Sure enough, he obliged, snatching up the nut I had ‘dropped’, putting it to his ear and shaking it, presumably to check if it was ripe. I didn’t know what sound would tell him this but whatever it was, it was the right one because, as I trailed him, he then seemed to cast around the forest floor, looking for something hard on which to crack the nut. Finally he found a rock that seemed to serve his purpose, because it had a dimple – a small hole in it – in which the nut could be placed, enabling him to whack it open with a piece of branch, without it rolling away as he struck it.
I watched this simple yet clever process several times. It would vary: sometimes the resting hole would be in the fallen trunk of a tree, other times the tool in his hand would be a piece of rock. But every time the result would be the same. The nut would split, and the monkey would pop a tasty prize into his mouth. Monkey see, monkey do! I remember thinking to myself as I searched for a tool with which to crack my own nuts.
Those first couple of days with the troop saw me spending almost all of my time trying to satisfy my hunger. The jungle was generous in her offerings, and as well as the bananas, figs and nuts there were all sorts of different fruits to try.
Once again, I learned from the monkeys. They loved uchuva, guanabana and guava unreservedly, but with other fruits they were clearly more picky. One particular fruit, the lulo, they would always seem to test first: shaking and sniffing the big orange globes before deciding whether to pick them from their bushes. I would come to learn there was a good reason for this. The unripe fruits were incredibly sour. It was the same with the curuba (which looks a little like a fat gherkin). They would only touch the yellowish-brown ones, leaving the green ones well alone. The monkeys also ate leaves, which I found I couldn’t stomach, and a variety of insects and grubs.
But life in the jungle in those first days wasn’t just about feeding. Or playing and grooming and chattering, come to that. For the monkeys, it was also about survival. To my new family, this meant having territory, and, crucially, protecting it from intrusion by other monkey troops. And this, I soon came to learn, meant fighting.
The first time I saw the monkeys fight with intruders, I was terrified. I simply couldn’t understand what was going on. One minute they were all playing, above and around me, and the next there was the clatter and crash of breaking branches as they massed in the canopy and fought. On this occasion it was with monkeys that looked different from the ones I knew. They had reddish fur and had come from I knew not where. The sound of the violence above me was petrifying, the noise of their screams as they fought so intense and horrific that I scrambled to escape it, hiding under a bush and clamping my hands over my ears. And when they came down again, the intruders presumably having being beaten, I was shocked by the sight of the blood around many of their mouths. Had they eaten the other monkeys? Or had they just wounded them to frighten them? And if I displeased them in some way, might they decide to turn on me?
It was a stark reminder that I was in a dangerous place, with dangerous animals, but when I thought about how the monkeys had treated me since stumbling upon me, I decided they must have accepted that I posed no threat. Why else had they not driven me away with screams and bloody violence? Why else had they let me stay so close to them?
Ever anxious for reassurance, I decided that perhaps they had seen me being abandoned. Perhaps they had seen how the men had so callously dumped me, and, understanding my plight, had taken pity. It was comforting to think that they seemed to accept that I wished them no harm and only wanted to be their friend. And, as I watched them start cleaning the blood from their mouths, I could only hope they didn’t change their minds.
5
No one came.
The day passed, as did the next day, and the one after that, and still there was no sign of my parents. There was no sign of anyone. No one human, at any rate. My hope of rescue, which had been at the front of my mind since I’d been abandoned, was fading as fast as the flower pattern on my dress.
It perhaps wasn’t surprising then that slowly, over a period of time I can only guess at, I began to stop hoping to be rescued. Instead I found myself blocking out all thoughts of home and concentrating on my strange new jungle life.
Each new day turned out to be exactly like the last one. The jungle would wake at the hot insistence of the sunlight, the steam rising in fragrant clouds as the light shafted down through the branches. I would watch the monkeys – being careful not to annoy them – and follow them to find food, then watch them some more. This would continue till the sun disappeared beneath the trees and the night suddenly dropped its curtain of blackness. I’d then find shelter where I could and crave sleep.
The only break in this routine in the early days was when one day (without warning, as I was so sheltered by the canopy) the heavens opened and my world was full of rain. I’d seen rain before, of course, but now it took on a whole new significance. It danced on the leaf tops, made the forest floor jump and jive, and created enough noise to drown out almost every other sound. It provided a ready source of water for me, creating a small pool from which I could drink, and soaked through my heavy matted hair and ran in urgent streams down my limbs. It felt almost magical: a fierce and cleansing force.
But apart from that marker, I really was losing all sense of time – of the hours and the days and the weeks and how to measure them. What I remember most clearly from that period is the feeling of incredible loneliness, the like of which I never hope to feel again. As the monkeys were the only jungle animals that didn’t scare me, it was perhaps natural that I felt drawn to them. They seemed so like me that I felt a need to try to understand them better.
Doing so didn’t just involve watching them. It involved listening as well. They communicated with one another using a great number of different noises and, starved of human contact (particularly the comfort of human voices), I would sit and listen avidly to these sounds.
I was also starved of the opportunity to speak and somehow communicating through my voice was a powerful and instinctive need. At first I imitated the noises the monkeys made for my own amusement, though probably also for the comfort of hearing the sound of my own voice. But I soon realised that sometimes a monkey – or several monkeys – would respond, as if we were having a conversation. This galvanised me. It felt like I had been taken notice of, finally. So I practised and practised the sounds that they made, always desperate to get a reaction.
It’s impossible to represent monkey-speech using letters, and it’s extremely difficult to reproduce, too. Even with my high-pitched little girl’s voice, there were some sounds I wasn’t physically able to copy. I do, however, remember the first sound I seemed to be able to imitate was one they made often – a warning call. It was a kind of guttural scream – a loud, urgent noise. Which it needed to be – it had to alert the whole troop. And it soon became clear that they made this call often. They were constantly alert, constantly on the lookout, vigilant all the time in case of anything abnormal, and reporting almost anything that moved or entered their territory. They had a particular stance that went with this as well. They’d pull a face – a sort of open–mouthed stare – before they did it and would rise up on their hind legs, almost on tiptoes. Then they’d start by making low sounds, presumably while assessing the level of threat. Then, once they’d identified an intruder and deemed it threatening, they’d move on to screeching, often swinging their heads from side to side. They were no different from children – or any human, really – in that, the scarier the threat was, the louder they’d scream at all the others.
If the danger was immediate, the call would be even higher – a sharp, high-pitched scream, which was usually accompanied by them slapping their hands on the ground. When this happened, the rest of the monkeys would join in, and they’d all scamper up to the safety of the canopy, leaving me (now I’d learned what the calls were about) scared and panicky as I rushed about trying to find a place of safety on the ground.
But I quickly learned that I didn’t always need