A Primate's Memoir, page 13
Peace descended on the troop, and the trains ran on time. Saul fathered many kids, dominating reproduction to as great an extent as any alpha male I’ve seen, although he was not especially paternal. He had good affiliative relations with almost all the females in the troop, although he was never particularly close with anyone. Years passed, and no doubt Saul was beginning to contemplate the building of grand commemorative cathedrals and endowing of monastic orders in perpetuity with florins. For other males in the troop, watching their prime years come and maybe go amid Saul’s stranglehold, it must have been a trying time indeed. As it turned out, it took extraordinary measures to topple this extraordinary individual.
Usually, there is an heir apparent or two, waiting for a bit more nerve, for the alpha’s reflexes to slow a bit. Uriah breathed down Solomon’s neck in 1978, as had Solomon and Aaron down the mythic 203’s in 1975. Now there was no obvious number 2, just a bunch of young males in their prime, none of whom would dream of messing with Saul. Finally, they did the logical, if rare, thing; they formed a cooperative coalition.
Joshua and Menasseh, another big male, soon bound to be enemies, teamed up first. They spent a morning making coalitional appeasement gestures to each other, cementing a partnership, and finally worked up the nerve to challenge Saul, who promptly kicked their asses, slashed Menasseh’s haunch, sent them both running. By most predictions, that should have settled that. Instead, the next day, Joshua and Menasseh formed a coalition with Levi, a fireplug of a young male who had been around for a few years. Saul dispatched the trio in seconds. And they came back the next day with the vile Nebuchanezzar in tow. Nebuchanezzar and Menasseh managed to hold their own for a few seconds fencing against Saul before he scattered them.
The next day they were joined by Daniel and, as a measure of how much they just needed cannon fodder for this grand enterprise, Benjamin. Six against one. I was betting on Saul. He emerged at the edge of the forest, and they surrounded him. I was on top of the Jeep, trying to follow everyone at once. It seemed like the assassination of Caesar.
I’m sure the six were wetting their pants. I suspect Saul was not, despite the fact that all the males were conspicuously grinding and displaying their canines, half-lunging forward and slapping at the ground, things baboons do when they try to ruffle you big time. Saul seemed markedly unruffled and still. I can’t conceive that the six had it together enough to have a strategy. Baboons are simply not up to that. They must have happened on their strategy by accident. Levi and Menasseh were the two most physically likely to be able to inflict damage, and they wound up on opposite sides of the circle. Saul couldn’t face one without putting his back to the other.
Saul made his decision, launched himself at Levi and Joshua. I’m sure he would have gotten away with it, scattered the six, but Menasseh got in a lucky shot from behind. He lunged at Saul’s back as the latter leapt, managed to hit Saul’s haunches. It knocked him off balance, and he missed Levi and Joshua, landing on his side. And everyone was on him in an instant.
For three days afterward, he lay on the forest floor. Why he wasn’t killed by hyenas then, I’ll never know. When I darted him a few weeks later, he was covered with half-healed canine punctures. He’d lost a quarter of his weight, his shoulder was dislocated and his upper arm broken, and his stress hormone levels were soaring.
He recovered, although it was iffy for a while. He learned how to walk with three limbs, could eventually run for short stretches, looking like a fullback in a three-point stance, his useless arm at his chest. He was never in another fight, never mated again, disappeared to the bottom of the hierarchy. And he returned from whence he came, back to the wilderness. Unlike in years before, he was no longer the first one out, rushing ahead to keep a distance between himself and the others. Now, in his crippled state, he was the last one out. He kept to himself, moved away if anyone approached, sat and watched from the same distance as in the past.
9
Samwelly Versus the Elephants
I returned to Kenya for the reign of Saul, feeling altogether more weathered and worldly than the quivery kid who’d started out there a few years earlier. I now had a passport full of visa stamps plus a persistent fungal problem from Uganda that made me a perennial teaching tool for dermatology grand rounds at the medical school. I had come to own two ties and had recently been forced by circumstances to eat dinner in a Manhattan restaurant that required the wearing of one. I was making some progress with my research—I was starting to accumulate data suggesting that the bodies of low-ranking baboons chronically activated stress responses, the sort of profile that would predispose you to stress-related disease. And I had even survived my first scientific conference as a graduate student, giving a petrified fifteen-minute talk about that work. By the standards of my scientific tribe, or even by those of the baboon troop, I was becoming a somewhat credible subadult.
