Adolescents

Meanwhile, back in the jungle ....

During the summer there was a couple of weeks when the papers were full of reports of strange new behaviours that had been observed in colonies of wild primates. Most of the behaviours decribed in this story have been observed in the wild in great apes or monkeys including getting drunk on fermented breadfruit, (and then behaving like blokes down the pub), bum wiping and baby stealing by young males who then try to parent the doomed young ones. Some of these behaviours reminded me of the tv drama Adolescence, which was a big thing at the time if only because they reminded me what a tough thing growing up is.

The troop ranged over a dense and twisted tangle of ironwood and leadwood, kapok and dragon blood, jackalbark and sycamore fig, that covered the area between the brown river and the first stirrings of the purple hills some twenty miles to the east.

They were an arboreal group who passed most of their days in the treetops and their nights too, in nests that they built from leaves and branches where they could rest without fear of predators.

Towards the northern end of their range was an area where many fruit trees grew; apples, bananas, mangoes, pawpaw and grapefruit and, most importantly, the big cream coloured breadfruit, and on warm afternoons the senior males liked to gather there to relax and share a few from the pits.

The pits were the depressions that were left when wind or disease brought down large trees, ripping their roots from the ground and forming holes which were in some cases several feet deep and the same across. They were maintained and replenished by juvenile males for whom this was frequently their first taste of responsibility, albeit of very low status.

Each day the appointed monitors were expected to scrap out the empty pits, discarding any vegetable or fecal matter left over from the previous night’s indulgence, then to refill them with alternate layers of breadfruit and banana leaves. To counter the effects of wind a few branches were laid across the top of what was in effect a large, round compost heap.

The fermentation process usually took a week or two, depending on the weather and by the time it was complete the monitors could feel the heat from their decomposition through the soles of their feet when they walked across the top layer of leaves. When exhumed, the breadfruit, which had been as hard as stones when they were buried, had softened almost to a pulp. Their skins had turned from creamy yellow to dark brown and, most of the sugar that they contained having turned to alcohol, they were giving off that sweet slightly sweaty odour that all primates find irresistible.

This afternoon the individuals responsible for the maintenance of the pits were a pair of adolescents called Simon and Marvin. This was the first time that they had been chosen for so important a role and their selection represented an important step in their ascent of the hierarchy of the troop. They were determined to make the most of their preferment by impressing their seniors with their hard work and aptitude.

The day had been warm and Simon and Marvin had fulfilled their responsibilities well, (or so they thought at least), maintaining a regular supply of fruit to the older males and setting aside the choicest morsels for the most senior. They had also performed acts of grooming on several individuals including some who would normally be considered way too high and mighty for them to even approach.

By late afternoon most of the elders had consumed their fill of strong fruit and were sleeping soundly, curled into balls with their faces on pillows of leaves and their red arses pointing skywards like beacons, in what passed, in their inebriated condition, for ground nests but were actually just a large and untidy piles of branches and leaves. The forest was silent apart from some yawning and sternutation and an occasional belch.

None of the females ever joined these sessions. They did not get to eat breadfruit. They had clearings of their own where they did female things and cared for the infants. Of course their clearings were not as nice as those of the males but they were perfectly adequate for their needs.

The breadfruit was reserved for elders. If there was a surplus then a few might be shared with some of the more promising adolescents, but this was more in the spirit of showing the youngsters what they were missing out on than of welcoming them to join the party.

All of which meant, of course, that breadfruit was reserved solely for consumption by males because there were no female elders. There were females who were old of course, but there was more to being an elder than a mere count of years. There was also wisdom to be considered and fighting skill and the ability to walk in a straight line after consuming several pounds of high octane breadfruit. Essential male traits, honed to a fine edge by long years of practice.

This year the summer had been long and hot and the harvest had been a bumper one. For many of the younger individuals today had brought their first taste of the sweet juice of life, as the adults called it, and their snores echoed round the fruit grove. It was good to start them young.

Some of the adolescents and juveniles who had indulged less freely in the available intoxicants, (either because they were of a naturally reserved disposition or because they didn’t like the taste), were seated on the floor, grooming each other. At their ages this was no more than a harmless pastime but they took it very seriously. In a couple of years most of them would be competing to establish their positions in the hierarchy of the troop, and their skill with fingers and tongue would be an important factor in deciding whether or not they would achieve high status.

Some others were amusing themselves with games, stripping bark from sticks, flicking pieces of shit at each other or sitting around a split oak log playing the leaf game, in which a number of large flat leaves were balanced in a neat pile on the trunk of a fallen tree with one corner projecting over the edge of the playing surface and the players would take it in turns to flip them over with an upward flick of their foot and catch them neatly with a snap of thumb and fingers as they descended.

