The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men

by Georges T. Dodds

  He lived some two leagues from the Pahouin village, in the middle of a clearing deliberately chosen amidst the old- growth forest, the limits of which were unknown to him, except towards the village where it ended among the mangroves on the shores of the Como River.7

  His new friends had built his cabin in the shelter of a huge fig tree, standing there alone like some great king of all vegetation. They had cleared and planted a wide zone around it, and had offered to organize a great beating out of elephants and d’ginnas of whose terrible proximity they had warned him of, insisting rather that he abandon his project of living alone and continue to live among them. Bearing a sincere affection for him, even revering him, after the cure he had effected on Akayrawiro, their chief, as equal to the most skilled of shamans, these brave folk could not have conceived, given his refusal to eat them, that on the contrary, the proximity of the fierce apes led him to speed up the construction of his shelter. He accepted their services as carpenters and gardeners, but not as hunters, hoping to make them understand that it was not dead, and not in order to tan their hides that he wanted gorillas and chimpanzees, but living, so he could educate them, help them to climb the last rung of the animal ladder, to finally raise them, not only to the level of the guileless and naive cannibals, but to his, the evolutionary philosopher and fervent Lutheran.

  A troop of young elephants destroyed his crops. One night when he was returning from nursing a sick man in the village, a panther lurked about, without however attacking him. At noon, on a day of blazing sun, as he was leaning against the inner wall of his cabin reading he heard above him and outdoors a strange scraping, slow and heavy: a magnificent python, as large as a man’s thigh in the middle, was climbing sideways up the slope of his cone-shaped roof, festooning it like a sculpture of barbaric splendor, the jewel-like scintillations of its scales barely muted by the deep shadows imposed by the fig tree. No longer being a novice tourist, Jan did as he had seen the blacks do in similar circumstances; he grabbed hold of the overhanging tail with two hands, tore across the clearing dragging the snake who could now not uncoil itself like an inert and monstrous blood-sausage and smashed its head against a tree-trunk by throwing it like a stone from a sling. To fill his larder he hunted kudus, slender antelopes with the gracefulness of a gazelle, and, with fewer regrets, the Phacochorus, frightening boars which resembled hairy hippopotami.

  The rainy season arrived. The floods doubled the width of the rivers, the frequency and intensity of storms only allowed for short outings and prevented any visits to the Pahouins. Tropical storms, where the storm clouds crashed to the ground in a wild cavalcade of leaps and sounds, and spread, even in the daytime, such a nocturnal opacity over the land that neither the straight nor the crooked bolts of lightning could penetrate and dissolve into huge livid flashes, were frequent.

  After one such storm, during which he had, for 48 hours, believed his uprooted home to be constantly spinning through the air, he heard plaintive human voices calling him from the edge of the forest. He burst out with happiness. Finally the gorillas had come, the long-expected and mysterious guests, of whom he had not seen a trace since the one he had seen trying to rape the native woman.

  This time it was a couple, a large older male and a female, with her lesser size, much younger. She was moaning. She had been caught in the fork of the tree, where they had been sheltering during the storm, after it had straightened up, pinning her wrist like a vice. The male was shaking her around the waist. Immediately, Jan, his gun thrown over his shoulder, climbed the lianas to reach their refuge. At first, the male was content to make, with one hand, the same gestures with which a man might warn away the importunate, then, seeing him continue to climb, let go of his mate, growled, slipped down onto the lower branch upon which Jan’s foot was about to alight. While instinctively loading his rifle, the good Jan continued to talk to the other as if he knew Dutch, repeating that he wished him no harm, but rather to help release his mate, and put a tender intonation like that of an indulgent school teacher into his voice to appease an infant’s anger. Bloodshot eyes, bared teeth grinding, nostrils flared, the hair on its brow erect, the large square bulk of his pectorals rounding at every breath, the d’ginna continued to advance. Jan, to keep him at a distance, extended the rifle like a stick. In a fury it took the barrel by the end, bit it, and, the shot having gone off by itself, he tumbled down, the back of his head blown off, from branch to branch, into the thick understory, with a unique quasi-human cry, whose imaginary echo, like the last gasp of a murdered man, would later, on several occasions, lead his adversary to wake up with a start.

