The Girl With No Name: The Incredible Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys

by Marina Chapman

  It was from up here, idly watching, that I was to make a discovery that was to change my life completely. Initially, however, I didn’t know it. All I knew was that the legs that I could see moving far below me were unlike the legs of any monkey I had ever seen before. They were long and straight, and they looked to be hairless, though, at this distance and with a mass of branches blocking my vision it was obviously difficult to be sure.

  Intrigued, I changed position slightly so I could get a better view. The animal was walking, and now I could see it more clearly I could get a better appreciation of its size. It was a big animal, certainly much bigger than the monkeys — bigger, too, than the wild boar I would sometimes catch sight of and mostly took care to avoid. It also, I realised with something of a start, seemed to be walking on two legs.

  I changed position again, feeling the strangest of sensations: that this creature reminded me of myself. I studied it, enthralled at our similarities. It had long, straight black hair, not so different from my own, and moved in a way that I knew my own legs could if being on all fours were not now so natural. It also seemed to be on a quest to find something. It kept stopping and peering into various bushes then, apparently dissatisfied, walking on again. It also looked tired, with a weariness about it that put me in mind of how Grandpa monkey often behaved. Though this creature, unlike Grandpa, didn’t look at all old.

  It did look sick, though, I decided, and as if it was in pain. It had a strangely distended belly, which it clutched with one arm and seemed to find a great burden to carry around. Had it been poisoned as I had? Was it soon going to die?

  I kept looking, transfixed now, keen to see what it would do. It was just such a strange sight. Terrifically exciting. But also one that left me unsettled. My eyes kept coming back to its odd gait, its weary manner, the cloth (though I barely registered the idea of clothes now) that hung from its middle, tied with what looked like vine. I was also confounded by what hung around its neck: a string of something that, from where I was, looked like berries.

  All too soon, however, it walked out of my sight line, so I quickly and carefully shimmied back down the tree to a vantage point that would give me a clearer view of the animal but one not too dangerously close to the ground. Once there, now terrified that it would hear me and so look up and see me, I crouched motionless, my breath held, till it moved further away.

  But it didn’t move far. It was still inspecting bushes and finally seemed to see one it liked. Or at least that’s how it seemed because now it crouched on the ground and began awkwardly crawling inside it. All of a sudden the air was full of the clamour of angry birds that had been shaken from the bush by this intruder. But I had no interest in their noise, because beneath the frantic cawing came a new sound that demanded my attention.

  I’d never heard a noise in my life like the one that was coming from the animal that day. It seemed to groan, it seemed to hoot, it seemed to scream and sob and roar. These were nothing like the sounds I would hear from the monkeys; no attack shriek could compare to the intensity of this.

  I had no idea what to do. What on earth was going on here? I was torn between the urge to climb down and so see better, and the fear of whatever was going on.

  As the noises ceased — which they seemed to do with unexpected abruptness — I began, after a time, to wonder if the creature had left the bush. But how could it have? I had not taken my eyes off it for an instant. I would have seen it happen. So where could it be?

  I have no idea how long it was before I got my answer. It could have been moments, or it could have been hours, because what I saw was such a shock to me that it filled my mind completely, causing all other thoughts in there to take flight. And as soon as I realised what I was seeing, it was obvious. This wasn’t an animal — an ‘it’ — it was a female! A mother! A mother who’d just had a baby!

  Eyes almost out on stalks now, I watched as she emerged from the bush, carrying the tiny mewling infant in her arms, wrapped up in some sort of material. I remember the material well: it was hard-looking, off-white, and all I could see of the baby wrapped in it was the nut-brown dome of a tiny wrinkled head.

  I could barely comprehend what I had witnessed. My thoughts were a maelstrom of emotion at that moment. This was a mother who’d just given birth to a baby, and I could see from her expression and the tenderness of her movements that she would love it and take care of its needs. I was captivated. And, at the same time, I felt bereft. I don’t think I’ve ever felt such a longing to be wanted as I did at that moment. That was the kind of bush baby I wanted to be.

  Her baby born, the new mother began walking back from the direction she’d come, her gait now completely different and her body straighter. And now that I’d found her, I was terrified of losing her, so I leapt from my perch and shimmied the rest of the way down the tree trunk, going so fast that I badly scratched the skin on my stomach and created a great cloud of bark-dust.

  When I reached the ground, however, she was disappearing back into the undergrowth and the bush she’d been in was now empty. But was it? Might there be more babies in there? Torn between following her and answering the question that had just occurred to me, I decided to quickly wriggle inside the abandoned bush. It was dark, but I could see there were no babies, only a sticky and strange-smelling pool of what looked like blood. This shocked me. I still had no real idea how this baby had come about, even though I knew that such things did happen. Since I’d been with them, the monkeys had produced tiny babies from time to time, though I had never seen any of them give birth. They would simply disappear then reappear with a newborn, which would cling to its mother till it was big enough to play and so become of interest to the troop. But this animal wasn’t a monkey. It was a creature like me. Which made what I’d witnessed today different.