I celebrated by betraying the political principles of my union label family. I joined management. The baboon work was booming, and I was limited in how much time I could spend in the bush each year, ignoring my lab studies and the polite inquiries of my academic adviser as to whether I was ever going to finish my thesis. I needed the baboons to be monitored in my absence, and I hired two Kenyans to collect behavioral data on them year-round. Neither had degrees in zoology or primatology. Neither had degrees of any sort. Each had had a few years of schooling before their families had run out of money for school fees, and at roughly the same age as I, they had washed up in the army of hangers-on at the tourist lodges of the park, distant cousins of some waiter or pot-washer, sleeping on the floor in the staff quarters, hoping for any kind of job. I should congratulate myself for my astuteness in choosing them among the endless office-seekers, but it was dumb, random luck that I found these two who have become, I anticipate, my friends for life.
Richard was from an agricultural tribe north of the Masai, Hudson from one to the west. Both had the initial task of coming to terms with working in the territory of their traditional tribal enemy, living there, with their wives and families long distances away in their tribal farmlands. But beyond that, they were veritable opposites. Richard was bubbly, emotional, triumphant at a successful darting and inconsolable at a bad one, constantly trying out new personas, sopping up the mannerisms of every Westerner he encountered and brilliantly mimicking them. Hudson, in contrast, was reserved, pensive, steady as a rock, frugal and ascetic while supporting endless distant relatives through school, a man who would very rarely give you a hint of his depths of feelings and judgments and sly caustic humor. They settled into rooms at the staff quarters in the lodge, since, unlike me, they had no desire to live in a tent. Richard would spend a dozen years on the project before deciding he wanted to move back home to be with his family. Hudson would soon spend much of that same period working at a baboon site at the other end of the country, only to return to work with me in the 1990s.
My decline into capitalist depravity went even further. I hired someone to stay in camp with me. During the early years, my campsite was up on the remote mountain at the far corner of the park, and Masai and other visitors might wander up only once every few weeks. Because of some shifts in the movement of the baboons, it made sense now to move my camp to the open plains below. This was hotter, drier, and, unfortunately, far closer to the growing number of villages on the park’s boundary. My possessions started to get pilfered while I was away during the day, and it became obvious that I needed someone to watch camp while I was out.
Finding someone was easy—every acquaintance at any lodge or ranger post had some relative looking for work. The trouble was that the camp guys kept going to pieces on me. There was a long-standing tradition of such individuals turning out not to fare very well in the bush. I had recently observed a rather dramatic case of that in the camp of Laurence of the Hyenas, the Berkeley scientist who had started his research on the other side of the mountain around the same time I did.
Laurence had been short on research funds and had thus set up a campsite for an organization called Earthwatch, which sends ecotourists out to work at actual field sites. It had succeeded handsomely, and soon he had hired guys to cook for the guests. He first landed Thomas, a brilliant camp cook, famous with safari companies throughout the land, a man with many skills, some of which were useful. He made a rather dramatic first impression: short, squat, cackly, filthy, wheezy, brisdy, leering, unapologetically soused all the time. At every opportunity, Thomas would scoot off to the Masai village nearby for a bottle of home-brewed Masai hootch, come back smashed, wiggling and leering and dancing and singing in a raspy chortle.
