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Jorge’s English was limited, he had managed from Malou’s first day at the ranch to communicate to her his distaste for los monos, the monkeys. He was hewn from the Mexican cowboy vaquero tradition that dictated that the only animal a true man ever had any truck with was the horse. Jorge considered her and her monkeys a galling nuisance. Reluctantly, Malou walked over to him.
    â€œBuenos días,” she hailed him.
    Jorge turned away from his labor and glared at her. That was the extent of the cordiality she had ever seenJorge extend to anyone other than Mr. Stallings, to whom the menacing foreman had been slavishly devoted.
    Fishing through her entirely inadequate Spanish vocabulary, Malou tried to communicate that Ernie’s shower was broken. “La ducha de Ernesto, no funciona,” she tried. “Cuándo reparar?” Though she knew she was butchering the language, apparently Jorge understood what she was asking. He began shaking his head in a vigorous negative.
    â€œNo repair. New jefe say no repair.”
    Thank you, Mr. Cameron Landell, Malou thought wearily. From the deep frown furrowing Jorge’s face, it was clear that the foreman had shifted his loyalties to the “new jefe, ” the new boss, who now owned Stallings’s property. He turned his thickly muscled back to her. Malou, turning up her palms in resignation to the language and emotional barriers between her and Jorge, went on into the enclosure. Ernie would have to keep using her shower.
    Dozens of crouched monkeys were quiet as they concentrated on foraging enough edible plant matter from the stingy earth to sustain life. With an expertise born of painful practice, they stripped spines from cactus pads and picked the tender shoots out from the middle of saber-sharp yucca plants. For Malou it was a miracle. Few primatologists ten years ago had seriously believed that the 150 monkeys who’d been transplanted from theserenely cool Storm Mountain could survive on a patch of south Texas brushland where summer sun could broil the land with 130-degree heat.
    She tried to imagine what old Kojiwa must have thought when he’d been unloaded ten years ago in his new home. He might have landed on the moon for all the resemblance the desolate landscape bore to the piney mountain refuge where he’d grown up. Where respectful tourists had made the long uphill trudge to the mountaintop feeding station simply to see him and his troopmates silhouetted against the Kyoto skyline and to offer selected tidbits of rice cake, nuts, and pickled vegetable. Where, long ago, the fearless samurai warriors had brought their mistresses so that they too might enjoy the snow-muffled tranquility of Storm Mountain and, if they were lucky enough and patient enough, catch a fleeting glimpse of the “old men of the forest.”
    Then to find himself brutally thrust into a world of heat, dust, and strange predators must have been an incomprehensible ordeal for the old one. Malou had heard the history of the relocation many times. For the first few weeks, the troop had been able to do little more than lie panting in the sparse shade offered by scattered spiked plants. Death had been an ever-present companion in those first terrible weeks. Kojiwa had watched five members of his own family, the Miwata clan, die horrible deaths. Two had died after eating the bright berries ofthe coyotillo bush. Bobcats, rattlesnakes, and drought claimed the other three as well as a dozen more from the other five families that composed the troop.
    Gradually they’d learned how to get past the stinging spines of the cactus to the surprisingly palatable pads beneath, and to seek relief from the battering heat in the water of the pond. They not only survived, they thrived. In short, they astonished the doubters with their incredible adaptability.
    Malou’s reverie was interrupted by soft sucking sounds. A new mother, Tulip, who had borne her first infant,