Through a Window (18 page)

After ten minutes Humphrey let go of Godi. The others stopped their attack and left in a noisy, boisterous group. Godi remained motionless for a few moments, lying as his assailants had left him, then slowly got to his feet and, giving weak screams, stood gazing after them. He was badly wounded, with great gashes on his face, one leg and the right side of his chest, and he must have been badly bruised by the tremendous pummelling to which he had been subjected. Undoubtedly he died of his injuries, for he was never seen again by the field staff and students working in the Kahama community range.

Over the next four years, four more assaults of this sort were witnessed. The second victim was the young male De. He was equally badly wounded as a result of a twenty-minute battering inflicted by Jomeo, Sherry and Evered. Again Gigi was present, and that time she actually joined the males in their attack. De, emaciated and with a number of unhealed wounds, was seen for the last time one month after the attack. Then he too disappeared for ever.

The third victim was, for me, the most tragic of all. It was none other than my old friend Goliath, the second chimpanzee who had ever allowed me to approach him closely. Goliath, who
had been top-ranking before Mike's reign, was always one of the boldest and bravest of the adult males. Why he had moved to the south at the time of the community division will always remain a mystery to me. The other Kahama males had, from the start, shown close affiliations with each other and spent much time together. But Goliath had always seemed to be more friendly with the Kasekela males who, at the end, so suddenly and brutally attacked him. He was old and frail when it happened, with his once powerful body wizened, his once glossy black hair faded and brown, his teeth worn down to broken stumps.

One of the students, Emilie, was present during the attack that led to Goliath's death. What shocked her most was the terrifying rage and hostility of the five aggressors—Figan and Faben, Humphrey, Satan and Jomeo.

"They were definitely trying to kill him," she told us afterwards. "Faben even twisted his leg round and round—as though he was trying to dismember an adult colobus after a hunt."

When the assault was over Emilie followed the assailants back to the north and recorded their wild excitement. Repeatedly they drummed on tree trunks, hurled rocks, dragged and threw branches. And all the time they called out, as though in triumph.

Goliath, like the other victims, had been horribly wounded. He managed to sit, but with difficulty, and as he gazed after his one-time companions he was trembling violently. He cradled one wrist with his other hand as though it was broken, and his body was covered with wounds. The next day we all turned out to search for him but he too vanished without trace.

After the death of Goliath, only three Kahama males remained—Charlie; Sniff, now a young adult male; and Willy Wally, still crippled as a result of the 1966 polio epidemic. Hugh had vanished, probably killed like the others.

Charlie was the next to go. No one saw the attack on him, but fishermen reported hearing the sounds of fierce conflict and, after searching in the area for three days, field staff found Charlie's dead body lying near the Kahama Stream. The nature of his terrible injuries was proof enough that he too had been killed by the Kasekela males.

It was clear by then that the Kahama males were doomed: sooner or later the remaining two would be hunted down and killed. But I was deeply shocked when the next victim was neither of them but one of the three females, Madam Bee. I suppose I should have been prepared for this, knowing of the brutal attacks on stranger females. But Madam Bee was not a stranger, and I had thought that the Kasekela males, once they had disposed of their Kahama rivals, would probably try to take back the three females who had "defected" to enemy ranks.

Like Goliath, Madam Bee was old. And she was even more frail, with one arm paralysed by polio. At the time of the fatal assault she had already been subjected to a series of attacks and was weak from a number of unhealed wounds. Yet this defenceless female was set upon in the same vicious way, pounded and hit, kicked and dragged and rolled over. After the final battering she lay face down, completely motionless, as though she were dead. But, as the aggressors displayed away, calling noisily, she somehow managed to drag herself into some thick vegetation.

She hid so well that it took two days of diligent searching to find her—and then it was only because her adolescent daughter, Honey Bee, was seen feeding in a tree above. For the next two days the stricken female lay on the ground, sometimes dragging herself a few feet only to collapse again. Gradually she became weaker and was seized by uncontrollable spasms of shivering. Four days after the attack she died.