On a warm afternoon like this one there would usually be some rough and tumble, stick banging or play fighting going on but with the most senior males in the troupe lying asleep close by it would have taken a brave chimpanzee to raise a hullabaloo. Even the occasional pant hoots which were the usual accompaniment of any adolescent activity were silenced because however easy tempered and forgiving the breadfruit might make the senior males their benevolence was liable to dissipate rapidly if their hard earned siesta was disturbed.

Every so often one or two of the adolescents would slide nonchalantly away from the others, climb swiftly into the canopy and then clamber through the branches until they were above the clearing where the females and infants were playing and basking in the sun. They too were being kept supplied with fruit by juniors but none of it was fermented.

The intention of the adolescents, when they sneaked round from the pits, was usually to act out some of the display gestures that they had witnessed being performed by the elder males during the heat season but when they arrived above the females they invariably found that their nerve had failed them and instead of strutting around the clearing and whooping up a storm, they kept to the darkest corners of the canopy, staying quiet, anxious to go unnoticed with their hands cupped over their eyebrow ridges to minimise the sun’s glare and so that their presence was not betrayed by the flashing of the whites of their eyes.

From their vantage points they watched fascinated and sometimes a little appalled, unable to draw their eyes away from the females and their infants as the mothers groomed and cradled the young ones, offered them the tit or showed them how to make and use simple tools or how to scrape a depression for defecation and to use leaves to wipe themselves clean afterward. Those who were coming into heat strolled around displaying their tumescences but the adolescents in the trees were not their intended audience, although they kept their eyes fixed firmly on the females.

Not that they had never witnessed such activity in the past, of course. It was part of the quotidian behaviour of any troop and many of those who came by to observe from the canopy were young enough to remember when their own mothers had fed and cared for them in the same ways. Some looked down on the females with wistful eyes as if they would gladly trade places with the infants in order to experience closeness to their mothers again.

Their presence was strictly tapu. If they were caught there would be trouble but somehow the absence of the elder males combined with the transgressive nature of their observation imparted a frisson of forbidden mystery that made the situation strangely exhilarating.

For Simon and Marvin, tasked with keeping the pits tidy and the breadfruit flowing, it was becoming a very boring day. When they had been appointed they had been delighted and full of pride at the dignity of their office, but by late afternoon when all the elders were asleep and many individuals younger than themselves were well on the way to stupefaction, it had begun to seem less like a special honour and more of a thankless burden.

They had already paid a couple of visits each to the females’ clearing, always leaving one of them on duty in case supplies ran low or anything kicked off but now that the sun was just starting to descend it seemed safe enough to go together so they set off for a last visit.

Simon’s own mother was in the clearing when they arrived. She was lying on her back and there were two bundles of black fur on her belly. She was tickling them with her long toes and when the sound of infant laughter came up through the leaves Simon experienced a momentary pang of sadness. He had hung beneath that belly for two years, one of them alongside the same female infant who was laughing there now, but the arrival of a newborn, (also a female), had cost him his place and when he went to visit his new sister his mother had turned away from him, dismissed him without so much as a hug. When the newborn died shortly afterwards Simon had hoped that he would be able to retake his place in the family unit, but that was not to be the case. His mother was still carrying the lifeless body of her baby alongside his sister and was also a part time wet nurse to the infants of a female elder whose milk had dried up. Somehow this made him feel worse.

As Simon watched his mother sat up and took the dead baby in her feet and laid it down in her lap. She stroked its fur gently with her toes then turned her attention to the other child, showing her how to strip the green from banana leaves, so that only the stem was left, long and flexible and perfectly adapted for inserting into the entrances of termite mounds.

The infant was growing fast. She was a quick learner too and she took to the making of the spills with alacrity. Simon remembered his mother teaching him the same skill.

When they had made enough his mother picked both infants up and balanced the lifeless one on her shoulder while the older one grabbed hand and footfulls of hair and swung upside down beneath her belly as she knuckle walked off in search of termites.

Simon followed without descending from the upper branches. Was his mother aware that he was there? He wasn’t sure. Did she even remember him? He couldn’t say. He watched enviously as the infant reached its head up and succeeded in locating a tit. He remembered the taste of his mother’s milk and the smell of her pelt.

He wasn’t sure why but it made him angry.

