Rima the Monkey's Child

RIMA,

the Monkey's Child

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the Monkey's Child HARRY LEE LITTLE with illustrations by H. G. Glyde

The University of Alberta Press

First published by The University of Alberta Press 450 Athabasca Hall Edmonton, Alberta Canada T6G 2E8 Copyright © The University of Alberta Press 1983 Illustrations copyright © H. G. Glyde 1983 ISBN 0-88864-040-4

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Little, Harry Lee, 1916-1980. Rima, the monkey's child

ISBN 0-88864-040-4 1. Rima (Spider monkey) 2. Spider monkeys - Biography. I. Title. QL795.M7L58 599.8'2'0924

C83-091051-4

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright owner. Typesetting by The Typeworks, Vancouver, British Columbia. Printed by John Deyell Company, Willowdale, Ontario, Canada.

To the children of the wild, especially the primate children

Acknowledgments

The publisher would like to thank Dr. George E. Ball, Chairman of the Department of Entomology of The University of Alberta, who brought the manuscript of Rima from the jungle of Brazil to western Canada to be published, and who acted as literary agent for Harry and Jan Little, to whom he had become "a younger brother." Special thanks are also due to Dr. H. G. Glyde, former Professor of Art at The University of Alberta, for his sensitive illustrations of Rima, the monkey's child. The map on the endpapers was drawn by the careful hand of Geoff Lester.

Contents

Introduction by Jan Little Prologue 1 The Orphan 2 Dual Parent Family 3 Monkey Baby Games 4 The Child Learns to Walk 5 Visitors to the Homestead 6 The Terrestrial Monkey 7 Juvenile Mischief 8 The Outside World Interferes 9 Rima Flourishes 10 Preparing to Leave 11 The Trek to Agua Zarca 12 Refugees to Civilization 13 The Confined Monkey Child 14 "Ausente"—The Absent One Epilogue

viii xv 1 7 15 22 28 35 43 51 61 68 76 84 95 110 123

Introduction

Many people who touched our homestead life seemed as astonished as the first Europeans in the New World must have been when they saw salmon leaping upriver. The question in both instances was, why would they leave sure security for such a difficult venture against the current? The answer is understandable in the case of the salmon when it is known that an effort is being made to return to the spawning area. For us it was the same thing, in a way. We needed to return to the wilderness, the tropical wilderness, and live in an an ageold peasant homestead. Harry was born in the one corner of America that still had a peasant culture, if such a term exists in American speech. His birthplace was a hill farm in Washington County in Vermont during World War I. His people could trace the establishment of the family farm back to a drummer boy in the War of 1812. That would suggest a secure heritage for Harry, but that is not the story. A railroad spur line had taken the best field several years before; the farm had been sold, and the grandfather and his four sons had then moved to Florida. Harry's father returned to Vermont with his Florida-born wife a few months before Harry's birth. They were in time for the maple sugar harvest, hiring themselves out as farm servants. By Harry's fourth birthday, his father had his own farm, with a mortgage, adjacent to his brother and father who had also returned from Florida. The sheriff-owner foreclosed two years later, a usual practice for him, and the Little family viii

moved back to Florida where the father earned enough capital selling milk in booming Miami to return to Vermont, and buy another farm. That farm failed from tragedy: Harry's mother died of cancer the same week the farm burned. Only a few months before, she had helped Harry prepare for a public function in the village. He wore long pants for the first time, and in recognition of this new status, she gave him some advice for the years to come: "Never, never take a woman unless you are willing to marry her," and "Never be a soldier; a soldier is a murderer." She had not been a conscious Christian nor did anyone know her as a pacifist. She was, however, a southern woman, whose parents had been born during the American Civil War within the hundred-mile path of Sherman's "March to the Sea"—and she had a Yankee son. High school for Harry was the best of all possible worlds. He won the high school's prize for public speaking in his freshman year, he stayed high on the honors list, was rebutter on the debating team, and graduated as valedictorian. He became engaged to his beautiful high school sweetheart, but it was 1934. He was without a scholarship to college, he had no funds, nor a job, and the town had just gone through a bitter quarry workers' strike with the National Guard patrolling the streets. After reading law for a year, during which he earned his cash by haying for the judge, he went to the University of Vermont on a scholarship that paid for tuition and books; eating was left to his own resources. College was a disappointment. He was required to take five hours a week of math, with little to compensate. "I was willing to starve to learn the answers, but nobody was asking the questions." He heard Toyohiko Kagawa, the Japanese pacifist trade unionist speak, twice, in arranged lectures to the college, and he became a friend of his English professor who asked him at the end of the year: "Are you coming back?" Harry replied he didn't think so. "Why don't you go to England?" He meant to Manchester, to the College of the Co-operative Union. It was a simple question and Harry did not answer then, but he ix

knew within a few minutes that was just what he would do. Professor Hall arranged for a scholarship, and Harry earned enough during the summer to pay his passage on the last run of a grain freighter out of Montreal. He had lost his girlfriend the year before, probably because he did not have a car and his rivals had. On the boat he met E., six years his senior, with a master's degree from McGill and a desire to emulate Katherine Mansfield. At the end of his school year they cycled the English countryside on a tour of her literary favorites, then went to Denmark to study the rural cooperatives. War was coming to Europe; they saw it. They were young, seeking to encapsulate in their own lives what William Blake, Tolstoy, John Middleton Murry, and the Danish peasants had suggested. They returned to the United States, to Washington, D.C. to settle down to married life. Their son was born there, and his arrival spurred their decision to become vegetarians, to quit smoking, and, eventually, to resettle on an abandoned farm in Vermont. They were fixing up the old farmhouse for the winter when Harry was required to register for the draft. He registered, but when it came to filling out the papers, he put the unfinished forms back in the mail box. He served a first imprisonment of three months in near solitary confinement, being released in the early spring to a state of ecstatic illumination. He was now a confirmed pacifist, and prison, not church, had confirmed him as a Christian. He spent an additional two years in jail at Lewisburg, but was released at the end of the war. By 1945 Vermont was no longer a homesteader's haven. Out-of-state summer people were moving in and causing increases in the tax rates. Village schools were bussing in children from the one-roomers in the hills, the wood supply was running out, and the 110-day growing season was too short for a vegetarian year. Harry considered Cuba and decided to go there to see what the prospects were. Once there, he headed for the Sierra Maestra, in full beard and long hair, wearing overalls as he would have on the homestead. The cane-field workers thought him one of Castro's band, sought x

him out, sometimes mobbing him. The blue-coated police had the same notion about him and saw to it he left town, with an escort. Harry was quite willing. Cuba was off his list for a future homestead: "It looks like there's going to be a revolution." Harry and E. were interested in the Society of Brothers, founded after the First World War in Germany to reachieve primitive Christianity as practiced by the first followers of Jesus Christ. From England, where the German members faced internment even though they were refugees from Hitler, they had gone to Paraguay, which is where Harry visited them as escort to three Union Theological students. E. and their son kept the homestead going in Sky Cottage above Tumbridge. There was much about the Society of Brothers that Harry enjoyed, though the theocratic structure was not suited to his urge for independent living. He doubted that he or E. could be content with the absence of "the garden life," so he left, heading homeward over the Andes for the Peruvian port of Callao. He had been told by the doctor making the then required physical examination for his passport: "You can go, but you have a heart murmur. No more hard work for you." As he crossed Lake Titicaca at night and journeyed into La Paz he suffered increasing pain, becoming nearly immobilized until he crawled into a snow water shower. Thenceforward he lived with his vulnerability to a serious heart condition. He continued the search for a new homestead location with a trip to the Marquesas Islands and on to Tahiti. He had read all the books on boats and sailing in the prison library. His first sailing experience came on a shakedown sail from the Golden Gate to the Farallon Islands, after he had put in more than eight months refurbishing and outfitting the eightmeter double-ended Collins Archer lifeboat, owned by his partner Prebin Kauffman, a Danish engineer. Their chief disappointment in Tahiti was the refusal of the French colonial administration to allow any visitors—hence, settlers—onto the island of Rapa, the coolest of all the islands in French xi

Oceania, an important consideration for Harry and E., both subarctic-bred. Added to that was Harry's antipathy to French colonial rule, and the lack of freshwater streams on the smaller, less inhabited islands. From Tahiti, Prebin took his boat, alone, to the Tongas where he traded it to the royal family for an island of his own. Harry headed for Vermont but stopped off in Costa Rica to visit the Hicksite Quakers in the mountains, where they had established themselves as dairy farmers after leaving the United States. Here all conditions for homesteading near the Quakers seemed favorable. Harry returned home ready to relocate the family. E.'s parents did not want her nor their only grandchild to leave the United States. Her father sent money for a divorce and an ultimatum. She returned the money but throughout the selling of the homestead and preparations for departure, E. wavered. Settling in the tropics had originally been her idea, but now, a child of the Canadian prairies, she feared the sun. It was hard for her to uproot herself from the ten or more years of Vermont homesteading for an alien world and a pioneering start. One afternoon, at the edge of the United States border, she disappeared with the child, leaving a farewell note and twenty dollars from their traveling funds. Harry never saw E. nor his son again. A divorce was eventually finalized by her family. After a short stay with a cooperative community in Georgia, which was to integrate, at a later date, with the Quakersponsored Society of Brothers in three settlements in northeastern America, Harry began a pattern of half-year pioneering, which lasted until he married me, Jan, six years later. He needed to work part of the year to earn enough money to maintain himself for the rest of it. Costa Rica was too far for such commuting. He chose the Lacandon rain forest of southern Mexico, near the border with Guatemala, on the eastern side. Here in a tropical wilderness of more than 56,000 square kilometers lived the remnant of the Lacandon primitive Mayas, considered to be the descendants of farmers x11

who stayed behind when the Maya civilization began its crescent line move to Yucatan a thousand years ago. The Lacandon forest was the northernmost spur of Amazonian flora, luxuriant on a fertile limestone soil, and with Amazonian fauna. It took three years of annual expeditions before Harry found a place acceptable to him and the claimholders to the mahogany or other forest resources. A Lacandon family helped him build his thatched-roof hut—no walls—and begin his first banana grove. It was here he brought me, his American wife, and my small daughter, Rebecca, to live as homesteaders. We had met through mutual friends in the highland town of San Cristobal de Las Casas, where I had come to live a few months before. I had grown up in the Sacramento Valley, near the American River. At age five I barely survived pneumonia, but my hearing was impaired and later my eyesight also suffered. The condition was diagnosed as retinitis pigmentosa and I was early legally blind, though well able to read. Left alone with a little girl to raise, I had sought a way out of transportation restrictions and high income needs by going to Mexico, "to homestead," I insisted. My restricted visual field was not much of a handicap, but loss of visual acuity a decade later was. By then, Rebecca was assuming more of the household tasks. Homesteading was more than a living for us. It rooted us deeply in the nourishing earth and made us feel at one with all life. It was to this family, devoted, erratic, wondering, happy, and hard-pressed, that Rima came. Sacramento, California December 1982

JAN LITTLE

Xlll

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Prologue On our first night in the virgin tropical rain forest where we would be building our second homestead, Jan and Becca bedded down inside the little Royce tent. I stayed outside in my old jungle hammock. I lay listening to the rustlings in the treetops high above me. The soft sounds grew louder, then twigs began to fall, small at first, then a big one, and then another, bouncing off the tent. "What's that?" Becca asked. She was nine years old then, and had already spent five years in the jungle. I got down from the hammock to poke up a blaze in the camp fire. The shadows were too deep in the thick foliage to discern anything; now the rain of leaves and twigs fell heavier. "Monkeys," I answered. "The Spider monkeys." "Why are they doing that?" Becca demanded. "Curious as to who we are—or what we are doing—they want to know." "But they never came to us down at the old place." "No, we were too far from the mountains down there—now we have moved in close to their home. They are mountaineers." "But they'll make holes in the tent!" she protested. "No—the twigs are small—and they'll go away in a little while back up on the mountain." In the morning we saw them watching, looking down on us. They were sitting in plain view, chattering at us. "See," I pointed them out to Becca. "See how interested they are in having us for neighbors." "I wonder what they think of us?" she said, smiling. "I wonder?" I repeated after her. xv

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The Orphan

The first time we saw Rima she was clutching Ramon's forearm, a black hairy tarantula-like creature, so small he swung his arm freely as if she were nothing at all. And with his usual bravado he pretended to ignore her, giving his right arm a little extra swing, if anything, as he came at his usual rapid stride up the path to our jungle hut. "What's he got on his arm?" Becca asked. She was now nearly seventeen, as old as Ramon. 1

"A baby monkey," I said in a low voice. "Best ignore it." I spoke in this way because I had once had a baby monkey, and I knew a little of how having a baby monkey is not as simple a thing as it may seem to one who does not have, or never has had, a baby monkey. Ramon, a Mexico City youth, had come to our jungle to find freedom from drugs and other things, but especially from drugs. He was enjoying his freedom, especially his association with the local remnant of the Lacandon Indians. He was returning from two days and nights with them. Obviously they had been on a monkey hunt, and clinging to his arm was the not unusual orphan of such a hunt, an infant whose mother had been shot without serious injury to her baby. But I saw at a glance there were in fact two unusual aspects to this orphan; it was extremely young and it had no tail. Ramon sat down and forcibly detached the little clinging hairy creature from his sleeve. He tried to make it sit up on his lap but it insisted on clinging to his shirt sleeve. Jan and Becca examined it closely. I looked away. "It's awfully small," Jan said. "Only a month or so old, the Indians say," he explained. "Is it a boy or girl?" Becca asked. "A female," Ramon replied. "It has almost no tail," Jan exclaimed. "Shouldn't it have a tail? Harry?" "Of course—a long prehensile tail if it is a Spider—as it apparently is." "Yes, it's a Spider," Ramon said. "The mother had a big tail, but the Lacandons said she was sick. She was very thin." "Can she eat?" Becca asked. "How long has she been away from her mother? She must be hungry." As if she understood a little, the tiny monkey, scarcely a handful of actual torso, began to watch us while still clutching at Ramon's shirt. She now turned upon us her wizened little face with its buff-colored "spectacles" around her dark pupilless eyes, and buff-colored mouth, cheeks, and chin. 2

Her chest was a light color, too, in strange contrast to the shaggy black of the rest of her. "She is hungry, I can tell," Becca exclaimed. "Will she drink milk? I'll mix her some milk." She stirred powdered milk into a cup of warm water and handed it with the spoon to Ramon. "She hasn't really learned to drink yet," he said, taking her jaws in his fingers so as to hold her mouth open while he poured the milk down her throat. The milk went down, one spoonful, then another, but it did not stay. It all came back up spilling down the soft gray chest and onto his pants. "She doesn't know how to drink—" Becca began. "Too young; she must have been still nursing," Jan said. "Yes," Ramon said. "She was still taking milk from her mother." All were silent. At last he set the cup on the table. I kept my gaze averted until he had gone off to his own hut. "What will happen to it now?" Becca asked. "It's much too young, "Jan repeated as if to herself. "It will have to nurse for weeks." "No concern of ours," I said. "It all goes with the hunting and eating of monkeys." I don't recall just when Rima became Rima, but from this point on she must have had her name. W.H. Hudson makes it clear that he had in mind the Spider monkeys when he conceived his nature girl Rima in his classic novel Green Mansions* We were soon to observe how well justified he was, for the month-old Spider monkey, motherless and tailless, was heard pleading and scolding all the rest of the day in just such birdlike speech as Hudson made his bird girl use. Ramon's hut was only a three minutes' walk from ours, though not visible. He had gone off and left her tied by one leg to a hut post and with an old blanket to sleep on, or so Becca reported. I could hear her alternate sweet pleadings First published in London in 1904, it has since appeared in many editions on both sides of the Atlantic.

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and guttural scoldings well enough, but I refused to go near her. "Can you hear her?" Becca asked her mother. "Yes, I can hear her." Jan answered. "She must be hungry," Becca added. "What will he do if she doesn't learn to drink?" "Never mind! I tell you," I half-scolded. "It is none of our affair." So we tried to ignore her. All day she pleaded and scolded tirelessly. We were expecting important visitors by plane on the morrow. Becca and Ramon and the downcreek neighbors' children planned an early departure for the airstrip. By day's end the little orphan monkey was somewhat forgotten. By night's fall she was silent. "What has happened to her?" I overheard Jan asking Becca. "He wrapped her up in the old blanket and she must have gone to sleep." Early next morning Becca and Ramon with several others were off to meet the plane and our visitors, a young family with two children who were smaller than Becca would have wished, but still very exciting to one who had grown up in a jungle without playmates. They were not gone long when Jan and I heard the orphan begin her pleadings again with no noticeable weakening—except possibly there was a little more pleading and less scolding than yesterday. After an hour or so I looked out in the backyard to see Jan standing hesitantly on the path to the house, and in her arms was the little hairy black monkey. Rima had one long skinny arm reaching up into Jan's hair. She looked more like a huge tarantula than a Spider, but she was silent, content, small dark eyes studying all about her. I got up from the hammock and hurried out. "You don't realize what you are getting us into, Jan." I protested, albeit weakly. "I couldn't stand it any longer, Harry. She so wants to live." "I know. I tell you, I went through it all with one once. Big4

ger by quite a bit than this—" I hesitated. "This one is even too small to drink, and we gave away the last nursing bottle. Oh well, bring her in." A skinny arm, all bone and hair, reached out to me and a sweet melodious half-whistle, halfchirp followed out of the wide, thin-lipped, but firm little mouth. "All right! All right, you imp!" I exclaimed, taking the hand of four skinny fingers, each with its perfect black nail, in mine. "Let me have her. We have absorbent cotton, mix some milk in warm water, and I think maybe I can teach her to drink." Jan smiled. Rima climbed up on my arm and grasped my hair firmly. "How tiny she is!" Jan said, "yet how eager to live. She must be starving." "And thirsting. Hurry up with the milk!" I shaped the cotton to fit her little mouth, soaked the tip in the warm milk, and held it to her lips. She sucked eagerly. As fast as I could dip it she sucked it dry, resting on my arm with her head back, long skinny hairy legs dangling, one hand firmly in my hair, the other grasping the arm in which I held her. For a moment our eyes met, and I saw the eyes of an infant full of love and gratitude. For a moment I saw nothing of the hairy little body with its long, all too skinny arms and legs. I saw only the soul, as if of a human baby. "Look," I said to Jan "you wanted a baby?" "Yes, that is why I had to heed her pleadings." Rima drank and drank, or rather sucked and sucked, for it was some days before she mastered drinking. "She must have been thirty-six or more hours without anything." Jan said. "Maybe longer, depending on when they went hunting," I added. The new family arrived from the airstrip toward noon, together with many Indians from the village carrying their cargo. In the excitement and confusion I looked up to see Rima climbing up the other end of my hammock. Before I 5

could stop her she had reached where it was tied to a house post and, in attempting to climb off onto the barkless post, she fell two meters or more on to the hardwood puncheon floor. I jumped out of the hammock to rescue her but our visitors' five-year old boy had picked her up. When she squawked, he tossed her down the steps. By the time I reached her she was lying on her back, kicking and loudly protesting. I picked her up and tried to soothe her. In a few moments she was quiet, nestling on my arm, hand tight up in my hair, none the worse for either the fall or the tossing. "You are a tough little sprite," I said. She looked at me and chirped in her birdlike voice. I explained to the children how as yet she was too small to play with. They would have to be content just to watch her. To Ramon I explained how Jan had been moved to bring her down to try to feed her. "Maybe we could keep her until she learns to drink?" I suggested. "Good idea," he said, but in my heart I already knew—and Rima already knew—she was ours forever.

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Dual Parent Family

According to Becca, Ramon had taken care of Rima's sleeping arrangements by simply wrapping her up in an old blanket. That is, he rolled her up in it so she had trouble fighting free of it in the morning. But at least she had kept warm. We decided to bed her down in a basket, a spacious round basket with plenty of woolen scraps and rags, including Becca's childhood sweater. Rima didn't like the basket and had to be very sleepy before she would remain in it, but for the first few 7

nights it seemed to serve. Then came a cold spell in March with unusually cool nights for the time of year. '' Maybe the hot water bottle under her would help ?" I suggested. So we put her to bed on a very cosy pile of woolens with the hot water bottle under it all. Rima slept hard all night, so hard she failed to wake up at our breakfast time. I examined her and she seemed all right. We left her another hour or so. Then suddenly I realized she couldn't wake up— she had become chilled sometime after the hot water bottle cooled, and was in a torpor. I hastily but gently lifted her out of the basket, talking to her, begging her to wake up. Jan hurriedly prepared warm milk. ' Tut some honey in it!" I called. "She is half dead!'' I stretched her across my stomach, patting her, and calling to her to rouse. At last, as Jan arrived with the milk, she half opened her eyes and reached for it. She sucked feebly but adequately for a few minutes, then collapsed. ' 'The hot water bottle!'' I cried. ' 'It acted as a trap in the night but now it may save her!'' We placed her, chest down, on the hot water bottle, patting and talking to her. At last, slowly, very slowly, the warm milk and honey and the hot water bottle brought back her normal circulation. She roused and was soon chirping and chattering and running about the hammock as usual. I tied some strong cords to various handy points adjacent to the hammock so she could have play room. She soon learned to use the cords to make her way from me to Jan's easy chair alongside the foot of the hammock and facing me. "How can we solve it?" I asked. "The sleeping problem?" "I think I know what to do," Jan answered slowly. "Yes?" "She can sleep with me." "She's so small, you could easily smother her." ' 'No, Becca slept with me sometimes from tiniest infancy. I won't hurt her, you'll see." And that night, Rima was delighted to join Jan, her soft gray little belly gently against Jan's warm neck. Thus began 8

Rima's experience of a dual parent family. In nature she would have known only one parent, her mother. Now, with me feeding her and Jan sleeping with her, she had to learn to look two ways. Up until and including the last moments of her life she insisted on keeping as close as possible to both of us. The time came when, after prayers (which she always found annoying simply because she felt left out), as I bent down to kiss Jan goodnight on her bed on a mat beside my hammock, Rima would try to pull me down to sleep with them. And how she delighted in making their bed, first unrolling the mats, then the sleeping bag ' 'mattresses,'' until at last the blankets and sheets were spread. She loved to let the blankets and sheets fall on her and then fight her way out from under—but I anticipate too much, for Rima was still an infant in human terms. Allowing a human life to be four or five times as long as a monkey's, Rima was now about the equivalent of a five-to-six-month-old child. From this time on she always went to bed with Jan, but there came a time when she would rouse and join me in one of my night-time snacks of a hot drink and bananas. We were aware from the beginning that powdered milk, even though in a rich whole form, was not enough for Rima. She would need some source of vitamin C. What? We had two fruits in abundance, bananas and limes, but Rima was not ready for solid food. She could not even eat mashed bananas, which later confirmed the fact that she was less than six weeks old when we adopted her, the age when infant monkeys begin to eat solids. I tried giving her diluted and honey-sweetened lime juice, but this quickly upset her bowels, and I hastened to put her back on straight milk. Hardly had this vitamin C quest failed when she came down with a cold virus. It appeared she had caught it from Ramon. Happily it was not a feverish type, but still her breathing was soon badly hampered. We sat up by turn keeping her as warm and as comfortable as possible with the hot water bottle. Our visiting friends had vitamin C tablets, and suggested we crush one in her milk. But before midnight she 9

was too ill to nurse, and her breathing became short and choking. Still, those dark little human eyes were alive and pleading. We talked to her and prayed over her until it was clear that she understood how much we loved her and that we wanted her to live. She kept her eyes fixed on our faces, or our eyes. For in this first severe illness we saw, not for the first time, how spiritual our little monkey was. Shortly after midnight she passed through another severe choking spasm. It seemed her life was over, but we kept her face close to ours, her eyes did not close, and suddenly the crisis was over. She began to breathe freely, relaxed under our stroking, and soon fell fast asleep. "I told you what it would be like," I protested limply. "It's all right," Jan said. "We need something to love." "Now I guess she knows how much we love her, all right." "That is why she survived the crisis." "There will be others," I said, still protesting. "Maybe, and we shall grow in love." "Yet, she is only a baby monkey." "Maybe all babies. . . ?" Jan began. "And all mothers..." I added. "It's where love was invented." The next morning Rima was fully recovered. She nursed eagerly from the absorbent cotton teats I fashioned and dipped in the warm whole powdered milk with vitamin C added. The experience had brought us closer; she was more communicative from this point on, chirping and chattering in ways I found hard to imitate, but she seemed happy with my efforts and would call me back if I tried to leave the house without her; or, if I slipped out while she slept, would scold me upon my return. Rima was now very much the center of attraction for all who came to our house. Children were enchanted and adults likewise, depending on how childlike their natures had remained. We greatly enjoyed her popularity, but were wary of people with virus infections. We were by no means satisfied with the vitamin tablets, and besides, the supply was limited. 10

We tried and tried to think of some natural home solution, and at last Becca saw the way—sugar cane juice, if we could find a way to press it from the hard pith. For children with teeth, only the hard outer skin had to be removed, then the soft juice-filled pulp was easily crushed, but Rima was too young for this work. We would have to find a device. I tried the potato masher our visitors had brought for us. No good. Then Becca again found inspiration. The pliers, the old ordinary pincers. In five minutes she had all the fresh, sweet vitamin-rich cane juice Rima could hold. And how she loved it! Her gratitude came shining forth in her smiling eyes and in the sweet birdlike chirpings that, in moments of excitement, told us how much monkeys have to say to each other that is sweet and lovely. Certainly Hudson was justified in finding inspiration for his Rima among the Spider monkeys. It appears that other naturalists have noted how the so-called Spiders excel in spirituality, that is, in their gentle, affectionate, responsive natures. And during all her life with me it was (Becca first used the three adjectives) her "carefree, affectionate, and fun-loving" nature that won all hearts. I say all—there was only one person who rejected her consistently, and he was ailing in both mind and body.