  The female, by her uncoordinated and futile movements, was exhausting herself. Her feet left the fork in the tree, and she spun hanging freely by an arm like some ancient martyr. Jan, even if he already blamed himself for her mate’s death, even though he did not shoot deliberately, rid himself of his gun and approached. She clawed him in the face. He petted her, put her back on her feet, lifted her to relieve the tension and ease the pain of her pinched muscles. All this he did with such precautions that she calmed down little by little whilst her eyes followed him and seemed to implore and encourage him. Jan, with a saw-toothed knife widened the cracks in the tree limb with successive notches so as not to further damage her wrist. Freed, she held on to him, wrapped her good arm around his neck, and allowed herself to fall to the ground, her pain such a rapid and capable tamer. Having barely reached the ground, she already could not stand, and fell fully onto her side, moaning loudly. Jan believed her to be more severely injured than he first thought. He carefully felt her limbs, ascertained that besides her right hand being crushed to a bloody pulp, she had a contusion on her left knee. He picked her up and took her off like a mother would her infant.

  Nothing disturbed his devotion or his patience. “How are you my little d’ginna?” he would ask her minute by minute, so baptizing her individually with her generic name. D’ginna turned herself over on the bed, silent, sleepy from fatigue, refusing warm, honey-flavored herbal teas. She wanted cold water, her looks and the fingers of her left hand extended toward the water jug indicating this on several occasions. He dared not give her any because of her fever. The knee was improving, the swelling going down under a simple clay compress, a treatment borrowed from the Pahouins, and she could support herself, walking without much of a limp. In vain did he employ all the medical knowledge he had acquired during his voyages or in the books he constantly flipped through. The wound, in this miasmatic atmosphere, ill-suited to healing, took on more and more the aspect of a bad wound, the flesh as if bleached, the pus fetid, ragged tears, weeping and pale, ran deeply through the scattered, crusty boils. A cold turgidity, which kept the imprint of a finger, was spreading over the wrist and forearm. Jan was frightened, having noticed the corpse-like odor of gangrene which he had so often smelled among lightly injured natives who nonetheless died soon after, and had decided to allow, according to the expression of an old surgeon he had known, the “boon of steel” to intervene. Until now he had hesitated. No help. One of his best knives, some boiled batting, a needle and thread were prepared; he restrained the patient in a veritable straightjacket and amputated the arm above the elbow, in the healthy portion, where a series of tourniquets stopped the blood flow, allowing him to delay the ligature of the larger blood vessels. He need not have tied up the patient for she was so low that she barely reacted and fell, after the bandaging was complete, into a torpid sleep.

  He watched over her, barely sparing himself quarter hours of sleep. The trauma-induced fever lifted, all fear of complications gone, he took off the bandage, and ascertained, to his great joy, the complete success of the operation. On the rounded stump, free of suppuration and of a magnificent purple, the folded back flaps of skin were knitting, and in the middle, the sawn off end of the humerus now only offering a bare surface to observation. The healing finished, he still continued to apply the dressing and batting to the injured area, a precaution born of tenderness and continu
ed to protect from any shock or abrupt change in temperature, the soft scar tissue, prone to soreness. Her appetite and strength were returning. Eating, moving about with the ill-considered precipitation of convalescents, who seemingly wish to make up for lost time, she gave herself stomach and muscular aches. He had to ration her food and playtime. She growled, even once biting his thumb so hard he collapsed in pain, stretching out on the ground. The remains of the day came in from outside through the door that was ajar. She leapt towards it, sucked in noisily, then, as if dizzy from this breath of fresh air, she closed the door, came back inside on her three limbs, stumbling on her still somewhat stiff knee and swinging her stump about, she lay down next to her savior, put her arm across his shoulders and caressed him softly with the motion he himself had so often cajoled her with to calm the irritation of her fresh wounds and stop her from removing the dressings.

