by Marc Secchia
Until she could breathe again, all Pip could do was watch and wheeze as the mother Oraial chased her baby around the cage, hooting and making low-pitched sounds deep in her throat as though she were a log drum being pounded for a Pygmy dance. Eventually, a cowed young Ape returned to Pip’s side, closely shadowed by his mother. She hoped he was not planning to hit her again.
“Hoo-na-goo,” he said, beating his chest.
This time, he seemed to think she was a jungle flower which could be bruised at a breath. His thick black finger brushed her skin with great care.
“Hunagu?” asked Pip, pointing at herself.
“Hunagu.” He scowled, turning his ribcage into a drum.
The mother Oraial whacked his back with her enormous paw. “Hunagu. Ho-yo-luk?”
“Um–Pip.” She touched her chest.
“Umpip?”
“Pip. Just Pip.” Taking a deep breath, she imitated the youngster by thumping her breastbone. “Pip.” She punched the baby firmly on the shoulder with her good hand. “Hunagu.”
This feat of language learning threw the mother Oraial into a fit of hooting, ground-slapping celebration. Pip and the baby both looked on, bemused. She could learn to speak to them, she realised. They were not animals. They had speech. They could teach her.
Excited, Pip pointed at the bowl of water. “What’s that?”
“Kototo,” said Hunagu, and danced around the cage in imitation of his mother.
From that day on, the Pygmy girl and the two Oraials became fast friends. They shared their food with her–such as she could eat, because their main diet was branches and leaves, supplemented by fruits such as tinker bananas, pink sweet-melons and the purple prekki-fruit. When the prekki-fruit was ripe she would gorge herself at will, and so a hot summer faded into the cooler weather of autumn. The zookeepers occasionally brought her a little meat, or nuts and stale breads which they passed through the barred door, but mostly, she relied on trapping the odd rat that the chief seemed to enjoy tossing down from the zookeepers’ platform above the cage. She found a stone tossed aside by the builders of their climbing frame, which when struck against the wall, produced sparks. She lit small piles of dry bamboo stalks and roasted the rats by skewering them with a sharpened bamboo stick and planting them so that the rodents hung head-down over the flames.
With the onset of the early cold season storms, Pip constructed a shelter made from bamboo stems and covered with leaves and dirt. To her surprise, the Oraials did not enjoy eating bamboo, not even the tender young shoots. The bamboo had been growing madly all summer and now towered halfway up the wall. She cut it by patiently sawing at the tough stems with a sliver of giant coconut shell, and then begged the zookeeper with signs for enough rope to tie it together.
She learned how to speak Ape.
“Pip come wrestle,” Hunagu would command her.
He loved nothing more than to wrestle. His mother would sometimes play-fight with him, but soon she would stop and shake her scarred head, which had been so gravely wounded by the big people who had captured them. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. Sometimes, dark moods came upon her. Then Hunagu and Pip knew to keep their distance. She beat them, otherwise–just as she beat the trees or the walls or the crysglass windows of their cage. In her madness she seemed to feel no hurt.
Pip wrestled with Hunagu because she wanted to keep her Pygmy warrior skills sharp. At over six feet tall by now, he was vastly stronger than her, but after a few painful accidents, he learned gentleness. Pip begged him to fight harder. She made bows and swords out of bamboo. She shot her primitive arrows at the faces of big people who came to her windows. That always cheered her up. She trained endlessly at her knife and sword skills beneath the five moons, using bamboo sticks as she worked through the warrior training exercises that she remembered.
Once, late in her second summer in the zoo, she tried to escape by building a bamboo structure against the wall. But the zookeepers were wise to her idea. Shouting and waving at her to jump clear, they poured oil from atop the wall and fired it. Her ladder burned brightly. Several seasons later, Pip tried to sneak through the second gate, which had been left ajar, but she was caught at once by three zoo workers. They threw her back inside with many words that burned her spirit.
After that, the old zookeeper left and a new, unsmiling big person took his place. He also liked to feed her rats, and once tossed a lethal copperhead viper into their cage, which Hunagu brained with a piece of wood. Pip roasted and ate it. Snake meat was delicious. The Apes rubbed their noses at the smell of roasting meat.
“Disgusting,” Hunagu grunted, scratching his rump vigorously.