FROM THIS POINT ON RIMA DEVELOPED RAPIDLY. BEFORE many days she was drinking her milk and her cane juice from a spoon. Then Jan taught her to take small pieces of banana from her fingers. Having learned to eat banana, she was eager to try everything on my plate. Thus she discovered black bean soup, and peanut butter and honey. Peanut butter came by way of an oily drop falling on her nose. She looked forward to meals and joined in eagerly, passing by way of the hammock and her trapeze cords from my plate in my lap to Jan's shoulder and so down to her plate. She was meanwhile working out her relationship to Becca, and perfectly understood that Becca was merely another child—albeit older—of the

11

family. She would accept food and attention from her but never on a parental basis. She did, however, eagerly accept her as a playmate. It was at about this time that we tried putting her in diapers. The problem of her wastes daily became more serious. Her own instincts were good enough for the treetops, but for a house and especially for sleeping in a bed, they were inadequate, to say the least. Her inner guidance was to climb up on a trapeze cord and let go. I met this with pieces of plastic which could be easily wiped off, on all surfaces near my hammock where she and I spent most of our days, but at night her system failed her. She could not rouse enough to climb up off Jan's pillow to her trapeze. Jan's pillow suffered and so did her hair. We put rags and papers on Rima's end of the pillow, which helped, but Jan finally suggested we try diapers. I agreed, but found, as I suspected, she would not accept any form of clothing. She simply fought every device I tried to fasten on her as a diaper until it came off. When one night I succeeded in getting her off to bed with a thick absorbent diaper, it nearly killed her. I awoke to find that in the chill of the night she had fallen away from the warmth ofJan's pillow and was lying soaked and chilled on the floor. I roused Jan, removed the diaper, and for an hour we once again struggled for Rima's life with hot milk and the hot water bottle. Partly, no doubt, because of our previous experience with the virus, we at last brought her around. But that was the end of diapering our little orphan of the treetops. And Rima, as so often, seemed to understand. At least she now seldom missed waking enough to climb up with me at some time during the night, usually when I was having a hot drink. She would share my snack and relieve herself on the trapeze before rejoining Jan. Sometimes, as she grew bigger and Jan's pillow grew smaller, Rima would straddle my thigh and fall asleep, her little head resting against my abdomen. Some nights I would fail to rouse when she joined me and I would awake to find her fast asleep, her little fourfingered hands firmly gripping my shirt. (Rima had only 12

vestigial thumbs, tiny bones just under the skin.) As she now began to play more and more on the trapeze strings and use them as a pathway from my hammock to Jan's easy chair at the foot, I looked about for toys to hang from the trapeze—an oversize button or an empty can—but best of all in Rima's eyes was a rubber sink stopper, a leftover item from Jan's apartment house days. Rima's teeth had begun to develop very rapidly and efficiently, and she had begun to use them both in play and to get her way. I tied the sink stopper so that it hung beside Jan's shoulder as she sat in her chair, and Rima soon made it her favorite toy. In fact, the first morning she discovered it, as I came in from outdoors, she proudly showed me all the things she could do with it, from biting and chewing on it to using it as a swing. She chirped at me in her delight—so delighted was she that I arranged another real swing from the trapeze cords alongside the hammock, and forever after—throughout the rest of our days on the homestead, that is—I would often feel a little tap on my arm and looking down would see Rima asking to be swung. How she loved it—but if I became too boisterous, swinging too high and too far, she would leap free into the hammock or down onto the bookshelf directly under her trapeze. It was probably her instinct against any action or overaction that could lead to a fall. Sometimes in her high excitement she would defecate on the plastic, so I decided to try to teach her to climb out into some bushes that nearly touched the house. She would have none of this, and when one day after such a training session a snake one and a half meters long suddenly appeared on the roof just above our heads, I understood the grounds of her objections. As her play urges grew, we learned quite by accident that she loved to be tossed and tickled. And one morning, when we had become extraordinarily boisterous, I was astonished to hear what could only be monkey laughter right in my ear. She loved to be wrapped around my neck and tickled in the ribs at the same time—and now the laughter in my ear. Jan later 13

described it as troll-like. Certainly, it was a fairy sound. I put her through the same play maneuvers again and each time I heard a true human laugh, only elfin in its very sweetness and lightness. I began now to call her "Sprite" or "Spritely" as a nickname, and from across the room she would answer with a sweet chirp or soft scolding chuckle if she felt I was planning to leave the house without her. With Jan she also began to laugh, especially when Jan bubbled her, that is, made noises blowing with her lips and mouth against Rima's soft gray sweet-smelling belly. Rima in her delight would then laugh and bounce her own little face against Jan's cheeks. Meanwhile she was working out other games with Becca, tugging at Becca's skirt, begging to be swung around by her long skinny arms, and at last left rolling over and over on the floor. Then there came a time when Rima decided both the dog and the cat should be included in the fun, but the results of her attempts to bridge the primate, canine, and feline worlds were mixed and must await another chapter for the telling.

14

Monkey Baby Games

As the dry season, which is also the hot season, came on there arose the problem of what to do with Rima. My retreat was the beach. This rather grand name I had given to a spot where the ever cool creek, in making a sharp bend, had left a generous and inviting little strand of coarse brown sand and colorful quartz pebbles. Here I could swing a hammock just above the cool, briskly flowing crystal water and ignore the 34°C(95°F) heat of the midday hours. But that meant Rima being left 15

with Jan and Becca. She loudly protested my going, but I couldn't see any way to look after her up there in the forest swinging low over the swift-flowing, though not deep, creek. Jan and Becca tried taking Rima up in the loft to share their siesta, but Rima did not have any inclination or instinct about having a siesta. She sometimes enjoyed short naps, but not by any schedule. Siesta to her meant playtime up in a fascinating new environment—fascinating because it included some rare opportunities for playing with the tomcat. Rima, as has been shown, possessed a deep sense of personality. Every new individual, be it man, woman, child, or animal, meant a great new potential relationship to her. Up until now, both our dog and cat had managed for the most part to avoid her. Nor had Rima been active enough on the rather rough puncheon floor to pursue either of them for new playmates. But up in the loft she found the big, furry, orange tabby tomcat well within reach. She reached, and held on firmly in her simian style. Goldie, who had been sprawled out in his usual perfect siesta relaxation, leapt to free himself of what might, for all he knew, be the return of the giant boa, which had nearly carried him off as a kitten. He headed for the ladder, dragging Rima with him, and disdaining a slower descent, leapt out of the house completely, landing well out of doors. "Monkey Baby," as I now sometimes called her, simply let go at the top of the ladder and made her own halffalling, half-scrambling descent to the floor. Becca rescued her, but the next day we worked out a different system. I took her up to the creek for the first half of the siesta, then Jan came up for her and took her back down to the house. Rima, to my surprise and pleasure, fitted in very well at the beach. She at once settled in to the hammock with me; her original "home" since coming to live with us had been with me in the hammock. Now all that had changed was the location. Here we were still in a hammock together but out in the tall green sun-shot jungle, swinging over cool flowing water. What would the little Spider monkey, now about three months old, make of it? 16

She made much of it, so much that I had to put my book down just to watch her. I had noticed only a day or so before how her observation powers were growing. On the cover of a nature book of Becca's there was a design of the sun in eclipse. I saw Rima stop and stare, then bend her head low over the dark disc. I thought she was going to try to eat it, but instead she carefully placed a long slender finger (each finger had its perfect black nail) upon the dark sphere, and rubbed it. When nothing happened she turned away from it as abruptly as she had turned toward it. Now with me, for the first time out in the forest and up at the beach, she studied everything in the relaxed meditative mood I had just begun to observe as being a basic part of her nature. At first she lay back on my arm looking up into the treetops, twenty—twenty-five—thirty meters above us. All was still and leafy up there, a world filled with green gold light, with patches of pale blue sky clearly showing wherever the branches opened up a little. As I watched her face for some record of her emotion upon her first opportunity to observe closely what would have been her normal environment, I was surprised to see unmistakable awe—no pleasure or hint of longing to be up there in the treetops—only a great wonder colored slightly by what I can only call fear. Or was it simply my failure to read what was her sense of separation and loss? I shall never know, but her response was deep and real. And never again did I catch her gazing upward into her true dwelling place. With only a stub of a tail, which is to the normal Spider monkey a fifth arm and hand combined, she would have been severely handicapped in the treetops, but bright as she was she could not know this. Later on, when in a few weeks she began to walk upright with a great gracefulness and ballerinalike balance, I saw that God had been merciful and had offered her much compensation for the loss of her treetop life. With a long clumsy tail, she would never have become our delightful childlike playmate, with a wonderful capacity for walking and running upright. 17

Rima's attention meanwhile had been diverted from the green and lofty world above us to that directly beneath us where the creek was flowing so transparently that every pebble, nearly every grain of sand, was clearly visible. At first I did not grasp what was holding Rima's attention as she watched intently, looking down first over one side of the hammock, then over the other. There was no fish or other animal movement on or in the water, but only the clear, swift, rippling flow of the water itself. And as I studied her abruptly shifting gaze, from one side to the other, it became clear enough that it was the motion of the water itself that had fascinated her. By arrangement Jan came up for her in an hour or so. Rima was content in the hammock, though still obviously subdued by such a full exposure to the jungle. She had grown up thus far as a little house monkey, and the jungle seemed as vast and strange and awesome to her, it appeared, as it would have to any human child. As always she was happy to go to Jan, and back at the house Jan simply occupied my place in the hammock, providing Rima with her familiar play surroundings until I returned with the cooler temperature as the sun dropped behind "Jan's Mountain." Rima learned to enjoy the new afternoon routine, and would not let me go up to the beach without her. When I returned she would be hanging in the upper strings of the hammock to welcome me. She loved us, trusted us, accepting us as her parents without question, but as she was rapidly becoming a monkey juvenile, and no longer a mere clinging, suckling infant, her demands upon us were increasing, especially in the direction of play. At first we did not understand the sudden use of her sharp little teeth, but my natural response to being bitten provided the clues. Juvenile monkeys play roughly, and sharp little bites are merely invitations to more roughhousing. At first, not understanding, we tried to stop Rima's biting by slapping her on the mouth. Of course, this was abnormal response on our part and bewildering to her, but so powerful were her play instincts that she refused to accept our repulses. As later, 18

when under similar conditions she undertook to teach monkey play to the dog, she had her bottom bitten. But she persisted and won her own way. So we all learned to play monkey style, as did even the dog, and all enjoyed it. I saw what she wanted when my own natural response to her biting included seizing her hand and biting her fingers—how she squawked in protest for, of course, holding was not fair. But when immediately I released her, she would give me a sharp nip and flee up the hammock. It was all monkey play. Once, as she fled, I grabbed her five centimeters of stubby tail and gave it a hard pinch. This delighted her. She squawked and squirmed, and fled with amazing speed and agility well beyond my reach up on to the highest parts of her trapeze there to scold and challenge while I continued to chide and threaten. At last, thoroughly weary she would come down quietly to my lap and perhaps ask for food or, on rare and sweet occasions, climb up to nibble my earlobes in the supreme gesture of monkey affection. Very rarely she went so far as to explore my chest, but seeing how utterly dry my nipples were she paid no more attention. With her mother, she would have been probably still nursing. Sleeping with Jan and eating mainly with me, that is, living with two parents, where in nature she would have had only one, troubled her but little, and that little only at night. Usually she would rouse toward midnight for a feeding and a urination. If I were not already awake, she would make her way up from Jan's bed on the floor into the hammock, and rouse me with her short but sharp alarm cry. I came to wonder if her rousing me was not the mercy of God, for at this time I was recovering from a severe heart attack that had made long naps after midnight dangerous. Rima's cry probably expressed her confusion at awakening hungry, only to discover her food "mother" was not with her. She would settle down in my lap to her snack of warm milk and honey and often a small banana, then swing about on her trapeze a few minutes before relieving herself. At last, and with no further concern for 19

me, she returned to Jan's pillow, curled up beside Jan's head with one hand anchored firmly in her hair, and so back to sleep until morning. At bedtime she always warned anyone who left the house to go out into the dark. Her warning whistle was sharp and clear in portent. "Night has fallen," it signaled. "This is our sleep tree. Only the fool wanders off into the dark, stay together. " And if it chanced I had to go to the privy after dark—some few minutes' walk—I had no choice but to take her or listen to her loud, unbroken scolding until I returned. Making Jan's bed on the floor, as has been described, was a special playtime for Rima, and bed unmaking in the morning was equally so. She delighted in hiding under the sheets, romping over the sleeping bag and blankets, and finally mounting the high pile only to roll tumbling off to escape my tail-pinching grasp.

ALONG WITH RIMA'S DEVELOPING JUVENILE PLAY AND its show of independence came our first strong persistent attempt toward toilet training. Diapers having proved a nearfatal failure, we returned to our first practice, which had at first seemed successful. I would hold her at arm's length in a comfortable position or simply place her in the fork of a small tree and indicate by example we were at the time and place. At first Rima was often open to suggestion, but now as a budding juvenile she rebelled. "What a lot of nonsense!" suddenly became her attitude. "Do I have to be taught to do such things as all monkeys do when and where they feel like it?" And suddenly Rima never "felt like it" when we did. She simply leapt about if we placed her in the "pee-pee tree" or loudly squawked if we tried to hold her out at arm's length. Finally, becoming annoyed by such stubbornness in such a small creature, I one day walked off and left her in the tree. She then set such a dreadfully high level of scolding and squawking that I had to hurry back before all the hidden 20

monkey-flesh lovers, from snake to eagle, "answered" her calls of distress. Indeed, in Rima I saw each day more clearly how of all the mammals, we primates stand out not so much in mere brainpower as in pure willpower. There is, even in an infant monkey, an absolutely bottomless supply of this old fashioned stubbornness. And there is one other trait that sets all primates apart, one that our infant had already revealed, namely, a power for quiet meditation that in high human development emerges as religious mysticism. More than at any other level, Rima, the orphan Spider monkey of not quite four months, now began to share in both our human willpower and our human meditative power. The former was largely concentrated in the thin but long firm line of her mouth. A close examination revealed, in the lines of her mouth and lips and chin, a remarkable strength of will, which, of course, had already been amply displayed upon her arrival at four to six weeks of age, when she had refused to accept life's harshest terms and had demanded something better with every remaining breath. The second power, of meditation or mystical reflection, she also displayed early and this was naturally seated in her eyes. Rima's eyes were deceptive. They looked as though they were merely overlarge for the face, all black, rather lively and gleaming animal eyes, with no show of pupil or iris. Then one day by chance I discovered Rima's eyes staring up at me from behind a large magnifying glass I was using to study a map. I was looking into the eyes of a human child, complete with black pupils and dark brownish irises. The eyeball itself being black, the pupil and iris were not apparent until seen under slight magnification. From that moment until our last moments together in the flesh, Rima became for me more human child than monkey child. And only perhaps because I knew she would never use human words, I felt that expansion of tenderness toward her that a loving human parent feels for a so-called defective human child. Our relationship now grew deeper each day and more tenderly filled with love and trust and joy in each other. 21

The Child Learns to Walk

About this time I began taking Rima with me on my weekly tree-gluing trips. I made a cloth sling such as the Indian women use to carry their babies, which passes under the right arm and is tied over the left shoulder. I varied it so Rima could ride on my chest—on my ribs, rather—instead of Indianstyle, half around on the hip. Rima wanted to be where she could see everything, especially everything I was doing and everywhere we were going. Tree gluing consisted of keeping a 22

narrow band of very sticky Tanglefoot glue fresh and effective around the trunk of each of our several dozen fruit trees to give protection against the leaf cutter ants. I did half the orchard one week and the other half the following week. This meant two to three hours for one morning each week. Besides the actual application of the glue, I usually had to remove with a machete (a meter-long bush knife) whatever grass, weeds, and vines had sprung up around or over the tree since my last visit. Sometimes this machete work became rather vigorous, especially when an unusually heavy broken or fallen branch had to be removed. But little Rima simply curled up in her sling with one and sometimes two of her hands clutching my hair and never complained. She accepted all my movements, including the machete work, with all the interested composure she would have shown had she been leaping through the treetops with her monkey mother. Indeed she so loved these work jaunts that it was soon impossible for me to leave the house for any reason without her crying out to be allowed to leap into her sling and accompany me. I wore the sling most of the time so as to be ready, for it was impossible to leave her behind unless I wanted to listen all during my absence to her loud scolding guttural protests alternating with sweet, plaintive, birdlike, baby pleadings. I always took her, and we were as happy a pair of primates as could be found anywhere in the jungle. Perhaps it was this expanding daytime companionship that led to Rima's preference to sleep with me instead of with Jan. We thought that it was perhaps partly owing to her rather rapid growth, making Jan's pillow too small for both Jan's rather big head and Rima's body. Whatever the reason was, Rima now often started the night with me and finished it with Jan. With me she slept in her usual place astride my thigh, her head and stomach against my stomach, her hands gripping my shirt. There had always been a small difficulty over going to bed. Monkeys—that is, sensible monkeys—went to bed at dusk, 23

Rima kept insisting. Consequently, she early came to detest our foolish delays. By human standards, even in the forest, we were early-to-bedders, but not as early as the monkeys, who apparently go to bed with the parrots. We did eat while it was still light, but there were certain delays after eating. One of us might even commit the extreme folly, already mentioned, of walking out into the darkness—which never failed to evoke a specially sharp protest. At first Rima would fight hard to stay awake while dishes were cleared. Bible read and the "Lord's Prayer" repeated and finally Jan's bed made, she would chirp and chatter and try to resume playing, then end up yawning and whimpering by herself in the hammock, peering with heavy, half-shut eyes over the edge. The prayer, when we held hands, fascinated her. She obviously felt this was a family activity from which she was being excluded, but if I tried to hold her hand, she quickly pulled it away, half-embarrassed, and simply watched and listened intently until we had finished. Perhaps she saw in it something familiar, yet improperly performed as was so much of what we did. She eventually learned to eat, then fall asleep on my lap until bedmaking time—this she would not miss. She roused herself from her nap and joined in the fun, but as soon as the bed was ready, she was waiting to join Jan on the pillow with her own generous heaps of little woolen blankets and pillows. At this point she could not bear delay. Once a youthful visitor eager for talk tried to keep us up in spite of everything being obviously ready for our retirement. Rima, quickly sensing his inconsideration, began scolding so relentlessly even he became aware of his mistake, and said goodnight.