When his sister climbed down to probe for termites Simon stayed to watch her first few attempts but he got bored. He was about to head back to the pits when suddenly his mother stopped, half turned, and looked directly up at him through a gap in the canopy. For a moment their eyes met but there was nothing in her gaze to indicate recognition or affection and after a few seconds of blankness she turned back, scooped up her babies and walked away. Simon stayed put, watching his sister swinging between her legs and arms until she became invisible, swallowed up by the long grass.

Back at the pits most of the adult males were still asleep. A rasping chorus of sternutation rose from the ground nest. Only a mid ranking five year called Big Mike was up and about and he was looking a little unsteady on his feet and knuckles.

Simon was careful around Big Mike, a sturdily built adolescent with a reputation for volatility. Remarkably strong and wiry, he seemed to get bigger and meaner with every day that passed. Simon did his best to avoid him but sometimes contact was unavoidable and he did his best to get through their encounters with some dignity intact.

Simon would have been happy to be left alone but Big Mike had noticed his arrival and was on his way over. Simon lowered his gaze and crouched deferentially and when Mike came closer and sat next to him he turned and displayed his arse in a gesture that was intended to convey polite subordination rather than complete obeisance.

He was tired and hungry and he noticed that Big Mike’s arms were full of apples which he dropped in the grass by his feet as he sat down. Every so often he would stuff one into his mouth and bite down noisily. His chin hair was matted with apple juice and he stopped chewing occasionally to spit copious quantities of phlegm and seeds across the clearing. Some landed on Simon’s fur. The polite thing for Mike to do would have been to offer to groom him by way of apology, but Mike did not seem concerned about politeness. Simon was annoyed. Mike might be the bigger and a little the older of the two of them but they were of broadly similar status. A little bit of courtesy would not have gone amiss.

Having been brought up as the offspring of one of the senior members of the troop Simon was used to being shown a degree of respect by those with whom he came into contact. Even as an infant he had been treated with politeness by low status adults, but now he was coming to the end of his adolescence and it would soon be time for him to make a place for himself in the hierarchy of the troupe. There would be no more reliance on inherited rank. He would have to make a reputation for himself and that would involve fighting. Big Mike was one of those that he would probably have to fight. But that was for the future.

He was in no mood to take Big Mike on today even if he was somewhat the worse for wear, and Simon looked for ways to defuse the situation. He was aware that several of the juveniles had stopped whatever games they were playing and were watching events with keen attention so that even if no blood was to be spilled there was reputation at stake.

Simon reached into a pit, retrieved a particularly well ripened breadfruit and held it out towards Big Mike who took it without a thank you and ate it greedily, pausing only once or twice to spit.

When he had done eating Big Mike’s eyes looked a little glazed. He put his arm round Simon’s shoulder and pulled him in so close they could smell each other’s arse glands then grabbed a handful of scruff and scrubbed it up and down amicably.

“Simon, my old friend, old buddy,” he said. ”Do you know that you are truly one of the truly greatest chimps I’ve ever met? I truly love you. Truly I do. Truly.”

Simon, emboldened by this fruit fuelled outburst of bonhomie and truthfulness, replied

“I love you too, Big Mike. Give us an apple.”

Big Mike gave him a long look. Suddenly the glade felt a little cooler.

“Fuck off, monkey” he said.

Most times that would have been enough to set Simon off. No ape likes to be disrespected and to be referred to as one of the prehensile tailed vermin was about as disrespectful as it got.

A shiver of excitement went through the younger members of the troop, It looked like trouble was brewing. There might be some entertainment soon.

Simon and Mike turned to face each other on all fours and eyed each other up and down for a long time. Their pupils narrowed almost to dots, the hairs on the back of their necks bristled and their lips folded back on themselves to revealing sharp yellow teeth.

Fortunately for one or both of them Mike had consumed a lot of breadfruit during the course of the afternoon. He tried to stand upright, ready to assertively slap his chest with his hands but he lost his balance and sat down again with a bump. He looked up at Simon with a dopey expression on his face but that didn’t necessarily make him any less dangerous. Simon continued to stare down at him.

The standoff was brought to an end by the sudden arrival of a shower of scat from the leaves above and Simon looked up to see Reg, the biggest of the middle ranking adolescents peering down at them. He had constructed a nest half way up an ironwood and was sitting with his legs in the air, eating grapefruits and scratching himself.

Both Simon and Mike now turned their anger onto Reg, issuing a stream of invective in his direction, but Simon was not in the mood to pursue matters further and Mike was in no fit state, so they stayed put and gradually their hackles subsided and they sat together companionably, leaning together with their arms around each others’ waists, having apparently forgotten that only moments previously they had been getting ready fo rip each other’s throats out.