  I sometimes think back to that precious shard of mirrored glass and wonder at the timing of my finding it. Would I have appreciated the significance of what I saw that day had I not been reacquainted with such a powerful sense of self? I don’t know, but I was as determined as I had ever been about anything that I must find that mother, follow her and meet her.

  I turned back to where I’d seen her heading and saw a sudden glimpse of movement. And did I hear something too? The unfamiliar mewl of an infant crying? It had to be. I set off in pursuit.

  10

  Trailing the mother and her baby wasn’t as difficult as it might once have been. I was agile now and swift, and so familiar with the monkey tunnel networks that I could save time by using these rather than following her exact path. I was in new territory, obviously, but the principle was the same. And though my view was restricted, and the tunnels often veered me away from her route, I made sure to check regularly that she was still in my sight, even scampering up tree trunks to get a better view.

  I was getting further from my home with every step, but my excitement and determination were powerful forces that lured me out of my normal comfort zone. I just followed her, and followed blindly, as I had only one goal: to go to wherever she was going.

  As time passed, the whole look of the landscape began to change. It became clearer, less choked with the usual dense vegetation, and bit by bit I was beginning to see wide open spaces where the ground was no longer earthy but sandy.

  By now, the woman and her baby were only a short distance ahead of me, and I felt a powerful urge to call out to her. I wanted to draw attention to myself, let her see me, make some sort of connection before it was too late. Something long dormant had definitely been awakened in me. I didn’t know what — I just had this need for her to acknowledge me and want to meet me. And though it might now seem fanciful, my recollection is clear: I craved the opportunity for her to want me like she did that baby. I had no idea why this sensation was so strong in me. I had learned to be afraid now, to treat the new and strange with caution, yet I felt so drawn to the woman that my fear couldn’t compete.

  But I was too late. No sooner had I resolved to catch up with h
er than she suddenly disappeared from sight, having slipped through a gap in an unnatural-looking hedge that seemed to be made out of rows of forest sticks. I increased my speed, scrabbling across what was left of the undergrowth, but as much as I was committed to finding out where she’d gone, instinct stopped me from crossing the exposed open ground.

  What I found, when I drew closer to the hedge the woman had gone through, drove all other thoughts from my mind. I crouched low, hidden among the vegetation, and slipped my fingers into the dense mesh of leaves so I could see. I had travelled far, so I was obviously in a new and different territory, but this was a territory the like of which I had never seen before.

  As with my first sighting of the woman it took a few minutes before I could even begin to understand what I was seeing. But some tucked-away memory in my brain must have roused itself, because I definitely remember the sensation of it seeming strange but at the same time almost painfully familiar. And it set up a sort of yearning in my heart.

  I don’t know how old I was by now, or how long I’d been living with the monkeys, but my hunch is that it couldn’t have been more than three years or so because memories from my life before the jungle must have come flooding back to me. Though I have very few left in my head now, several long decades later, I still have a strong sense that at that time I did still have them. I certainly had a conviction that the species beyond the fence were my species and that they lived in homes just as I had, even if they didn’t look the same as the home I remembered.

  In this case, they were huts, and there were three of them beyond the fence. They were very large and circular, with roofs made of lengths of long grass, and each had a single opening for a door. They seemed to be built from long wooden canes or boughs, which were tied together with strands of twisted vine, similar to the string the woman had been wearing round her waist.

  There were also lengths of cloth slung from vines between trees, and after puzzling for a moment I recognised them too — they were called hammocks! I knew of hammocks! People used them to rest in, in just the same way as the monkeys would doze in their nests high in the trees. One of them held a man who seemed to be sleeping, the hammock which cradled him gently swaying.

  Some of the men, to my unaccustomed eyes, seemed huge: well built, imposing and very scary. I was used to my monkey family now, where I dwarfed even the largest of the males. If I had been startled at the height of the woman I’d scampered after, I was in awe of these powerful-looking men. But once again, my fear was tempered — even if only a little — by the odd sensation that they were still the same as me.

  There were several women around, too, wearing less than the new mother I had seen but with the same strings of berries around their necks. Only now another memory surfaced and nudged me. They weren’t berries. They were necklaces: long strings of coloured beads. I remembered those, too. But where did they get them? There was so much to see and too much to take in. So many unfamiliar sights and smells and sounds.

  Of the woman with the baby, however, there was no longer any sign, and I imagined she must have gone into one of the huts. But there were several other humans, of all shapes and sizes, and as I looked around from my hidden perch on top of a fallen log, I could also see that beyond the huts there was a riverbank. The water beyond it was flowing brown and slow, and I wondered if it was the same river I could see from the canopy. If so, weren’t the people afraid of the caimans that might come up the bank and snap at their heels?

  There seemed to be lots of activity by the river, however, so perhaps the scary caimans didn’t go there. And at the water’s edge there were two long, upturned structures made from tree trunks, which were glistening and obviously wet. They had been carved into a shape that initially made no sense but at the same time was frustratingly familiar, and it suddenly came to me that they must be boats.

