could only even attempt to break into those fruits whose outer pods had split open from the fall. The intact ones were just impossible. Even the nuts inside didn’t yield without putting up a fight; it would take an awful lot of bashes, using my cranny-and-rock system, before I could make so much as a single crack in their armour.
Similarly, the trunks of these trees seemed to spite me. About six to eight feet in diameter, they towered upwards to the sky – an almost smooth vertical corridor. If I looked up, it made me dizzy to see how impossibly high they grew, disappearing up through the steamy air before seeming to almost come to a point, and only then graced with any branches I could climb on.
But there were smaller trees too, striving upwards between these colossal kings of the jungle; the friendly trees that provided the delicious little bananas, and others, jewelled with the hanging waxy flowers I would later learn were orchids. These would also be draped with graceful looping vines and fronds of dark, spongy mosses, and, between them, the curls and arches of delicate green ferns.
Perhaps, I wondered one day, when the monkeys had again deserted me, I could find a way to join them by making my way up the smaller trees, in the hope of somehow gaining access to the upper reaches of the Brazil trees. My plan was doomed to failure – it would be many months before I mastered that particular monkey talent – but it was to provide me with an unexpected discovery.
It had just rained, I remember – perhaps not the best time to try being an acrobat, because as ever the whole jungle ran with water and dripped. The boughs and vines were slippery, but, perhaps invigorated and energised by the cooling, cleansing downpour, I decided I would give it a try; if I didn’t try, as my mother used to say to me, how did I know what I could or couldn’t do?
At first, it wasn’t too difficult. I made my way upwards about six or seven feet, using a tangle of roots and vines and low boughs, and finding plentiful foot- and handholds. But no sooner had I ascended to the top of a small tree than I was faced with a difficult horizontal clamber across a bough, to have any hope of getting higher.
I tried anyway (now I was this far, I could hardly bear to look down, much less climb down), but the slippery, slimy branch was my undoing. As soon as I put all my weight on it, I immediately lost purchase and crashed down, screaming loudly and frantically, terrified and sure I was about to die.
But the undergrowth was kind to me. While buffeting me and winding me, the tangle of massed foliage and latticework of stems, stalks and branches also broke my fall. And as I lay there getting my breath back, feeling tears of self-pity spring to my eyes, I realised I was looking straight at something I’d never seen before. It was a tunnel – the entrance to which was just about big enough to crawl through, and which disappeared into blackness around a bend.
I looked more closely. It seemed to be fashioned out of the same tangle of tree roots and undergrowth that had just been obliging enough to break my fall. It looked like it had been hollowed out some time ago as well, as its inner edges – the same latticework of branches and roots, mainly – were quite smooth of snags and spikes.
I pulled myself up and crawled across to it. It was a bit of a tight fit, but I could just about wriggle into it and venture in. I still remember that I didn’t feel too frightened. Sufficient light filtered through so that, although gloomy, it wasn’t pitch-black, and as I crawled along it opened out – it was a whole network of tunnels! – with branches heading off in several directions.
I began to wonder what kind of animal would have made such a tunnel, but curiosity triumphed over anxiety and I decided to crawl a little bit further. It was then, rounding a bend, that I made my next big discovery. There was a monkey up ahead of me – one of my monkeys – and it was scampering towards me with a nut in its hand. No sooner did it see me than it veered off down a side tunnel, with another monkey (they were both young and playing chase, it was obvious) scrambling along and screeching playfully in hot pursuit.
Seeing this made everything fall into place. They had created this network of tunnels on the floor of their territory to enable them to get around on the ground just as easily as they traversed the tops of the trees. And I realised that I would also be able to use it to get about the jungle floor speedily and safely. My disappointment about my lack of climbing skills now all but forgotten, I crawled after the monkeys and finally emerged in a small, familiar clearing, feeling as uplifted as at any point since I’d been abandoned in the jungle. Making this new discovery felt – and I remember the feeling to this day – almost as if Christmas had arrived. It really was as thrilling to me as that. A mark, perhaps, of just how feral I’d become.
I was certainly beginning to feel I’d learned all the skills I would need to keep me safe in this wild and remote place. But it was an assumption that turned out to be very wrong.
6
I was going to die soon, I was sure of it.
I had no idea why, only that the sense that I was dying was one that was diffusing through the whole of my body, causing me to clutch my stomach and whimper in pain.
I tried to think back, through the fog of pain, to what I’d eaten that might have done this thing to me.
Tamarind! It suddenly came to me. The day before, I’d eaten tamarind. It was one of my favourite things to feed on. Similar in shape to the bean pods that used to grow on our allotment, the tamarind pod was dark brown and furry, and, when spilt open, the insides were sweet and sticky, with the texture of figs.
But even as I’d tasted it, I’d known it wasn’t like the usual tamarind. This variety – doubtless one of many others to be found – had lots of small fruits inside, similar in size to peas, and, if anything, tasted even sweeter, like dates.
The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys Page 4