RIMA'S RELATIONSHIP WITH BECCA GREW EACH DAY more sisterly, albeit big sisterly. Becca's first remark when she saw her mother and me taking on a full parental relationship to the hairy little orphan was: "She'll never be anything but a monkey—remember!" I was jolted by this edge of bitterness 24

almost never heard from jungle-reared Rebecca. For a moment it seemed she might even be caught up in jealousy, but we never heard her speak of Rima in that tone again, and soon they were great playmates. It seems probable that it was from her play with Becca that Rima learned early to walk upright, for she had been running about on all fours for some time. She and Becca began with the simple peek-a-boo game. Rima would hide down inside the hammock, Becca would call to her, and then Rima would leap up into view with a grimace and a chuckle or chortle. From this they went on to games outside the hammock, including swinging Rima on a rope hanging from her trapeze. She loved this as long as it was kept within definite limits. If there was too much, too fast, and too far swinging, she protested loudly and tried to grab her way to a stable surface. But her love of swinging led to other versions of the game, where she swung from Becca's skirt or simply held on to Becca's hand while Becca swung her around in a complete circle. Out of this she learned to stand upright, holding on to Becca by one hand, and so at last to walk upright. One day I looked up to see her walking all by herself, her long arms held gracefully above her head with forearms bending inward in a perfect ballerina position. I shouted encouragement as she came rather rapidly toward me, and then I reached down and picked her up by her two hands, lifting her into the hammock and so into my lap. She was delighted, as always, with praise and gaiety; her whole nature was fun-loving, and ever after I called her my "beautiful gibbon" when she walked, or more often ran, upright. When for a period she left off walking and went about on all fours, we derided her playfully, calling her "Baboon!" The truth was, of course, that walking upright did not come easily to her. It was fun, that is, exciting, but it was not natural, because Rima's feet were actually her hands. On her feet she had perfect thumbs. Her hands, as mentioned, had only four long skinny, though powerful, fingers. But, as a person may learn to walk fairly well on their hands, so did our Rima. The gibbon is said to walk in a true plantigrade fashion 25

and Rima's walk, and run, were very gibbonlike. She certainly looked like a gibbon, and later when I read that, of all the monkeys, the Spiders most resemble the gibbons in their mode of travel in the treetops, I understood how the resemblance carried over into walking upright. Having mastered walking upright, Rima often used it when visitors were present, though I never was sure if it was done in a show-off spirit. Regardless, it fascinated persons of all ages, sexes, education, and culture. So far as we could discern, the effect was much the same in quantity and quality whether the visitor was a very primitive Lacandon Indian or a professor of English literature from a university. There was, however, somewhat more to Rima's charm than her upright walk, for with nine out of ten of our visitors she simply walked over and crawled up on their knees and began her gentle gracious gestures of making friends. I use advisedly both the adjectives "gentle" and "gracious" for unless a person through timidity or sheer boorishness proved quite incapable of accepting her advances, she was as gentle with a grown man as she was with the smallest baby in a woman's arms. She was, I repeat, a very sharp judge of character. Only the Lacandon monkey hunters were rejected as potential friends. She declined to approach them, but sat with me, studying them closely. With the rare noisy, harsh-spoken person she was also withdrawn, but all others she at once approached in a friend-seeking spirit; and she was only repelled once and that by a man whom I myself found difficult to understand. But Rima refused to give up even on him, and would always make one more attempt to sit in his lap whenever he sat down in our house, though he always removed her. He had two small children of his own, toward whom he seemed a very good father, yet for the little orphan monkey he had nothing to offer. Becca always thought that this was because Rima had slightly soiled his pants on his first visit. I found this explanation difficult to accept of a father who had helped his two children through infancy while their mother taught school part-time. His wife received Rima with almost 26

as much affection and pleasure as did we three, and the two children accepted her as one of their own kind. I suspect that the father sensed in her that stubborn will that made her too much the rival of any willful person. Rima always treated everyone as an equal, except Jan and me. To us she gave parental recognition, which included obedience, but even toward Becca the relationship had to be one of equals. She would not accept commands or scoldings from Becca, but reacted with immediate defiance, giving scold for scold even to sharp bites of retaliation at the least threat of force. There is a point at which mere stubbornness, which we all deplore in others, suddenly becomes the same thing as the highest courage. We were to watch this wonderful primate stubbornness in our beloved little monkey orphan—a little girl monkey orphan, be it remembered—carry her through until at last all her stubbornness was transfigured into sublime courage.

27

Visitors to the Homestead

Around this time, hardly did one set of visitors from Civilization leave us before another arrived. We were not used to such a social life, especially with the sophisticated, who made so many more demands in all ways than did our Indian neighbors. Still we welcomed each new face, especially when it was such an old friend's face as Trudi Blom's. She was the widow of Frans Blom, the last of the old-style Maya archaeological explorers. Trudi, Swiss by birth, a cosmopolitan European, mis28

tress of five languages, a Lacandon anthropologist, a painter, writer, and professional photographer, as well as an explorer and competent muleteer in her own right, now sat for the first time in our Lacandon rain forest hut. Though we had been her guests many times in San Cristobal, she had never been ours. Here was a woman who had been everywhere and seen everything—everything except a seventeen-year-old girl and a four-month-old Spider monkey completely absorbed in play. Becca would hide at the foot of my hammock making soft teasing sounds until Rima, unable to resist, would move with great hestitation slowly down the hammock toward her. Suddenly Becca's head would pop up—"Boo!" and with both hands she would grab for Rima. With a shriek, half-fearful half-delighted, Rima would bound back up into my lap trembling and chirping with excited pleasure. The game was almost too much for Rima once, when Becca actually seized her leg. Rima, on getting loose, came up and in clearest terms of her speech and gestures, plus a solemn concerned little countenance, asked if I was sure it was really just all in play. Was Becca that trustworthy—was it all real monkey play? She had some doubts. As a human, I reassured her, and told Becca to proceed just a little less aggressively, and they went back to playing, while Trudi kept her worldlywise gaze upon little Rima as uninterruptedly as any Indian child would have done. For all her experience of both the world and the jungle, Trudi Blom had never seen a baby monkey as an integral member of a human household. Rima had not accepted our guest, mainly because Trudi, over the years, had more and more taken on the loud-speaking rough ways of the mule caravans she so much loved to be a part of. But Trudi did have her professional camera, and readily agreed to take our first photographs of Rima. I asked her to leave me out, but she protested it would be an impossible composition so Rima and I appeared together, Rima reflecting so much of her suspicion concerning Trudi that her true nature scarcely showed at all. Still, the photographs 29

Trudi took do reveal how small Rima was after some three and a half months with us. It is regrettable no one came with a camera during Rima's first month with her adoptive family. I am not sure Rima gained enough confidence during Trudi's twenty-four hours with us even to leave the hammock for an upright walk. We soon were engaged for hours with Trudi in that loud argumentative kind of conversation Rima especially hated. She slept as much as possible through it, and bit me from time to time, whether pleading for play or merely to express her annoyance with our vain disputations, I could not be sure. She loved fun-making and eating, and we were doing neither. We were scolding, something monkeys, to be sure, did occasionally, but only for a few seconds at a time— we went on and on. Rima curled up tight in the crook of my arm for another nap. Our next visitors, and they followed Trudi rather closely, were also old friends, or rather the husband was, a professor specializing in Mexican beetles. He had spent two days with us during our first year on the homestead. Now he had his wife and a graduate student with him. All three were naturalists, and Rima appreciated the man and wife from the start. For some reason, Rima held the student at a full Spider monkey arm's length, probably because he was too sure of himself—"All wild animals love me! In an hour she'll be all over me!" But Rima was not won by such self assurance. Peter, the student, never gained her confidence, but he did take some color photographs of Rima and me in the hammock. And one day beetling upon the mountainside he came upon the bodies of two murdered* adult male Spiders from one of which he saved the skull. This skull when cleaned and washed seemed to speak clearly for much that was remarkable about Rima. The skull also confirms Bates's high estimate of the species; in his Naturalist on the Amazons* *, he ranks the * I say "murdered" because usually they are killed for food. * * Bates, Henry W. Naturalist on the Amazons (Everyman Paperbacks), Dutton, New York.

30

Spider monkeys at the top of primate evolution in the New World. But Rima's love of people exposed her nearly every day to all the worst human contagions, which all primates readily catch from man. There was nothing to be done about it except as we did for ourselves: "To love God, and our neighbors," and to trust in God's will, for both man and monkey. This meant that if a child with a bad cough came with a parent, and Rima, as usual, had to sit beside the child on the parent's other knee, then we had to permit it. We had asked people not to come or bring their children coughing and sneezing, but some did not understand or pretended not to understand, perhaps the same thing in the end. Clearly we could not expect Rima to understand that she could play with some children, not with others. Soon after our visitors left, Rima caught a deadly dysentery microbe. She became very ill, so ill that she soon stopped eating. She began a fast that allowed only creek water and sleep. She was at the same time what I can only call ashamed because she hated as much as anyone being at the mercy of her bowels, which were completely out of control. She defecated at random all over everything, beginning with me and the hammock and all her play places. I had recourse to sheets of plastic for all the flat surfaces, plus rags for myself and the hammock, plus roll on roll of toilet paper for Rima herself. It must have been at this time that she acquired her almost fetish contempt for toilet paper. At any rate, ever after she would grasp every opportunity to reduce a roll of toilet paper to its highest common denominator, unrolling and shredding with a demon's glee she made no attempt to hide, even pretending to eat it. And all this ostensibly because she hated having her behind wiped. It may have been in part out of a sense of the challenging mystery she felt as to just what toilet paper was. After all, our Indian neighbor girls had used it to decorate their hair. Rima felt in a similar way the challenge in my recorder. She did not object specifically to the music, though I suspect high 31

notes annoyed her. What bothered her was her incomprehension. She knew it made sounds only when I put it in my mouth and so would always try to put it in her mouth. As it was too big for her little mouth, she ended up biting it, and my recorder bears today the marks of her sharp little teeth as clearly as ever all about the mouthpiece. Becca's abacus challenged her in like manner for a while, but one day Rima's trapeze broke while she was toying with the counters and, abacus and all, she fell at once down behind the bookshelf. Thereafter, she paid little attention to the abacus. I did not know at that time that baby monkeys have to be taught to climb by their mothers, and how serious even a slight fall must be. Later when Rima actually seemed to resent being placed up above head height in a tree crotch, we all wondered what was wrong and blamed it on the defective tail. But, later I read that baby monkeys are taught to climb trees even as baby humans are taught to walk, and are sometimes even spanked for slowness. As we have seen, Rima learned with very little training to walk, but she never learned to climb with ease and pleasure. But now she had dysentry and slowly she lost her wonderful strength and energy. She became listless and weak. Once again Jan and I prayed over her, making her understand how much we loved her, and I fed her cold creek water diluted with freshly squeezed cane juice. In this way we kept her eyes shining with all the will to live and she soon recovered. And with each recovery from serious illness she became more dear to us, and we to her, for she reciprocated our love in many little demonstrations as these I find noted in my journal: 8 JUNE Rima flourishes into juvenilehood, tears corners off the dictionary pages as we type Jan's essay. I mend them with Scotch tape. I bite her toe-fingers—she bites my nose!

32

9 JUNE

Rima and Becca play tag, hide-and-seek, and peek-a-boo with deep and mutual delight, shrieks, literally, of laughter from both. And in her excitement to escape, Rima runs briefly upright with all the grace and agility of a gibbon. 18 JUNE

Evidently hard thunder showers are a cause of alarm to monkeys in the wild. Rima announced one by rushing to me with her sharp, shrill warning cry. (For the rains, Nature provided her with a heavy extra undercoat on her back.) 20 JUNE Last night Jan went off to sleep without her, and Rima had to go to bed with me. For an hour, until Jan turned over on her back and so made room for her, she resented the situation, choosing to sit up on my shoulders and grind her new molars. When I tried to settle her cosily under my chin, her long fingers reached up and explored carefully the contours of my face protesting that she wanted Jan's face to sleep with. She tries our patience at times to be sure, but rewards us in a hundred other ways with clear demonstrations of purest affection as when, after prayers, we include her in the round of mutual goodnight kisses, she comes closest to true human speech with sounds deep in her throat and chest. And on another similar occasion: Rima flourishes, even shows off, I supect. Becca plays more and more with her. Tonight when Becca leaned over to kiss her mother goodnight, from the nearby trapeze Rima turned her little face up to Becca for her goodnight kiss. 4 JULY Jan takes Smoky the dog in her lap to brush her. Rima laughs her throaty chuckle-laugh. Goldie jumps up to be petted while Rima is in my arms. Rima laughs and tries to touch him. He flees. A large troupe of Spider monkeys up at the cave "barking" (like terriers) loudly. Rima pays no attention to them whatever.

33

9 JULY

Rima and I harvest lemons in later afternoon just before the big storm. She loves a walk and now learns to walk upright outdoors as well as inside. At first she ran with both arms above her head ready to fall forward on to all fours. Now she walks one arm raised akimbo, the other extended balletwise, but now walking instead of running with more mastery of balance. She longs to engage the cat in play. He protests wildly her hair-pulling as we force her to let him be, but he is not hostile, nor even resentful, only wary. She wants to accept him as another monkey, albeit a strangely reserved one. Returning from the walk we met the dog trying to join us, tail wagging, head crouching, ashamed to have missed the walk. Rima laughed at her. She now laughs more loudly and clearly, and more often, like a "talking" doll, but more real and human, incredible!

34

The Terrestrial Monkey

All aspects of Nature, including the great rainy season's electrical storms, found acceptance in Rima's life. If the storm were extraordinarily violent, she would come and curl up in my arms chirping and chattering, all in mingled admiration for the storm and gratitude for having found such good shelter together. I always used to wonder, especially on chilly nights when a storm might go on for hours, just how the monkeys met it up on the mountains. Although they no 35

longer visited us, we knew they were still up there because from time to time we would hear them in an outburst of scolding, but hardly one-quarter of the great troupe had survived —the same troupe that had welcomed us, monkey-fashion, to the virgin vale of the arroyo and cavern, so appropriately called "Santa Maria." Our friend Tata Domingo explained that they crouched close to the trunk of a great tree and below a huge limb, thus finding maximum shelter against the worst storms. This information, plus the daily lengthening and thickening of the hair on Rima's back, gave me comfort when I thought of them, especially of the babies such as Rima had been. So long as an infant clung to the mother's chest, as it did for the first weeks, it probably kept dry even in the worst storms. All the mother had to do was to crouch forward, and her head and shoulders would shield her infant from the rain. By the time the baby was big enough to take up its place on the mother's back, its own pelt would be like Rima's, waterand cold-repellent, at least on the back and shoulders. I used to enjoy combing Rima's fine, long, thick hair with her own special comb. And no matter what she was doing she would stop for a grooming. She seemed to understand that, along with eating and playing, it was one of the three priorities of monkey life, and I enjoyed it especially because her back hair was her only physically beautiful aspect unless, of course, you included her wonderfully alert, expressive eyes. Her long, skinny limbs with hands where feet ought to be, and hooks where hands ought to be, and all covered only with stiff, sparse coarse hair, were certainly not beautiful. Likewise her head and neck. Her head hair was sparse and concentrated in an uncombable rooster-tail, or cowlick, that nothing could cause to lie flat. Her nose was flat with the nostrils opening outward, and would have been downright ugly but for its being so small and delicate and, as I have said, flat. Happily her mouth, together with her eyes, redeemed the entire head and face, for the Spider monkey's mouth is a marvellously firm, character-filled line, much more so than that of any even of the so-called great apes. Of the four anthropoid apes—the 36

chimpanzee, the orangutan, the gorilla, and the gibbon— only the gibbon shows the same force of will in its mouth lines and jaw structure as does the Spider monkey (Ateles of various races). In fact, find a tailless Spider monkey, and in most ways, I suspect, especially in character, you will have a gibbon. If I may be allowed to carry this analogy a bit further (and admittedly I am carrying it far because Nature did not provide the New World with a true anthropoid ape, only monkeys), if the New World Spider monkey is more or less a substitute for a gibbon, then the New World capuchin monkey may perhaps pass equally for a chimpanzee, the New World howler monkey for a gorilla, and the uakaris monkey for an orangutan. The last-named actually has hardly any tail compared with the other New World monkeys. 23 JULY

Rainy Sunday, light, frequent showers, no thunder, mists rising and falling along the mountains. At marimba time Rima screams her objections. Monkeys in their right minds stick together—close together when it rains. I give in after a half-dozen pieces. Becca practices alone, with four sticks; bass is hardly necessary. 28 JULY No-see-ums, tiny biting gnats, keep us up in the loft, "smoky heaven," for sleeping. Other years we merely wrapped ourselves up in sheets with only nostrils exposed, but Rima will suffer no such wrapping up, and they drive her back and forth between Jan's bed on the floor and my hammock, all night. Up in the loft she sleeps all night against Jan's cheek as usual. 30 AUGUST

Rima assumes she is a person or takes it for granted—very affectionate. She absorbs and reflects love. LIVING IN A HOUSE SUITED RIMA VERY WELL EXCEPT WHEN it came time for some major repair, to roof or floor or hearth or support posts. Anything that brought work crews and dig37

ging or pounding or, especially, dismantling or tearing down, turned her into a frightened, peevish, complaining, impossible-to-live-with little imp. Why? We reasoned that it was all because she was psychically unequipped for destruction of her habitat. In the forest a limb might break off and fall or much more rarely, an entire tree might crash, but that was Nature. Here "monkeys" were actively destroying their own shelter— it drove her insane in the simplest analysis. And whenever such work on the house went on for an hour or more, she simply had to be taken for a long walk out in the jungle. Jan took her, and said that once away from the house, she became quiet and enjoyed the stroll along the forest path as usual. This would seem to indicate that most of what passes for neurosis in primates, including man, is traceable to artificial conditions being imposed upon the individual beyond his unique powers of endurance. In other words, primates are driven crazy more easily by some circumstances than others, but the word driven is equally the key to all cases. And it is always the artificial, not the natural, that disorganizes the psyche to the point of madness. As noted, Rima accepted the most violent of the great electrical storms without neurotic reactions, seeking only extra physical security close in our arms, and chortling her sense of comfort and safety in monkey speech. In the midst of the rainy season when we had already had one flood with water running under the floor from the overflowing creek, we had our most refined and cultured visitors ever from the United States: a professor of literature and his almost equally educated wife. They plowed through the dripping jungle over the muddy three hours from the airstrip with a sturdy competence worthy of much younger people. Hardly had they sat down to rest before Rima was in their laps. Edgar was a native of Massachusetts, Mary of Maine. As I am a Vermonter, I joked that Rima apparently recognized New Englanders—it almost seemed that way. They had heard about her—even read about her—so were, to a degree, prepared. Although Rima clutched their hair and danced up and down on their knees inviting play, both of them fully ac38

cepted her without a gesture or even a word of rejection, and so it was for the happy week they spent with us. It appeared that only the simplest, humblest Indian, or the most highly educated and cultured white could easily accept Rima for what she was. Perhaps neither education nor culture have anything to do with it. Probably it all depends on an inner simplicity and humility. To the proud and fastidious, Rima's affectionate, natural simian simplicity was offensive. To an old Indian woman, or an Indian grandfather, her approaches were natural—she was simply a child of a kindred species. (Later we would discover that the Hindus seemed to understand monkeys best.) For Edgar and Mary, though their own reactions were no doubt more complicated, Rima was still pretty much the same as she was to the Indians, that is, she was obviously accorded a child's status in our home, and as an adopted child they both could accept her. Rima was especially fond of Mary, and we had to assume that in a monkey troupe in Nature, a baby turns to almost any female adult with equal trust and is not disappointed. Further, these visitors were parents of four grown-up children, so carried an aura as grandparental as any of the Indians. My own special reward in watching Rima with Edgar came in the realization that a doctorate in philosophy does not necessarily spoil a man's capacity to be humble. I only wondered if these highly educated people could understand the one trait in particular about Rima that had deeply stirred us—her capacity for giving as well as receiving love. Out of my doubts this book is in part being written, for it is impossible to believe that anyone, short of a maddened sadist, who is aware of what a monkey actually is, could ever abuse one for any purpose whatever. As it is with human beings, to torture a monkey or ape is to torture God. On this basis the traffic in monkeys for any purpose whatever has to be prohibited. Happily, it was not until after our quality visitors had left that Rima had begun a practice that quickly reduced me to desperation. Up until this point she had never ventured more 39

than a step or two outside the house on her own. For some reason—her growing up, of course—she began running out along the muddy approach paths all the way to the woodpile and laundry bench, which meant that she returned with muddy feet and hands. Heedlessly she would leap into the hammock and into my lap and, when I shrieked, leap back out only to muddy everything else she touched in fleeing my annoyance. Here was a complication as hard in its way as the no-see-ums. With the no-see-ums we had finally learned to put Rima in the same sling I used for taking her out on orchard work. The sling protected most of her body from the ferocious biting gnats, and she was willing to fall asleep with my shirt drawn more or less across her face; further to the good, the gnats were no longer with us, after some three weeks. For the muddy feet there was no solution until it stopped raining hard, that is, until December, and we were hardly into September. Meanwhile, I could only train her to let me wipe her feet and hands after each of her daily more frequent excursions out along the ever muddy paths. I complained aloud, scolded poor little Rima, and desperately cultivated my never-too-thriving garden of patience and endurance. When I arrived at the last measure of both, I turned to prayer, perhaps because I refused to let anything break the beautiful trust and affectionate relationship between us. I had brought her up as a terrestrial creature, and earth, unlike treetops, is a place of mud. Therefore it was up to me to find the solution. Rima herself had absolutely nothing to tell her how to keep from tracking mud into a human habitation, yet every day her expanding nature was urging her to explore her environment. She could not romp in the treetops, so she went romping in the yard. This not only meant mud in the wet season, but to Becca's deep dismay, it also meant broken over and crushed plants, especially the huge and handsome taros, of which several flourishing clumps surrounded the two sides of the house. Rima soon had them looking as if a herd of elephants had passed through them. Shouting at her or even chasing her was 40

of little use—she took both as forms of encouragement and merely romped the more wildly. The truth was, and it came out very clearly later on, the juvenile primate is gifted with an amount of sheer physical energy that has to be observed and felt to be credited. There seemed no way of saving any fragile vegetation near the house, but I did finally hit upon a fairly satisfactory solution to the muddy feet problem. Once a week I cut enough big banana leaves to cover the worst of the muddy paths. Rima was just as happy to run and romp over the clear soft banana leaves as she was in the mud. My scolding and impatience with her stopped and, likewise, so did her unhappiness at being rudely wiped hand and foot every time she came to the hammock from an outdoor play. We were happy and in perfect harmony again. And Rima was as relieved as I, for she never failed to curl up on my lap and chortle in her throat her little half-song, half-chant of happiness in reconciliation after a scolding or, very rarely, a shaking. A shaking was a very serious chastisement, apparently used by monkey mothers only in extreme cases. At least, that was always Rima's response. "I hope you realize what a terribly harsh punishment you have inflicted upon me!" was her comment, but she did obey more readily, at least for a time, after being shaken. As Rima became more active out of doors, so at the same time she moved more freely inside. Although out-of-doors tree-climbing remained unattractive to her, she did master going up the ladder into the loft all on her own. At first trying only the first two or three rungs, then swinging rather awkwardly back down, she at last went rapidly up all the way. This conquest of the ladder was inspired by her real fondness for the loft as a play area. Indeed, it must have been ideal for a young house-reared monkey. Besides many piles of boxes and books to climb over and explore, there were ropes, some with ends even hanging within reach. At first taken up by Jan or Becca, she learned to go up and play there by herself, or even finally with the cat. She had eventually learned that he would 41

play with her for a short time, if she played what was for her very gently. Goldie would spar with her and even frolic a bit if she controlled herself enough not to seize his tail or soft fur. This was usually too great a demand for Rima. Sooner or later she would pinch his tail or grab a handful of fur, and Goldie would come fleeing down the ladder, but after the one bad fall, she never made the mistake of hanging on and being dragged down the ladder with him. What she enjoyed most was to have Becca and Jan both up there with her. Then, with two more "monkeys" to join in, she had the best play of her life. She never tired, as they both did; Jan once pretended falling asleep to try to stop the play, but Rima teased her by leaping on her mercilessly and when that did not suffice to "waken" her, Rima actually pried Jan's eyes open, gently but successfully, with long skinny but dexterous fingers. She did finally learn to come down the ladder alone, but along the inside using only her arms, whereas in the ascent she walked up human-style using all fours. Backing down humanwise was apparently not natural to her. She did quickly learn to come down by way of my hammock tie rope, which was easily reachable from under the eaves. She would amuse herself by going up just past or just over my head, squeezing under the eaves into the loft, and then coming back the same route. But as we watched her develop we could never forget that in many ways Rima was as much a terrestrial animal as we were. Although evolution had built her a body for great ease and skill in the tree tops, her little mind and soul were still quite terrestrial. She was ever conservative about climbing and heights. And in turn I can confess I have never watched a monkey troupe at home in the trees without a sizeable twinge of envy rippling across my soul. Undoubtedly, all the higher primates share this psychic ambivalence with respect to life in the trees and life on the ground.

