Damfakha arrived in a sweat-worn button-up shirt and knit cap and took us into patches of woodland forests below the shaved mountains. We shared handfuls of peanuts and little bags of biscuits for breakfast as the sun rode up over the mountains and washed through the savanna, making the grass appear translucent. Dew from the rainy season’s quick-growing grasses soaked through our boots and socks within minutes.
We navigated stretches of savanna pocked with mushroom-shaped termite mounds and clusters of white flowers, petals long like lilies. Every so often we stopped for water or a bathroom break, but Kelly was eager to get to la place du baobab géant before lunch and the heat of midday. We spoke little, but occasionally Damfakha would ask for new boots (he only had sandals), or new linoleum floors for his wives’ huts. Kelly agreed to bring him work boots the next time she visited, but demurred about the new floors.
“You know that stream near Dakar?” Damfakha asked in his minimal French.
At first we were stumped.
“The big one,” he said.
“You mean the ocean?” Kelly asked.
“Do you have to pass over that to get here?”
“Yes. In an airplane.”
“I didn’t know there were villages on the other side.”
Kelly spotted the giant baobab—the thick trunk was wide and buttressed, the sparse limbs like an intricate root system secured into the sky. Male chimps will pound their fists on tree buttresses like these to get the attention of the group. However, beside the giant, no other trees remained. The earth surrounding the baobab was scorched and ashy. Chimp nests, and all the trees that contained them, were gone. What was once a forest that chimps utilized for food and sleeping trees had been cut down and burned for cultivation. Kelly’s mouth dropped open as she stopped in her tracks and scanned the desiccated earth. She threw her backpack to the ground and ran through the field.
A bare-breasted woman in a long, blue warp skirt adorned with fish bones planted peanuts amid blackened tree stumps. The woman glanced over at us briefly before resuming her work. Kelly started to cry.
“There were forty nests here last summer,” she whispered, hiding her face so Damfakha wouldn’t see her tears.
Chimps returned to this place often, a sanctuary guarded by the baobab, now the lone survivor in what will become a field of peanuts local people use to make a traditional sauce.
“I know people need land to cultivate, but why did they have to choose this spot? Why here?” Kelly asked.
There were still a few trees left on the periphery, and a number of old nests, but Kelly figured that the chimps had been forced to find a new place to go.
She wiped her eyes with her shirtsleeve and pulled out her field notebook. She lifted her chin and diligently wrote down the GPS coordinates and time, then simply: “forest gone.” We were seeing firsthand the effects of human encroachment on what was previously considered wildlife habitat. Can chimps viably share space with humans? How long can their displacement go on before there is simply no room left on the planet for them?
“They’ve found somewhere else,” Kelly decided, examining the blue swaths of forest on her GPS. “I want to check out the gallery forests to the north. I haven’t been there yet, but I’m sure there’re chimps.”
Despite setbacks, Kelly remains dedicated and inspired, and most importantly, she truly believes that chimpanzees have a place in the future of our planet. On the back of Kelly’s business card is the famous quote from Baba Dioum, an environmentalist from Senegal: “In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, we will understand only what we are taught.” Kelly is working toward conservation education programs in local schools to teach children the value of protecting forests and the animals that reside there.
“There are losses we just have to let go of,” Kelly said, turning away from the giant baobab. “This year there will be peanuts instead of chimp nests, but many years from now, the forest will start to come back.”
And with the forest will come fruit, and with fruit, chimpanzees.
Another day in Bofeto, I got on the back of Kelly’s moto and we rode through the bush, over the ArcelorMittal bridge, and into gallery forests to the north. The USGS map promised stretches of dense forest. We hiked through savanna-woodland mosaics not looking for chimpanzees, only evidence of their presence. As Kelly taught me, habituating primates could put them in danger. Besides, we can learn all we need to know about the unique behaviors of West African savanna chimps from the group Jill habituated at Fongoli. Also, Kelly had recently begun putting camera traps in places where she’d documented feeding activity, and has some wonderful footage of chimps bringing fruit into caves. These wildlife-surveillance systems take pictures at even the slightest of movements, and allow Kelly to observe behaviors she otherwise would have missed. She’s even gotten footage of a curious lion sniffing the camera lens.
As we crossed the savanna into gallery forest, baboons barked in alarm, those in the foreground statuesque as they watched us stumble through vines and twisted lianas.
“There have to be nests here,” Kelly said as we turned on our GPSs, wrote down our coordinates, and began looking.
In waterproof field notebooks we recorded the time, latitude, longitude, number of nests in one place, how old they were, and what habitat they’d been found in. Kelly considers nests fresh if they were built the previous night, old if they appeared to be from a few weeks ago, and ancient if they were made months or even years ago. Instead of trying to see chimps, we sought out remnants of their existence—nests, feces, places they’d left discarded fruit, caves they’d rested in.
We descended dense, wet, green hills, and sound seemed to drown away. All I heard was our footsteps, water falling from leaves, birds chirping. A flash of orange antelope crossed our path, and immediately we found nests. Many of them were fresh. Kelly spotted footprints on the edge of a termite mound, and we searched the ground for feces, which were filled with saba seeds.
