Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) (18 page)

Y
oko and Max lay on the mountainside, staring up at the trees, waiting out the gorillas' afternoon nap. Mutara sat a little back from them. He had a radio he was listening to with earplugs. He stayed very still, his head cocked to one side, moving only when he needed to wind up the radio. Perhaps he was listening to news about the Kutu. His intensity made Max nervous.

“Why doesn't Dubois want me to find the vine?” she asked.

Yoko was lying on her back, facing the jungle canopy. Up there, the sun shivered through storey after storey of leaves, a twinkling of green. The dry leaves below her rustled as she rolled her head to face Max. “There are two reasons. If you find the vine, then you're going to leave and, at that point, your company will have gotten what they need from us. Roswell can stop paying for the park guards if he wants to. Without guards, the hunters will come and the gorillas start dying.”

Max pictured the family as they lay at the moment, napping in their giant bird's nests, hairy and snoring.

“Why would anyone want to kill them?” It couldn't be very challenging to track them. A child could follow their bulldozed paths. Once a hunter reached them, of course the silverback would charge the intruder, hoping to buy his family a few seconds to escape, offering his chest for target practice. “Trophies?”

“They eat them.”

“Eat?” In her mouth, the word felt foreign. It made her see again the gulf between her and most other humans. She, who ate primarily tofu, oatmeal, and bananas, tried to imagine sinking her teeth into a gorilla's dark arm.

She remembered her recurrent nightmare of Aunt Tilda chasing her, wanting to take over her flesh. She could imagine how a gorilla might feel, understanding it was to be eaten, its body transformed into jumpy human flesh.

“Look, for the last fifty years, the developed world has given this country vaccinations without following up with enough condoms. There are over eight hundred people now per square mile. Surviving off the land. They desperately need some source of protein. If they come upon a gorilla and they have five children at home screaming with hunger . . . ” Yoko shrugged.

“And the second reason?”

“Reason?”

“The second reason Dubois doesn't want me finding the vine.”

“Oh yeah. Sorry,” she said. “If you find the vine, it'll take a while before your company is able to molecularly manufacture the active compound. Until that can be managed, Roswell will need lots of the plant to experiment with and to make into medicine for the clinical trials, lots of it. If he offered enough perks to Rwanda, the government would allow people up here, hunting through the jungle for the vine, harassing the gorillas and driving them further up the mountains.”

Max looked at the distant peaks above. “Well, there's still more land up there for them, isn't there?”

Yoko scrubbed her eyes so hard there was an audible squishy noise. “The gorillas aren't meant to live this far up the mountains. At this altitude, there are fewer of the plants they eat and the temps are colder. They're at their limit. Still, the people down there need firewood and arable land. Every year they push the gorillas a little higher. Edge them out of existence foot-by-foot. Most research predicts the gorillas will be gone within twenty years.”

Max picked up a stick and turned it over in her hands. Even without leaves or much bark, she could identify it as
Hagenia
.

“That baby up there,” said Yoko, “Asante, she's part of the last generation. The least we can do is let her live out some of her life in relative peace. Keep the hunters away. Stop crowds of people from tramping all over the mountains.”

Max, thinking this through, noticed her body was rocking slightly back and forth. She forced herself still. “Can't some of the gorillas be kept alive in zoos?”

“You'll find lowland gorillas in zoos, but not mountain gorillas. Back in the 60s and 70s, a few zoos tried kidnapping a baby or two, but a whole family will die fighting to stop that. Not just the mother and the silverback, but every adult and juvenile will run screaming straight into gunfire in an attempt to protect a baby. The baby, having seen its whole family slaughtered in front of it, won't eat, won't drink, and shortly thereafter dies from grief.”

Max's hands were clenched into balls now.

Yoko inhaled. “You know, when they're really sad, they sing. I heard it once. After a baby died. It was the most . . . ”

There was a distant crack. It could have been a branch breaking or gunfire far down the mountains. They both turned to look in that direction.

“No,” Yoko said. “They will live on these mountains. Or they will die.”

