Through a Window (24 page)

Once his wounds were healed, Goblin, although for a while he avoided direct confrontations with Figan, once more began to challenge the other senior males. It was not long before the repeated displays, the constant disruption of social harmony again began to tell on them. Gradually, during the ten months following the Great Attack, Goblin regained his former position until, as before, he could dominate each of them when they were on their own. And then he set to work on the reinstated alpha. Poor Figan—his recently regained confidence, shaky at the best of times, wavered and broke. His best friend Humphrey had disappeared, perhaps a victim of the Kalande males. And, although Figan had then sought friendship with both Jomeo and Evered, and although they spent a good deal of time with him, he had no one whom he could really trust. When Goblin was around, Figan's appeals for help from the three remaining senior males became ever more desperate.

Within a few months Goblin had, once again, utterly intimidated the hero of his youth. Soon after this Figan himself disappeared. Perhaps he too fell victim to intercommunity aggression. Or perhaps he died, alone, of some disease. We shall never know. I grieved for his passing for I had known him for many years and long admired his intelligence and persistence.

With Figan gone, Goblin's disruptive displays became increasingly violent. And in response the senior males would sit close together and groom one another with almost frenzied concentration. The harder Goblin tried to disrupt their grooming, the more they groomed. And the more intently they groomed, the more reassurance they got from each other, and the longer they could ignore, or pretend to ignore, his tempestuous behaviour. Goblin became increasingly frustrated. For one thing it is much harder to threaten a rival if he will not flee or even meet your gaze. For another, his rivals were displaying overt signs of friendship and that was hard for Goblin to swallow. At all costs he must break up these grooming sessions.

But the older males, their eyes only a few inches from small patches of fur, were able to maintain a pretence of disinterest for over fifteen minutes. Again and again he displayed towards and past them. In between, panting, he sat and glared. Eventually, he passed the threshold of caution and became brave enough to actually attack one of the groomers.

These incidents were amazing to watch. One day, for example, Goblin suddenly arrived in the group that I had been following all morning, which included Satan and Jomeo. As soon as he appeared, the two seniors, as usual, approached and began to groom each other. Goblin stood, his hair bristling, and stared at them, but they paid no heed. After a few minutes he started one of his displays. The two senior males continued to groom, their concentration seeming almost fanatical. The females and youngsters screamed in a satisfying way and shot up trees. But Goblin was not interested in intimidating
them,
only his rivals. He paused, then displayed again, passing a little closer to the two males. They continued to groom, even more frenziedly. And so it went on.
Goblin displayed vigorously seven times until he had worked himself into a state of utter fury. Then, during an eighth display he attacked Satan, leaping into the tree above and stamping down onto the older male's head. Now the groomers were forced to respond. Screaming loudly they charged Goblin, waving their arms in rage. And despite the fact that his adversaries weighed 108 pounds and 103 pounds respectively, the eighty-pound Goblin stood his ground and tackled them both. For just over a minute they grappled and hit at each other—then, to my utter amazement, Satan and Jomeo fled while Goblin chased after them, hurling rocks. And then, as though to emphasize his statement, Goblin attacked Satan again. After that, as though the tension was altogether too much for him, Goblin left the group altogether.

On one occasion a similar confrontation, but this time with Satan and Evered, ended with no clear-cut victory for anyone. Goblin left the other two and, again, went off on his own. This time Hilali followed him. An hour later he encountered Fifi and immediately subjected her to a violent attack. Then, for good measure, he beat up Freud and Frodo as well. To the accompaniment of screams and waa-barks he displayed away and continued his solitary pursuits. Forty-five minutes after leaving Fifi, Goblin bumped into another female and she, too, was attacked fiercely and—at least so far as she was concerned—for no reason at all. In fact we can imagine Goblin still seething as he stumped through the forest, spoiling to vent his frustrated fury, really directed against Satan and Evered, on anyone he met.