42

Juvenile Mischief

Marimba practice had been a part of the day's routine for Becca and me for the last three or four years. It began with a small single keyboard instrument carried in on an Indian's back twelve days over the trails from Guatemala. Having slowly mastered the primitive Indian-manufactured instrument, we gave it away to the young men who had been our teachers and bought a double keyboard and much larger instrument from a regular factory near the state capital. This 43

beautiful "baby grand" of rare fine woods and made by professionals demanded effort from us. At first we could find no one who knew how to play the double keyboard, but at last three youths turned up, one from the San Quintin, and then, two brothers from the Zapata ejido beyond the two rivers. We were soon making good progress and liked to practice undisturbed for at least an hour every day. What to do with Rima? She would not hear of me going off anywhere outside without her. And if I did, she climbed up as high on the hammock cords as possible where she could look out along the path and kept up her guttural scoldings and squawkings, varied only with infantile, broken-hearted pleadings. There was no question of music practice in the face of her protest. Jan volunteered: "I'll take her for a walk while you practice." Becca and I recognized the nobleness of this offer and seized upon it. But Rima was not easily deceived. Much as she loved an outing with Jan, she much preferred it with me. Jan for a sleeping "mother," but I for a jaunting—and feeding—"mother.'' She refused to go with Jan, so we had to develop higher deceptions. I would pick her up and let her slip into the carrying, or as I called it, the "papoose" sling. Then Jan would join us in a walk down to the swimming hole in the creek, only five minutes away. There I would pretend I was going to go in swimming. Rima understood as I went down and stood beside the water, and she would allow herself to be passed to Jan, whereupon I slipped past and back up to the marimba, which was kept in the greenhouse. Rima would sometimes resist this trick but eventually, when it had become part of a rather full routine of varied activity for her, she would simply join Jan at the sound of marimba, that is, accept my music practice as her time to be with Jan. First Jan would take her out into the jungle and along the creek bank path up to the beach. On these quiet walks Rima seems to have learned to love the silent shady forest, though she kept some of her early awe of it. She taught Jan to explore for edible leaves, but as neither of them knew what was what, Jan ended up by bringing her back to the greenhouse, where 44

tender and crisp succulent leaves of purslane were aplenty, plus such interesting exotics as ramie leaves (a nettle relative). Munching eagerly on her treat, Rima would pass us musicians with hardly more than a glance. Having walked and snacked, Rima's next step was independent exploration. Between the main orchard path and the greenhouse was an overgrown area bordering both sides of a drainage ditch. Among wild cannas and tame arums, taro, that is, grew a beautiful young Black zapote tree. This tree became Rima's first learning-to-climb tree. At first she preferred just to romp wildly and destructively, more or less, among and up and down and over the cannas and taro, inevitably bending and breaking some of them. Why all this romping about along the ground when there were perfectly suitable low trees for climbing? Jan tried for some time to interest her in climbing in this very inviting young Black zapote, but Rima said "No." She couldn't understand why Jan insisted on placing her up on the lowest branches of the tree. She much preferred racing about in the low growing plants, swinging on them, and breaking, or at least bending them over. I finally tried, at a somewhat later date, to interest her in learning to climb a young breadfruit. I wanted very much to have a photo of her in it, but no, she was still quite uninterested in becoming a tree climber. Perhaps Rima was too young to be placed up in a tree alone? After all, we stayed on the ground, and there was no doubt that she identified completely with us. At this time she actually kept close track of me at the marimba. She would, in her romping, pass close by and watch us playing. If she felt time was up, she would rush over and climb up on my shoulders. This annoyed Becca, especially if time was not up; we practiced usually for about forty minutes. She would threaten Rima with the marimba sticks, telling her to go play some more. Rima might then voluntarily slide down and rush off to Jan and some more play, or she might simply refuse and scold Becca for threatening her. As noted, Rima looked upon seventeen-year-old Becca as her equal and playmate and nothing 45

more. She would not back down without a scolding or a threat, and in a tussle gave tit-for-tat with her very sharp little teeth. Likewise, if a thoughtless or perverse visitor thought covertly to tease or use force against her after accepting her on his knee, she quickly revealed his meanness with a loud squawk and a bite if at all merited. Her biting we now understood—unless carelessly or wilfully provoked by bad treatment—was a signal either of hunger or a desire to play. While lunch was being prepared she would begin biting my toes. It quickly became a noisy game. I would try to pull my feet away, but in the hammock places to put them were limited. When she caught a toe and began biting, I would cringe and squawk and shake my head from side to side just as she did. She loved my joining in so heartily, and my willingness, up to a point, to sacrifice my toes, but if I seized her suddenly and bit a finger, she shrieked with mingled delight and protest. Holding was unfair—holding her entire body, that is. So I would let her go, but not without getting in a hearty squeeze of her five centimeter stub of tail as she fled. But no doubt our uproar did assist in hurrying up an otherwise slow-to-appear meal from time to time. She loved mealtimes. She would begin usually by eagerly trying everything on my plate, but never rudely. She would always sit decorously while we held hands in a silent grace, and wait as I offered her each item. If she liked some one thing, I would give her as much as she wanted. She ate daintily, and if by chance some difficult food fell on her chest she waited to be wiped. Her mouth she would lift up voluntarily when it needed wiping or when she was finished eating. Likewise she expected her slender fingers to be kept clean. If my plate did not satisfy her she would move over to Jan, and examine her plate for any possible variety. Her greatest food discovery was corn on the cob, and this she made with Jan, as my dentition had for quite some years forced me to forego the delights that Rima now discovered, but never have I enjoyed eating a cob of new, garden-fresh Golden Bantam corn more than I enjoyed watching Rima, the little Spider monkey, eat46

ing her first one. She watched Jan's method for only a moment, then put her mouth down to the tender tip and began. Jan stopped eating and held it for her while Rima bit off row on row of the tenderest kernels, stopping only for a glance up at Jan that said: "How am I doing? Sure is good, isn't it!" Becca and I laughed and laughed but for once Rima did not join in. She was too happy with her discovery even to laugh. IT WAS NOT ALWAYS POSSIBLE TO UNDERSTAND RIMA'S motivations and I always hesitated to write off as sheer mischief some odd response which might, while appearing as such, actually be something else. As we have observed, the biting that we at first saw as rather unpleasant mischief was merely a juvenile monkey's invitation to play, and as juvenile monkeys play rough, biting was the normal invitation. For a brief period, coming upon some of her own dung that I had not had an opportunity to remove, Rima would pop it in her mouth. I was properly disgusted, and scolded her. She promptly stopped and would merely stare at it, and avoid it. I finally decided that putting the dung into her mouth was a spontaneous response to a situation she would never have encountered in nature. In the tree tops all her dung, and all that of the others, would have fallen to the ground. She might well have lived her entire span of fifteen to twenty years and never have seen her own dung, or any monkey dung. Upon being severely scolded, she, as usual, came as if fleeing the ugliness of the situation, scrambling into my lap and curling up, chirping and chortling, in the hollow of my right arm. Peace reestablished, she would resume her play, but the peace once broken had to be restored ere life could go on. Her treatment of toilet paper was, apparently, another case of pure mischief, yet mingled in her enjoyment of unrolling it and creating chaos with it, including biting and shredding. I came to feel there might be a trace of pure hostility toward something she had learned to associate so intimately with all the misery of dysentery. She was, in her own way, enjoying some revenge upon it. 47

Her pulling the table cloth off, along with whatever dishes might be set upon it, was somewhat more difficult to interpret as anything at all but mischief, pure and very simple. The situation tempted her because usually the "table'' was only a pair of low benches set beside my hammock with an old inner beehive cover for the top. Becca would place any one of several of her embroidered covers upon it, and the game would begin with Rima slipping in and jerking it all off on to the floor as she fled. Everyone scolded her, which apparently only made it more of a game, and if we did not divert her or actually hold her, she would end up with both dishes and food on the floor. But here again, to her it was all just more play, and if we chose to define it as mischief, then it was up to us to define also where play ends and mischief begins. It is certain that Rima knew no distinctions. Any activity that led to romping and tussling, even at some cost of property or peace, was legal play to her. Even the tomcat gradually learned how overriding was the play instinct in her, and though his kittenhood was too far behind him for any wholehearted sharing, he did at last learn to accept her overtures, returning a stiff paw poke when she became too rough, as she always did for his taste. This was in part because all her play, except with the dog—was with adult "monkeys," and all three of us were rough with her, and made no attempt to restrain her responses except for the biting. Becca would let Rima seize her by her long hair and swing on a lock in front of her face while only tickling her to make her let go, and both laughing the while. Goldie the tomcat might well insist that such hair-pulling, which in his case included tail-pulling, was not legitimate kitten play. He would gallop off in mingled disgust and bewilderment, but he never attacked her. ONE MORNING RAMON TURNED UP WITH ANOTHER BABY monkey, this time a howler. It was the first young of the howlers I had ever seen—and how strange it was, how utterly different from Rima. As with Rima, Ramon was not feeding or caring for it pro48

perly. He had no nursery bottle, and had simply tried to pour corn gruel down its throat with a spoon. It spent its whole hour with us exploring for food and drink, whining in a curious high-pitched tone I had never heard from Rima, like a phonograph running down! Its face and head were so different from hers it seemed hardly a monkey at all, but rather some sphinxlike fairytale infant monster. The very long thick tail added force to this overall impression of unmonkeyness because we were so used to our tailless Rima. I realized with a shock how the tail made Ramon's little howler a mere animal whereas our tailless Rima was a monkey person. This was even more shocking when it became apparent to me that the infant howler's head and face showed an almost Caucasian sharpness of profile to Rima's decidedly African facial angle. And the distinction could even be pursued into the area of personality and psyche: Rima, the carefree volatile African, and the little howler, the morose heavy-handed Caucasian. Later I read how even the Indians who fill their huts with all species of monkeys as pets find the howlers the least responsive and the shortest-lived, but one promptly forgets these shortcomings when on a moonlit jungle night they begin their wonderful chorale. Certainly no other primate hymn to Nature and the God of Nature—including the hymns of man—expresses more basically and forcefully the common primate bond to the tropical forest. A genial disposition is a great gift and brain power likewise, but neither denotes genius. The howler, which perhaps should be called the choral monkey, is a creature of genius. (Most naturalists have had negative responses to the howler—except for W. H. Hudson who, together with Ivan Sandersen, shares my high estimate of their choral genius.) Rima would have nothing to do with the whining little monster. She kept with me in the hammock and pretended it was not there. Perhaps this was in part due to her fear of Ramon. He was one of the few human beings she feared. When he came near she cringed and whimpered. Did she associate him with the murder of her mother, or merely with 49

the string tied to her leg, the nights rolled up in the blanket, and the forced feeding? Perhaps she sensed the youth's terrible instability of soul (he had been on drugs from the age of eleven), and shared with us at her own elemental level some of our tensions in his presence. Be that as it may, the little howler, after vainly searching every corner of our house, went out and sprawled on his belly on the path. "It is starving," I said. "Impossible, it eats maize gruel," Ramon protested. "No milk?" "I have no milk." "Here, let me give you some powdered milk—it cannot survive while a baby, you know, without milk." He accepted the milk and promised to begin at once feeding it to his monkey. "It knows how to drink," he reassured us. The next day it died. And Ramon was so graceless as to say our gift of milk had killed it. (Later we learned that the local curandero had told him this.)

50

The Outside World Interferes

About this time in Rima's life, after she had been with us some five and a half months, which made her over six months old, we were experiencing a mounting tension over our landholding. Having "bought" it in the name of our Indian friend in complete confidence, it was now, after some two years, being brought home to us with more pressure every day that we might well be forced off. This led to more and more of those overlong intense discussions that Rima especially hated. 51

She would retreat to her place of security curled up in my right arm resting on my lap, to watch and listen. As the discussion grew more heated she would become more restless. One day she ended up defecating on me, and in disgust I gave her to Jan, who took her out for a walk along the creek path, where she soon quieted. I hated to see her falling victim to our social frictions and tensions, but there seemed no avoiding what was now clearly happening. Ramon, whom she still recognized as the only enemy she had ever had, began to play a larger role in the land struggle, sometimes on our side, sometimes not. Rima trembled in my arms from the time he entered until he left, but she now began to recognize the several brothers who were trying to force us off also as enemies. We tried to remove her as a matter of routine whenever any of them turned up, but this was not easy because Jan felt she needed to be present on such occasions. I felt especially sad because whenever we were left alone and could live our old hermitlike life for a few peaceful days, Rima expanded spiritually even as she was developing physically. I once discovered that she had joined me in listening to the exquisite yet piercing antiphonal singing of a pair of wrens. She chuckled in her pleasure, and I suspect it was all of her own, for she gave no sign that she was aware that I, too, was enchanted by the explosive bursts of bird melody. And it had been the same when she laughed at the frogs croaking. She did share my flute with me, but I doubt that she at all enjoyed it as music. She was, rather, fascinated by the mystery of it and saw in it a challenge. That is, she recognized that it was not a part of me, yet seemed to understand that I somehow caused the sound. Whatever it was that motivated her she usually tried to interfere with my practice on it, biting it and even grasping it with both her hands and feet. I suppose, as with the dog, it may have "hurt her ears," as it is said. Yet she did not seem so much to be trying to stop me from playing as attempting to make it give out sound herself. As I have noted, her little teeth marks are still clearly visible on the mouth piece and as they are the only daily physical reminders 52

of her left, I shall never bother to remove them. They seem to show that what she really wanted was to learn to play the recorder! Possibly the psychologists would write it down to mere primate imitative curiosity as when she came upon some loose salt and ate enough to cause her to vomit. She was always ready to try a new food, but the musical instrument seems to me to carry us onto higher levels of consciousness. With the marimba her response was simply to allow it as something Becca and I did every morning at a certain hour while she went off to walk and romp with Jan. In the instrument itself she showed not the slightest interest. At the end of about thirty to forty minutes, she would come running and climb up my pant leg onto my shoulder to tell us time was up. If we insisted she was too early she would grant us another five or ten minutes and then promptly reappear and we would stop. She was certainly growing more independent every day, yet was evidently even more trusting that we would keep all our commitments toward her. And we never failed her so long as we were able to live in our jungle homestead. It was in October, when she was at least eight months old, that she first showed a startled recognition of the presence of her own kind. Late one afternoon the small group of Spider monkeys remaining up the mountain suddenly burst out into one of their loud barking contests, or mutual scoldings. I never was able to decide just what was transpiring in those outbursts. At any rate this group was very close to the edge of the clearing, and very loud and sudden in their outburst. Rima stopped her play, stared a moment, then clambered up into my arms as at any other sudden strange noise. I could not tell whether or not she really recognized the source. None of the monkeys was visible, and as often all was quickly over. Perhaps Rima felt no special response any more than she had when Ramon brought his little howler to visit. Rima certainly showed no recognition of the presence of a close relative, but then Ramon was for her a serious problem, and no doubt deflected her attention from his little monkey. 53

Later I learned that next to the howlers the Spider monkeys have the most highly developed larynx, which would explain their loud barking as well as Rima's considerable powers of expression from the sweetest of liquid birdlike calls to harsh guttural scoldings. We began to wonder at this time what was to be done with Rima if, as seemed more and more likely, we had to abandon our homestead. We discussed the possibility of taking her up on the mountainside and leaving her to join the Spiders. "But she's not a monkey," Becca was quick to point out, and that settled us; whatever happened, wherever we headed, Rima would have to go with us. And there did come the day and the hour when we all saw clearly how right Becca had been. Rima was a monkey only in her physical appearance; in her spiritual nature she had become near human. I am aware that animal and child psychologists must be allowed their smile, or worse, over this "anthropomorphic" statement. I am aware that all young mammals to some extent reveal surprisingly close affinities with human beings. The Adamsons' baby lions* have proved that such is true even of the great felines, but I must insist that with the infant monkey, likewise the infant ape, there is a common ground that no other infant mammal enters. Perhaps an illustration will help my point. All infant mammals love play, and will play with human beings, but an infant monkey rises to beyond shared play to a realm describable only in such terms as trust and love. And beyond all other mammals the infant anthropoid has at its command ways of expressing its love and trust. And it was on this foundation that spiritually, due in large measure, no doubt, to our careful response, Rima became so human. This is not to say that had we had to receive another monkey into our home at this time, Rima would not have accepted it and worked out a relationship with it. It is to say that another monkey could not have become as close to her as we were. Toward the end of October we finally received a high and *Adamson, Joy, Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds, Pantheon, New York.

54

official delegation, which made it clear we must give up all notions of an Indian holding legal title to land in Chiapas, Mexico. We could keep our little corner (three to five acres) of botanical garden but our friend Tomas was to have nothing; the rancher descendants of the Conquistadores were to have all he had legally applied for and been granted and more, some five hundred acres in all. This came as a shock because only a week before in town they had told him he was to have the land we had helped him to apply for and survey. It led to a lot of heated discussion, however, under more crowded conditions inside and outside our house as well, than any of us had ever witnessed. When I realized Tomas had been cruelly and unjustly deceived, I denounced the entire proceedings in the name of the various Mexican revolutions, but I did nothing to terminate the meeting. It was Rima who did that good office. All through the steadily mounting voices she had become more and more restless until I feared she would leap from my lap. The house was far too crowded for her to escape, but apparently escape was not on her mind. She might easily have raced up the hammock cords and slipped under the eaves into the empty and quiet loft as she often did. Instead she became furious and began biting my fingers. In play, as to hasten a meal, she had often nibbled my toes, but this was an act of pure anger such as I had never before seen. I stood up and, passing the three chief officials, shook hands with the two of them nearest, saying "Goodbye, gentlemen, I have to be excused." [These men revealed to me for the first time in actual physical presence the nature of the unholy alliance of the whites (only one percent) and the Mestizos (seventy percent) that governs Mexico to the exclusion of the pure Indians (twenty-nine percent of the total).] Rima had quieted. Immediately I stood up. I passed out into the backyard, reassuring her with hand and voice. By the time we were out of the house she was relaxed as if nothing at all had happened to disturb her. I heard the officials departing. Jan said they stared at each other, then the chief an55

nounced, "I guess we are finished here," and they left without saying goodbye to her; of course they would never know that the meeting had been terminated by an eight-month-old tailless female Spider monkey who hated all forms of ugliness, especially noisy ones. Back with the governor they reported I had "insulted" them. I thought about this strange accusation, for two of the three had shaken my hand as I said, "Goodbye, Senores." Perhaps they felt Rima's participation without understanding it. At any rate I am sure Rima agreed with my only comment: "The truth is always insulting to those who seldom if ever hear it." This visit forced us to make our long-debated decision to try to find a new virgin rain forest. Where? The Guiana Highlands were still referred to as "one of earth's last frontiers." This was the land of W. H. Hudson's Rima. We would head for one of the four countries that shared the vast virgin region. As Guyana was the only English-speaking one with a progressive, if unsteady, political life, we chose it. But after so many years of putting down roots, could we pull them up in a matter of days? Meanwhile, we would have to live under tensions we had slowly been helping to build up in the land rights struggle. Then came the blessed Renner family. We had corresponded with them for many months and advised them of all our problems and uncertainties but they decided to come anyway, to see how a tropical subsistence homestead worked. And we assured them ours was working fine, or would be, if no one drove us off it. The Renners were rather young, she still in her twenties, he in his thirties, and with them were their twin children, a boy and a girl of eight or nine years. Rima and Becca were delighted with them. They had been living in a rather rural way in recent years and felt at home on the jungle's edge. But the parents were both of deep urban origin and had little more than a strong impulse toward rural and simple ways of life. She had taught biology in high schools whenever possible as a 56

substitute. He had worked for years in an auto factory, part of the time to help her finish college. Apparently he had overworked himself, especially as the twins had come along before either had finished college. The hard hike from Agua Zarca prostrated him, that is, he had collapsed when about threequarters of the way to our house and had had to rest for half an hour. As it turned out, their visit appeared to be for the purpose of helping him to improve his health more than for anything else. He never showed any serious intention of homesteading in the tropics. They did not stay long. We proposed that they join us for the Guiana Highlands tropical frontier, but it came out that their funds were mainly promises from her well-to-do parents and applied only if Mexico proved suitable. When they saw we were faced with abandoning our years of work, they confessed they had no funds for South America. This was a disappointment because to begin over we would need at least one other family, and they were very compatible, with their autoharp and songs, and she was teaching her children to play the recorder. They did provide a wonderful easing of tension for us, embattled as we were by people who had every reason to do us serious mischief in our helpless isolation. We had resisted to the last three hundred or more years of tradition. We had, in short, defied the Conquistadores by attempting to return a small parcel of the conquered lands to the original occupants, a mistake no doubt. But with a second American family present, we would be unmolested. When it came time for them to leave, the little girl, Ilse, cried at parting with Rima, and Rima watched her out of sight. At least we had witnessed another child come to love our little jungle orphan. One day not long after their departure I noticed something large and gleaming white in Rima's mouth—holding her mouth open it proved to be her first permanent tooth. At this time she also began going to a certain small palm tree close by the back corner of the house when she had to relieve herself, even to urinate. No doubt she begins to grow 57

up, we thought. How to take her the thousands of miles to a new jungle on a new continent? And not only Rima, the monkey's child, but Smoky the dog as well, plus Goldie the cat? How could we ever do what we must do if we were to keep faith with our life in the tropical forest? God would have to lead and sustain us, else I, with a damaged heart that had kept me a semi-invalid for nine years, might not even get as far as Agua Zarca, the nearest village. We went on working out of habit even though we knew in our hearts all was over. I took Rima gluing as usual, to protect the young fruit trees from the leaf cutter ants. She even rode in her sling in perfect ease and trust one morning while I used my machete to cut out weeds from Jan's youngest African oil palms. Rima had no fear of the vegetation falling right in front of us under the long swinging cuts of the sharp machete. She never murmured or whimpered, but clung tight, content to be where Nature told her she belonged—clinging fast to her parent, regardless. As we finished we cut several of the tall fat sugar cane stalks nearby, and took them home for squeezing on the new cane press. It was small and hand-operated but in fifteen minutes gave us two quarts of thick green and richly sweet, frothy juice. Rima now drank it eagerly from a cup, the froth clinging to her light moustache and hairy chin. We were asked by friends to take some souvenir photos of our place now that it was clear we must abandon everything to those whose only declared accusation against us was that we had been so foolish as to plant our gardens on the site of their stables! I pointed out to Jan how startlingly this odd statement smacked of the ancient conflict recorded at the roots of Zoroastrianism, the conflict between the peasant or horticulturist, and the nomad-herder. The "People of Light" in Zoroaster's teaching are identified with the former, and the "People of Darkness" with the latter. Man as centaur surely has little use or space for man as mere biped, and one may wonder whether or not the heliocopter-borne new "cavalryman" actually feels the same sense of pure power as the old 58

cavalryman mounted on a powerful and spirited horse. Rima was utterly uninterested in posing for her photo. I wanted most of all some of her in a tree, but she refused, simply leaping down and racing off over what she deemed proper monkey playground, that is anything not too obviously a tree. As a result, I wasted half a roll of film. We did succeed in getting some good pictures of the place, and later we had friends who succeeded somewhat in capturing Rima on film, but not of her in the trees. Rima had a remarkable face even as a baby, but now as she rapidly matured as a juvenile her face became stronger than ever, for Rima showed both chin and forehead. Of all the primates, only the gibbon and orangutan—other than man—are supposed to show marked development of the forehead. To this list should be added the Spider monkey. A study of the photo of the skull of a mature monkey would reveal that the Spider monkey compares favorably with the skulls of both gibbons and orangutans. Actually, it would be unfair not to add that several other species of monkeys appear to share with man, orangutan, and gibbon the forehead thought to be the seat of the reflective and meditative powers. I limit my list to the New World, and name the squirrel monkey, which is said to have a larger brain in proportion to its body than man; the woolly monkey with its strangely negroid human face; the capuchin, claimed to be the chimpanzee of the monkeys for its imitative powers; and finally, the rare and little known goeldis monkey which seems to share more than any of the others Rima's firm mouth line. Indeed, from the one not very good picture I have of the goeldi, also known as the "Callithrix," the entire face resembles the Spider monkey, although it is said to be placed in an I.Q. classification closest to the capuchin. It is the woolly monkey that is placed closest to the Spiders. Both the goeldi and the woolly do seem to share with the Spider the firm mouth and chin; however, there the resemblance becomes less marked, as the Spider excels all others in its gentleness and affection. It is a curious fact that whereas 59

specialists rank the Old World monkeys as surpassing the New in intelligence, they do give credit for stronger affection and devotion to humans to the New Worlders. With my limited experience, I would dispute only one statement in their overall list of comparisons, and that is where they say that the New World monkey as a whole is lacking not only intelligence but also gaiety. Certainly no monkey anywhere could have surpassed Rima in gaiety. Becca's chosen adjective, as noted, was "fun-loving." Perhaps there is an element of unconscious prejudice in this owing to the Old World monkey being closer anatomically to man in dentition and nasal form. It is also among the Old World forms that the predatory monkeys are found that unhappily so much more resemble man both as predators and as "organizers." New World monkeys have no species that come close to the baboons and macaques in either brutal aggressiveness or tightly knit, hierarchial social life. And the carefree Spiders seem to be the most gentle and democratic of all the New World forms, even excelling in equality of the sexes.