“They were here eating just this morning,” Kelly said, poking a pile of dung with a stick.
We left the bush late that afternoon with notebooks full of fresh nest counts. On the back of Kelly’s moto, wind dried the sweat on my face. We traversed rock-studded mining roads that cut through stretches of savanna and forest, making accessible land that had been known only to local hunters a few years ago.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” Kelly yelled suddenly. Damfakha’s moto in front of us had swerved into the grass, and a few yards away, a series of hulking black masses knuckle-walked through a patch of termite mounds.
“There they are! It’s a whole group of them!” Damfakha pointed excitedly.
Kelly and I both jumped off our moto and let it fall into the road.
“Come on! Let’s go!” Damfakha motioned for us to follow him, but Kelly begged him to come back.
She frantically grasped for her binoculars in attempts to get a group count. How many males and females, how many adults and juveniles? How many mothers with infants? Eight black chimpanzees, muscled shoulders poised above the neon grass, walked single file away from us. A juvenile sprinted to the front of the group.
“It would be so easy to follow them,” Kelly said, “but we just can’t.”
Her hands shook as she held the binoculars to her face. I grabbed for mine and got a brief glimpse of the backside of an adult male at the end of the line before they disappeared into the forest. We stood at the edge of the road, silent and breathless, our boots toeing the grass as if some invisible wall were keeping us out of the bush. It’s best they remain afraid of humans, I told myself, particularly now that their forests are being replaced by mines. As much as Kelly would have loved to find out where they were going, she was satisfied just to know that they were still here.
Back in the village, I was too tired to write. My boots were muddy and soaked through with condensation, my stomach rumbled, and my legs felt like Jell-O. My desires were primal—all I wanted was foo
d. I ate a prized apple I’d been stowing away at the bottom of my backpack, an import from South Africa sold at a boutique in Kédougou. I swept away pieces of bone from the rabbit we’d had for breakfast, and sprayed insect repellent everywhere. It was no match for the fly population, and the day was still too hot to get underneath my mosquito net to read or nap.
While Kelly entered data into her Toughbook before dinner, I hiked a cow path to a rock plateau above the village. No one is ever alone in a village—I still heard roosters, women pounding millet. I listened to children running home from the fields, trailed by their mothers, who were carrying buckets of peanuts and cabbage. The hunting dogs came to bark at me as the sky lowered its purple gaze onto rocks still warm with sun. Rocks that harbor gold. A child threw stones at the dogs, and I noticed that his jersey, torn at the shoulder, featured Barack Obama’s smiling face.
The dogs yelped and ran down the cow path. I listened to a generator’s whir. I found a sense of solitude and stillness here, and felt myself a part of the landscape, a white bipedal creature sitting on metamorphic rock, a rock perhaps filled with precious metals. This landscape has been vastly modified by time, animals, weather, people, agriculture, and mining companies, but it felt ancient and knowing. The wind moved easily and intimately through the grass, welcoming another wet season. The sky was a bare lavender, and I could see every indent, every contour and carved space of the moon. Damfakha approached in a loose, button-up shirt covered in yellow and red butterflies to tell me that dinner was ready. There would be antelope, rolled into balls by his wives, fried in palm oil, and served over rice. Once, there were volcanoes here. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
Three Poems
Dan Rosenberg
SERVAL
Our bed is elevated. The serval hunts
on wires. Breaks open a butterfly. Dust
crushed in a vertical pounce. Lovemaking
on the proscenium. And lovemaking
in the hardware section. Our bed,
strung on wires. Our serval makes
a proscenium of love. We break
open the butterfly with a vertical
crush. Our eyes closed in deep grass
for up to fifteen minutes, the stillness
before the leap. Your paws clamp down.
Break open our lovemaking: the dust
crushes out. What else so honestly
powders itself to our paws? Butterflies,
hunted. Make do with the wares
we have offered each other. We receive
a proscenium closed in deep grass.
Your serval breaks open her hardware,
dusts our bed. And at my pounce
a proscenium closes. Your paws clamp
our bed: a lovemaking. The hunter
sleeps a hunt in our bed. The feline
twitch and flex of hardware. We elevate
our hands, the bed, we hunt the butterfly,
a vertical pounce. This lovemaking
breaks open. What dust crushes out
from us. What dust on wires we are.
What dust so honestly itself in deep grass
for up to fifteen minutes. The eyes clamp
on wires. The butterfly, dust-hunting.
The proscenium closes our lovemaking.
What else on wires, what else breaks
open: the hunter the hunted loves making.
SAFARI
stuck long unbuckled in the middle seat sweating—
we buzz toward the black and blue sails—tsetse flies
(—vectors carry disease—mark the path
of force)—sterilized—sails keep the population
down—a shared design—the lion stands
on a giraffe’s head and chews—the family has
a thirst—a vision—imagining through lenses
bent—maggots nest in zebras’ nostrils
when they’re still—alive—it takes just a quick
imitation—of corpse—watching—nothing
we’ve done surprises—the space from mind
to eye—the lively socket what’s in there—
clockwork—motion but—not dance—the vulture’s
black wings spread still—not death—the drying after
DON’T LET ME INTERRUPT
The garden-party feline flexes his paws.