To Simon’s surprise Mike placed an apple on the floor near his foot and then kicked it casually across the gap between them almost as if he did it accidentally. Simon nodded slightly in acknowledgement, picked the fruit up with his foot and put it in his mouth.

After a few minutes Big Mike fell asleep and Simon went to join Marvin, who was stretching and looking bored.

“I’ve had enough of this,” Marvin said. “What shall we do?”

Simon shrugged his shoulders but then his face lit up.

“I know,” he said. “The patrol found some scrapes near the river this morning and it looked like they were from carnies. Shall we go see if we can find them and make a bit of trouble? Show ‘em our arses.”

Marvin didn’t need asking twice.

“Now,” he said. That’s the best idea you’ve had all day. I fuckin’ hate carnies.” He looked around at the sleepers in the nest. ”If any of these wake up hungry now they can sort it out for themselves. Let’s go.”

The two adolescents set off knuckle walking through the cane break towards a stand of long limbed baobabs that grew on either side of the river and whose intertwining branches served the troop as their customary path across.

Although this area was within the customary range of the troop it was also used by the carnies, whose territory was mostly grassland. This crossing point was the only access to water their troop had. It was frequently the site of intergroup squabbles.

When they were over the river they dropped to the ground and sat on a root for a few minutes, listening intently and sniffing the breeze.

Both Simon and Marvin could smell carnies, and more accurately, smell their scat.

Their own troop tended to eat only vegetable matter, mostly leaves and fruit, and although occasionally they might chance upon an injured bird or a young antelope and kill it and eat it, meat was not a major part of their diet. The reason was not that they disliked the taste but that it didn’t agree with them and if they indulged then they would suffer gut pains later in the day.

And it made their shit stink. Which, in a copracentric society where shit and rituals related to shit were considered to be of considerable importance, was no trivial matter.

For the carnies, whose range had fewer big trees, animal protein was an important source of calories, shit stink or otherwise.

As soon as they clambered down on the other side of the river Simon could smell carnie. The places where they had marked their territory with piss. The places where they had chewed banana leaves and spat them out. The places where they had stopped to feed their infants. The places where they had killed and eaten and shat. They had been here recently, he was sure of it. Better to go careful. They might still be around and carnies could be trouble.

To a casual observer the two troops might have appeared very similar, but the carnies tended to be slightly the smaller of the two groups and to have a reddish tint to their fur. The tribes often intermingled peacefully and there was frequent interbreeding. Sometimes it could be hard to tell which group an individual belonged to.

Simon felt uncomfortable in this less familiar terrain. He had been across the river a handful of times before, but always with an older male for company.

On this side the forest was less dense, with clumps of thorn and cane and bracken taking the place of the great trees that dominated in the forest on their side of the river, to be quickly replaced in their turn by an ocean of tall grass that stretched for miles across the plain.

There was no sign of carnies in the immediate vicinity so Simon and Marvin climbed a tall ironwood and hid themselves in its upper branches and waited and an hour or so later they heard a pant hoot, then another, and shortly after that a group of carnies came knuckle walking out of a swathe of bracken, pushing aside the fronds with the backs of their hands, like swimmers feathering the waves as they walked in to shore.

A small group. Just a male, a couple of females and three juveniles, all walking slowly and lazily towards the river. Probably they had been for a walk on their own and were now heading back to the other members of their troop for the night. From the state of them they had likely passed the afternoon in the same manner that Simon and Marvin’s troop had done, although the carnies appeared to extend the privilege of breadfruit consumption to females as well as males. These two looked as unsteady on their feet as the male, who could barely stand.

When they reached the foot of the ironwood the females sat down for a rest, leaning back against the trunk, and within a few minutes they were fast asleep. The male, having already got some way ahead, came back to the sleepers and having given them a couple of ineffectual prods with his finger he lay down beside them and did the same. In the absence of supervision the juveniles took the opportunity to wander off in search of entertainment, much as Simon and Marvin were doing, although by now they had begun to wish that they hadn’t bothered.

The male asleep at the foot of the tree was a big guy and they didn’t fancy taking him on, not for the promise of a bit of indecent exposure and some noise making. On the other hand, having come so far they were loath to give up too easily, so they decided to stay put and wait it out. In the meantime they sat on a wide branch in silence watching the females below them as they slept. Once or twice one of them would make a sudden gesture of irritation as if their sleep were being disturbed by some sort of insect, but so far as the watchers could see there were few flies around.

It was as the bigger of the females settled herself down to sleep again after such a twitch that Simon noticed that there was something moving on the fur below her neck and further observation confirmed that there was a small infant, probably a newborn, feeding from her tit. Simon was quickly absorbed by the spectacle and the tint of the infant’s fur made the strangeness even greater than it had been earlier in the day.