“Fuckity fuck,” Max said. “Isn't it time to go up?”

She climbed upward as quickly as she could, leading the others. Even with her fractured rib, she was climbing a little faster each day. She'd always been able to manage pain well. Among all her fairly extreme sensations, pain had never seemed all that interesting. By now her lungs were more accustomed to the altitude, her balance was better, and she was learning strategies to keep her traction on the muddy slope. Today she managed to stay in the lead, rushing upward until she heard the gorillas again, the distant crunching and cracking of their foraging. They'd finished their siesta.

She paused, breathing hard. The pain of her rib was a hot yellow shimmer in the back of her head. She consciously turned her attention to the smell of the gorillas drifting by. That living scent of moose-like flatulence and crushed vegetation, of furry heat and adolescent sweat.

Gradually she wandered closer, knucklewalking in roundabout until she sat down on the outskirts of the group. Close to them again, she felt her muscles ease, her shoulders relax. The gorillas ambled about in their sideways navigation around one another, eyes politely on the plants, their dance of distant affection. The color of the earth and the bark, the tangled intensity of the jungle. She observed their movements with glances, using all her considerable attention, memorizing every detail. A headache was blooming up the back of her skull.

Several of the females were harvesting moss off a
Hagenia
. From the coloration, it looked to be at least two different kinds of
Sphagnum
. They stuffed masses of it in their mouths, then sucked the trailing ends in with loud kissing noises. Further up the slope was Rafiki, the mother of Asante. She was easy to recognize because her right arm ended in a stump. Yoko said she'd lost it in a hunter's trap. Rafiki half-stood to reach one of the lower branches of a
Vernonia adolfi-friderici
, wide leaves, clusters of lavender-tipped buds. Levering the branch down to her height, the wood whining, she held it using the stump of her right arm while she tugged off bunches of its buds with her left hand. When she let go, the branch shot back up with the
kunkh
of an arrow hitting. She settled herself beneath the tree and began popping buds into her mouth with little smacks of satisfaction.

Uncle, the other silverback, circled the
Vernonia
trunk until he found a spot where the wood was a bit rotten. Uncle was older than Titus and tended to startle quite easily, sometimes jumping a foot into the air at a sudden noise, not a great attribute in a male gorilla responsible for defending the others. At the moment, he gnawed on the trunk, staring off into the distance with a reflective expression, his teeth rasping against the wood.

Max plucked blackberries off a nearby bush. She crouched on her heels, munching on the berries, arms draped forward. She didn't have to remind herself anymore to sit like a gorilla. During the day, in the jungle, when she moved forward, it was automatically on her knuckles, lumbering along with her shoulders. In the evening, down at the research station, she sat straight up in a chair and ate with utensils. The results of a lifetime spent imitating the social norms of others.

As she ate the berries, a few family members in their foraging moved closer to her, one sat down within six feet, solid and relaxed. No more distance between them and her than there was between each other. She'd noticed recently Yoko could knucklewalk into the group to examine a poop—the family would let her—but the circle of them would never repair itself around her.

Now the three-year-old Asante approached her, roundabout, her eyes directed toward anything but Max, the very soul of misdirection. The style of the gorillas had begun to seem almost Japanese to Max, with their lowered eyes and clear rules of propriety.

Even after a week, Asante still seemed curious about Max and got at times quite close, trying to peek inside her knapsack or run off with her notebook.

Today Max listened to her rustle through the blackberry bush beside her. From the edge of her eyes, she could see her fingers picking berries. Her fingers weren't large and fleshy like an adult gorilla's, but narrow as a human child's. Yoko said she was only three years old, but her fingers moved quite deftly. It seemed impossible to picture her grown up and searching for food on the rocky mountaintops above, chronically undernourished in the cold, her family dying one by one around her.

Five feet behind her sat Rafiki, shooting a glance over at any sharp noise. She didn't like her child being this close to a human.

Within an hour though, Rafiki finally relaxed enough to move ten feet off, was harvesting some
Galium
vine, faced away and yanking the plant down.

