Jane (38 page)

A strange and intoxicating paradox.

Adolescents too young to breed, males and females alike, were devoted to playful activities, their favorites of which were wrestling and chasing one another through the canopy. Of course there was foraging for food, but I (in my stationary blind) was prohibited from observing it. Mangani left the immediate bower for hours at a time. I resigned myself to Tarzan’s descriptions and the obvious results of the food search—a diet quite similar to the meals he had returned with for the two of us, though the
P.a.e.
ate leaves in quantities and fat white grubs as a kind of delicacy. There were pools in the vicinity, but the Mangani did not eat fish. Tarzan reported that their refusal to swim was the cause but that the species was not adverse to eating snails and tiny crabs they found at the water’s edge.

Tarzan’s spirits lifted considerably with any sight of his “half sister,” Jai. He told me that after Kala’s death and his banishment from the Great Bower, Jai had been the only Mangani who’d not abandoned him. Even after he’d moved his nesting place far enough from the bower to guarantee his safety, Jai had found him and visited him there. Lately, though, her disappearances from the bower had begun to provoke Kerchak.

All of his attempts at
kin-ga
(mating) with her had as yet come to nothing. She had no desire to mate with her mother’s murderer, and while Kerchak wished to show his dominance over every female in his tribe, he was leery of Jai, perhaps remembering the consequences of killing her mother and Kala’s
tar-zan
son (he did indeed believe Tarzan had perished after his beating and expulsion from the bower).

Late afternoons were a time for rest. Matrons called their young back to the nest for feeding and a nap. As everyone dozed, the buzzing of ten thousand insects rose and melded into a single solid sound.

Tarzan had gone scouting for our evening meal, and I sat contentedly writing up the morning’s observations. Aside from the quickly dwindling time for study before we would have to leave the forest (fewer than three weeks now), the Claytons’ journal was filling at an alarming rate with my smallest handwriting and dozens of illustrations, and endless data was still to be recorded. It had been the only blank paper I’d found at Zu-dak-lul, Alice’s precious box of stationery scattered about and destroyed by the elements of the previous sixteen years. When the awful day came, when the last blank page of the journal was full, I would have to resort to my memory of a thousand tiny details—a very daunting prospect.

I heard a gravelly voice from the forest floor and, knowing at once it was Kerchak, went quickly to the view hole to peer down. As yet there was no movement in the bower, but the Mangani chief repeated his call, this time louder and more demandingly.

“Gamla,
yud
Kerchak!” Gamla, come to Kerchak!

My eyes sought the female in her nest nursing her two infants. I had looked up but had yet to move from my place.

“Gamla!” Kerchak roared and pounded the ground with both of his clenched fists.
“Yud!”

I scanned as many nests as I was able, attempting to observe the Mangani response to Kerchak’s unwelcome summons. Many of them had already shrunk away into the shadows. Others leaned over the lips of their nests and watched, for Gamla had laid down her
balu
and begun her reluctant descent to the forest floor.

It was with a sick feeling that I watched the handsome furred female walk on her straight legs to the center of the clearing—what I had come to call the “throne room”—where Kerchak still sat, idly chewing on a pile of that day’s offerings. I was grateful Tarzan was not present to witness what I guessed was about to happen. From this height there were no facial expressions visible, but I could clearly see the posture of defeat as Gamla turned her back to Kerchak and dropped to her hands and knees. Then Kerchak, as if possessed by sudden rage, swept away the food with a swipe of an arm and rose to his full height, pounding his chest with balled fists, exactly as John Clayton had described the beast’s display before his terrified wife.

Do not watch,
I commanded myself.
Turn away from this spectacle of violence.
But I could not. I was a scientist. The Mangani were my subjects. It was my privilege and duty to observe every aspect of behavior, no matter how repugnant.

Kerchak, larger by half than all the adult Mangani females, mounted Gamla from behind, roughly grabbing the fur at his partner’s neck. Yet she bore the frenzied copulation quietly. Mercifully, it was short-lived.

Once Gamla had regained her upright stance and began climbing back to her nest, I pulled back from the view hole, slumping down with relief. My heart was thudding. Bitter bile rose in my throat and I thought I might vomit. But I calmed myself, aware of Tarzan’s imminent return. I would not allow him to see me upset, and under no circumstance would I write of Kerchak’s rape of Gamla in John and Alice Clayton’s journal. It would be sacrilege, I thought, an insult added to injury. No, I had committed every moment of the scene to memory, and once returned to England I would record it in detail.

A sudden jolting of the earth caused some screeching and scrambling in the Mangani bower. Even Kerchak, busy stuffing his mouth with grubs, jumped to his feet in fear. Though the earth tremor was brief, in the hollow tree its consequence nearly proved fatal, for the journal in my lap as I sat on the ledge flipped up and out of my grasp and, to my horror, tumbled down through the trunk, clattering and echoing loudly as it fell. I looked at Tarzan, who had returned. He was standing at the blind and had braced himself for the shock. But now that it had passed, his body was stiff with attention. His eyes were fixed out the view hole, and he clutched the interior vines and ridges for another quake. When all was still, I joined him and looked down on the clearing.

Kerchak was now on his feet and moving slowly toward the base of the hollow tree.

I cringed as the journal, momentarily resting on a rotted latticework twenty feet below us, slipped off and fell an additional distance, coming to rest with a thud near the bottom.

When Kerchak started to climb, Tarzan and I pulled back quickly. I saw him look up and determine that a hasty escape out the top would be impossible. Climbing down would trap us in the well of the trunk.

Now we could hear Kerchak’s progress up the outside of the tree. I fought panic and wished desperately to speak to Tarzan, to make a plan. But we must remain silent and at all costs stay out of Kerchak’s sight.