After feeding for some time the infant appeared to reach a point of satiety and it forsook the tit, sat up in its hindquarters and began to look around the clearing with interest, almost as if it were the first time it had ever seen such a place, which, to judge by its age, might well be the case.

Across the grassland the sun was sinking behind a range of low purplish hills. The evening was on its way. A chill breeze passed through the canopy.

Something had caught the infant’s attention and it climbed across its mother’s belly to her waist and allowed itself to slide down her hip and onto the ground where it sat for a few minutes picking up bits of dirt and small stones and twigs, each of which it placed in its mouth and chewed with an air of scientific thoughtfulness.

When its curiosity about the flavour of the world had been temporarily satisfied it turned and rolled itself into a crawling posture then set off to explore its surroundings, in particular the cane break that grew on the opposite side of the tree from the adults’ sleeping place.

Intrigued as to what the baby might do next, Simon and Marvin climbed quietly down and tiptoed to where the infant was crawling. Judging by the big smile that spread across its face it was pleased to see them and when Simon extended a finger towards it, it responded by arching its back and grabbing the digit with its feet and pulling hard on it.

So amused was it by this activity that it began to chatter happily until Simon laid his finger gently on its lips and it was silent again. The chatter spooked Marvin and he indicated that they should leave but Simon, having felt the warmth of the creature’s breath on his skin, was unwilling to move away. He left his finger in place and the infant sucked on it with its pale pink lips.

When the infant began to crawl away and into the nearby cane break their first thought was to return it to its adults, but they were still sleeping and the infant evinced no interest in being returned. They picked it up and tried putting it on the ground near its mother but it just crawled away again, pausing every so often to make sure that one or other of its new friends was in pursuit. In fact it was Simon who made himself responsible for the collection and return of the infant. Marvin had quickly lost interest in their new toy and was anxious to get rid of it so that they could return home.

By now the sun was getting low in the sky and the infant was beginning to shiver and to whimper a little and Simon picked it up and crouched forward over it and rocked gently forwards and back until it settled, as he had seen his mother do with her new female.

The infant reached out and stroked the hair on Simon’s chest and then found his nipple with its fingers and mouth and tried to drink. The tickling sensation was strange and exhilarating and stirred in Simon a distant recollection of life when he was new and his mother had fed him.

“Let’s get going,” Marvin said.

Simon wanted to say yes but he hesitated.

“We can’t just leave it here on its own,” he said. “Anything could happen.”

Marvin couldn’t argue. The river was yards away and this was an area known for leopards. And besides, Simon thought, he didn’t want to give the baby back. He liked it. It liked him.

It was at this moment that the eyes of the mother snapped open and suddenly she was looking straight at Simon and Marvin and the baby and there was nothing they could do but run, along the river bank, up the baobabs and down on the other side, the carnies screaming and shambling along behind them, still feeling the effects of their day’s indulgence. Their only idea was to get away and to rejoin their own troop. Fortunately, the inebriated state of their pursuers meant that they were not difficult to outrun and they had soon built up a sizable lead.

It wasn’t until they had left the river far behind and they paused to rest near the fruit trees that it occurred to them that Simon was still carrying the infant.

It did not seem happy any more. It whimpered, softly at first but within a few seconds of their stopping it was crying loudly. They could still hear the carnies crashing through the forest behind them.

Back at the fruit groves the troop heard the ruckus and everyone was quickly awake, the females grouping defensively around the young, the males adopting aggressive postures.

Simon spoke to the baby to try and soothe it but to no avail. He ran in search of his mother.

She was tending to the dead baby in the females’ grove. Simon called to her. She seemed surprised to see him, but not happy. He called again and she approached him with manifest reluctance.

“Mother,” he said, “I need your help.”

And he held the carnie baby out towards her. It was crying louder now, and shivering as if it were trying to shake itself to pieces. His mother looked down at the baby then back at Simon. She seemed to understand what had happened.

She took the dead baby from her shoulder and laid it in a cradle of roots at the foot of a tree and scattered a few leaves over it. Then she picked up the carnie newborn and offered it her belly fur. It grabbed tight with hands and feet.

To Simon she said,

“Go now. If anybody asks, you saw nothing. We have not spoken. We will not speak again.”

And she stalked away up the path, back the way they had come. Simon watched her go, with his sister, a ball of black fur clinging to her shoulder and the carnie baby, a reddish ball, clinging under her chest in the position that had once been his own.

He did not see her again.