60

Rima Flourishes

30 OCTOBER

Rima grows up, frolics by herself, upstairs and down, indoors and out. 3 NOVEMBER

Rima and I go tree gluing in morning. She helps Jan transplant in afternoon. When near the forest she now romps in the lower vegetation—no tree climbing—only shrubs that bend with her weight. 61

13 NOVEMBER

The little girl (Ilse) and Becca and Rima make a cheerful trio. Rima with me in the hammock hears the chatting down at the creek bathing pool and calls to them from high up in the hammock cords above my head. They can hear her throaty chuckle-chortle and call up to her. Later she rushes out to meet them as they move up toward the house and begs to be picked up by Ilse. (Rima has no interest in bathing although monkeys are supposed to swim when necessary.) 18 NOVEMBER

With people Rima is a great show-off, but meets most, now even the Lacandons—with pure affection and trust. Proud, wicked people cannot, however, hide from her. With the proud she persists in demanding a come-down even though they openly reject her advances, much as she persisted until accepted by the cat and dog. With the truly wicked and malicious she keeps a good distance, not letting them touch her. She seems especially uncomfortable with the mentally unstable. 29 NOVEMBER Rima flourishes.

Two new foods now came into Rima's experience, one as a direct result of the last visitors. They had brought in a huge sack of unshelled peanuts, and were, of course, not interested in taking it out with them. Rima was instantly fascinated and spent many happy times with them. As always she watched carefully to see how we handled the new food, then did likewise, but she still lacked enough permanent teeth to crack or eat peanuts. Undaunted even by the discovery she could not eat them, she nevertheless persevered in learning to crack them. It required much time and patience before she succeeded with that first nut, but she rapidly discovered that by holding the nut in just one right position she did have teeth enough to crack nine out of ten of them. When we saw that after all her patient effort the kernel was still beyond her, Jan chewed it and let her take the mashed nut from her lips, a device Rima had long since taught us with other too tough 62

foods. But she always insisted on cracking her share of the nuts, and obviously as much for the simple pleasure of the work as for the food. If she found a stray nut she would always stop and patiently crack it, then nibble on it in vain, and finally carelessly abandon it. Lettuce was her second food discovery about this time. We had tried to grow lettuce at all seasons and under many experimental conditions. Our successes had not averaged fifty percent, perhaps not even thirty percent, for lettuce is far from happy in any season in a tropical rain forest. But often when we made a crop it was a good one. Rima was now present for our first good lettuce crop since she joined us. Lettuce—the sheer leafy, green goodness of it—overwhelmed her. If the discovery of peanuts had fascinated and engrossed her, lettuce charmed and delighted her. It was as if she found its crisp, tender goodness somehow unbelievable—as if it were in truth a miracle. She could not refuse another leaf no matter how many she had eaten. The Spiders are said to be among the most frugivorous of monkeys, but Rima's response to lettuce seemed to indicate they must have a fine relish for tender leaves as well. We knew already how fond she was of eating flowers with certain tender, leafy petals, and during marimba practice, Jan had taught her to munch purslane, but she recognized instantly in lettuce a higher food than either flowers or purslane.

ALMOST ALWAYS NOW, WHENEVER THE LITTLE TROUPE of mountain monkeys came down close and broke out into their yelping barks, Rima would pause a moment and listen, but only for a moment, then go back to her play. Actually, she would spend more time watching the swallows, when they happened to be feeding on the wing close to the house, than she ever did listening to monkeys. The graceful motions of the swallows pleased her deeply, though I never heard her comment on them as she would on frogs or birds singing. She accepted the swallows' flight in silent admiration, much as she 63

had her first awareness of the sun-bathed treetops when first lying on her back on my lap in the hammock up at the creek beach. 19 DECEMBER

Monkeys heard up the mountain—Rima listens. Then resumes her play, leaping, jumping up and down—this a way of asking for play; and then cavorting with Becca, clinging to her skirt while Becca whirls as would a three-or-four-year-old human child, which is about her relative age.

We now seemed forgotten for a time, which was strange because as soon as people knew we were leaving they began to come for things we might be giving away. We considered having an auction sale, which was the usual way in Vermont when a farm family had to go. But we soon realized that too few local people had ready money for such a course to be practical. Those very few with cash would buy up quickly and cheaply our few valuables and the rest would have to be given away. We offered for sale the recently acquired sugar cane press but no one wanted to pay the price of a hand-operated all-iron mill. So we gave the cane juice mill to the children of Agua Zarca who really didn't need it, as most of them were blessed with jaws and teeth nearly as efficient as our little mechanical mill. The marimba we could have sold but decided instead to give it to Alex and Juan, the ejido brothers who had taught us some of our best pieces. They had tried to find support for buying one by forming a youth cooperative, but there was not enough interest or money. Then, at the last minute, the typewriter went to Jamie B. or "Baron" B. who, being of the oldest and original family of the local gentry, had quite accurately prophesied that we and our Indians would lose out, flatly stating: "Feudalism will win." This was in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1972 A.D., and we had held some reasonable doubts that it could happen. "Baron" B. was proven correct, and for five hundred pesos took our very much used typewriter, pleased with his bargain. 64

Probably Christmas and the pre-fiesta preparations kept people away. At any rate, we enjoyed the respite to collect our wits and the forces needed to tear up the last roots of eight years' intensive homesteading and to abandon the many nearto-bearing fruit trees. We joked about how in another year the loft would have collapsed on our heads just from the overload of books— better to abandon everything than succumb to such a fate. But Jan wept nonetheless— how hard she had labored at the homestead. We carefully sorted the books, each person being allowed a few dearest favorites, the rest going to the Bartholomew Las Casas Library founded by the Bloms in San Cristobal de Las Casas. I doubt Rima sensed the coming break-up. Like the dog, she was perfectly content so long as she had us. Becca had just about adjusted to the necessity of leaving Goldie, her gorgeous golden tabby tomcat, behind. As a cat he would be content to remain with the house. The dog and the monkey must go with us. Leaving either behind became each day more unthinkable. Rima's participation in family activity now increased to such a pitch that she began to rise at 4:30 A.M., when Becca and I breakfasted lightly and did school and literary work until dawn at about 6:30. Becca and I would be hardly seated to our oatmeal and bananas when Rima would crawl out sleepily from Jan's pillow, stumble across the rough floor and climb up into my lap, ready to share our pre-dawn breakfast. She never ate much but she almost never missed. Having eaten, she promptly rejoined Jan in bed and went back to sleep until daybreak. Then she rose in time to tumble over Jan's bedmaking, enjoying especially the climbing over the mounting pile of blankets and half-rolling, half-leaping off. From this point on throughout the day, she would alternate long play periods with short naps. Simple tag seemed to be her favorite game—and she objected not at all that my way of playing was to give a sharp pinch of her stubby tail—that was, 65

in fact, hardly big enough to grasp. Part of her extra-intense play at this time was probably due to the long spell of chilly overcast winter weather we had prior to Christmas. Rima's response to harsh weather now was to keep super active. Extra activity, plus the wonderful growth of hair both on her back and front, kept her warm as long as there was no wind. And in our sheltered hollow we felt the hardest highland blows as only a rare day, or night, of infrequent gusts. Her winter fur now became a thick wooly coat beneath, protected outside by long silky hairs made to shed water. In direct sun her blackest hair showed a reddish bronze shine and on the front darkened only slightly to a grayish buff. On coldest days her long skinny "toes" would feel very cold to the touch, and I would seize a foot and rub it vigorously between my hands. Rima accepted this as an odd form of play, but after some mingled pleasure she would utter chortles of protest and flee. I doubt she was at all aware of the cold toe-fingers. We gave her all the fresh pressed cane juice laced with lime juice she could drink, which was a great deal, and she flourished. About this time she became aware of the curiously high value we placed upon the little scraps of paper we so carefully attached to letters. While I was engrossed in preparing a big batch of outgoing mail, she would snatch whatever stamps she could reach and run away with them, forcing us to corner her in order to save them from destruction. She would tear them if given the opportunity. I wondered about this odd reaction until I remembered how if any extra big mail arrived that kept all three of us deeply involved in reading and discussing the letters, she would show annoyance. In other words, she really disliked being left out. She took revenge on the postage stamps, or so it seemed. I suppose it is possible that some such snatch-and-run game is known among juvenile monkeys in the world, but Rima never "played" it with anything else, except, on rare occasions when it was available, paper money. Her chilly weather activity finally led her into a shocking 66

escapade with a pan of dirty dishwater. As she frolicked past Jan, she suddenly reached up and pulled the nearly full pan directly down over herself. The entire pan tipped as it fell and Rima came up dripping with the water. Happily, though dirty, the water was not hot. I picked Rima up and dried her with towels on their way to the laundry, and Becca donated some ilang-ilang flowers (the kind used in perfumes) she had just gathered. I rubbed Rima with the mushy fragrant flowers, which she appreciated as she also liked to eat them. And for the rest of the afternoon she was quiet even when our friend Martin C. and his wife Rosa and little boy, Enrique, came visiting with their usual gift of eggs. He would have supervision of the cane mill we were giving to the village children, and when we were ready to depart he would go out for a plane. The little boy and Rima often played well together although she was somewhat his senior in most things. The last time she had frightened him, although he did not cry, by biting his feet. Actually, as I pointed out, she was fascinated by the little booties he wore that his clever mother had knitted for him. Rima was curious, and also challenged by them and, as always, used her teeth to determine just what they might be. I noticed that very small children who were her comparative juniors were easily frightened by her advances. One little girl burst into tears when Rima touched her, but then one young woman could not stop giggling when Rima climbed up on her lap.

67

Preparing to Leave

18 JANUARY

Rima and Becca enjoyed a big play while sun-bathing, much tickling and tussling, and mutual laughter—incredible!

The nineteenth of January we declared Rima's birthday, as she had been born sometime about the middle of January. We had a birthday cake for her, which she fully appreciated as she had long since made the happy acquaintance of cake. The candles were not new to her either, as she had once singed the 68

hair on one elbow in the flame of a candle. But the rest of the family was deeply impressed that we had a one-year-old Spider monkey as a member, and that close to eleven months of that year had been spent with us. We had photos taken of the homestead, especially of the orchard. Several of the trees had turned out very beautifully, but I had not succeeded in capturing the bounding bouncing monkey in a single attempt. Rima had not wanted her picture taken and she had had her will. She now had her will in a much more serious matter. After much discussion as to how one travels with a monkey, especially on board ship, we decided Rima should have a harness to which a strong but generously long cord could be attached. I patiently designed what seemed a comfortable, efficient harness, then even more patiently cut it out of strong cloth and sewed it. But Rima refused to have anything to do with it; she even refused to let me try it on her. As we had never used decisive force against her, I declined to begin. "She'll fall overboard if we travel by ship," Becca warned. "I haven't a doubt of it," I answered. "And no captain is going to stop for a monkey," Jan pointed out. "Probably not," I agreed gloomily.

WE HAD AT LAST SET A DATE AND, AS WITH ALL DATES, once set it came galloping down upon us.

I tried to patch and waterproof the old tent we had used in the move eight years (to the week) before. But Rima quickly settled that attempt also. Every time she leaped upon the tent, a new hole was torn; she obviously saw a tent as a new and exciting playground. "It's no use," I reported glumly. "She tears holes faster than I can patch the old ones." "The tent must be rotten," Jan suggested. "Yes. Guess we'll have to make a new one, something to do if we have to wait in Las Margaritas." 69

We had received a generous offer of an empty house in the village of that name in the highlands near a small city where we could quietly and unhurriedly make final preparations for leaving Mexico and seeking a new jungle home in South America. I still had the original pattern for the Royce semipyramidal tent. "O.K., I'll make a new extra-strong one," I said. "And extra-waterproof!" Becca added. The old one had not kept them dry during the nearly two months we had spent making a clearing and building the first hut. "And Rima can help you!" Jan offered. "No doubt!" I said. About this time we had some more visitors from the United States, an artist couple from Iowa, but he by birth a Bulgarian. They were "doing" the Lacandon country, and had included us without realizing our days were numbered. With them was "Baron" B., our real enemy as far as the property was concerned, the feudal proprietor trying to claim an old Spanish grant to many square kilometers of the Lacandon lands. Yet we had somehow managed to love him. Half IrishAmerican by a Virginia mother, he spoke English fluently, and while ousting us, fully respected us. He had assumed we were Protestant missionaries and hoped soon to cleanse the area with an image of the Mexican virgin up at the cave. In explaining our plight, I pointed at him, whereupon Rima sprang up and gave him a sharp bite on a finger. He winced, and laughed, as we all did. Rima had made a point; we were in fact Catholic missionaries in the original meaning. Then a strange thing happened. Within an hour, two friends of Ramon, unannounced and unknown, arrived. The first, John by name, came limping in wearing a torn shirt and ragged-edged shorts: he was barefoot and mudsplattered, handsome, white, young and blond, with hazel-green glittering eyes that betrayed heavy drug addiction. At once he announced that he was the reincarnation of a certain Maya warrior returned from death to defend the Lacandons. I restudied his face, and realized with a feeling hard 70

to describe to anyone who has not been face to face with a madman, that John was indeed insane. I had faced such men before but never outside an institution. What to do? I realized I must do as I had done successfully inside the institutions; I must act toward him as if all were well. First, I washed the dirty, infected gash he had on one foot with strong soap and bandaged it, listening the while to his mad discourse about his being the returned Maya warrior. He even had a Maya name to make it all more real. It was three to four days before he would reveal his own name. By then we had succeeded in persuading him that Maya arrows and spears simply would not help the Lacandons to obtain justice. Something more and quite different was called for. But, not an hour after John's arrival came Miguel, an Aztec youth from Mexico City. He was very tall, slender, and handsome, with long black waving hair and very efficient high leather military boots. They knew each other and Miguel had an immediately quieting effect upon John. Both were surprised to hear of our approaching departure. Ramon had not told them.

WE WERE ALL WORKING HARD NOW TO MAKE FINAL personal choices of books to take; the rest, several hundred volumes, had to be packed for shipment out to Blom's library, named in honor of Las Casas, the Spanish Dominican, who, like ourselves, had discovered how difficult it is to stand up for the rights of the Indian. He had to learn, as we had to learn, that the conquered have no rights and even more remarkable, that their children have no rights, nor their children's children, not in Mexico, at any rate. Surely of all known ways to come into possession of lands, conquest is by far the worst—unless, of course, you are able to exterminate the dispossessed quickly and thoroughly. We finally had the books ready to start their journey out. Agua Zarcans were now coming and going every day in hopes of gifts out of our humble possessions, especially the kitchen 71

ware and tools. Among the women, the rather battered wash tubs were probably the most coveted objects of all our household items. Some came who were interested in such plants as were transportable, cacao trees especially, and Jan's little greenhouse was rapidly stripped. Then, just when the last of the books were finally on their way, the problem we all had refused to face until the last hour finally had to be solved. What to do about the various book manuscripts? Many of them were mine, which had accumulated partly because of the long eight years of semi-invalidism in the hammock. Because sleep for me was dangerous after midnight, I often wrote to keep myself awake. There was an historical novel on the Dead Sea Scrolls filling in twenty-six handwritten tablets (it was in the form of a trilogy), and there were other novels and three to four books of nonfiction. "Better burn them," I said with conviction. Both Jan and Becca said no. "Better try to ship them—boat freight is cheap." "But—" I protested. "No burning manuscripts," Becca said. "It'll take a plane just to get them out of here!" I went on. "We'll have to have two planes, anyhow. There'll be room," Jan said, which I realized was true. So we dug out the dusty, even moldy, manuscripts and dusted and wiped and carefully packed them. Most people asked what we would do with the monkey. Suddenly our beloved little monkey-child had become to them a mere monkey, a problem. "We'll take her," we told them, and they nodded, "Of course." The monkey and the dog would go with us—only the cat would stay, and he with whomever had the house. It looked as if the new occupant would be Don Ricardo, one of the Conquistadores' peons—a strange peon, more than half-white— but a peon nonetheless in a world of the white conquerors' supremacy. He would have Becca's beautiful Goldie; cats be72

long to houses. Everyone seemed to understand. We remembered what had happened to Goldie's beautiful brother, whom we sold, because the two would quarrel at night, to some other white supremacists. He had fled to escape their countless dogs and hogs and had apparently perished in the mountains. In the midst of all the shadowy things that were happening, one very sunny incident occurred. Our spinning wheel had to be given away and some girls from Agua Zarca wanted it, but we had never got around to teaching any of them to spin. One lovely, bright morning, Becca gave three of the girls a lesson. She soon had them spinning. And I had confirmed what I had before suspected, that human life must always remain imperfect where girls do not learn to spin. Rima raced back and forth between the spinning lesson and me where I was at work putting a second coat of varnish on the old mule boxes we had used for years as clothes chests. Now they might just possibly serve again on jungle trails somewhere in the Guiana Highlands of South America. I put two coats of varnish on them while Rima, now catching something of the disturbed atmosphere, raced from one scene of unusual activity to another. And I wondered how she would ever adjust to a life of traveling, with its sometimes severe confinement and ever-present tension.

RAMON SUDDENLY SHOWED UP AND HIS TWO YOUNG friends joined him. We never knew just where they were keeping themselves or what they were doing. They came and went sometimes together, sometimes individually. All behaved well enough, except it was obvious that Ramon was ignoring our rule that no one use drugs on our premises. They were smoking cannabis up in our guest hut, so I told them it was against our rules for guests. They would have to go elsewhere. An Agua Zarcan reported the next afternoon seeing a long-haired person standing in the entrance to the cave. Upon his approach the person had disappeared into the cave— 73

"our" cave, where our wonderful pure water had its source—a drug den! Then during the night I heard strangely muted voices, voices of persons talking inside the cave. It could not be anywhere else. Because I had scolded them, they had actually gone up to the cave. In "our" cavern, "la caverna Santa Maria," they had found an ideal retreat, because it was just outside the surveyors' line, and so was still, as all the mountain above it, a part of the National Territory. We had been aware that the surveyors had not included it, and when "Baron" B. had, a little slyly, inquired if we would object if he placed a statue of the Virgin of Guadaloupe, Mexico's own patron saint, inside, we had pointed out the cave was not inside the surveys. He had been much taken aback by this, and now it belonged to the drug addicts. "Time to go," I told Jan and Becca as I explained what I had heard during the night. "It's not just the shadow of the old Conquistadores out of the Past; it's a new shadow very much out of the Present." "Ramon brought them!" Becca was angry. "The cave and our creek are polluted!" "He also bought us Rima, don't forget." I said. But she turned away. "Headhunters in front of her, soul-killers behind," I thought. 22 JANUARY

We are all three happy the place will not be abandoned. Becca decides to take her cat. Rima rebels violently at her travel harness.

And that was the last sentence of my last journal entry. We did not leave until the morning of the twenty-fourth. Becca changed her mind once again about the cat. He stayed behind, but the little female Belgian police dog, Smoky, and Rima, the year-old orphan Spider monkey, came with us, Rima cosy and content in her sling against my right side, Smoky on her own little feet close at Jan's heels. 74

The actual departure had better be described as a rout—at the last we were driven from the house by the crowds plundering the few odds and ends that had not as yet found an owner. The mob was mainly made up of the poorest and least restrained of the Agua Zarcan youth. In vain the peon of the ranchers who was to be the new occupant tried to get the plunderers out of "his" house. When he appealed to us, we hurried up our departure. Several of Becca's best friends among the village girls carried the personal travel belongings, leaving us free to negotiate the unfamiliar new trail the Agua Zarcan youth had opened during the last year to avoid conflicts with the ranchers whom they might meet on the old trail. And for me, of course, it was the first trailing I had attempted in nearly ten years. I carried only Rima. The new trail passed close to the cave, and I could see how someone had felled a balsa near the entrance, half peeled it and left it. And there were other less obvious signs of trampling and blighting of the cavern entrance. While we had held onto our paradise orchard and gardens, apparently all around us had fallen under the unmistakable advance of men whose chief mission in life seemed to be to mar all the beautiful things of God. The virgin vale of the Santa Maria clearly was no longer virgin. As we crossed the rocky ravine where the water silently welled forth to form the creek, I turned my back without regret upon Beauty Spoiled. The last sounds from the vale were the sounds of the cottage being plundered and stripped even of its last few unclaimed broken pots and rags.