There were many occasions when, during tense interactions between the senior males, Goblin would suddenly charge and attack some innocent bystander. Such scapegoats were usually adolescent males or females—including, of course, me. When anticipating one of Goblin's onslaughts I always stood up and held firmly onto a tree. Then, when Goblin pounded on me I was less likely to be pushed over—I have never much fancied the idea of
a chimp pounding on my prostrate body. Usually Goblin would simply pound a few times on my back in passing. Three times his attacks were worse. Once he pulled me from my tree, deliberately pushed me to the ground, then kicked me. Another time he started to pull me after him down a slope and I was terrified of losing my footing and falling on top of him. Heaven knows what the consequences would have been. The third incident was, I think, the worst. It started with his usual tactics as he seized the little tree that I was clutching, leapt up and pounded my back hard with his feet. But then he swung round, leapt up facing me, and kicked my chest. As he did so his wide open mouth with its four gleaming and rapier sharp canines, was barely three inches from my face. Occasionally Goblin would pound on one of the field staff also, and I think we all, human and chimpanzee alike, hoped most fervently that he would resolve his dominance position to his complete and utter satisfaction as quickly as possible!

It was at about this time that Goblin began, quite systematically, to terrorize Jomeo. Even though it was already clear that Jomeo was highly submissive to the younger male, Goblin lost no opportunity to charge and attack him—during reunions or other periods of social excitement. Indeed, Goblin persecuted him so fiercely that for a while Jomeo, unless he was with one of the other senior males, would leave the group he was with whenever he heard Goblin's distinctive pant-hoots nearby. And then, having reduced the Gombe heavyweight to a state of abject inferiority, Goblin began overtures of friendship. Suddenly he was grooming him more than he groomed any other male, sharing food with him, reassuring him in time of stress. The two became frequent travelling and feeding companions. In other words, they became friends—and Goblin, for the first time since turning on Figan five years earlier, had an ally. Not a very strong one, perhaps, but at least when he was with Jomeo, Goblin had a chance to relax and enjoy male companionship.

About a year after Figan's death the other males finally seemed
to give up. Worn down by Goblin's repeated challenges, they let him have his way. And so, at seventeen years of age, Goblin became the undisputed alpha, able to control almost any social situation. Although he continued to display often, his performances were less violent and led less frequently to attack. At long last, things became more peaceful for the other members of his community.

Looking back over this fascinating story it is clear that, whether genetic or acquired, Goblin, like Mike, Goliath, and Figan before him, showed, in super-abundance, courage and persistence—the will to get to the top and to stay there despite setbacks. Can we point to any aspects of Melissa's early care that might have contributed to the development of these characteristics? She was an attentive and supportive mother, yet in no way over-indulgent. When Goblin got into difficulties during his early attempts to walk and climb, his mother usually left him to get himself out of trouble, even when he whimpered—unless he was really stuck in which case she quickly retrieved him. She was not restrictive but not overly permissive either. She was not a punitive mother, and was not always able to command instant obedience—Goblin learned early on that, if he went on trying, he could sometimes get his own way. Yet he was not spoilt—when it came to things that really mattered to her, such as weaning, Melissa imposed her will on her son. All in all she was, quite clearly, a good mother with respect to her child-raising techniques. And, to the extent that Goblin's behaviour was inherited, since she contributed fifty per cent of his genes, she was undoubtedly a good mother in this respect as well.

J
OMEO'S PERSONALITY
was utterly different from that of Goblin. Where Goblin was fanatical in his determination to rise to a high social position and stay there, Jomeo, from adolescence onward, was almost entirely lacking in social ambition. He was the heaviest male we have known at Gombe, tipping the scale at just over one hundred and ten pounds, and he was a terrible enemy to individuals of neighbouring communities. Yet he did his best to avoid conflicts with the males of his own social group. A conundrum, was Jomeo, with a unique personality and a unique life history.