Tremor and tremble, swat the thimble.
Rust skitters over bricks. The box
on her belt keeps her blood sugared. He bats
the wire, bolts, she shivers, under her chair
a screw unthreads itself. Hunted
from the begonias, she holds it together.
Bunch of pleats dramatic in a thin-veined fist.
Acne arm, colored frames askew—but just so.
Thumping in temples her blood is a slow-
dance beat. Her delicate ankle bound
in a strappy number, she stands, teeters,
the feline scrounges the corners for spillage.
Buds unfurl, a nub sprouts to thorn, we
congregate in the cat’s domain with our pastries
and time. What can’t we celebrate? A plane
shifts the clouds, the wall garbles the traffic,
the news, our empathy condenses, these
mason jars of booze, some suffering, the claw
streak left white down her calf, and what else
shall we call to sacrifice? The ice is vapid
in our glasses, chittering over muddled mint.
Her dress is covered with flowers but is not
made of flowers. I slouch down to eclipse
the sun with her head. She’s an angel,
the light strikes from her head, a liberty
crown, the box beeps, I feel the tug
of claw and fang upon my shoelace knot.
Cat and Bird
Kyoko Mori
ON THE CONCRETE FLOOR of the boiler room, the small, dark bird resembles a fan knocked out of a flamenco dancer’s hand. Its curved wings, folded, cross over the tail feathers. The bird—a chimney swift—is about five inches from head to tail. Up in the sky, its wings would span twelve inches as it soars and glides, catching and holding two hundred midges or mosquitoes in its mouth. Chimney swifts cannot perch. They spend the whole day flying and rest at night by clinging vertically to a rough surface, such as the bricks inside a chimney. Their hooked feet can support their weight for hours in that position, but if a swift falls from its roost, as this one must have during the unseasonably cold night, it is unable to stand or hop.
In our brownstone, the bottom of the chimney is in the locked boiler room in the basement. Any other day, a trapped bird would have weakened and perished, but I’m here with the pest control guy to monitor our co-op’s mouse and roach situation.
The pest control guy, Roosevelt, is over six feet tall. He can take down wasps’ nests and move dishwashers out of the way to check for roaches underneath. He’s cheerful and talkative, so when he goes quiet, I know that a bird trapped indoors makes him nervous.
The bird flutters up to the window, slides down, and falls on the floor, where it sits flat on its chest. The boiler room is separated from the outdoors by two double-locked metal doors I don’t want to open with a bird cradled in one hand. “I’ll go find a bag,” I tell Roosevelt.
When I return with a small paper bag from my apartment, Roosevelt and the bird are exactly where I left them. I kneel on the floor and close my fingers around the bird’s back. The swift doesn’t resist being picked up; it makes no sound at all. But the moment I drop it into the bag and close my fist around the top, it spreads its wings and begins to flap. Through the heavy doors, up the stairs, along the side of the building to the backyard, I can hear the wings beating like Chinese firecrackers inside the bag.
I tip the bag and slide the swift out onto the picnic table behind our building. In the morning light, the feathers look sooty brown. The swift pushes itself up off the table and ascends the cleari
ng in widening circles. I count the spirals—three, four, five—until the bird rises over the treetops and disappears into the sky above our building, where every evening for the last couple of weeks, a small flock has appeared at dusk to circle, forage, and dive into our chimney.
It’s the last week of May. Chimney swifts have left their wintering grounds in the upper Amazon basin of Peru, Chile, and Brazil to disperse through their breeding range. Some will nest here in Washington, DC, while others will continue up the coast to Maine or southern Canada. If the bird I held in my hand returns tonight, or if it becomes one of a mating pair and spends the summer raising its young in our chimney, just on the other side of my bedroom wall, I won’t know it. All full-grown chimney swifts look identical, male or female, one-year-old or four-year-old. Still, any swift in North America this time of year, before breeding has started, is at least a year old, born the previous summer, migrated to the Amazon, and returned, so the bird I just released has traveled ten thousand miles at least.
In my apartment on the top floor of the building, on the bed adjacent to the chimney shaft, my two cats are sleeping with their light brown and dark brown legs tangled together. They’ve never been outside except in my car. Though the three of us run around the apartment several times a day with feather toys on strings, and Miles the Siamese loves to fetch his orange chew toy, the combined distance Miles and Jackson have traveled on foot isn’t likely to add up to a mile.
In the small Wisconsin town where I lived in the 1990s, I raised the baby birds people brought to the wildlife sanctuary after storms or tree trimmers or their dogs had knocked down the nests. I was on the list of trained rehabilitators on call who took the birds home, cared for them, and released them back into the wild. I kept the nestlings in the spare bedroom, away from my cat, and fed them every fifteen minutes with a soupy mixture of protein and fruits in a needleless syringe. There were robins, house finches, waxwings, chipping sparrows, kingbirds, each kept with its own kind in a makeshift nest of a paper-lined berry box inside a plastic laundry basket. Most of them stretched their necks, opened their mouths, and clamored for food with little prompting.
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