Pip glanced up at her friend. He was growing like bamboo. He towered to nearly three times her height now. She counted sadly. This was her third summer in the zoo. Eleven years old.
Thrusting away the pain, she said, “Fleas, Hunagu?”
“Pygmy help Hunagu?”
“Pygmy help,” she agreed, and settled down to groom her friend. Oraial fleas were the size of her smallest fingernail, while their ticks grew larger than the first joint of her thumb. They particularly enjoyed the blood-rich folds of an Oraial’s neck-ruff. “Bend down. Hunagu too tall.”
“Hunagu squash Pip and eat for breakfast.”
“Hunagu plant-eater,” she protested.
“Pip tick-eater.”
“Hey!” Pip twisted his arm behind his back. “Submit. Pip is jungle-king.”
“Pygmy-girl is flea on Hunagu’s back,” he chuckled. For some reason, this maddened Pip. She twisted his arm harder. “Flea grow strong,” said Hunagu. “Oraial jungle-king.”
Suddenly, he reached over with his free arm and ruffled her hair. Pip had braided her thick, matted black hair down her back. His fat fingers snagged in her braid and tore a chunk of hair loose.
Shouting at the unexpected pain, Pip surged upward. For a moment, she saw all as though a crimson moon had risen behind her eyes, and through it, Hunagu’s bellow shook her world. He ripped free of her grip. The mother Oraial clouted Pip, sending her tumbling head-over-heels down the slope of their cage toward the crysglass windows.
Pip rose, spitting mud out of her mouth. Hunagu rotated his shoulder, wincing. Great Islands, she had … hurt him? How? But she had no time to think. The mother Oraial thundered down the slope toward her, bellowing fit to make the ground shake. Pip leaped for her life. A massive paw glanced off her shoulder. The cage spun about her.
“Stop,” roared Hunagu.
The mother Ape skidded to a halt, ripping up grass and bushes as she swung about. The madness in her eyes! A coiling python of fear grasped her throat. The Ape meant to kill her. For a breath, the Oraial glared across at the Pygmy girl. Then, with that deafening roar of a furious Oraial Ape, she charged.
A mountain struck Pip in the back. There was roaring, hooting, screaming, grass and dirt flying in the air. Hunagu! He had pushed her out of the way. Now he fought his mother. The two Oraials ripped into each other. Their bellows shook the zoo. Across from them, the rajal roared, and the flying vervet monkeys in the neighbouring cage sent a chorus of hooting and screeching into the overheated afternoon sky. The big people watching cried out in their strange tongue.
The dust settled. Hunagu lay unmoving.
“Hunagu! No!” Sobbing, wailing, Pip advanced on the mother Oraial. “You kill Hunagu.” She beat the Ape’s flank with her fists. “Bad, wicked mother. You kill.”
Panting, the mother Oraial stared about her as though seeing the world for the first time. She shook ruff. Then her enormous paw came down to cover Pip’s entire back. Pip pressed her face into the well-loved fur, sobbing, afraid, heartbroken.
“I … sorry,” mumbled the Oraial. She shook Hunagu’s shoulder. “Wake up. Wake, please.”
Pip pushed herself loose. Kneeling beside Hunagu, she pressed her ear to his chest. Thump. Thump-thump. The drumbeat of his heart had never sounded sweeter.
The madness took her often, nowadays. Pip found
that she needed to behave more and more like an Ape, or she became the enemy. She spent hours grooming the mother. It seemed to calm her. She remembered how Pygmies made bamboo flutes. Countless tries and the loan of the zookeeper’s belt knife later, she had an instrument which sounded right. The bamboo had to be an exact thickness, and the holes the right size and spaced apart closely enough to fit her fingers, but far enough to make the correct notes. She tried to teach Hunagu a Pygmy dance. But he had grown moody of late. He writhed at night from pain in his joints–growing pains, Pip told him. He ate mountainously. And Hunagu grew mountainously, too. His shoulders filled out as though he had stuffed them with the sacks of melons which were sometimes given to them for food. He practised thumping his chest and charging at the tree–and a powerful, charging male Oraial was a sight to behold. Several times, he snapped at her. Pip decided to stop wrestling him when he wrenched her neck. He could just as easily rip her head off her shoulders.