We know nothing of his childhood, for he was already a young adolescent when first I met him, in the early sixties. I seldom saw him in his family setting since his mother, Vodka, was shy and, together with her two younger offspring, Sherry and little Quantro, she spent most of her time in the southern part of the community range. Jomeo, however, became a regular camp visitor. In most respects he was a perfectly normal adolescent, but he did have one idiosyncrasy. When he came to camp with one or more of the big males Jomeo, like any other youngster, was seldom able to get a share of bananas. And so, like the other adolescent males, he quite often arrived by himself—which meant that we could hand him his very own bananas. This was when the odd behaviour showed itself—the moment he set eyes on the
fruits he began to scream. Not just a few small screams of irrepressible excitement—which would have been quite understandable—but loudly, and for a couple of minutes at a time. Naturally, any chimps who happened to be nearby rushed to camp to see what was going on—and helped themselves to Jomeo's bananas. For at least six months he behaved in this peculiar fashion. And then, quite suddenly, the screaming stopped.

When he was about nine years old, Jomeo began his attempts to intimidate community females with the bristling, swaggering displays that are the hallmark of adolescence in the male chimpanzee. Initially, these performances were vigorous, impressive and audacious. Once he even dared to compete with Passion for a pile of bananas. As this most high-ranking and aggressive female began, with absolute confidence, to gather up the fruits, Jomeo stood upright and, with every hair on end, so that he looked twice his already large size, he swaggered in front of her, arms waving, with tight-lipped and furious mien. Passion, probably startled by his temerity (for to her he was still a child) gave back as good as she got and, as he displayed away, seemingly defeated, she began to gather up the scattered bananas. But Jomeo had merely gone to better equip himself for battle. Seizing a large dead branch that was lying nearby he charged back and began to swagger even more impressively, brandishing his weapon. And Passion, while she hung on to the bananas she had already picked up, did not dispute Jomeo's right to the rest.

It seemed then that Jomeo was firmly established on the ladder that would lead, ultimately, to a high position in the dominance hierarchy. But then something happened. One day in 1966, just a few months after his successful confrontation with Passion, Jomeo limped into camp covered with deep wounds. The worst was a great gash across the sole of his right foot which took weeks to heal and which left the toes permanently curled under. We shall never know who or what attacked Jomeo, but whatever it was that happened, it seemed to affect his whole
subsequent career. His blustering displays towards the community females, even the lower-ranking ones, abruptly ended. A year later I observed an incident that typified Jomeo's position in his society. It began when Passion's infant Pom moved too close to Jomeo during feeding. When he hit out at her, warning her to keep her distance, she did not move but, looking towards her mother, then back at the big male, gave a small but defiant-sounding bark. Instantly Passion charged towards Jomeo—and this time, in marked contrast to his performance the year before, he fled before her and, screaming in fright, took refuge up a palm tree. When she began to climb after him, Jomeo, screaming even louder, leapt to another tree, tumbled to the ground, and raced, helter-skelter, away.

By that time, Jomeo had become the heaviest male at Gombe, and his chicken-hearted behaviour made him the laughing stock of his human observers. Even when he was fifteen years old and weighed nearly one hundred pounds, Passion could sometimes put him to screaming flight. And so it might have gone on, perhaps for the remainder of his life, had it not been for his brother, Sherry. The two of them had begun to spend more and more time together after the disappearance of their mother in 1967. Whether she had died, or perhaps decided to remain in some peripheral haunt, we do not know: she and her infant daughter simply stopped appearing in camp and were never seen again. But Sherry and Jomeo became all but inseparable, and in many ways the elder brother acted in loco parentis. When Sherry, during his early attempts to intimidate the females, was threatened—and like all young adolescent males he often was—then Jomeo ran to his defence just as Vodka would have done had she been there. As time went on and Sherry tackled higher- and higher-ranking females, so Jomeo's help was needed more and more often. And on those occasions when he did fight, Jomeo was a chimpanzee to be reckoned with. What matter if his technique was not always the best—he was still at least twenty pounds heavier than
the largest of Sherry's female adversaries, and he inflicted hurt no matter
where
he hit or kicked. When he bodily lifted his victim in the air, then slammed her down, as he so often did, the punishment was horrible to watch. And so, at last, the females began to respect and even fear Jomeo and the days of Passion's supremacy over the huge male were gone for ever.