I could see Tarzan’s mind at work, his eyes flicking in every direction. Reverting to sign language, he gestured me to follow him. Squatting backward at the lip of the ledge, he lowered himself down till he was hanging by his fingers, his body suspended perilously over the well of the hollow tree. Swinging his legs forward and back, on the next forward movement he released his grip and disappeared.

I stifled the urge to shout, “What do you want me to do?” for clearly Tarzan meant for me to do exactly as he had done … and even with my rigorous training, it appeared impossible to me. The sound of Kerchak nearly at the blind hole forced me to act and to trust implicitly that Tarzan’s plan was viable. I leaped to the ledge, turned my back to the abyss, squatted, and placed my fingers around the lip. Praying that my balance and newly strengthened body parts would not fail me, I carefully lowered myself down. I dangled only by my fingertips for a moment that felt an eternity. Pain shot down my arms. They would not hold! I felt my fingers slipping, and the very moment they lost the lip, Tarzan’s arm shot out, clutching my waist. He pulled me to him where he clung by the other arm to a mass of tangled roots and ropy bark.

Not a moment too soon.

By the sounds above us, Kerchak’s grunts into the blind hole were echoing up and down the tree well. Shortly he was done entertaining himself with the strange racket, and a brief silence ensued. A moment later we saw the anteater’s carcass tumbling down the trunk. The thought that Kerchak’s hand was feeling around inside our blind struck such fear into my heart that, but for Tarzan’s strong arm supporting me, I would have lost all control of my muscles and followed the anteater’s stinking corpse to the bottom of the well.

Kerchak was ripping the bark and the brittle wood from the dead tree’s blind hole. How long it would take him to enlarge it enough to enter, I thought, was the remaining length of my life.

There was little light beneath the shelf, and I could not see Tarzan’s face. I buried my own in the musk of his smooth corded neck and thought there was nowhere else on earth I would rather spend the moments before death than in this man’s arms.

But Tarzan had pulled himself from my grip, giving me his handholds. I heard the sound of the Bowie knife being withdrawn from its sheath. Silent as a cat, he edged along the inner trunk and raised one arm, feeling for the lip of the ledge. He was going up to face the beast!

“Kerchak!”

Even from our hiding place below the ledge we could hear the name called and the widening of the blind hole cease.

“Jai!
Kin-ga!
”

Tarzan’s sister was deliberately luring Kerchak away from us!

When Tarzan was certain the beast had abandoned the hole, he helped me regain the ledge while he quickly recovered the fallen journal in the tree well.

From the blind, I watched as Jai, in the center of the clearing, fell to her knees and presented her rump to Kerchak, who was quickly descending to claim his prize. But the moment his feet touched the ground, Jai stood and, baring her teeth at him, turned and raced for the nearest tree.

Tarzan pulled me to go, but I urged him to observe his sister. I felt his fingers digging into my flesh and saw that his face was twisted with hatred. It was not lost on him that Jai was luring Kerchak away from him as his mother had done all those years before … and she had died for that sacrifice.

In the canopy, Kerchak was gaining now, bellowing in anger (was he, too, remembering the trickery?). Jai leaped into a mango tree, clinging fast to its branches, and began a careful climb. A moment later Kerchak crossed the void and landed in the limbs under her.

But they were
not
limbs. They were feathery leaves on delicate woody stalks. They could barely hold Jai’s weight. They could not hold his at all.

With a shocked and furious roar, Kerchak fell, crashing through the branches until his body hit the forest floor.

Now Tarzan was pulling me away from the blind, pushing me up the hollow trunk to make our escape.

I heard Kerchak’s blustering oath. “Kerchak
bundolo
Jai!” I will kill you!

Yes,
I thought.
He will kill her. But he will have to catch her first.

Kala’s Children

I learned more of the character of the Mangani from that day’s observations than I had in all the previous days combined. Of course there was no question of returning to the Great Bower now that Kerchak’s curiosity had been aroused. The danger was too great.

The loss of the observation blind was a massive blow for me. The few precious weeks left before our enforced departure were now useless. I was far from done studying the Mangani. I had, in fact, barely scratched the surface of their anatomy, physiology, and behavior.

Back in Tarzan’s nest, I fought despair by counting my blessings. Simply to have discovered
Pithecanthropus aporterensus erectus
had been the greatest thrill of my life. I read my writings endlessly, adding to them, even beginning an analysis of them. But it was no good. How could I possibly analyze the data if it was incomplete? I found myself unable to sleep, obsessed with the idea that in a single moment of weakness—allowing the journal to fly from my hands—I had destroyed, once and forever, any chance of a worthy study of the living missing link species.

“I should not have taken you,” Tarzan said, brooding and angry at himself for putting me in danger. I knew it was futile to ask to return. I grew short and snappish, but Tarzan bore my moods with quiet dignity and even tried to draw me into lovemaking, but in my obsession I had lost the desire for all but intimate friendship. In fact, his attempted embraces irritated me, and this reaction, in turn, disturbed me greatly. A constant war raged inside my head.

What have I gotten myself into?
This outrageous adventure and the unearthing of Tarzan’s harrowing secrets had drawn me,
seduced
me into a most bizarre affair of the heart. There was no doubt we cared deeply for one another and most certainly lusted after each other. I was nearly sure I loved him and was certain he believed me his fated companion for life.

But was he mine?

He said he longed to travel the world outside Eden, go to the places he’d seen in his mind’s eye after poring over his father’s map and hearing my descriptions of them. He was more than bright. Brilliant, I thought, and had powers to adapt that were stunning. But he had spent a whole lifetime believing himself to be an animal. He was a savage wild man who would chew the bloody flesh from the bone of a fresh kill with obvious relish. I could take Tarzan out of the jungle.
Could I take the jungle out of Tarzan?