There was nothing we could have done to prevent her death. If she had recovered, there would have been no future for her: even healthy males in the prime of life had not been able to avoid the implacable hostility of their Kasekela enemies. We did try to ease her passing by taking food and water to her where she lay,
but she accepted very little. Only in the presence of her adolescent daughter did she appear to find some comfort, for Honey Bee remained close by throughout those last cruel days, grooming her mother and trying to keep the flies from her wounds.

Willy Wally was the next to vanish. And then, for a year, Sniff was the lone survivor of the Kahama males, confined to a tiny area sandwiched between the Kasekela community to the north and the powerful Kalande community further to the south. I hoped so desperately that, against all odds, Sniff might make it. If only he could somehow gain admittance to the Kalande ranks. Or move to some unclaimed land outside the park boundary, east of the rift. He was so young, and so well-loved.

I remember when, in 1964, Sniff's mother had visited camp for the first time. While she hovered nervously in the bushes at the edge of the clearing, Sniff, with his insatiable curiosity, approached my tent, lifted the flap and peered inside. He had not seemed at all scared when he saw me, peering out! We had watched him grow up, from an engaging and playful youngster to a sturdy adolescent. We had been deeply touched when, after the death of his mother, Sniff (then eight years old) had adopted his fourteen-month-old sister. Still dependent on her mother's milk, she had only survived for three weeks, but during that time he had carried her everywhere he went, sharing his food and his nest at night, doing his best to protect her during the frequent aggressive incidents that broke out in camp at that time of intensive banana feeding.

But Sniff was brutally murdered like the others. Hunted down, attacked and left incapacitated, bleeding from innumerable wounds and with a broken leg. Once again we all went out to search for him: once again we failed to locate the place where he had crept away to die. His passing marked the end of the Kahama community. For a while there were occasional glimpses of the two remaining adult females and their infants, but then they too vanished. Probably they met the same fate as the rest of that
ill-fated little group. Only the adolescent females had been, from the start, immune from the violence.

The four years from early 1974, when Godi was attacked, until late 1977, when Sniff was killed, were the darkest years in Gombe's history. Not only was an entire community annihilated but, in addition, there were the cannibalistic attacks of Passion and Pom, the gruesome feasting on the flesh of newborn babies. And it was during that same time that the Zairean rebels had landed on Gombe's sandy beach and plunged us into the nightmare weeks that followed. I suppose we should thank God that the human drama, though it resulted in untold mental anguish, at least claimed no lives.

The kidnapping, despite the shock and misery, did little to change my view of human nature. History is peppered with accounts of kidnap and ransom and there have been many studies, particularly in recent years, of the effect that incidents of this sort may have on the individuals concerned. Of course the personal involvement gave me a new perspective: all of us who went through those weeks acquired, I am sure, a deeper sympathy for those whose lives have been violated in this way.

The intercommunity violence and the cannibalism that took place at Gombe, however, were newly recorded and those events changed for ever my view of chimpanzee nature. For so many years I had believed that chimpanzees, while showing uncanny similarities to humans in many ways were, by and large, rather "nicer" than us. Suddenly I found that under certain circumstances they could be just as brutal, that they also had a dark side to their nature. And it hurt. Of course, I had known that chimpanzees fight and wound one another from time to time. I had watched with horror when adult males, all inhibitions lost during the frenzy of a charging display, attacked females, youngsters—even tiny infants who got in their way. But those outbursts, shocking though they were to watch, had almost never
resulted in serious injuries. The intercommunity attacks and the cannibalism were a different kind of violence altogether.