  Awakened, he took a few seconds to completely come to. D’ginna continued to rock him with the monotonous and sleep-inducing hum of an unspoken canticle. She licked his hands. Not thinking, he scratched her head like one would a young dog, thanking her for the affection which, for the first time, she was showing him. Suddenly he sat up halfway, surprised by an unusual contact. The darkness was unfathomable. Blushing at sensing himself blushing, ashamed of his own shame, he had supposed the animal’s caresses to be without motive. When these same caresses, now so precisely directed that, even chaste as he had been, he could not but comprehend their intention, he ran outside, troubled and silent with disgust.

  He quickly recovered in the coolness of the open air. Believing them once again to be the result of happenstance, or that he had a nightmare when he was passed out, he mechanically swallowed a few mouthfuls of manioc and smoked meat, and prepared himself for a night of forgetfulness by stuffing a number of pipes with a Gabonese plant which is more intoxicating than tobacco, a sort of hashish-hemp whose smoke had the added property of repelling mosquitoes. D’ginna was not hungry either, and slept so calmly that he ended up being reassured. Obviously he was overcome with an unhealthy urge. Smiling at his alarm regarding his modesty, he went to sleep somewhat overexcited, rolling from side to side before finding a comfortable position.

  Were it empty the cabin would be no quieter.

  Jan’s bed consisted simply of leaves and grasses swept over; D’ginna’s bed, richer by a pile of mats and dried pelts. Exhausted by the night’s madness, he barely slept, when, upon the same caresses as before he felt the same excitement as before. It was no longer possible to have any doubt. He lit the lamp and dared not blow it out. D’ginna, returning to her spot and leaning her shoulder against the wall of the hut, was resting as she had during her life in the wild, when she would sit with her back to the truck of a tree in the fork of a tall, strong limb. Her hands knotted under her knees, her eyes closed, she feigned sleep, but the movement of her lips thrust forward like a snout, and arranged in the familiar pout of grumpy children to whom one has refused something, belied this. Jan, walking to relieve his nervous excitement, saw her as he passed back and forth before her, batting her eyes at him in the same way the young serving girls in Haarlem, tried to goad him from his reticence, when upon festival nights he would saunter alone along the walkways of Kenau Park. Perhaps it was a trick of the light wavering under the winds of his comings and goings; for the tenth tune at least, he felt that insomnia and fatigue were abusing his senses, and he returned to his bed. D’ginna softly slipping in beside him brought him back to reality. Should he sneak off to the cold of the tall grasses? He knew too well the treacherousness of such nights, when miasmas constantly emanated from the soil which had accumulated, activated and incubated in centuries of organic matter, the most pernicious of viruses, slow but more pitiless killers than the wild beasts. He was staggering about, asleep on his feet. Taking refuge in his books, the usual cure for his pains and troubles, he came across the modern theories on the origins of man, theories whose complexities and apparent contradictions he had a great deal of difficulty in sorting out, his lack of a bold outlook never allowing him a sufficient understanding of the concepts of space and especially of time so important to such studies. Automatically he turned to examine the false calmness of D’ginna still leaning against the wall. Thus this creature was not his immediate ancestor, as so many frivolous minds would accuse the scientists of teaching, and which the latter appropriately concurred in denying, but descended with him, like two branches of the same genetic tree, from an animal awkward in walking erect and without articulate speech.8 His imagination inflamed, Jan eliminated the immeasurable time passed and thought of this common ancestor, a four-legged giant, hairy and without speech, unknown and unseen since the Miocene. From one side were the great apes born, which must be those amongst the current anthropoids which would most resemble him; from the other, primitive man, still similar to him, but who would soon flake the flints of Thenay, and appropriating unto himself the Sun, domesticating it for his short-term needs by discovering fire and keeping it alive in the shelter of caves. So D’ginna looked not so different from him; of an inferior but related race. His life among the Pahouins aided in him accepting this conclusion, as soon as it began to emerge as the germ of an idea in his brain. He dropped to his knees under the massive blow of a sudden idea. His arteries carried this excitement through him. Did he not bear the renown, the scientific glory of all his dreams, for which he had suffered so much? The possibility of sexual relations, would it not prove an identity in nature? He got up, drew closer, and believing himself to be acting in the fullness of his free will, judging himself not to be giving in to the excitement of any vile desires, he took D’ginna, now reticent, and married her.

