Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) (30 page)

Her fingers rubbed the pouch mechanically without stopping.

Above her, the gorillas seemed to be even more restless. She heard them rustling or whining uneasily. Occasionally there was the
pok-pok
of Titus slapping his chest, displaying his power to the dark night.

The flexibility of the neurotypical mind had always amazed her, its lack of loyalty to any inconvenient fact, its willingness to convince itself of any blatant untruth simply because the untruth would make life easier.

Her lips were silently mouthing again, “Please God please God please.” Perhaps her work at becoming normal had been a trifle too successful.

That night, she heard Uncle the most often, pig-grunting roughly at the dark, determined to scare everything nearby away.

Late in the night she finally drifted to sleep by imagining it was Titus's back she rested against. His vast muscular body breathing, lying there calm, ready at a moment's notice to leap up at any threat.

Even asleep, Max held the pouch tight in her hand.

When she woke, the sky was just lightening. In the grey light, she could make out the dark form of Uncle on the slope, pacing back and forth. Titus was on his hind legs, motionless and majestic, staring at the surrounding jungle, smelling the air. Over the next twenty minutes as she watched, Uncle never stopped pacing. He jerked around to stare at each noise. He'd always been a bit jumpy, even before the gunfire started. Maybe he'd been pacing all night. Overnight he'd developed the nervous habit of tugging on the short beard under his chin, then wiping away the hair he'd jerked out on nearby leaves. When the wind moved in the right direction, she could hear the rasp of his breath. Sometimes he tapped his knuckles against his left breast, as though from indigestion. He was older than Titus. He might have lived through several wars. She didn't think either silverback had gotten much sleep.

As the sun came up, Uncle roughly roused the family by coughing and grunting. He led the way down toward the jungle, stopping to look back and make sure they were following. From behind, Titus herded the others along. They didn't loiter to feed, but walked along quickly single file.

The women packed up and followed the group from a distance, out of sight. The gorillas' trail proceeded for a mile, angled slightly south and down the mountain, straight as an arrow. Everything about their actions seemed unusual and Max wondered about their destination.

After an hour, the women caught up with them. The family was spread out and feeding hungrily, near a small waterfall. Max and Yoko hid behind a
Hagenia
about a hundred feet up the mountain, peeking out from behind it to watch the group. Although the rest of them fed hungrily on their normal foliage—
Vernonia, Galium,
and nettles—Uncle stood right by the water's edge, tugging leaves off a ground vine and folding them into his mouth. At this distance, Max couldn't identify the plant, but could see his concentration. After rolling the leaves around in his mouth for a moment, he leaned forward to spit the leftovers into the water, then plucked some more leaves and started again.

Max remembered the vine she searched for was supposed to be spat out, not swallowed.

“Can I borrow the binoculars?” she whispered.

When Yoko didn't respond, she flash-glanced at her.

Yoko's chin was thrust forward and her eyes averted. She made no move to hand over the binoculars.

Max sucked air in. Looking back at Uncle holding the vine, she said, “This is it, isn't it?”

Yoko said, “If you bring back that plant, people'll swarm over these mountains, harvesting all of this plant the gorillas need. Searching for other plants. They'll scare the gorillas up higher and up there they'll starve.”

Max's face felt hot. Although she still whispered, her voice was louder. “What are we, like an hour and a half from the station?”

“Hey Tombay,” Yoko said, low and harsh. “Hey, we didn't keep you from the search; we just didn't help you. You never expected us to.”

“Oh,
come on
.” She spoke loudly enough the gorillas heard. There was a single startled cough from them and they bolted into the bushes while Titus charged toward the women, roaring. About forty feet away, he recognized them and angled off, his sheer momentum taking yards to dissipate. His gut made
galumph-galumph
noises like a horse when it cantered. Once he'd come to a stop, he rested his face against a tree and breathed heavily. It was his responsibility to protect his family, to charge toward possible death. After several moments, he pulled himself up and knucklewalked slowly back toward the waterfall. Several of the others peeked out of the bushes on the far side of the clearing. He grunted and they gradually drifted back into view, peering up at the women.