75

The Trek to Agua Zarca

The new trail to Agua Zarca had been very cleverly searched out. All the way it followed the spine of a long ridge, making for easy and, at frequent points, even scenic walking. Becca and her girlfriends soon disappeared ahead rather thoughtlessly, but the trail was well worn and easy to follow. And close behind us were Chan Bor and Na Bora, the only two Lacandons to appear for the departure. Smiling as always and protective as the Lacandons always became in pure jungle, they 76

kept at a little distance so that they were nearly always in sight, but leaving Jan and me and Rima and Smoky to ourselves. Rima was soon fast asleep, Smoky always close at Jan's heels. Now began the test of the damaged heart. How much would it stand of such a challenging journey, from the Lacandon rain forest of Chiapas, Mexico, to the Guiana or Amazonian rain forests of South America? "For Rima the journey will be farthest and hardest," I had written in my journal. But I had included myself in the thought. Would we both reach our destination, and if one must fall by the way, would it not be better if it be little Rima? Would it not be better that she not be an orphan twice? For Jan and Becca she would at once become an impossible burden. God would know best. Perhaps it would be better if we should both go. I could not bear the thought of life without Rima, for she had taken me back into a lost world of innocence and simple play, joy beyond the wildest dream of all the Utopians, the lost world of the primates, the world lost to man in his mad plunge into what he calls History, his own self-created world of the Seven Deadly Sins. She had also served at night as a powerfully vital life force for me, cuddled close to me in the hammock, sometimes even rousing me, it seemed, when the heart was in difficulty. In Rima's old world of the primates there are none of these seven ugly lies that have turned man's world into Hell. With Rima I lived in the ancient Primate Heaven. If she were to die, best we die together. Or so I thought as she now slept in perfect trust in her sling against my ribs on the right side while the heart, with a badly damaged and scarred left ventricle, beat steadily enough on the left. Our glue trips had perhaps prepared us for this.

THE TRAIL IN THE DRY SEASON WAS BLESSEDLY FREE OF mud.The only difficulty was an occasional rooty stretch where the trail passed too close to some forest giant whose surface feeder roots created a network of rough cables one had to thread one's way over as if it were a giant spider's web. Other77

wise the trail was the easiest I had ever walked in all my years of jungle trailing. There were not even any steep places until the village was within hearing distance. I enjoyed it as I had hardly expected to, stopping to rest whenever as happened from time to time, the forest opened up little eastward vistas. Through these holes in the green wall we could look down on old overgrown corn fields of the villagers, abandoned now for a year or two, but in another year to be slashed and burned and cropped again under the destructive neolithic system we had preached against in vain over the years. I could see now two conditions I had not been aware of: how very much jungle lay between us and the village of Agua Zarca, and how close they had come to us in felling it. On the left side we could look down into a long, deep, very wild ravine with the main range of the Sierra de la Colmena (Beehive Hills) rising very steeply out of it, a wild, deep, jungly gorge buried in shadow, and home to no one knew what wonderful jungle wild life. Rima slept on, as she loved to do when snug in her sling on a walk. Chan Bor and Na Bora came up closely only when we stopped, and once when I spoke of thirst they stepped off the trail and brought me clean, good, though warm, water. "It is not far now?" I asked. And they both said, "No, not far." I knew they would say so even though the village was still hours away, for it is the Indians' careful manner to try to give you the answer you desire. Jan and Becca, though they had never been over this newly opened trail, both agreed it could not be far, and in a few minutes we came upon our first hog wallow, the surest sign of a village nearby. The first wallow was old and now dry, but soon we came to another that had a bit of real mud in the bottom. Then a grunt in the bushes and, around a bend, the first hogs. Neither Rima nor I, it must be remembered, had ever been to Agua Zarca, and this though we knew most of the people— men, women, and children—who dwelt there. But I had, in my pioneering days, entered many a pig village. They were all 78

alike, the most wretched communities yet devised by fallen man, rural slums with all the degradation of the urban variety plus a population of swine possibly three times or even up to five times that of humans. Somehow I had succeeded in keeping myself from believing my Agua Zarcan friends and neighbors were inhabitants of such a familiar rural slum, in no way different from the dozens I had passed through and even slept in. But with the first wallows and the first hollows, I had to prepare myself for beholding all those faces of dear old friends and beloved little children living in the midst of an old familiar pig village. This was difficult, like coming down to earth, for our virgin vale, be it remembered, had been a little paradise we had planted. And now to discover one's angel friends dwelling in a pigstye. . . ! Rima woke up. No doubt the sound and smell of the hogs, now everywhere in and alongside the trail, had roused her, plus the fact that the trail, abruptly descending, was much the worse for the hogs. Besides their wallows in the level moist spate, they had dug around the great trees, creating mazes of spreading, twisting roots. Then, of course, there were their droppings to be avoided if possible. As Jan's sight, never since the age of five very adequate, had during the past year or so begun to fail her more than ever, I had to lead her carefully over and through this obstacle course. Thus slowly, painfully, we descended to the creek with glimpses of the village itself at last appearing upon a little bare plateau beyond. As always the hogs had rendered the approach to the water a series of miry wallows. One by one we crawled around these mud holes and at the creek bank sat down to remove our boots and wash them. Pedro, the village idiot, detached himself from the crowd of children and youths on the other side, and came across to help us. Pedro was the youngest of the three sons of Tata Domingo, Rima's favorite "grandfather." Pedro was mute, that is, he was unable to form words, making only a garble of sounds that at their best somewhat resembled Rima's chortles and chuckles. Pedro had been described by his two very 79

handsome superior brothers as unable to speak at all, so when he appeared as an obvious mental defective we had not been taken aback. Pedro had come sometimes to work alongside his father with a machete, but he quickly tired, or lost interest, and we had discouraged his coming. But Pedro was able to be very helpful at home as a burden carrier. He seemed to enjoy bringing in massive loads of firewood or maize or bananas, all with no more than a tump line and his broad back. Now he took all we were carrying across, including our boots, and came back to help us with an outstretched hand, for the creek was wide and swift. Pedro liked us and trusted us and probably did not even understand we were leaving forever. We had not helped him with his speech defect, but he always tried to talk to us in his strangely Rimalike way, and we had helped his mother to overcome much of her bitter shame over having borne him. It was she who had no doubt sent him thus thoughtfully to help us across the swift-flowing creek and climb up the steep and broken bank into the village. Various men and youths had during the past few days carried over outgoing cargo for us. Now we asked that the things be brought on down to the airstrip. The huts were not as crowded together as in most pig villages, consequently the aspect, though utterly blighted by the swine, did not give quite so complete an impression of a grandiose pigstye. Each hut was surrounded by a stockade that in most cases kept out the hogs, if not the chickens and dogs. Thus it was possible for the small children to escape the hogs, and for the women to plant a chili bush or two, should so much of their gardening instinct survive. All the main planting had, of course, to be done an hour's walk away from the swine-infested village, and even at so great a distance, the active ever-hungry animals would hunt out the planted fields and destroy the crops. We made short work of our passage through the village, not stopping at a single household. One of the elders, who was also the native preacher, escorted us through and on down to the airstrip, explaining and protesting to all whom we en80

countered, dogs, children, hogs, and horses, that we were "true Christians." This chief convert of the missionaries had never been very close to us, in part because he did not have ten words of ready Spanish, but his two remarkably handsome and intelligent sons had been very close indeed. The eldest had even proposed we simply move in with the village, but neither he nor anyone else out of the over one hundred adults and youths of the village ever really understood how anyone could actually find it impossible to live with swine. This was all new to Rima and me, and we both stared about us on all sides as we made our way over the rooty, hole-filled trail on down to the Agua Zarca airstrip. I had heard this favorably, even enthusiastically, described by both Jan and Becca, and was pleased to find it quite worthy of their enthusiasm. In the first place, at the cost of enormous labor, it had been rail fenced its entire length along the village side. Of all men, perhaps only pilots of aircraft detest hogs as deeply as I do. The beasts could and did find their way out on to the over quarter-mile-long broad, smooth lawn that was the strip, but small boys for whom it was a heavenly playground, soon chased them off, their dogs cheerfully assisting. We clambered over the stile and crossed to the little corn storage hut, high upon its rat-proof stilts, the only accommodation for "waiters for the plane." A shade tree had been spared by a miracle, and as the hour was approaching noon and we well heated by our three-hour hard hike, we collapsed beneath it. Most of the adults of Agua Zarca not otherwise occupied, and all the children, had followed down from the village, and now at distances according to closeness of friendship over the years stood watching us. Meanwhile the children, all old acquaintances of Rima, pressed in much closer. Having rested a few minutes in the shade and supervised the storage of our mountain of cargo in the little hut, we debated where we might spend the night. There seemed hardly room in the hut, and it being now firm dry season, we decided to sleep out under the tree. An old partly fallen-over corral fence offered a back rest for me—there was no place to swing my 81

hammock—and there was a little hollow for the camp fire, on each side of which soft turf would serve very well for Jan and Becca. Rima could move back and forth between us during the night as was still her custom. As soon as our audience saw we were preparing to settle in, most of the adults drifted away. It was understood that a plane almost never came on the first day it was expected, and ours was hardly even as yet expected. Some of Rima's best friends among the children invited her to play but she seemed to be saying that she was not ready for normal relations under the sudden and profound change of conditions. She kept close to me, waiting to see in what direction we might be heading next, for this, our first really long excursion together, had not yet any promise of taking us back to familiar ground. And monkeys do not normally leave their own familiar territory. Soon some of our best friends appeared with generous and extra-tastefully prepared gifts of food. We ate and Rima was somewhat reassured. We, meanwhile, were wondering just what might have happened to the promise of horses we had had from the Baron. At last, about an hour after our arrival, he appeared from the village with two extra mounts, Ramon on one of them. Apparently our rather hard-pressed departure had taken place nearly an hour before the agreed time for the horses. We apologized, explaining how hectic and unpleasant conditions had become. He joined us at our campsite, saying he would wait awhile in case a plane did make it—there was one every hour coming in for chicle* now being shipped daily out of San Quintin. They flew over but none landed. Then Miguel, the Aztec, came hurrying up with a severe toothache. Might there be a chance of going out with us? We promised him that if a plane did come for us he could go out with a load of cargo, and he and Ramon wandered off down the airstrip. Rima's friends began to return, and soon she was the 'Chicle is the milky juice of the balata or sapodilla or similar tree, and is the main ingredient of chewing gum.

82

bouncing, frolicking center of a large group, most of them acting purely as spectators. This show ended up in fact with Rima and the Baron as chief actors. He had an old all-straw sombrero that he tossed at Rima as she dodged about enticing him. Often he succeeded in landing the big hat on top of her, which meant she all but disappeared beneath it. Her role was to seize it and flee, whereupon some child entered the game, rescuing the hat and returning it to the Baron. All this went on and on to shrieks of childrens' laughter and that of nearly all the adults present as well. Even the Baron joined in the laughter, presenting an image of feudal paternalism at its best. And this was Rima at her carefree, fun-loving best. We would never see her again in such high spirits, and we would always treasure this all too brief scene of the little simian frolicking in a manner that must have reflected quite accurately normal juvenile monkey play with the adults looking on. I had never seen Rima take on quite so brilliantly the conscious role of clown. There was no doubt she saw herself as very much the central actor, and was giving herself very fully to her role. Her use of the hat as a prop was worthy of Chaplin himself. Perhaps what we were watching was not altogether normal monkey play, because our Rima, having been reared by humans in a human abode surrounded with human props to living, was not a normal monkey. But she was no doubt normal for a Spider monkey who had been so reared. Watching the fascinated faces of the human children who made up most of her audience might have led one to conclude that our Rima was much more than normal, that she was in truth some highly gifted comedienne of her race. We shall never know for sure just what Rima was, but this much we shall never doubt, that she was sent by her Maker to teach men respect, if not love, for all monkeys. That was her mission, and when it had been fulfilled, her richly endowed nature was taken back into its Creator's eternal keeping.

83

Refugees to Civilization

No plane came that first day. In late afternoon the Baron and Ramon left us with hearty farewells, both of them sophisticated individuals, who, each in his fashion, had presented us with more problems than any persons we had ever encountered in our nearly fifteen years as pioneers and homesteaders in the Lacandon forest. Chan Bor and Na Bora had not followed us into the village. They must have turned back as we 84

came down to the creek, and without a word of farewell, as was always their way. Our good friends of Agua Zarca brought us more gifts of food. We bathed down in the beautiful pale jade, milky flowing—very unusual for the season—Rio Jatate. It was only five minutes away down a brushy but not hog-spoiled trail. Not nearly so cool and refreshing as our beloved, and now lost forever mountain cave-born creek, it still tasted and felt as pure as the virgin jungle that still sheltered its banks for miles above our bathing site. It would always be associated in my memory with the Lacandons and their sturdy yet graceful dugouts. By sundown we were alone around our little camp fire. The vast airstrip, vast in my eyes so long unaccustomed to anything more open and lawnlike than the few square meters about our house and garden, was deserted. No plane had landed all day, though several had passed over. But people had promenaded on it all day, and little boys had played up and down it some strange Indian boy version of Marbles. We had introduced marbles to the local children and had found them fully as magical in winning them over as fishing tackle and sewing supplies had been for their fathers and mothers. We had even demonstrated how to use marbles in play, but here on the grassy airstrip we discovered an altogether new game played with marbles. A group of marble-age boys, armed with bows and arrows also appropriate to their age, each took turns shooting down at close range what proved to be a marble. The object of the game seemed to be no more than to cause the marble to jump, thus relating the game somewhat to Tiddlywinks except there was no particular direction or place designated for the marble to jump to. Yet in spite of this seeming pointlessness, these small groups of boys would play this Indian boy version of Marbles for an hour at a time. Then they would abruptly break up, the boys running off in pairs or alone to some other pastime. Neither school nor work appeared to have entered their lives at all seriously. 85

With the little girls, life was much more serious. They did not have any equivalent game, but some found free time to visit Rima and Becca. And during the two and a half days we waited for the plane, Rima, during the daytime hours, was seldom without children to play with. We sometimes had to intervene—especially when her visitors included boys—but usually all went well for all parties. Rima's energy was boundless. Never before had she had children in such large groups, and she made the most of it.

I SLEPT NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME IN EIGHT YEARS OUT of a hammock. I braced my back against what was firm of the decaying corral, and with plenty of cushioning, slept well enough sitting nearly upright. It was very pleasant to be under the open sky again, and I vowed that what was left to me of earthly nights should be spent wherever possible under the stars. Rima enjoyed rousing when I made coffee or cocoa and joining me in a snack, even though she found my upright position difficult for sleeping in her usual position astride my right thigh. Thus our time passed not unpleasantly except for Miguel's abscessed tooth. But his Aztec stoicism kept him from complaining even when, as during the afternoon before, chicle planes came and went right over our heads. Finally, when the sun had already gone down behind the long line of "beehives"—actually the hills did resemble a row of oldfashioned straw skeps—a small plane came in as usual, but this time circled and landed. We quickly loaded it with cargo, and Miguel went on his way to a dentist. We never saw him again. But on the plane was our friend Martin C., the same we had sent out to bring a plane in for us. Hardly had he and his wife stepped out of the plane than I saw that the woman was weeping. Then Martin came over and gravely announced his little boy Enrique had died. He had come down with a violent, feverish virus. At the clinic there had been the usual "shots"—and death. 86

They had had only one girl and the boy. Martin did not weep, but found it hard to find suitable words. The little boy had been one of Rima's first playmates, the one whose booties had so fascinated her, and he was named after me. I ended up denouncing the use of injections on very ill small children, a denunciation he had often heard me make. I then told him God would send him another child, and when the child came, not to take it out to the towns where infections were much more violent than in the rural villages. This he already knew. About 10:30 the next morning the same pilot came for us but with an even smaller plane. We were packed in as tightly as possible, and still one box of books had to be left behind. The pilot assured us it would be called for by the next plane. He knew I had been annoyed to find a passenger on the plane we were paying for the night before. To this moment I don't know how he managed to fit us all in among the bags and boxes. Rima and I and Smoky were somehow wedged in with Jan and Becca perched heads against the roof right behind us. Smoky was pressed in between my legs and the pilot's. Even so Rima accepted it all, all until the motor started. She stiffened, looked up at me, and whimpered each time he increased power. "Why this, Harry?" I pressed her close where I could whisper into one ear: "It's all right Rima—hang on tight." Her little hand sought my hair. "That's right, hang on, old lady, here we go!" And as the plane lifted to the sky, I looked off to the west. There was the village slipping swiftly behind, the little thatched huts more like some sub-human, even some insect structure than man-made. No boards, no metal, only poles and cane leaf thatch and all dry and brown and gray, yet how many beloved faces of rich-souled human beings were turned up to watch the departure of their neighbors, neighbors who like themselves had been born among the "strangers and the pilgrims." Agua Zarca gone, now beneath us, close beneath, for the overloaded little plane climbed but slowly, we could now behold it all. "Twenty years of my life down there!" I nodded to the 87

pilot. He shook his head in sympathy for he, like others for miles around, knew how we had been forced to withdraw our support after years of struggle in behalf of the Indians, first the abused and abandoned Lacandons, and finally the refugee Highland Mayas, or Tzeltales, to which the Agua Zarcans belonged. Beneath, it all lay perfectly clear. True, we could not see our house tucked up at the foot of the mountains. We could not see our house because it alone was still blanketed in greenery. We alone had never burned or even destroyed vegetation we did not at once replace. But all the other houses stood revealed in all the barren nakedness caused by year after year of burning, burning for grassland, burning for corn land. Neolithic agriculture in the twentieth century! All through the years we had preached against it, but always had the same response, "The grass won't grow without burning, the corn won't grow without burning!" And already in the mere seven or eight years of intensive burning, the entire aspect of the once exquisitely green and wild savanna and lush jungle feet of the squat hills bore the bare, brown, and barren look of the very highlands whence both these ranchers and Indians had had to flee in search of virgin territory. In another twenty to twenty-five years, their children will be also seeking new lands, but there will be none to find. We were startled at what we saw, I, in particular, because in my enforced hermitage, had forgotten what was taking place on the savanna and all its jungle fringes, but in a matter of minutes I was to suffer a yet greater shock. The little plane lifted us slowly over the first range, our Sierra de la Colmena. He took us far down to southward where the hills were much lower, then turned directly west for the remaining twenty-five minutes to Comitan, capital of this frontier region (on the Guatemalan border) of Chiapas state. We would have to climb nearly 1,200 meters and that, as became at once apparent, straight in the face of a gusty but powerful head wind. Mercifully, Rima had fallen asleep and I could forget about 88

her and study the once familiar terrain slowly—very slowly, unfolding directly beneath us. I say "directly" because, as with most Mexican "bush" pilots, ours did not believe in altitude. "It wears out the motor." Or so I was once told. We scraped along just above the many ridges, the same ridges I had so often measured in all seasons with my mules, or more often, my own stride. Only now, some twelve years since my last trip over them either on foot or by air, I looked down upon continuous desolation. The forest had been for the most part destroyed over many square kilometers. The hills I had traveled through, or over, had all been covered either with pine or oak on the higher parts or evergreen forest in the lower; very little remained. Indians and ranchers had burned and felled to the very ridge crests. Only far away to the south could be discerned the low green wall where the untrammeled forest still endured. I pointed to it for Jan and Becca, but they could not hear me. Clearly we had been surrounded and isolated by an enemy: twentieth-century neolithic man with an ancient firebrand in his hands. The discovery of fire was, perhaps, man's first real step in acquiring technology. Its use to destroy forests demands as much pondering as man's use of atomic energy to produce bombs. Bombs only destroy cities, but fire, as an agricultural technique, destroys the earth's fertility and creates deserts. More clearly than ever we, and not the least poor little Rima, were all refugees. Even in our small, fairly sheltered corner we had long since noted the annually increasing scarcity of the howler monkeys, and hunters from the other side of the range had all but destroyed our flourishing colony of Spider monkeys. Burning the moutainsides, the monkeys' habitat, is wanton as the land is equally valueless for both pasture and agriculture. How long before both species, the only two found in Mexico, would be extinct? The little overloaded plane was now at the mercy of the strong westerly head wind. We bounced and tossed, bumping heads and elbows but the tightly packed cargo held firm, and meter by meter we approached the airport. Cold air slowly in89

vaded the plane, and I wrapped a wool scarf close around the still napping little monkey. The closer we came in over the highland plain that reaches Comitan on the south, the harder the wind blew in our face and the more we were rolled and tossed by it. Now flying lower than ever I could see marks of sheet erosion everywhere on this extensive plain; in earlier years there had been no erosion at all. Fire and overgrazing for the last twelve years had upset the ecological balance. Because there is much less highland rainfall than lowland rainfall, even more care should have been shown not to burn and overgraze. With the first bounce on the same old bumpy runway, Rima awakened. She did not whimper. She sat up straight, all alert, all eager to see what was to happen next. She looked up at me, spoke in her usual sweet chirping chortle, "What now, Harry?" "It's O.K. Rima," I reassured her. "We are landing. No more plane. Now a taxi." And there would never be another plane for Rima of the Lacandon rain forest. We got down stiffly, Rima and I and Smoky first, then Becca and Jan. The chill wind that had been buffeting the little plane now struck us full force. I kept Rima well wrapped not only in the big blue woolen scarf but buttoned up inside my jacket as well with only her eyes and nose peering out. The airport manager handed us a generous mail package of letters and papers and at the same time asked just twice what we owed him for handling it. I recognized in the gleam in his eye the petty Mexican official hoping to extract a "mordida," or bribe, literally a "bite." As this is common practice all the way up the tall ladder of officialdom, we were familiar enough with it to refuse. He then backed away a little saying it was his superior's claim. And when I assured him I would talk with the chief, he dropped it altogether. We paid what we fairly owed for both mail and plane, and piled our cargo and ourselves into the eager taxi. As we set out on to the Pan American highway for the three-to-five kilometer trip into the city, Rima whimpered questioningly once 90

more: "Why this? Harry?" And it would always be the same, for little Rima, the monkey's child, had something inside her that warned her that we were involving ourselves in a dangerous activity. Understanding absolutely nothing else about motor transportation, she was immediately aware of the one aspect most important to understand, namely the ever-present element of physical danger that is built into it. She had feared and questioned the airplane, but it was soon apparent that she feared automobiles more, a position whose validity is always asserted by experienced pilots. Even though our flight had been bumpy she had accepted it and gone to sleep; trips by car she never fully accepted, and always at the outset whimpered and lost control of her bowels. I asked for the small inexpensive hotel on a quiet back street where I had always stayed whenever I was "caught" in Comitan. It was after twelve years, not only still in business, but one of the operators, an old lady, remembered me. This was good, for I had wondered how we would be received with both dog and monkey. She was so captivated by Rima that she scarcely noticed the dog. And we were soon snugly at rest in a tight little room with two double beds, our cargo fitting miraculously for the most part underneath them. We had lots to do: passports had to be acquired, beginning with the photos; there was a trip up to San Cristobal (about seventy kilometers) to dispose of yet more books; rabies vaccination for the dog, and other lesser arrangements, not the least of which was to plan our ways and means of travel to the Guiana Highlands, the homeland of the original Rima. Somewhere I would need to build another tent, a strong, heavily waterproofed replica of the worn out Royce tent we had had to abandon. I had cut it up to use as a pattern, if somewhere there was time and materials. And lastly there was some money due that would help greatly to meet the expenses of such a long journey. As yet we had no clear lead even as to how best, or where, to leave Mexico. We had considered three possibilities: by way of Guatemala, by way of the Mexican part of Vera Cruz, and per91

haps best by way of Merida in Yucatan. If no ships were available, and we hoped for a ship for the sake of my heart, friends had suggested a jet flight. But I had never been aboard a jet —how would a damaged heart respond—and perhaps more to the point, how would the airways people respond to a dog and a monkey? We indeed had lots to do and decide before we left Comitan, and Mexico.