Whenever he had spare time, Thomas would roar up and down the river, drunkenly carrying on. This was where two of his truly unique traits shone. In a drunken reel, Thomas would sit down by a narrow side-trickle of the river, a streamlet a few feet wide and barely inches deep, and begin to fish. And he would instantly pull out fish by the score, big meaty honkers that had appeared out of nowhere, as if Thomas was not only the secret god of grapes, but of fish spawning as well. Unfortunately, few would ever get to see these fish because of Thomas’s other miraculous trait, which was to attract buffalo. Over the years, Thomas had been charged, chased, thrown, gored, catapulted, and stomped by endless buffalo. He would start home, cackling and wheezing and singing, bent under the weight of the fish, pausing to polish off the bottle, and like clockwork, like the flow and ebb of the seasons, a buffalo would inevitably leap out of the bush to get him. Buffalo would scamper in from miles away to nail Thomas, toss him over their shoulders, and send his fish sailing into mudholes, thorn bushes, high into trees. His attraction for buffalo was a miracle. Game Department officials, if concerned about diminishing wildlife, could repopulate entire lifeless provinces with surly buffalo merely by driving through with the singing, snarfling Thomas tied to the front of the Jeep, like some hood ornament out of Hogarth. Put Thomas in a gardening section of a Sears in Winnetka, Illinois, and I guarantee that within minutes an African cape buffalo would leap out from behind the snowplows to toss him into the ventilation ducts. Endlessly, we would go out searching for Thomas, only to find him cursing and spitting and cackling at some buffalo, threatening it with his trademark, an astounding pelvic grind, as the monster approached. Most amazing of all, he was only partially crippled by his numerous buffalo encounters, his femur shattered once and incorrectly set.
In stark contrast to Thomas was the number two cook, the saintly Julius, a meek, giggly, thoroughly delightful man, heavily influenced by the missionaries who’d gotten hold of him at an early age. As the older of the two, Thomas naturally took on the role of elder of their microvillage and soon, in magisterial fashion, was relieving Julius of half his salary on a regular basis. This was apparently not too much of a problem, as Julius had already reached a turn-the-other-cheek accommodation with the Masai warriors who were also ripping off chunks of his salary in some sort of protection racket. The major problems ensued whenever Thomas had time off and would come storming back into camp particularly soused. Even in this state, he noted that this pained Julius, and he thus doubled his efforts around him. Thomas would dance and cackle, make kissy noises at Julius, and torture the poor man with his wildly grinding pelvis. This was an affront to all that Julius held to be holy and tasteful, and soon he was spending most of his days in his tent, singing hymns.
One would have thought that Julius was the one likely to succumb in this unlikely conflict, but one day he inadvertently managed to turn the tables, once and for all. We had entered camp to find the denouement in progress; it was unclear what drunken outrage Thomas had committed, but instead of retreating to his tent for religious solace, Julius had grabbed his Bible and was orating at Thomas, hurtling fire and brimstone at the sinner. Unexpectedly, the meek had indeed inherited this patch of the grassland: Later that day, an angry, sobered Thomas informed Laurence that his job description did not include being subjected to this sort of shit, and he quit. The whole incident appeared to rob him permanently of his enthusiasm for life in the bush. To this day, Thomas wanders the streets of Nairobi, blasted on big-city moonshine, ignoring the frequent pilgrimages of tour operators who arrive, scraping and bowing, to beg him to come and cook for their outfits. He has found a new, more remunerative niche. A man with an astonishing memory, he somehow knows every colonial white living in Nairobi, rushes up whenever he spots one of them, with an obsequious “Memsab” or “Sahib.” Then he regales the old Brit with the latest chortly libelous gossip about all the other old colonials in town. Brawls, adultery, fallen soufflés, murders, fabulous inventions; no one quite knows how he gets his information, but nothing slips by him. He relays it all with such a gleeful malicious insincerity, such an air of improvisatory fraud, most of it so transparently false, that all are delighted to rush off immediately and repeat the slander. But not before Thomas invariably cadges a “loan.” So he grows rich and more dissipated, although buffalo have yet to regain a foothold in town in their pursuit of him.
So, surprisingly, it was Thomas who proved to have the less stamina for the unlikely demands of the bush, and Julius settled into a long, august career in Laurence’s employ.
It was around the time of Thomas’s departure that I realized I needed to have someone stay in camp with me. Thus began the series of camp guys cracking up on me. In retrospect, I think this was because of the Taiwanese mackerel in tomato sauce. I was making the same impatient culinary mistake each year. I’d be sitting in my laboratory in the States, getting itchy as hell to get to Kenya. Finally, reach Nairobi, a mere day away from finally getting to the bush, rearing to go. Rush to the market to get three months of supplies so I don’t have to go near Nairobi again, tear through the store, get some food, don’t even think about it, just hit the road. Grab a sack of rice, one of beans, some vegetables that will rot after the first week in the bush, some chili sauce to hide the taste of the rot, some cans of plums in thick sugar syrup for days when I’m celebrating something. Then, search for some stable protein source. Cheese turns to an alarming liquid after the first two days in the bush heat. Meat I was still trying to avoid. Cans of American-style tuna fish are expensive beyond the dreams of mere field biologists and are probably reserved for the American diplomatic corps anyway. Then, each year, I spot the cans of the Taiwanese mackerel in tomato sauce. Cheap, plentiful, teeming with protein and bones and gristle and nameless fish parts that make me queasy to contemplate. Each year, for an instant, I stop and think, Don’t do it, get a few different things, take the time to look around a bit first. But then there’s this impatient rush, Let’s get going, already, food is food. Grab a case of the stuff, gun the engine, and before you know it, I’m at my beloved campsite with nothing to eat for three months but rice and beans and goddamn Taiwanese mackerel in tomato sauce with the bones that keep jabbing your gums with each bite.