This was when Max glanced over and saw Asante's hands harvesting red berries. She was plucking the berries from a plant that looked a lot like wild ginger, but the leaves were clustered in groups of three instead of two. The stamens a purplish color.
Solanaceae benutis
. Nightshade family. Deadly.

Max slapped Asante's hands, knocking the berries out. The slap made an audible
thwap
and Asante squealed. Both noises echoed, as loud as in a library.

Every gorilla turning. Time telescoping out.

Titus rising to his feet, mammoth and bristling.

But Rafiki was moving faster, bolting toward Max and screaming. Her charge like a speeding car—the rushing forward of wind and impending weight.

Max yanked the
benutis
out of the ground and held it up. She tucked her head down, bracing for impact. As hard as she could, she crushed the roots in her fist, digging her nails in to release its bitter vinegar scent.

This small plant her only noun, verb, and plea. This plant her shield.

Rafiki barreled into her, full on.

Perhaps Max had a momentary blackout because, later on, she couldn't remember getting hit. She only had an image of the moment afterward, lying on the ground, no pain, not from her rib or shoulder. Her heart beating a loud
wa-shunk wa-shunk
; Rafiki crouched over her. From underneath, the girth of a gorilla was immense. Max's hand still clutched the
benutis
. Her fist with the tattered plant jammed against Rafiki's chin.

And Rafiki was motionless. Face averted.

Beneath her like this, Max could feel each raspy inhale of air into her huge lungs. One inhale. Two.

Then Rafiki tucked her chin in to look at the plant, its distinctive triad leaf pattern. Its purple stamens. Her large eyes refocused on Max—not flash-glanced, but looked-looked. What is white in a human's eye, is dark brown in a gorilla's eye. Maybe this was what made her eyes so emotive.

Every other gorilla stood motionless, awaiting her verdict.

Then Rafiki grabbed the plant from Max, spun on her heels and bolted toward Asante, running in a totally different way now, not all bristly and roaring, but floppy and fast, scooping her child up and sniffing her hands and face, prying her mouth open and smelling in there too, pushing her fingers in, checking for any of the bloody red pulp.

Max lay very still. She rewound her memory to examine the
benutis
as she'd held it against Rafiki's chin. She could picture only three empty stems where berries had been. Probably those were the berries she'd knocked out of Asante's hand. She moved her memory further back to scan the ground near where Asante had been. Couldn't remember seeing any other
benutis
. She waited, listening. After a few moments, Rafiki seemed to arrive at the same conclusion. There was a slap of flesh and Asante squealed, much louder than before. Rafiki roared. Max shot a glance. Rafiki was waving the plant in her three-year-old's face. Then she swiveled and roared her challenge at the entire jungle, daring any of it to hurt her child.

Titus bellowed, backing her up, and then there came the
pop-pop-pop
of him slapping his chest. The loud crack of a branch or small tree being pulled down. He barked and threw leaves in the air.

Yoko and Mutara sat as small and still as rocks. Max lay where she was, eyes closed, just breathing. She became aware of pain now in her left shoulder, rising in a throbbing hum. She didn't move.

The gorillas were restless for a long time afterward, coming one by one to sniff the
benutis
where it lay on the ground. They would jerk back and snort. Then move over to inspect Asante, sniffing loudly. Only gradually did they settle down enough to feed again.

When Max finally felt it was safe enough to sit up, she found her left arm hung in front of her body, limp and foreign, the lump of her shoulder all different. Cautiously, she flexed her fingers and found they still responded.

The three humans moved a hundred yards from the gorillas, far enough away to stand up and discuss how to pop her shoulder back into its socket, pooling what scant knowledge they had. Mutara was elected to do it. Yoko would hold onto Max to help her brace herself.

Yoko said, “Max, I hate to state the obvious, but we're going to have to touch you to do this. You OK with that?”

“No choice,” Max said.

“You ready?”

Max held up one finger while she searched for something to concentrate on. A place for her mind to go. As she had done with those boys in high school, she recreated smells, evoked them in her mind, vivid and layered.