RIMA HAD NEVER BEEN SO CLOSELY CONFINED AS SHE was to be now for the two weeks we stayed in the little hotel. In the streets she attracted so much attention that I soon stopped taking her with us except when it was inescapable. And, besides, there was always the chilly winds of the temperate highland plateau. I had forgotten how windy Comitan was and how chilly was the wind. Whenever I had to take her out I wrapped her up against the wind—and this she resented. She would stay wrapped up, but she scolded and squirmed— another good reason for staying off the streets. Happily, as soon as the sun struck in the small very sheltered patio of the hotel it became warm enough for her to go out. "Out," I say, but "out" where? For the first time as a family, we were tossed into city life. Jan and I had known much of it, of course, Becca a very little, none of which she could well remember, however, and for poor little "Monkey Baby" it was the first time ever. Consequently "out" to sun and play in the little hotel patio was, after the wide open spaces of the rain forest homestead, not very much "out." It was, though, compared with the cell-like bedroom, a great deal, and Rima appreciated it in spite of its cement floor and forbidden plants. This latter prohibition was now to become a major discouragement to the little primate's development, a grave stumbling block, not only physically but spiritually. At the forest homestead, we laid down no such prohibition although some plants suffered, especially our beautiful taro ("elephant ear"), a member of a very ornamental family, and our variety 92

offered, besides its striking beauty, both edible roots and leaves as well. Becca complained and scolded at the way Rima knocked down the stems and bruised the leaves, but there was no attempt to restrict the area of her play. She had run and leapt and climbed and tumbled and frolicked everywhere without restraint. Now suddenly she was a prisoner of city confinements as only children and dogs and, perhaps worst of all, monkeys can be prisoners. My old friend, the old lady who remembered me, had many rather well grown potted plants in the patio. They were everywhere and as some were in flower, Rima was at once attracted, for, no doubt, as we had learned in the forest, flowers are a common food of Spider monkeys. Rima broke off a handsome amaryllis before we could stop her. I apologized, and took her on my lap to sun, but she, of course, wanted to run about. The old lady liked Rima so much and enjoyed watching her so much she in part forgave her the broken amaryllis, and suggested it might help if she were allowed to climb in the dwarf mandarin orange tree. This proved to be a partial solution. As described, Rima had not been enthusiastic about climbing, but she liked the mandarin tree, perhaps even realizing that it represented a freedom she now could no longer enjoy on the ground. And in the nearly two weeks we were to spend in the hotel, she enjoyed many happy times in the tree with me standing watch that she not come down among the potted flowering plants with which it was nearly surrounded. There were children who soon discovered Rima, some resident in the hotel, but they were all a little too old to serve as real playmates, which Rima understood rather sorrowfully. They would talk to her, and try to pet her, but lacked the key to true monkey play. She enjoyed most their coming to the outside of one of our room windows. She had never encountered window glass before, and while puzzled by it, enjoyed having the childrens' faces so close to hers. At some cost to our privacy we let her entertain at the window where a small table offered her a standing place at just the right height. Here she spent many happy moments. Children would only have to tap 93

on the window, and she would run over to welcome them, pushing aside the curtain and pressing her little face against the glass to the laughter and exclamations of the children. Inside the room, I did my best to arrange suitable trapeze ropes but there were almost no fixtures to tie ropes to, and I ended up with only one area with the big closet door as its center. She could, however, by leaping from bed to bed and then seizing various vinelike hanging ropes that swung her to a chair and thence with a leap to her window table, make a complete monkey trip around the room. She also learned to pass time just romping in the middle of the large springy beds, furniture unknown in the rain forest. At night she still managed to pass the usual hours divided between sleeping on my thigh and on Jan's shoulder and neck. As I had to sleep sitting up with my back pillowed against the high back of the bed, her position on my thigh had to be more upright than in a hammock, but she accepted it and as usual spent the first half of the night with me, the last half with Jan and Becca.

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The Confined Monkey Child

Rima made two trips to San Cristobal, one with all of us, and one with me alone. San Cristobal de Las Casas, some sixty to eighty kilometers over the Pan American highway northward, is in the cold lands, which is to say at over 2,000 meters. It took us into a new climate, meaning a second climate change from the jungle. For Jan and Becca this had no significance. Over the years they had made annual buying/vacation trips up to San Cristobal while I kept house down in the warm lands. 95

They only had to take a few extra wraps and wear warm dresses, but for Rima and me it was somewhat serious, I with the damaged weakened heart, and Rima with her hatred of clothes and wraps. None of us would have made the trip had it not been for a curious, probably Old Spanish, legal system which required that our passport applications be notarized by a notary in San Cristobal. We were never quite sure of the legal explanation, but legal it was, for in spite of the plea that my heart was not capable of functioning at such an altitude, the local notary was firm—he could not notarize the passport applications because neither he nor any other local notary had the authority. We would all have to go to San Cristobal. Very well, but if we left very early and came home very late, I would not have to sleep in San Cristobal, and sleep was the perennial heart problem. By day it now functioned with little complaint, but after midnight, malfunctioning was common. I simply would have to be back down to 1,500 meters before midnight. So far the ascent from 220 meters (at the homestead) to Comitan at nearly 1,500 meters had raised no extra heart problem, but on up to 2,000 meters I knew was a challenge. As to Rima, she would have to submit to some kind of wraps most of the time, even indoors unless there was some sunny patio. San Cristobal houses were ninety-eight percent unheated. We hired a superior taxi, that is, an efficient courteous upper-class driver—in the Third World there are taxi drivers from the upper classes—with a nearly new car to match. We explained all our problems and asked him to call for us at 4:30 A.M. For this we were paying a hundred pesos, about twenty pesos over ordinary prices. He arrived at 5:00 A.M. Rima had fallen back to sleep after some loud protest at such an early rising and unacceptable bundling up, but as we entered the dreaded automobile, she awoke. As we set out with sharp fast turns through the ancient empty but very narrow streets, more suited to donkeys than to cars and trucks, she whimpered her unanswerable pleas: 96

"Why—why this, Harry?" and filled her "pants." By the time we were out on the open highway, merciful sleep had overtaken her again, and she slept all the way, about an hour's journey. It was barely dawn as we arrived, and cold as only San Cris dawns can be with the mountain mists hanging low over the city. No notaries awake, of course, so we went on up to see Trudi Blom. Trudi had worked hard to maintain the extensive, and intensive, establishment she and her late explorer husband had founded together and built up over the many years they had been Chiapas's most distinguished foreign residents. (Frans Blom received Mexican citizenship on his deathbed.) A research center with the best private-public library south of Mexico City, it was also an inn operated on traditional Swiss cleanliness and hospitality. Trudi, we knew, would be up and her day well begun, and we were not disappointed. But, as we had to expect, having in her eyes made ourselves a political hot potato, she was not overjoyed to see us, although we had warned her we might yet have to appear in San Cristobal. She did help us to wash up and unwrap a little, and then she took us into a mixed American-Chiapas breakfast. Rima, finding herself at a table, roused completely. Trudi, as always, had a few youthful vagabond semi-permanent semi-helpers, semi-guests. They made as much of Rima as she would permit, considering how even juvenile monkeys know better than to try to mix play with meals. Trudi was one of those persons who insist they love animals but who end up being really close only to unmanageable mules and rowdy disobedient dogs. Such people do not have much time for monkeys. But Trudi, being a true-hearted sensible spirit when not involved with either mules or dogs, did realize (after all she had not many weeks earlier seen Rima at home) that Rima's upbringing had made her somewhat more than mere monkey. As any sensitive person could quickly discern, Rima showed some unmistakable traits of a human child. And all that very long day, most of which Rima and I spent in Trudi's sunny patio, she only objected to Rima when 97

she broke off her huge flourishing geraniums. San Cristobal's climate, at least as modified by Trudi's spacious, high-walled patio, appeared to suit geraniums to perfection. They grew more as shrubbery than as potted plants, and Rima, as we have seen, delighted in shrubbery. I could not keep her out of the geraniums, and being among the most brittle-stemed of all flowers, she broke them off. Trudi railed at her in the same voice she used on mules, and sometimes muleteers as well, but Rima paid her even less attention than they. I am not sure she even understood Trudi's shouting was aimed at her. Finally Trudi aimed it all at me: "Why don't you stop her, can't you see she's ruining my geraniums!" "I can see Trudi, but I can't stop her any more than I can stop people from eating monkey mothers and making orphans of their babies!" This gave Trudi pause, for she had eaten monkey flesh in her jungle times as indeed most civilized persons have when on safari and other flesh falls scarce. Even the great English naturalist, Henry Walter Bates of the classic The Naturalist on the River Amazons, * confessed—and his was worded as a confession—to having acquired a high appreciation of monkey flesh. And he was also man enough to admit that the next step is man's flesh. Trudi finally rushed at Rima, but Rima saw it as an invitation to more play, and leapt higher among the giant but spindly and fragile geraniums. Some inevitably broke under her weight. "Best not frighten her, Trudi. She'll only do more damage," I told her, and Trudi had to retreat fuming over her broken flowers. "Geraniums root very easily—I'll root some of the broken stems for you," I called. But poor Trudi had retired. As usual in the afternoon, the place was filling up with the * Bates, Henry W. The Naturalist on the River Amazons, University of California Press, Berkeley.

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sight-seeing tourists. There was a Lacandon museum as well as the library. Documentary films of Frans Blom's expeditions into the Maya jungles were sometimes shown in the evenings. Among the sightseers were some American youths of that selfmade pariah class called "hippies." Thus far we had seen only the degraded type, drug degraded, that is, but now we saw some of the wholesome, sweet, and gentle-souled type, who seem to herald a bright tomorrow for the old blood-soaked, History-harried Earth. One of the girls of a party of this type saw Rima. I had persuaded Rima to sit on my lap for some peanut butter and bananas. She came over: "What a beautiful monkey you have!" she exclaimed, but in a sweet, friendly voice. She held out her hand, and Rima readily took it. "How friendly it is! What's your name, little one?" "Rima," I said. "Oh, how wonderful! Look! This is Rima, Paul," she exclaimed. She held out her arms, and Rima still munching peanut butter, clambered up. "Oh, you darling monkey!" the girl cried out. "Look Paul, look, look at her ears, black crepe paper, even finer than paper —look—and just like a human baby—every fold!" "Well, almost," her friend agreed. Rima had never received quite such deep-felt, openly expressed admiration. She gently pulled the girl's long blond hair, and chuckled and chortled her affection in return. Jan and Becca appeared, and Rima reached for Jan, and her new friends handed her over. "My wife and daughter," I explained, "Rima's mother and sister." They laughed, shook hands and rejoined their group. "We are invited down to Janet and Marcey's," Jan said. "They have hot water in their bathroom. We can all enjoy a hot shower." They were old friends, almost as "old" as Trudi, and much more stable: Janet, a photographer, Marcey, a painter, were both from New York City, but long-time, part-time residents of San Cristobal. They had changed houses lately and now had a large American-style home in the suburbs. The bath99

room was commodious but the shower was out of order. We had to use the tub. Rima insisted on going all the way in with me, something that had never happened before. At the jungle homestead we had used the threat of my going into the swimming hole in order to get Rima to go with Jan so that I could practice marimba with Becca. She would give me up rather than risk a wetting in the cold creek, but the bathtub did not daunt her, and we both enjoyed a much needed warm bath. At least Rima, if not actually enjoying it, took part without protest, clinging tightly to me though soaking in hot soapy water. After a short visit and an explanation of our travel plans, we returned to Trudi's to keep an appointment with an official who was close to the governor and in charge of Indian Affairs. He wished to hear our story at first hand with a view to being able to help our Indian friend hold on to some of his land now that we were gone from it (a rather smoothly executed deception, it proved to be). He took me over to his office and we returned to Trudi's at dusk. Rima was annoyed as usual at any failure of the family to reunite at dusk. She scolded me, then snuggled in my arms. It had grown very chill at sundown. I wrapped her in her woolen scarf, which she now accepted as unavoidable. Then we had to search out a notary, the original purpose of the trip. By the time we found one, Rima was fast asleep though by the smell I knew she had filled her "pants" on entering the taxi. I decided to rouse her enough to clean her before we said goodbye to Trudi and started the night journey back to Comitan. She whimpered a little but was too tired and sleepy after an active day in the high thin, chilly San Cristobal air to stay awake. She slept all the way home. Rima and I had to make one more brief trip up to San Cristobal at the request of the same Indian Affairs official. I would have left her with Jan, but the telephone call requesting an immediate discussion of certain points with other parties came abruptly when Jan and Becca were off shopping. The taxi cruised about the streets looking for them, Rima pro100

testing all the while—she particularly hated the town traffic—but we could not find them. However, we were in San Cristobal in hardly an hour, and aside from the usual dirtied "pants," neither of us suffered. Yet it is doubtful if any of our efforts helped out on the land situation for the Indians in the jungle. The Mexican Indian was a victim of "conquest," a word which Jan and I began to understand for the first time. The Spanish word "Conquistadores" has some of the prestige of the American word "Pilgrim father," but they mean very different things. The Mexican Indian, like the American Negro, is too numerous to exterminate yet impossible to assimilate. The American Negro, although the descendant of slaves, now fares better than the Mexican Indian, the descendant of the Conquered. Perhaps the explanation in part lies in the attitude of "Baron" B., the good old feudalist rancher of old Spanish stock who, complaining against the Indians of Agua Zarca for not having legal title to their lands, said: "They remain as invaders here!"

OUR GOOD FRIENDS WITH THE BEAUTIFUL UNOCCUPIED house out in the village of Las Margaritas, "The Daisies," had learned we were in the little hotel in Comitan. Dona Socorro, the wife, called and insisted we move out to the village and live in their home, if even for one week. We were all weary of the tight little hotel, so agreed, and in a day or two she came in a pick-up truck, and moved us out the 20 kilometers or so to Las Margaritas. The trip out to Las Margaritas was for some reason accepted by Rima without any of the usual protest. Jan and our friend's wife rode in the cab with the driver, Becca and Rima and I in back with the cargo. I fixed a trunk for a seat across the back so we had the tail gate for a back rest. And I bundled Rima up extra well against the cold wind that, for the first time, we would be facing in an open truck. Apparently one of Rima's chief objections to the planes and cars was being shut up in101

side the vehicle. I had not thought of that aspect. At any rate, she accepted everything, even the extra bundling, calmly, if not with pleasure. I on the other hand felt almost like whimpering. I had forgotten how bare and barren the arid hills were, how depressing they might be after our green mansions of the Lacandon rain forest. And clearly conditions had become more arid over the years. Where I could not ever remember having seen cactus, it was a common roadside plant. Except for a few starving, thirsting, stunted cattle there was no sign of economic life. And the little clay and thatch Indian huts that had once been common along the road hardly existed. The road itself had been much improved; straightened and widened, it was now a highway. The dust and the washboard bumps had kept it a third-class highway, but now it was all-weather with a raised bed whereas in former times it was really noweather. We took only half a bumpy hour where twenty years ago on my first trip over it we had been all of three hours reaching the village. The wind buffeted us but I was prepared for it with a thick blanket I could raise all around Rima so I looked down upon her almost as if she were at the bottom of a well. Nor did she fall asleep. She looked up at me contentedly enough as if to say: "Well, Harry, it's a strange life but if you like it, I like it." And the thing that pleased me as much as seeing Rima content with travel was the fact that all through my two trips up to 2,000-meter San Cristobal, and now bumping out over the dry hills to "The Daisies," my damaged heart had made no complaint, and a damaged heart has its own very clear modes of uttering its protests. I had dreaded having to leave Rima behind ever since that first look of sweet gratitude and trust upon her discovering rich warm milk for the sucking from the cotton swab held in my fingertips. I had then beheld in Rima's little human eyes what every primate mother beholds as her reward for the months of awkward, burdensome pregnancy. Rima had opened up to me, a mere human male, the world of depthless love and tender trust Nature opens between the primate, including the human, mother and her 102

young. I had prayed ever since that Rima might not be orphaned twice because of my crippled heart, and thus far under severe testing, my prayers were being answered. How it would be if I lost my monkey child, I had not paused to consider. Dona Socorro had not been prepared for our pet monkey, and as soon as my eyes fell on all the very beautiful expensive flowering plants bordering the spacious patio of her palatial home, I understood her coolness toward Rima. I hastened to reassure her: "We have trained her to respect flowers," I lied. "She behaved very well at the hotel, and we'll keep her out of your flowers, be assured." Dona Socorro responded well with the invariable courtesy of all classes of the Mexican, but inside I trembled for her flowers. There were saucer-sized tea roses, and plate-sized scarlet amaryllis, a favorite of Rima's, and a golden hibiscus of a richness I had never seen before. "Maybe you could keep her tied?" she proposed. "Just don't you worry," was all I could find for this gruesome suggestion. Dona Socorro however, was soon introducing us to her wonderful mother, Dona Maria, and her laughing sister Dona Angelica. Ah, me—the kind, warm-hearted, generous Mexican villagers! "They will look after you, just tell them what you need, and they will get it," she said. And after a hurried lunch with us, Dona Socorro was off to catch the little local plane to rejoin her husband at the distant hydroelectric site where he worked. (We had met them when for a number of years they were stationed near us in the forest.) Her mother, Dona Maria, and the two sisters lived nearby, across and only a few houses down the street. When, after a good chat, they, too, left us, we were free to examine our new "hotel." At a glance it appeared nearly the size of the one we had just left only this was all ours. The patio was actually larger than that at the hotel, larger but much less sheltered because on the windy side it was raised above the adjoining house and patio and so was very much exposed. At mid-afternoon, with the hot sun pouring in on the tiled floor it had 103

been heating all day, this exposure was not so apparent. On two sides in high wide beds were all those beautiful flowers. Even before Dona Maria left, Rima had leaped up on a bed for a bit of exploration. I ran over and picked her up much to her annoyance. But Dona Maria seemed reassured that we would control her, and we parted without further mention of any problems over the monkey. I saw, however, that Rima and I were in for some strained relations, worse than it had ever been at the hotel, because here there was no tree such as the mandarin, only the hibiscus bush laden with its heavy golden flowers. We had all our cargo piled up in a corner of the spacious portico, or portales as I believe the Spanish call them. Off these sheltered areas, one step up alongside the two sides of the patio that had no flower beds, the various rooms opened. All the rooms were very shut-in and quite unsuitable for swinging a hammock, whereas the portico posts were spaced just right, so we decided to sleep in the most sheltered and private corner of the portico that opened into the kitchen and dining room. We had our sleeping bags and pillows, so with Jan and Becca well padded on the floor and I in my hammock we were, by nightfall, quite comfortable. As the air grew cool, that is, as the night wind invaded the patio, Rima was glad to forget about the inviting flower beds and settle down to her usual night routine, first half with me, last half with Jan. The kitchen itself was adjacent, a small, cosy room with a very modern gas range and a very primitive cement sink without even a strainer. But this kitchen was always a snug retreat from the windy patio. We tried one meal out on the portico then moved in to the kitchen for all future dining. Early the next morning Dona Maria arrived, eager to find out how we had passed the night. She was taken aback that we were sleeping out on the portico, but when I explained how for reasons of my heart problem it was best for me to sleep in a hammock, she felt better, but was obviously disappointed that our occupancy had taken on such a temporary aspect. It was not until some time later I realized she had at the begin104

ning hoped we might rent the beautiful unused home and begin Mexican village life. Her daughter, who had been our guest in the forest, knew better, that is, understood we were utterly serious in seeking a new home in some faraway virgin jungle. I had mentioned my desire to make a new tent, knowing Dona Maria was a professional seamstress. Right away she was willing to start, so I got out the pieces I had saved of the old rotted tent for use as patterns. The spacious patio floor was ideal for the work except for the glare of direct sunlight upon the white tiles. I borrowed Jan's sunglasses, and the work went forward. When the gusty wind—it rarely died down—lifted the cloth, we weighted it down with stones from the backyard. Rima of course had to "help," scampering about, leaping up on to the forbidden flower beds, and when scolded, insisting on riding in her sling against my ribs. This while stooping over the tent work was difficult, as she well understood, but her attitude seemed to be, "If I cannot play in the flowers then I'll go on being a baby and you must carry me." Dona Maria took note and threw Rima some disapproving glances. I saw now that our monkey child in some good peoples' eyes was only another spoiled brat, always a shock to a fond parent, and so a shock to me. Undoubtedly Dona Maria wondered why I did not tie Rima up, but she said nothing, and the tent work progressed each morning, she helping me cut, I helping her sew on her machine. She had bought twenty-five meters of the heaviest cotton muslin available, for I intended this tent to absorb plenty of wax waterproofing for heavy duty in the Guiana rain forests. The machine sewing did not permit waxing the thread, but with wax ironed into all seams with even more care than for the tent as a whole, all should turn out well. Meanwhile we settled into village life. The most difficult adjustment for me was to the night noises: dogs, donkeys, roosters, and every two or three hours, a huge logging truck right past the door with the motor racing to make the long, 105

steep, rough street. The daytime noises were equally bad, especially those emanating from the nearby blacksmith's shop. He made much use of a trip hammer in fashioning iron tires for the still numerous ox carts that brought firewood down from the near-naked hills. But by day the noises scarcely mattered, so absorbed had I become in the tent. Rima did not like this absorption and became for the first time mischievous in a willful, unruly manner, even undertaking to interfere when we were sewing by romping upon the folds of tent hanging from the machine to the floor. Dona Maria joined in scolding her for this and I felt guilty about my spoiled "child." One afternoon, happily after Dona Maria had gone home, Rima sprang into the golden hibiscus and broke off one of the main branches. I railed at her and chased her across the patio, for I was angry. I saw suddenly by the look of fear on her little face just how angry I was. I stopped, I spoke softly to her, she came running to me and climbed up into my arms: "I'm sorry, 'Monkey Baby,' but I guess we're trapped this time, and I just don't know what to do to escape." I took string and scotch tape and repaired the broken hibiscus in such a way the damage was not apparent. Dona Maria never noticed it as I carefully removed each blossom as it wilted. And as Becca joined me in chasing Rima every time she tried to climb into it, she finally accepted it as a game, with no hard feelings. A far worse problem now developed for Rima and what for her had become a prison in the spacious patio. We were well protected from the street by a sturdy gate of open iron work, but it was not open enough for Rima's many child admirers to come in and play with her. She could not understand that if they came in there would soon be no flowers left at all. So every day the many children passing by called Rima over to the gates of her prison, but none of them came in to play with her. I noticed that this frustration every day became more heavy for her to bear. I recalled the gay time at the airstrip when she frolicked for hours with the Agua Zarcan children. 106

My heart grew heavy with hers, but I saw no solution. The children could not come in to romp in the patio; Rima could not go out into the street. "Poor little rich girl! Someday we'll get back to the jungle, old lady," I told her but that did nothing to explain why she could not play with the other children today. There was a small tree in the narrow shabby backyard, a loquat about the same size as the mandarin in the hotel patio. I took Rima out and helped her up into its badly pruned branches. She stared out over the wall into the street where the chickens and dogs and pigs and ox carts were sometimes visible all at the same time. She stared into the rough, dusty street and beyond at the village houses half hidden behind their walls and trees. She asked to come back down, and I realized that Rima's zest for life was no more. Where all had been eager joy of living there was a deep frustration, and most of it no doubt from the lack of playmates and play space. I, who in the hammock in the jungle had almost always been available for a swing or a rumpling, tousling tickling frolic, was now deeply absorbed by the tent, and I suspected the experience with the children at the Agua Zarca airport had given Rima a glimpse into the proper play world of the juvenile monkey, a world for which even our old play world of the hammock could not much longer have substituted. Then the weather turned chillier than ever because for days on end we lost the bright warm tropical sun, but not the biting temperate winds. They continued to blow across the patio. I tried to keep Rima warm by staying inside the cosy kitchen with her. Dona Maria had to go on a visit to a sick relative, and work on the tent slowed down. I was able to spend more time with Rima, but the hammock, our old play center, was out in the gusty, chilly patio tied between two portico posts. She could not keep properly out of the wind. Jan lay on her bed—Dona Maria had found a sturdy, comfortable mattress to put down on the cold hard tile floor—and listened to The Grapes of Wrath on her cassette for the blind from the Library of Congress. Rima resented our preoccupation with this device. She 107

became mischievous, leaping on it when we were not expecting her. This meant scoldings and more frustration for the little monkey child we had been forced to remove from just about every natural aspect of a monkey environment. We humans could comfort ourselves and each other with the realization that we were in fact refugees with the necessity of undergoing all the hardships and frustrations that come with a refugee's life, but only man has the capacity for martyrdom because only man has the gift of Hope. Our little monkey child had only us, and we, for reasons she could not begin to grasp, were to all appearances failing her. We were failing to provide her with a path into life. We were, in short, jeopardizing her natural development. We were destroying her body and soul, and that was the hardest of all the aspects to bear of our life as refugees. We now tasted that bitterest of all cups, the inability to give life to one's children. In all ages parents have had to watch their children fail and perish under the curses of famine and pestilence and war. We now had to watch our beloved little Rima wilt like a plant removed from its proper environment. She no longer tried to play among the flowers in the patio beds. Dona Maria had noticed the damage, and had complained. I had suggested that we go some other place, and she said no, it was not necessary, but she plainly indicated she believed we ought to be considerate enough to cage or tie up the monkey. As my Vermont hill farmer father had put it: "Never try to keep a dog in the city." I would add to that, "nor a monkey!"