Feeling guilty, Max shuffled out on her knees from behind the tree so they could see her and she pretend-foraged, trying to look unthreatening, until all the gorillas were eating again.

Only then did she whisper, much more quietly, “Do you understand what this drug could mean? Hand over those binoculars.” Her face was still hot with anger.

Yoko made no response, her stubbornness apparent in the silence between them.

Max drew in a breath. “My dad died of a stroke when I was a kid. In front of me. I was the only one in the house. That vine might have saved him.”

When Yoko spoke, her voice had lost all its fierceness. “Oh Tombay. I'm sorry.”

Her tone released some tightness in Max's gut. The heat in her face moved to her eyes. She stared at the jungle for a moment to gain control. “Thank you. Now hand over those binoculars.”

“I can't.” Yoko said. “I'm sorry about your dad—really sorry—but neither of us can help him now.”

“This plant could save thousands, if not tens of thousands, of lives every year.”

Yoko scrubbed her hand through her hair. At her movement, Max caught the smell of her sweat, sour from a day of fear.

“This is the way I think about it,” Yoko said. “As a species, we have it all. We have cars, central heating, and cruises to the Caribbean. We have a million pharmaceuticals. We can be a bit generous here. We can do without one thing. Let this family have a few square miles, some trees, a few more years.”

Titus sat down next to Uncle and began to pick leaves off the vine. He was still breathing heavily.

Involuntarily, Max remembered that moment in the tree, swinging from his grasp, how he waited until she'd gotten her balance before he let go.

When she spoke, the depth of her rage surprised even herself. “Forget your binoculars. OK? I don't need them.”

She knucklewalked/ toward the vine, her arm in its sling pressed against her belly. At her direct path, the gorillas flash-glanced over. When they saw who it was, they watched her, but nothing more. She saw their trust in her. She forced herself to make her path more circuitous, but was still powered along faster than she should, especially since she wasn't stopping to forage. As she got closer to Titus and Uncle, they sniffed the breeze and looked past her for what might be making her move like this. They assumed she wouldn't do this without good reason.

Ashamed, she made herself stop. She foraged for a minute before proceeding, moving slowly enough that at least she wouldn't cause them alarm.

Once she'd gotten within five feet of them, she got a glimpse of the plant in their hands. A compound pinnate, the leaves cordate and lobed, the vine had a strong rhizoid spreading pattern and a tiny white flower.

Searching the ground near her, she found a sample of the plant, crushed a leaf in her hand and waved it under her nose. Astringent.

Touching the leaf to her tongue, bitterness flooded her mouth. Alkaloids. The first heart medicine ever discovered, digitalis, came from a plant high in alkaloids. She spat the taste out, felt a momentary numbness in her mouth—probably it affected the central nervous system too.

She looked down at the leaf in her hand. This vine was what brought her to this jungle, these gorillas, this danger. She turned to the gorillas, their lumbering backs. Asante was munching through a large clump of ferns, feeding hungrily.

I won't tell Stevens where it came from, she thought. I'll pretend I got it down in town, that someone gave it to me.

She watched her hand collect ten feet of the vine and loop it into a small bundle.

Better yet, she thought to herself, she'd keep it secret. She'd quit Panoply and figure out how to synthesize the compound on her own.

It would take a lot longer to get to market because the clinical trials wouldn't be run concurrently using extracts from the wild-harvested plant. But in a way that would help. By the time the drug was ready to announce, no one would ever associate it with her trip to this country.

She held out the vine, examining not so much the plant as her hand continuing to hold it. This is my hand, she thought.

She watched it stuff the vine into her pocket and zip it shut.

Afterward she knuckle-walked slowly back to Yoko. “Let me guess. They only use the plant after a lot of stress, right? Not all the time.”