After three days of this, you’re hallucinating about strawberry Pop-Tarts and Velveeta cheese food and Yoo-Hoo chocolate drink. But at least it was my decision, I keep telling myself. For the poor bastard hired to live out here, it slowly dawns on him that this is the grub for the duration. With the exception of people from the coast or the lakes regions, most Africans I’ve met seem a bit alarmed by fish to begin with, and rice and beans are definitely novel, since the local starch is a tasteless white maize paste that solidifies your bowels. So, each meal goes by, the man sitting and watching with Bantu stoicism as yet another can of mackerel is opened, the distressing shploooog of tomato sauce spraying out, the sickening sucking noise of the fish plopping out of the can, the glint of cartilage. Slowly, the guy begins to go to pieces.
Well, maybe this is unfair, blaming too much on the mackerel. The camp guys probably also went mad because it was a crummy job. You’re a Kenyan farm kid, trying to get some cash, and suddenly you have to live in the middle of nowhere with some white guy. It’s basically pretty scary. I eat weird stuff, have strange habits, talk marginal Swahili. My skin changes color in the sun, and then big chunks of it come peeling off. Richard admitted after endless questioning from me that we white guys smell kinda peculiar. To add to the problems, I have a large beard and a lot of bushy hair, which definitely gives the heebie-jeebies to Africans. And the goings-on in camp do not help, with half-awake baboons lurching around and crates of dry ice and liquid nitrogen belching smoke and everything covered with baboon piss and baboon blood and baboon shit.
But that was only part of the problems for the camp guy. A stoic person in a tough situation might try to take solace from interesting surroundings. But the guys were from some upcountry agricultural village, and the nearest such village was eighty miles away. And the bush is not much solace to a farm kid. From his perspective, the place was teeming with lions to maul you and buffalo to toss you in the river and crocodiles to grab you from there, and, if there’s anything left, swarms of hissing army ants to eat your eyelids. And worst of all, the neighbors were Masai, the nightmare of every Kenyan farm boy.
All in all, not their idea of fun, and soon after the start of each season, they would go to pieces. One guy, following the path pioneered by Thomas but without his verve or gifts, declined into a shapeless alcoholism after having reached enough of a rapprochement with the Masai to buy moonshine from them. Another festered in the same sort of religiousness as Julius and soon found objections to me; the president of the country had spoken out against beards as a moral blight, and in the classic merging of patriotism and religious piety that holds sway here, the camp guy made it clear that he’d be damned if he was going to hell in my bearded camp. One was mute with terror at the animals and Masai, and slept with a shovel. Another had a full-blown psychotic break, screaming in his tent at night about the lights paralyzing him. One went not so much mad as pointlessly larcenous, pilfering all sorts of minor objects and disappearing for days on end without explanation. I reached that strange maturational stage of having to fire someone for the first time and spent days obsessively planning it, alternating between guilt, sufficient anger that I wanted to machete him to pieces, and sufficient paranoia to be convinced that he was about to do the same to me. I gave him a prepared speech in Swahili invoking the Puritan work ethic, the golden rule, Vince Lombardi, made-up tales of similar misdeeds from my own misguided youth (i.e., trying to impress upon him that if he pulled himself together, he could still rise to become a professor like me), and, speech completed, I sacked him. He took it like a man, and to this day, I am convinced that every murmur, every crackling of a twig, at night in my camp is he, rising out of the riverbank to chop me into little pieces and feed me to the willingly cooperative hyenas (for this is how a surprising number of bush murders are carried out here).
