Brazzaville Beach Read Online Free PDF

accord after a while, to reappear up to a week or so later. She kept herself somewhat aloof, on the fringes of the group, but they seemed to accept her comings and goings without fuss.
    We watched the chimps for over two hours. Muffin groomed Rita-Mae. Rita-Lu left the tree for twenty minutes and returned. The troop of colobus monkeys—from the first fig tree, I supposed—passed nearby. The chimps barked at them. Clovis displayed aggressively, shaking branches, the hair on his body erect. Later Mr. Jeb tried, half-heartedly, to copulate with Rita-Lu, who was partially in estrus, but she drove him away. Lester played with his mother and brother. And so the time wore on, an average chimp day: feeding, grooming, relaxing, with a certain amount of aggression and sex.
    And then they seemed to have eaten their fill. Rita-Mae picked up Lester, slung him on her back and slid down one of the huge buttressing roots of the fig tree to the ground. Slowly the others followed. They prowled around the foot of the tree for a while, munching on some fallen figs. Then baby Lester slipped off his mother’s back and ran off to tug and pull at what looked like a tangle of rotting vegetation. Rita-Lu scampered after him, snatched the bundle away and flailed it violently up and down, making loud waa-bark noises as she did so. Through my binoculars I could see that the object she was flinging about was limp, but solid, like a very oily rag, say, or a dead fish.
    She soon lost interest, however, as she saw the other membersof the group moving out of the fig tree clearing, and threw the bundle away as she ran to follow them.
    â€œWe go?” Alda said. Normally we would spend the rest of the day trailing the group.
    â€œNo. Wait,” I said. Something about that bundle intrigued me. We picked our way over the rocks to where Rita-Lu had flung it. Alda crouched down and prodded it with a twig.
    â€œBaboon,” he said. “Baby baboon.”
    The tiny carcass was half eaten. Most of the head was gone, as were the chest and stomach. Two legs and an arm remained. A gleam of thin white ribs, like the teeth of a comb, shone through blackening membrane. The pale body, a bloodless bluey gray, was covered in the finest down. It looked distressingly human.
    A dead baby baboon, eaten by chimpanzees, was not extraordinary. Chimps would eat baby monkeys, duiker, bushpigs, anything they could catch…. But I knew this wasn’t a baby baboon. This was the corpse of an infant chimpanzee, a few days old.
    We have been aware for a long time now that chimpanzees are not pure vegetarians like gorillas. In London Zoo, in 1883, a chimp called Sally was observed to catch and eat a pigeon that had flown into her cage, and she continued to feast on any curious bird that hopped in looking for pickings. Indeed, Mallabar’s own work here at Grosso Arvore had done much to establish the different types of meat that chimps consumed, and revealed for the first time their predatory nature. Mallabar was the first person ever to observe and photograph chimpanzees hunting monkeys. In a memorable film he shot, the world saw a group of adult chimpanzees organize themselves into a hunting party, chase, capture and consume a baby bushpig. Chimpanzees liked eating meat—people were very surprised to learn—and chimps hunted and killed in order to get it. It made them less lovable, less gentle, perhaps, but more human.
    I walked around the rocks and the blasted fig tree and I thought of the way Rita-Lu had thrashed the ground with the tattered remains of this baby. I wondered what Eugene Mallabar would make of this. Alda waited patiently for me.
    After a minute or two I told him to put the corpse in a plastic bag and seal it. As he did so, I examined the ground beneath the fig tree and collected samples of feces in my specimen bottles. As I labeled them I tried to keep my thoughts calm and rational. What I had here was some very interesting evidence,