Late-season storms dumped flurries of hail on their home. Pip found it harder and harder to remember her jungle and her tribe. No matter how she fought, the memories slipped through her mind like wet river sand through her fingers.
One night, as Pip lay awake outside their shelter, staring at the stars around the looming immensity of the Yellow moon, which filled half the sky, she was surprised to feel Hunagu settle close to her.
“Pygmy girl cold?” he rumbled.
“Cold,” she agreed.
“No fur bad. Big people no give Pygmy skin-coverings. Big people bad.” To her surprise, Hunagu put his arm about her and drew her against his chest. His arm was so massive, it covered her like a blanket. “Pygmy girl look stars, think big thoughts. What think?”
Quietly, Pip told him how much she missed her jungle and her tribe, how she sometimes spoke to the stars and begged them to return her to her home.
“No good with Oraial friends?” he asked.
“Hunagu good. Hunagu mother …”
“Sick.” He spoke like a whisper of wind across the top of their cage. “She sick, Pip. Head-sick and heart-sick. She no live long.”
Pip chewed over this for a while, feeling desperately sad. “How Hunagu know?”
“We Oraial know way of spirit. She soon leave world. Hunagu know Pip dream of world outside man-wall. Hunagu no remember jungle. Pip tell about jungle?”
He didn’t remember his jungle home.
She talked for as long as he listened, watching the Yellow moon recede and the stars shining so thickly above, it was as though handfuls of white sand had been sprinkled across the vast, depthless darkness. She told him Pygmy stories and legends, finding that she remembered them word for word, even now. Her friend’s body was as warm as a cosy fire. Thickly furred, he did not suffer from the cold. She held his hand, her tiny fingers no longer able to fit around his thumb.
“Hunagu grow to adult,” she told him, tracing the deep creases on his palm with her forefinger. “Pip see blue stripe on back. Hunagu have new smell. Male Oraial smell; big-ape smell. Hunagu dream of world outside wall?”
“Hunagu dream of mate,” he admitted, with a wry smile. He squeezed her fingers. “Hunagu dream of jungle-world and vines, world of no walls, where Ape be Ape and Pygmy be Pygmy. No bad-man traders in jungle. Hunagu think Pygmy girl and Ape be friends, good-good.”
Pip had wondered if Oraials ever dreamed. Now she knew. He was sweet, using Pygmy language like ‘good-good’.
“Hunagu afraid,” he added, unexpectedly.
“Hunagu afraid? Hunagu mighty-big-courage.”
Hunagu guffawed heartily. “Hunagu know world-in-walls,” he said. “World outside very big, mother say. Different. How Hunagu impress mate if Hunagu know nothing about jungle? How Hunagu find jungle? Have babies? This big-man place. Jungle far. Look. Hunagu see Dragon.”
His massive arm pointed just above the wall’s lip, toward the Yellow moon. Pip gasped. He was right. It was far away, but the size and shape of that silhouette could not be mistaken. There was something so achingly glorious about the way the dark Dragon rippled across the moon’s pockmarked face, that a tear trickled down her cheek. Here she was, trapped in a big person zoo, and that creature flew wild and free above the real world, the world of cold and rats to eat and walls which kept a spirited Oraial trapped away from any hope of life, or a mate, or children.
“Pip take Hunagu to jungle. Promise.”
Instead of mocking an impossible promise, her Ape-friend said, “When Pip angry, Pip strong-strong. Strange-strong. Hurt Hunagu, once.”
Strange-strong? Pip stared at the great shaggy head beside her, wishing she could read his mind. She remembered that incident. Her friend had put his paw right on the matter. Now that she thought about it, she remembered how her flaring fury had caused her to injure his shoulder. That was definitely strange-strong. How else could a Pygmy girl possibly injure an Oraial? Also, Pip recalled suddenly, she had once ripped the trader’s pole from its moorings.
“Pip jungle king,” she teased, pushing a sense of disturbance to the back of her mind.
Hunagu grunted, “Hunagu dream Pip fly over wall. She free.”
Fly? If only …
“Pip and Hunagu fly to jungle,” said Pip.
She could not hope. It hurt too much. But her dreaming did not stop. Maybe she could escape and steal a Dragonship from the big people. She would fly it to the Crescent Islands, her home. She would take Hunagu with her. There, they would learn the jungle’s ways together. He would join the Oraials. They would always be friends, Pygmy and Oraial.