For several years I struggled to come to terms with this new knowledge. Often when I woke in the night, horrific pictures sprang unbidden to my mind—Satan, cupping his hand below Sniff's chin to drink the blood that welled from a great wound on his face; old Rodolf, usually so benign, standing upright to hurl a four-pound rock at Godi's prostrate body; Jomeo tearing a strip of skin from Dé's thigh; Figan, charging and hitting, again and again, the stricken, quivering body of Goliath, one of his childhood heroes. And, perhaps worst of all, Passion gorging on the flesh of Gilka's baby, her mouth smeared with blood like some grotesque vampire from the legends of childhood.

Gradually, however, I learned to accept the new picture. For although the basic aggressive patterns of the chimpanzees are remarkably similar to some of our own, their comprehension of the suffering they inflict on their victims is very different from ours. Chimpanzees, it is true, are able to empathize, to understand at least to some extent the wants and needs of their companions. But only humans, I believe, are capable of
deliberate
cruelty—acting with the intention of causing pain and suffering.

Meanwhile, oblivious of the concern they had caused me, the chimpanzees got on with their lives. And, for the Kasekela chimpanzees, retribution was at hand. After Sniff's death the victorious Kasekela males, along with their females and young, travelled, fed and nested without fear in their newly annexed territory. The size of their range increased from twelve to more than fifteen square kilometres. But this happy state of affairs did not last for long. The Kahama community, it seemed, had acted as a buffer between the Kasekela chimpanzees and the powerful Kalande community in the south. And now this community began to push further and further northward. A year after the Kasekela males had gained their final victory over Sniff, they
were forced to begin a retreat. Again and again as they travelled in the area they had wrested, with such brutality, from the Kahama chimpanzees, Kasekela individuals encountered Kalande patrols. They began to move in the south with increasing caution and gradually their range began to shrink again.

Some dramatic encounters between Kasekela and Kalande groups were observed. Once, for example, Figan and four other males were routed by a larger group of Kalandeites and fled, in silence, back towards the north and safety. Two Kasekela males disappeared: first the strong young male Sherry and, the following year, old Humphrey. And, while we shall never know for sure, we thought it more than likely that they were victims of intercommunity aggression. After this, with only five adult males remaining, the Kasekela community not only continued to lose ground in the south, but also in the north where the large Mitumba community, seizing the opportunity, began to extend its territory southward. By the end of 1981, four years after Sniff's death, the Kasekela range was only about five and a half square miles—scarcely big enough to support the eighteen adult females and their families. I even feared that we might lose the whole community. Two of the more solitary and peripheral females who ranged most often in the south lost their infants, and, as with Sherry and Humphrey, we suspected that the Kalande males may have been responsible.

During the following year things came to a head. Four Kalande males actually arrived in camp and attacked Melissa. Fortunately—presumably because of their unfamiliar surroundings—it was a mild attack and her infant was unharmed. A few weeks later, when Eslom was out fishing one day, he heard Kalande males calling from the Mkenke-Kahama ridge just south of camp and, perhaps in reply, Mitumba males calling from the Linda-Kasekela ridge, just one valley north of camp. The Kasekela chimpanzees were being subjected to some of their own medicine. For several days after this they went about in silence.
They even left one crop of succulent fruit hanging on trees by the Kakombe Stream—because, we thought, the rushing noise of the water would have made it impossible for chimpanzees feeding there to hear the approach of their "enemies."

Fortunately there were, at that time, an unusually large number of young males growing up in the Kasekela community. As time went on, they gradually began to spend more and more time away from their mothers, accompanying the adult males on their excursions to the north and south. These youngsters—Mustard and Atlas, Beethoven and Freud—lacked the strength and social experience to be of much use during an actual attack, but the sound of their calling and noisy displays, added to that of the four remaining senior males, may have given their neighbours the illusion that the Kasekela community was more powerful than it really was.

The danger was averted, and once again Kasekela patrols began moving south to Kahama, north beyond Rutanga. When they encountered males of the neighbouring communities, although both groups hurled challenges at one another as before, we saw no more dramatic chases. No more adult males, no other infants of peripheral females, disappeared. The status quo, it seemed, had returned.