  The next day, the experimenter’s enthusiasm having waned, he believed his actions to be the result of a diabolical temptation, that he was now forever among the fallen, weeping in regret for his former candor, he ran off into the forest, avoiding the puddles of water where he could have mired himself. But the night, inciting in him troubling memories worse than his remorse, he fought in vain. Insidious doubts assailed him, the monstrous sexual relationship was well consummated, and the poor Jan soon presented a rare case of a splitting of the will. In the day, he tended to the ordinary chores of a new Crusoe, more carefree than he had been in the past, remembering nothing, indifferent to the tattoo-like traces of D’ginna’s howling embraces. As soon as dusk came, like poorly healed wounds of a rabid dog, which reopen and needle him to more ferocious battles, each of the former caresses seemed to spread, to become poisoned; and he would run to his mistress begging her for new ones, deeper and harsher.

  He was only cured of this form of sleep-walking one morning while gardening, when he noticed his mate’s pregnancy. Picking fleas from the folds of her groin, squatting in the sun, leaning back a bit, her belly in this position cast a rounded shadow so ridiculous that at first Jan refused to believe what was right before his eyes. Floored when he understood, the pact broken, the bewitchment dissipated, his memory now clear, he accepted, as a form of expiation, the reality of his adventure, and vowed he would confess to his crime with complete candor. I shall be dishonored, he thought, but immortal; the good, ignorant, common folk will hound me from civilized countries so that my sight will not taint their women and girls, but in deference to the results that will bring them the experimental solution to the most difficult anthropological questions, the fanatics of this science, in their conscience, in their spoken teachings if not in their written works, would forgive me that which the vulgar would term my filthy bestiality.

  Months went by.

  The river back within its banks, the trails practicable, the Pahouins arrived to consult him regarding their sick, the number of which increased after each winter season. Still believing him capable of outperforming their shamans, and conquered besides by his goodwill, they spared him nothing, renewing his supplies of oil, honey, corn, fishing tackle, hunting snares for birds and other small game, and happy to finally see his dream of possessing a gr
eat ape fulfilled, they congratulated him in having found a pregnant female, knowing, they told him, that when they were in this state their mate would defend them to their last breath. One of their javelins, with shark-like sawtooths, could not have slashed Jan’s heart any worse than this complement. He hid his sudden sadness. Having accompanied them back to the banks of the Como and being alone, the thought that perhaps they were right, that D’ginna was probably already pregnant when he had killed her powerful mate, plunged him into such a cruel perplexity that he did not eat or sleep for several days.

  For the simple calculation which would remove any doubt, the required elements were all missing. As eddies, chasms and cataracts conceal the direction of torrents, as admiring the marvels of the forest takes away any leisure one might have to pick out landmarks, the disgust, the regrets, the triumphs and delirium of kisses exchanged had prevented him from counting the days. He did not know when he settled in the clearing, when he met D’ginna, when their lovemaking began, at what date he noticed her pregnancy and the number of months since. Had he this information, the main element would still be missing, the gestation period of the African great apes. The best of his books, a well known medical dictionary translated into French, only indicated that they menstruate periodically, a capacity incorrectly assessed by naturalists as being limited only to human beings, and the suppression of which in the woman was a clear sign of impending motherhood. D’ginna never having shown such a flow was thus either pregnant before their intimate relations, or became so immediately after. And in this was Jan’s despair at being unable, of these two mutually exclusive truths, to definitely eliminate the first.