Best friends belonged in the jungle, not in a zoo.
Chapter 5: Moving Cages
The mother Oraial died on the coldest day of the year.
Storm after storm battered the zoo. The big people did not come to gawp at them in the bad weather, but huddled inside the big huts Pip had seen three summers before. They had to be hiding. Even the zookeepers walked like hunchbacked Apes under their fur coverings, as if afraid the sky was about to attack them.
She could not believe her eyes, that morning. White ground? She tested it with her bare toes. A freezing blanket had descended. Her toes throbbed and ached simultaneously. Rain that stuck to the ground! Bending down through a puff of breath steaming from her nostrils, Pip took some of the white rain between her fingers. Cold burned? She giggled.
“Snow,” said Hunagu. His breath boiled above her, creating clouds of its own. “Many moons ago, Oraials come from land of snows. Pygmy girl cold?”
“Pip turning blue like Hunagu,” she said.
“Fur good?”
The zookeeper had given her a worn old rajal skin out of pity. It was little proof against the bitter cold, the bitterest winter she had known since coming to the zoo, but better than nothing. She sneezed twice. Reaching over, Hunagu cleaned her nose and wiped his fingers on his thigh. Then, he picked her up in one arm as though she were an Oraial baby.
“Snow hurt Pygmy feet,” he explained.
As one, they looked up to the climbing frame. His mother had spent the night up there, careless of the weather. Snow dusted her coat. Icicles trailed down from her stubby tail and the longer fur on the backs of her legs and thighs. She was singing. The mother Oraial had been singing for several weeks now, and eating little. Hunagu tried to offer her the tastiest leaves. She bit his arm. He tried to talk to her, but she did not appear to understand.
Hunagu moved over to their water barrel, next to the locked and barred gate. He could no longer fit through it, Pip realised. He had grown too large.
“Frozen,” said Hunagu. He cracked the skin of ice with his fist. “Drink, friend.”
Swinging down, Pip lowered her face to the water. She gasped at the cold.
The ground shook. Pip whirled to see the great female Oraial thundering down the slope toward one of the crysglass windows. She did not stop. She did not slow. Tons of Ape crashed into the armoured glass with a sickening, wet smack. A triangular section of crysglass shattered. For a second, Pip thou
ght the female Oraial would climb through. But then a shudder seized her body–a wrong movement, the kind of jerky, distressing motion a body should never make. She slumped, and lay still.
“Oh, no,” Pip breathed.
Hunagu moaned, “Mother …”
Her feet slapped over the frozen ground. Pip halted, catching sight of the gap in the glass, easily big enough for a Pygmy girl. Maybe Hunagu could squeeze through? Her eyes leaped to the stricken Ape. Pip sucked on her lip. Courage, Pygmy warrior. She touched the Ape. Nothing. No heartbeat, no life. She checked again. Hope drained from her, until her heart felt colder than the day.
She turned to her friend. “Pip sorry, Hunagu. She-spirit gone.”
The big Ape’s face crumpled. He moaned, covered his eyes, peeking out between his fingers like one of the big person children playing their games with a Pygmy girl on the other side of the zoo’s windows. He began to make a low, keening sound, as if an ill wind moaned through the Pygmy cave of warriors. He rocked back and forth, making that pitiable sound, unceasing.
Pip dashed back to Hunagu. Grabbing his fingers, she pulled as hard as she could. “Come. Escape. Come, Hunagu.”
But he sat as though rooted to the ground.
She gazed longingly at the shattered glass. A Pygmy could slip away if she was quick. Here came the first of the zookeepers, curious as to the source of the commotion. She had to go now.
“Escape, Hunagu. Must come with Pip. Please.”
His keening rose to the grey, uncaring skies.
“Come,” Pip cried. In her distress, she switched to her native tongue. “Hunagu, please, you must come with me. We can escape. Listen, Hunagu …”
The worst was, Pip understood. She knew why he needed to grieve. With one final look at the hole, so inviting, such an invitation to a new life for one of them at least, she deliberately turned her back on the crysglass window. Pip sat beside her friend. Tears brimmed over. She wailed the Pygmy cry of mourning, and began to rend her face with her fingernails, split and torn from hard work and grubbing in the soil for food.