Me Cheeta Read Online Free PDF Page B

the sight of her catching up to Mama. I fled back down the ridge the way we’d come, suddenly capable of running, and when I fell, I looked back up the ridge and saw Mama running toward me, and a couple of hostiles—except they weren’t hostiles, of course, but Cary, who once carried me down from a msuba tree, and Spence, who used to feed me bits of moonfruit—running shoulder to shoulder with her. She fell, or was tripped, and then Cary was stamping on her, and others were catching up. From the tall grass I watched her try to rise. But Cary and Spence and Tom were on her—all my fathers were on her, screaming with hatred, with outrage. Stroheim nipped in and out, capering with excitement, but I didn’t see him strike. It didn’t even occur to me to try to rescue her. I just took off down the side of the ridge where the slope was so steep I could almost fall down it into the upper canopy of the trees below.
    I blundered through a maze into the lower canopy, where I was hidden, and blundered on until I had to stop and rest in a little cradle of branches. After a while, there didn’t seem to be much reason to go anywhere; Mama was my only home, and she would find me if she could. So I didn’t move, except once to get some leaves when the cradle began to hurt. I breathed and slept and didn’t grow hungry, and let the rain fall on me as it fell on everything else.
    What happened to us, dearest humans, was nothing special. I suppose Cary must have staged a coup against old Kirk, and then against his two other main rivals. But who cares? It was just politics. Sooner or later, every creature that lives in a forest has to learn that there’s only the hierarchy and alphadom and the constant dance of death. From the termites to the turacos to the marmosets and pythons, from the mongooses to the leopards and the apes, every one of us, every second of every day, was simply trying to pass on its death to another. Even the bushpigs at their mothers’teats, stealing milk from their brothers and sisters, and the trees and the grasses too. Everything that lived, murdered. We were meant to be the best of all creatures, the paragon of the animals, and we also were mired in it. I watched the turacos around me stab the caterpillars and kept thinking there had to be something—one thing—that wasn’t hostile to its bones. But everything was steeped in death: all creatures great and small.
    I stayed in my tree for what seemed a long time; a day and a night, and a day, and another night, and another day. I heard the turacos’ chicks screaming for their caterpillars; I watched the many-colored bird alight and fly off and wondered whether I might become a bird now that I meant never to go to ground again. I heard hooting and barking close by; glazedly I watched Cary make the leap from the foliage of the sloe tree next to me; I saw the way the branch gave as he landed; I saw the turacos and the orioles scatter, the butterflies explode, and the streams of ants not minding; and I watched him prise open the ribcage of the tree toward where I lay cradled. And only when he was almost upon me did I realize I wasn’t reconciled to it: I didn’t want to die. To my surprise, I wanted to survive.
    There was no chance that I could outclimb Cary: I waited until my own branch was quivering with his weight, and then dropped back down into what I had once thought was my own little princedom. Then I was running again on rubbery legs, and I thought the worst that could happen was that I’d be chased off and could maybe find Mama or Victoria before the leopards got me. But I saw that closer to me than Cary, and even more frightening, was Stroheim. He was almost
hopping
with exultation at the way his world had suddenly become a whole lot simpler. Big dumb Stroheim, who later, by the way, went on to a nothing-much career in Hollywood. In fact, MGM used to loan him out to RKO, where he’doccasionally crop up in tenth-rate B’s, bull-necked, horse-faced