ABOUT TWO WEEKS AFTER OUR FAMILY TRIP UP TO SAN Cristobal, Jan abruptly fell very ill. As always with her, symptoms were very mixed and difficult. But even with jungle malaria I had never seen her so hard pressed by an illness. This might well be an attack of the San Cristobal grippe from which our friends had been suffering. All had complained about its severity, but as all seemed to have recovered from it, 108

we had not thought any more about it until Jan became ill. This meant that Rima had to give up her usual habit of sleeping the last part of the night curled around Jan's neck. She loved this sleeping with Jan and had only rejoined me when she learned that I woke up for snacks, warm sweet drinks, that is. Having enjoyed with me at least one such snack she always climbed down from the hammock and crawled up to Jan's pillow and snuggled down with her, one slender hand firmly twisted in Jan's long, wavy hair. I loved to watch them both soundly sleeping. Jan is a big woman, yet the little monkey had not the slightest doubt she had a warm, protective mother. The little primate child never seemed aware in the slightest degree that we were really giants. Rima seemed to "see" only our souls, which were not in any way different enough from hers to matter. Now, in case Jan had caught the violent San Cristobal virus, Rima could not be allowed to go on sleeping with her. I tried my best to prevent it, but one morning I overslept. When I awoke at 4:3 0 A. M. Rima was not asleep on my thigh. I flashed the foco down on Jan's pillow, and there she was in her usual place cheek on cheek. I put out the light, and let them sleep on.

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"Ausente"—The Absent One

One day Dona Maria returned and we resumed work on the tent. I had turned my attention during her absence to having some sturdy boxes made, boxes for either mules or men to carry goods in over jungle trails. When in reply to her questions, I explained what they were for, I could see how disappointed she was that we were not going to rent her daughter's big house and live forever in Las Margaritas. Apparently she was willing to accept Rima if only we would stay. Nor were her 110

motives monetary entirely. Certainly, as she explained, she hated to see the somewhat grand new home go on year after year unoccupied. She sincerely liked us. When Jan's illness dragged on she was genuinely distressed, and discovering Jan's only medicine was an incredible number of fresh picked oranges every day, herself undertook to keep Jan in supply. Rima could not understand Jan's sudden withdrawal, that is, the way Jan kept her at a distance even in the daytime. Nor were mine and Becca's extra efforts to amuse and comfort her very successful. She was lost and caged at the same time more and more every day we spent in the labyrinthine house. Sometimes we could still laugh at her, although Rima herself never seemed to laugh any more. Doors always mystified and annoyed her, especially the bathroom door. While I sat on the stool she would come and peer under the two-or three-inch space at the bottom of the door, chattering, scolding, and trying in every way possible to crawl under the door. The space was too narrow but she always tried, twisting and reaching first an arm, then a leg, then her face, even her little bottom would appear in the crack, meanwhile always the scolding, guttural complaint against being shut out. We laughed, but Rima was serious—why must there exist all these barriers? Barriers and forbidden areas, for we had to be careful she did not get shut in the dining room, where there was a cupboard full of heirloom china—the first I had ever seen in Mexico— and if not yet genuine heirloom, then destined to become so. About this time the numerous rose bushes in the patio beds had all begun flowering at once. Becca loved them, and as no one cut them she kept a bouquet on the dining room table. To slip into the dining room unobserved and eat the roses became one of Rima's jail house diversions. And when someone discovered her she would dodge under the table or race wildly about the room until the one trying to drive her out usually had to call for help. She enjoyed this game, for so she saw it, and I learned not to be too severe with her when she found entrance into the forbidden room. Our diet had become more and more dependent upon 111

cooked foods, potatoes and vegetables and tortillas. Bananas were scarce, and Rima's response to the unfamiliar diet was to ask to be fed, mouth to mouth. "What is it?" she seemed to ask, "Oh well, you feed it to me." We did have lettuce and tomato salads regularly, and she as always relished the lettuce, treating it as a real monkey soul food. There were also the rather rich cup cakes little girls sold door to door from huge baskets carried on their heads. Rima seemed to deem these fresh baked cup cakes on a level with rose petals as food for monkey children, and would climb disobediently up on to the table to get them. Jan now slowly regained strength, and once again we attacked the problem of how, by exactly what route, it was best to leave Mexico. We still hoped to be able to travel all the way by sea. None of us liked either the prospect of a long overland journey by bus, or a short swift jet flight. I, in particular, wanted nothing of the latter, and we all knew that bussing with the animals even in a private rebuilt schoolbus, as some friends in the United States were now proposing, would be trying even if the people were perfectly congenial. It would be out of the question, of course, if they were not. We discussed going all the way up to Vera Cruz, Mexico's greatest port. Surely there we would find ships sailing for South America? Then early one morning, while everyone else was still sound asleep, I was once again going over all the information on travel we had thus far been able to obtain, which was not very much, and thus far not very helpful. There was a letter from a New York travel agency mentioning a freighter that carried rather a large number of passengers on its monthly round trip from Jamaica to Trinidad. But how to reach Jamaica? I picked up the folder from Mexican Airways once again, and for the novelty tried reading it backwards. There were a number of those wonderously complicated tables of distance and fares and departures and arrivals. I had had several brushes with these same tables, but for the first time I noticed the word "Kingston." This must be Jamaica. A closer study of this, the last table in the folder, revealed that once a week a Mexi112

can jet flew from Merida, Yucatan, to Kingston, Jamaica. Here at last was our connection for the ship to Trinidad and the virgin rain forests of the Guiana Highlands. If they allowed both dogs and monkeys, dare I board my first jet at fifty-seven years of age and with a history of three heart attacks? Well, what would Daniel Boone have done? He had recently become my model for action after learning how many times he pulled up stakes rather than settle down with the forest-burners. He would have boarded the jet, of course. And the dog and the little orphan monkey? They would have to travel in God's hands with the rest of the family. "But could you leave Rima behind?" The simple question would not be silent. But there was an answer: "Wait and see what the airline says." Two weeks had passed since Jan became ill but now she was well recovered. She had consumed dozens of Dona Maria's delicious oranges; she sunbathed in the patio every afternoon, an activity in which Rima joined, subject to interruptions such as the arrival of a cup cake girl at the gate or a trip to the bathroom with me—as far as the door, that is. I would never allow her inside, and she never ceased protesting at being shut out. Doors were unfair, hateful, she scolded as she tried once again to force her way through the narrow space at the bottom of the door. But Rima seemed somewhat happier. She had been sleeping with Jan as usual, and romping between the hammock and the bed with me. I had some "vines" hanging from above the hammock, and we swung sometimes but she seemed afraid of being swung too far out over the tile floor of the patio. I was surprised at how conservative she had become, and I blamed it on the prisonlike life we were all living. Except for shopping and post office trips every other day, none of us went out of the house, and as Jan and Becca did the shopping, Rima and I never went out the patio gate. Smoky always went on the shopping trips. The tent was nearly done, only the tasks of making the grommet at the peak and the corner stake tabs remained, plus of course, the final big waxing job. Dona Maria had an elec113

trie iron and ordinary sealing wax could be bought by the kilo. Seven jungle cargo boxes were all lined up along the house wall under the portico on the other side of the patio. Each box had a top on hinges with an iron strap and eye for a lock. Further, in big bright yellow letters each box said J-l, J-2, H-l, R-l, etc. The odd seventh box bore the letter K for Kitchen. We had even given in and purchased a marimba in Comitan, not quite as beautiful as the one left behind in the forest, nor nearly as expensive, yet almost as beautiful in tone. We had planned carefully how to pack it for its long journey, meanwhile practicing hard all our half-forgotten repertoire. We had now decided to leave Mexico by way of Merida and the jet—three and a half hours—to Jamaica. A friend would haul our belongings from Las Margaritas to the Comitan airport. I, with the animals and as much cargo as we could put in a small plane, would fly to Ocosingo—some one hundred and ten kilometers north of Comitan. Jan and Becca would take the bus there a day ahead by way of San Cristobal, and meet us at the airstrip. At Ocosingo we had an invitation from the Dominican missionaries to rest over with them. From Ocosingo we could then fly in half an hour out to Palenque, where the railway passed on its way from Mexico City to Merida in Yucatan.

TODAY IT IS DIFFICULT FOR ME TO REMEMBER THAT Rima was not with us on that little pick-up that did finally haul us and everything, including the marimba, out to Comitan and the airport. It is hard to envisage Smoky and I packed tight with the cargo in the same little plane that brought us all out from the forest, and no Rima. Almost exactly two weeks after the first night she slept with Jan after Jan became ill, I noticed Rima in later afternoon crouched on the cement wall of the flower bed where it abutted the main house wall. There she sat as she sometimes did while children chatted with her through the grill of the high

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iron patio gate. I was in my hammock from where she presented a side view only six meters away. As I watched her she shivered noticeably. It was late, the wind chilly. I called her over. She came without her usual eagerness, wanting to remain where she could at least see the children. I got up and went to meet her. She put out her long, skinny arms to be picked up, but I saw in her little face that she was ill. As I had suspected she was trembling, and I supposed with cold. I felt guilty that I had left her huddled on the cement wall so late in the chill afternoon. I bundled her up with me in the hammock and tried to comfort her. "Cheer up, old lady, we'11 get back to a nice warm, wet jungle again one of these days," but Rima did not respond with any of her cheerful chuckling, chortling monkey chat. She remained silent and even without protest at so much bundling. I concluded she had warmed up and fallen asleep. The sun went down and supper was being prepared. I decided we should move into the cosy little kitchen. It was then I realized Rima was too warm. I unwrapped her. She was drowsy and hot. I felt her all over carefully and took her into the kitchen. At supper she roused and ate but very little. "Is Rima not well?" Becca asked. "She has a fever," I answered. Rima's fever rose during the night. I gave her water and orange juice. The water had such a flat, dead, tastelessness after the sparkling, delicious creek water of the jungle that we almost never drank it without adding orange or lime juice. She took but little and complained in the little high-pitched, batlike squeaks the monkey baby uses to tell its mother when it is in pain or distress. Monkey infants apparently never cry— squall—that is, as do human babies. * The nearest Rima ever came to crying like a baby was when in trying to give her toilet training we would set her up in the branches of a shrub at the corner of the house and leave her. She could see us and felt the deliberate abandonment—an abandonment probably un*Some species do—in tantrums even!

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known in the monkey world. She would come close to crying "like a baby" under such cruel unsimian treatment. And sure enough the predators would hear her. A snake came once obviously to carry her off so we quickly dropped that method of toilet training, which was not succeeding anyhow. When in her mother's arms the monkey's child never cries. It squeaks, as I say, like a bat, or a mouse. Thus Rima told me the fever was burning up her little body, and that she needed extra care and love. Jan's virus attack had not been noticeable for its fever so at first we did not relate Rima's illness to Jan's. But in the morning just before dawn, Rima startled me as she never had before. She cried out in a half-scream, half-squawk that was more desperate than anything we had ever heard from her. I roused Jan. "Rima is very ill," I told her. "I think she may be dying—I think she wants us all." Becca also woke up. It was nearly dawn, our usual time for rising. We all gathered around Rima and she asked to go to Jan. Jan took her into the kitchen. Rima was panting from the violence of the all-night fever. I thought she was breathing her last but Jan was comforting her with more truly maternal affection than I had ever been able to offer her. She was also praying, as was I. Rima quieted. Her breathing became more normal, and Becca and I prepared breakfast. Rima ate nothing at all, only a little warm orange juice and honey. The fever had relented slightly. After breakfast I took her back to the hammock. She slept most of the morning, but the fever did not leave her. When she woke up I called Jan. "She still has bad fever," I said. "What can it be?" "Let's try to get her some fresh cane juice." Jan and Becca went shopping and to the post office as usual. They asked everywhere for cane but came home with only two small dried out sticks. Becca succeeded in pressing from them only a few teaspoons of grayish unsweet juice. Rima drank it but without enthusiasm for she was now absorbed in a strange struggle with her body. It seemed to be more a problem of tension than of pain. She would lie on her 116

back on my lap cushioned with her blankets and press with all her might her feet against my hand. That is, she was acting like a butterfly breaking out of its chrysalis. I called Jan to help by holding Rima's head in a way to brace her head and shoulders as I was bracing her feet. This went on and on, varied only when I discovered half by accident that it also helped if I pressed down on her abdomen with the palm of my hand, applying pressure and abrupt release as with artificial respiration. Once when I by chance tickled her in the solar plexus she laughed. "I'm sure that was a laugh." "I don't understand it either." Jan answered. "As long as we are helping her, it does not matter. Obviously there is great tension." Then Rima did a strange thing. The neighbor who had brought the poor-quality juiceless cane the day before returned in mid-afternoon to report that due to the extra dry, dry season he could not find any good juicy sugar cane. He was concerned that he could not help Rima overcome her fever and stayed to chat and watch her. He had made friends with her before her illness. While Jan and I were both diverted from her in talking with him, Rima suddenly sprang up from my lap and fled into the narrow corridor that led to the bathroom and the backyard. As the back door was always shut she apparently had no special intent to go outside. When Jan went for her, she found her sitting on top of the narrow cement wall opposite the bathroom. Here a heavy wire mesh reached from the top of the wall to the ceiling. Rima sometimes stood on the narrow ledge where wall and mesh joined and, with her fingers grasping the mesh, stared into the small, trashy, unexciting backyard. Perhaps she found the half-dozen large trees shading the neighboring banana orchard of interest. We never knew, but sometimes we would find her alone there staring through the large squares of mesh—a cage—as was the rest of the house, but this corner more honestly so. Here Jan found her, and picked her up and brought her back. As I looked up at her in 117

Jan's arms Rima stared hard at me, and for the first time I saw the eyes of an adult monkey. They were both hard and questioning. I was startled beyond words and suddenly aware that live or die, God was telling us we had lost—or were soon to lose—our monkey baby. Our beloved infant had begun to grow up and, with her dawning adult consciousness, for a flashing moment Rima had doubted'me. I was too surprised to say anything at the moment. In a little while the visitor left, and Rima had meanwhile settled on my lap again. Her tension seemed to have eased. I placed her on her stomach and patted her gently and she fell asleep. "I think the fever may be easing up," I told Jan. "Why did she spring up like that, do you suppose?" Jan asked. "I really don't know, but when you brought her back a curious thing happened. She stared at me with such suspicion in her eyes that I can only describe as adult. It was as if for a moment she had suddenly grown up, and, well, doubted us." "I suppose it could be. I have wondered what would happen to our relationship if she did live to grow up, and what we would do with her." "Strange thing to say but I guess I never realized that she would grow up." I said. "How is the fever?" "A little lower, I would guess." But during the night Rima's fever returned as hard as ever. And she was very much the monkey's little child again— squeaking close to my face and asking me to help her with the tension in her stomach. We slept very little, if at all, and when she screamed again at the same pre-dawn hour, I hastily roused Jan and Becca: "Rima is calling for you two again," I told them, "please get up and help me comfort her." We gathered around her, I still holding her. Jan talked to her and Becca petted her gently. Rima was instantly comforted. All she wanted was the presence of her family. "And the fever?" Jan asked. 118

"All night," I said "but it seems to be easing up now." By mid-morning the fever had completely gone as far as I could tell, but Rima was very weak. She had taken no solid food for two days, and now had no desire even to drink. She lay in my arms in a semi-coma, thin and dry from the long bout of fever. I talked to her softly about getting back to the jungle, and from time to time walked her around and around the patio. I knew, we all knew I suppose, that Rima was being taken from us. By early afternoon I saw she was losing consciousness, silently, without making any of her little squeaks of protest. What to do? I had taken the little orphan monkey deep into my heart—the parting was going to hurt and hurt deeply. I prayed that somehow Rima and I might speak to each other and know one another's love once more in this life, and came the inspiration—what if she is dying of thirst? I went for water and offered it to her in a small spoon, but she showed no interest. I tried pouring a few drops into her mouth. It only dribbled down her neck and chest. I recalled trying to pour milk down her throat. "Rima," I said softly, "Rima, please drink a little." She opened her eyes ever so little. It must have been the plea of love in my voice. Then I understood. I filled my mouth with water, put my lips gently down upon hers and fed her the water a few drops at a time. At first I had trouble controlling the amount but quickly I learned to control it and give it to her only so fast as she could take it. And she was taking it. After three or four attempts she began to swallow as fast as I gave it to her. And in an hour I could see she was reviving from the coma. By suppertime she was sitting upon my lap and drinking on her own in her normal way from a cup. Still she would not eat, but we all sighed in our relief that she had passed a crisis. At bedtime an orchestra nearby struck up for a dance celebrating a marriage that had taken place in the morning. At first there was a marimba with it, but later it was swallowed up as usual by the other instruments. I was so absorbed in the music I at first did not realize that Rima was squeaking, tell119

ing me all was not as well as at suppertime. She indicated she was in pain, or tension. "We can't sleep, Harry—not tonight, Harry. Help me, I am still in trouble, Harry." I massaged her stomach holding her close to my cheek. The fever had reduced her almost to the tiny orphan we had first known. "We'll all get back to the jungle some day," I told her. "Maybe you will go first, Rima, but we'll come to you, yes, I promise you." About midnight she again asked for the family, but not so loud and desperately as before. Our love and tender care were helping her overcome the biological fear of death. The party was in full gaiety and some of the music very beautiful, but it was mixed with some that was raucous jazz, bad as only badly played jazz can be. Rima asked at once to go with Jan. We all retired to the kitchen and sat on the long bench against the wall opposite the low table. Jan held her little shrunken body close to her throat, Rima's favorite place as an infant. Soon she was asleep, a short fitful sleep that was suddenly broken by the worst half-scream, half-squawk we had ever heard from her, as if she had been seized in the night by some beast of prey. I took her. "It's all right, Rima, it's only a dream, death is only a dream, Monkey Baby. We love you, remember, Rima— remember one thing! We love you!" I placed her on my chest, on the left side above my heart, her body against mine, her little head resting on my shoulder. I hurried her out on to the portico and sprinkled her face with cold water from the bucket kept full under the faucet. Then a few rapid turns around the patio under the cool, sweet stars— the party music was playing a haunting, and beautiful, melody—a popular song apparently, for I recognized it as one they had already played at least twice. * *"Ausente" was the song—"The Absent One."

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Back in the kitchen I was grateful that Becca had lit the two candles that had served at supper instead of turning on the electric light. Rima was still breathing and conscious. I placed her on her back across my lap. Jan bent down on her knees beside her speaking words of love and comfort. Becca stroked her little fuzzy gray stomach. I could see Rima's breathing was now in the feeblest possible short pantings. Yet she chortled softly, sweetly at Becca's stroking her belly. Then a tiny squeak. I picked her up, placed her gently against my shoulder, and went again out to walk her in the fresh air under the stars. Twice around and I knew that Rima was no longer breathing. I took her little body into Jan and Becca and placed it gently in Jan's outstretched arms. "Back to the jungle—Rima's gone on ahead of us," I said, and to let my tears flow freely went back out to the patio. The band was playing the beautiful, rhythmical melody again. It was well after midnight. I walked and walked and wept. Tired at last, I went back in. Jan was holding Rima's little body. I looked at the little monkey face, the lips were slightly parted, the face relaxed as in sweetest slumber. I kissed Jan. Becca had gone back to bed. I went back to my hammock. At dawn I found Jan sitting at the foot of their bed, Rima's body cradled in her arms. "Maybe Dona Maria will let us bury her body in her orange orchard," she said. Jan and Becca buried Rima's fever-shrunken little monkey body under a young mango tree in the orchard of Dona Maria, in the village of Las Margaritas, Mexico, on the morning of 27 February 1973. She had been with us almost exactly one year, so had reached an age of about one year and four to six weeks, or about the age of four in human terms. Thus died the monkey's child—one of the uncounted victims of man's lack of love for those closest to him in all living Creation.

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Epilogue

While the manuscript of this book was at the publisher's office and negotiations were underway for its eventual publication, Becca and Harry Little died of a tropical disease contracted at their new jungle home, five days by canoe from Cucui, Amazonas, Brazil. Jan, who was also very ill, recovered and, after many weeks on her own, was eventually brought out of the jungle by the local Indians who had come in to deliver the mail. In the fall of 1980 friends brought her back to the United States, where she is now living with her parents in Sacramento, California.

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