  So these people must travel on the river, for whatever reason. To get fish? To find new territories? Even to leave the jungle? I was transfixed as a new thought came to join the others. Did the river hold the key to finding my way back to my old home? The feeling came over me with startling intensity. I had barely thought of my old home in such a long time, and it shook me to be ambushed by the memory of it. I had forgotten so much, and now it all came clamouring back. These people were a family. A human family. And I was human, too.

  I stayed close to the camp for the rest of the day. First I spied on them from my hidden viewpoint by the fence, and as the day wore on from a number of other locations, moving stealthily through the clumps of sparse vegetation that circled the camp on all but its riverbank edge. I just couldn’t seem to drag myself away. But I was cautious. I was still very fearful of discovery — not by the women or the children but by one of the scary-looking men. The memory of the men who had brought me to the jungle had now been rekindled just as strongly as any other.

  Watching these people going about their daily business was like being transported to a completely different world. Why did they have coloured marks on their faces? What was the purpose of rubbing lengths of material against stones? What were the strange green containers full of water for? Why was it that only the little ones seemed to have teeth? Just as it had been when I’d first come to the jungle, I was again learning about what seemed a completely different species, even as I accepted that it was probably my own.

  I was particularly mesmerised by the children. Just like the monkeys, whose behaviour I was now so attuned to, the little ones, who were browner than I was and also cleaner, played and fought and frolicked and made happy sounds. The sound stirred up memories both from a life I’d forgotten and more recent experience. I had heard these shrill noises before when sitting in the canopy and had always assumed they were just a different kind of monkey sound. But they weren’t. They’d been the sounds of these children!

  Where the adults seemed strangely silent — unlike the monkeys, they didn’t seem to want to interact with one another — the infants felt much more like me. Not just in their playfulness but also in their play — the way they used their hands and arms and bodies. And a part of me, naturally, wanted to show myself to them. To go and join in with their games and feel welcomed.

  But it was my stomach that eventually dragged me away. It was cross and grumbling because I hadn’t filled it since morning. What did these people eat, I wondered, as I stretched limbs stiff from crouching. I had seen fruit that I recognised, piled in containers, but had seen no one eating it. So what did they eat? Fish from the river, perhaps? There had certainly been odd smells. The light was fading, but I decided to make one further foray, to the far edge of the fence, where I’d not yet been.

  It was while doing this that I found a well-trodden path, close to the perimeter. It led away from the camp and, though I couldn’t see the end of it, I became aware of a cloud rising up from the trees. Again I had a moment of complete incomprehension, watching the stone-coloured billows puff up into the sky. But then I realised. It was smoke! It was smoke from a fire! So that had been the source of the strange smell.

  I edged hesitantly along the path, fearful that I might meet one of the scary adult humans. But it seemed I was alone. I neither saw nor heard anyone or anything. The path eventually opened out into another small clearing, which had the same dry, beaten ground as the camp itself. In the middle of this, two campfires burned. I had not seen a fire for so long that I barely recognised what it was. But somehow, seeing the smoke and the flames, I knew to be wary. More instinct than memory, I think. It served me well.

  The closest of the fires was topped by a thin sheet of a shiny hard material. I didn’t know it then, but this was a piece of metal and on top of it sat a large round container that seemed to have been made from the same material. Feeling the heat lick at my skin as I approached, I peered into it. It was full of bubbling water in which some large white root-like substance was immersed. My nose wrinkled as the mist from it swirled round my face. This was food for these people? I could hardly imagine eating it. It
smelled so foul it immediately made me gag.

  I moved across to the other fire, which was burning but empty apart from some sort of criss-cross of sticks. I placed my hands above the surface, marvelling at the heat I could feel on them. It was like the heat of the sun, only coming upwards. Incredible.

  But there was nothing to eat, so I might well have slipped away at that point except for the realisation that I could hear faint human sounds. The noise, which was low, was coming from just beyond the clearing, so I carefully made my way across the dusty ground to the source of it, thankful for the absence of twigs, leaves and branches that might unwittingly betray my presence to them.

  Once close enough to hear them clearly, I poked my nose carefully through the undergrowth and was rewarded by the sight of two of the male humans, both squatting on their haunches by the base of a large, wide-trunked tree. They had set what I assumed must be some sort of trap. It was a container, made of sticks that had been criss-crossed and tied together. Threaded through it and coming out through the opening on the front of it was a length of a kind of string made of vine. The string was clearly there to lure something out — something they could eat — because they kept jiggling the end of it near the base of the tree. I waited to see whatever they were after, while the sun slunk even lower and the night took its place. Even in the gloom, I could see well enough. And what I eventually saw emerge was the biggest, hairiest spider I had ever seen.

  I was used to spiders, even if these days I didn’t tease them like I used to, but this was like no spider I’d ever seen in our territory. It was enormous — easily bigger than either of the men’s hands — but sadly not much longer for this world. Almost as soon as it had emerged from its little home to chase after the end of the string, it was in the trap and stone dead — skewered in a heartbeat by one of the men’s daggers, which had flashed by so fast I’d barely registered it.