Yoko nodded. She didn't mention what Max had done. Her voice was tight. “A silverback will come to this waterfall three or four times a year, after a fight with a rival or a close brush with hunters. They only touch the plant in the very early morning, before seven. Dubois has a theory the leaves are less toxic then.”

Max said, “The chemical's probably manufactured in the roots and lifted into the leaves in the morning once transpiration's started.”

Yoko scrubbed her face. Her voice was tired. “Look, I want to be clear. I don't blame you. This is your job. It's my fault. I worked hard to bring you here, to convince Dubois. It was a calculated risk.”

She decided to ignore Yoko's statement. “So I could have spent my life hiking up every morning to observe what they eat, and I'd never have found the plant.”

Yoko nodded. “Normally we never get to the gorillas before eight. It's what we were counting on. The only way you could see them use the plant was to sleep up here with them. Be with them at first light.”

“Dubois slept with them?”

“She'd camp nearby. With her workload, it was the only time she had with them. She'd hike up just before sunset, then come down in the morning. That's how she found it.”

They both sat there, staring down at the gorillas.

“Jesus,” Max said. Looking down at the gorillas, she pictured Dubois and Pip in a beat-up Toyota driving over the border into neighboring Burundi, yodeling out the windows with relief.

Then, unwillingly she pictured them instead in town just a few miles from here, face down in a huge pile, everyone's limbs tangled together in stiffened intimacy.

“Jesus,” she repeated.

The morning mist had dissipated. The early morning birds and monkeys still called. The gorillas seemed perhaps a bit less jumpy today. There didn't seem to be as much gunfire. The apes foraged, hungry after their long walk. They made little noise, the occasional crack of a branch or a social grunt. Once in a while they glanced over at the humans, their expressions unreadable.

Her stomach grumbled. “OK, let's get breakfast.”

Wordlessly, she and Yoko moved into a nearby thicket to pick blackberries. They ate with a fast intensity.

After they'd finished off all the blackberries, she showed Yoko two or three other plants she could eat and then she moved off to forage. She gradually knuckled in among the family. Sitting among them, she chewed methodically through leaves and stems just like they did. She tried not to think about the vine in her pocket.

The gorillas accepted her without comment, their ranks closing around her.

Around noon, she was sitting on a log with Rafiki, pulling off clumps of
Usnea lichens
and chomping through it.
Usnea
looked like Spanish moss and tasted a bit like watercress. Eating food this low in calories was real work. Her jaws got tired from the sheer chewing and she still felt a little light-headed from hunger. However she applied herself to the task. She knew, over the next few weeks, she would need every calorie she could get. In a way she was well prepared for this, for she'd never considered eating a pleasure, more a task that needed to be powered through and, since she normally ate a very narrow set of possible foods, she had no problem with a monotonous diet.

She and Rafiki sat with their backs to one another, one leg on either side of the log, heads down and concentrating on the
Usnea
. Back to back was how the gorillas tended to sit if they were within a few feet of each other because it decreased the chance they might glance into each other's eyes by mistake.

Rafiki shifted backward a few inches, closer to Max, in order to pull some piece of moss out from under her leg. This close, Max sat inside her shadow, her smell all around: a dense combination of sweaty horse, chewed greenery, and pungent adolescent.

She touched her pocket with the vine. Perhaps, once she had synthesized the compound successfully, she could persuade some researchers to pretend they'd invented it from scratch. That she had nothing to do with it. Then no one would ever connect the resulting medicine with the gorillas or these mountains.

Still chewing the last bit of moss, Rafiki leaned back, settled her weight against Max. A solid deep pressure, none of the uneasy fritter of humans. The quiet contact Max had always wanted. She leaned back into it. Rafiki inhaled—the long draw of breath filling her ribcage—and then sighed out.

They relaxed there against each other, the only motion their breathing. Staring out at the dense jungle.

In the background was the gunfire.

 

They were eating berries aroud midday when they heard the first voice. Both the women and the gorillas stopped in mid-chew. There was the cracking of underbrush under many feet, male voices, perhaps two hundred feet away.