Through a Window (25 page)

The frequency with which a male displays is, of course, an important factor in determining his position in the male hierarchy. Jomeo's frequency had dropped to almost nil after the horrible injury to his foot six years earlier. But now, because of his new self-confidence, he began to display much more often. Poor Jomeo—I sometimes wonder whether those early performances of his, intended to strike fear into the hearts of the beholders, were as amusing to the chimpanzee spectators as they were to us humans! He had so much to learn when it came to technique. Once, for example, he tried to enhance a fast downhill charge by rolling a huge rock. But instead of bounding noisily down the slope, adding a whole new dimension to Jomeo's performance, it remained firmly embedded in the hard ground. Any other male would have charged on regardless. Not Jomeo. He came to a complete halt, turned around, and heaved and pushed on the offending rock. Eventually he pried it from its resting place—but to no avail. It was much too big, and after rolling lazily for a couple of feet it came to a halt. Jomeo, the effect of his display now completely ruined, ran on, in a half-hearted way, without it.

Another time as he charged towards a group of females and youngsters, he tripped over a tree root and fell, sprawling in the undergrowth. The females, instead of screaming and fleeing in the way that must be so immensely satisfying to a young male, had quietly climbed nearby trees and, by the time he had picked himself up, were watching him from safety.

Funniest of all (from our point of view) was "the case of the recalcitrant sapling." It was a small tree, with a nice leafy top that would have looked good if flailed and brandished by a charging
male. But when Jomeo seized hold of it as he ran past, he failed either to snap it off or to uproot it. And so, as with the boulder, he interrupted his performance to struggle with it. After about thirty seconds he finally managed to uproot the little tree. By then it was quite clear (to me) that it was far too large to make an effective prop. But Jomeo, having won his battle with it, was obviously determined to use it anyway. He charged on, dragging it tenaciously behind him. At least, that is what he tried to do. But it had so many side branches that one or other repeatedly became entangled in other vegetation: three times, before he finally abandoned his display, Jomeo was forced to move backwards, hauling at the sapling with both hands.

Gradually though, with the passing of the months, Jomeo's displays improved and he developed an impressive and powerful technique that was all his own.

It was the same when it came to hunting: at first Jomeo, though dead keen usually bungled the job. There was the time, for instance, when he tried to catch an adult blue monkey. The chase was fast and furious and the monkey, in desperation, took a flying leap to a neighbouring tree. Jomeo, close on its heels, likewise launched himself into space. But he never made it. "Halfway across he simply ran out of jump," David Bygott (who observed the incident) told me afterwards. Poor Jomeo: he crashed to the ground some thirty feet below, and for a chimp as heavy as Jomeo, that is some fall. He stayed quite still for a few moments, undoubtedly dazed and probably hurting. Then he stood up, gazed after his rapidly vanishing midday meal, and plodded off to eat figs.

When hunting, the Gombe chimpanzees mostly capture infant and juvenile prey, and typically they make heavy weather when it comes to killing an adult monkey. Thus when Jomeo captured a full-grown colobus male it was not surprising that it took him quite some while of hard and strenuous biting, flailing and hitting before his victim lay, limp and dead, across a
branch. Then, before Jomeo could enjoy even a single mouthful of his hard-won prize, the other senior males converged on him and snatched it away. It was Richard Wrangham who watched that drama, and I remember him telling me the rest of the story afterwards:

"He sat and watched for a bit as the others divided up his prey. They were all excited and screaming and he was very quiet. He didn't join the females and youngsters to beg for a share. He just went and licked a few leaves below, where blood had splattered down. And then he wandered away. I almost felt like crying."

As time went on there were other reports of Jomeo losing his prey to higher-ranking males—once even to Gigi—and we all began to feel sorry for him. But we noticed too that he very often disappeared during or after a hunt. And we began to wonder whether, perhaps, he sometimes managed to catch a small monkey during the confusion and sneak away with it before any of the others noticed. One day, after catching an infant which was then taken from him by Figan, Jomeo disappeared as usual. And then, about two hours later, he was found, sitting by himself, with a hugely distended stomach, and clutching the remains of a bushbuck fawn. Clearly it wasn't always necessary to feel sorry for Jomeo!

But all the time, despite his new accomplishments—his unchallenged authority over the females, his improved display techniques, and his increasing skill in hunting—Jomeo continued to be plagued by countless small indignities. All of which, of course, increasingly endeared him to us. There was, for instance, the day that I watched him as, slowly and with an air of intense concentration, he inched his way up a tall tree. All morning it had rained and the trunk, gleaming like polished ebony, was very, very slippery. At last the lowest branch, some twenty-five feet above the ground, was within the climber's reach—but even as he made a grab for it he began to slip. Faster and faster he plummeted earthwards, clutching the treacherous trunk tightly
but in vain. There was a thud as the Gombe heavyweight reached the ground. For a few moments he sat perfectly still, staring at the trunk before him. Then, after gazing up into the branches above, he slowly rose to his feet and, with great determination, began the difficult ascent a second time. No fairground enthusiast ever struggled up a greased pole with more persistence—and this time he made it. For the next hour he feasted on tender green leaves and by the time he was ready to descend, the trunk had dried out in the afternoon sun and he reached the forest floor with dignity.

Then there was the colobus monkey incident. The adult male colobus are extremely brave in defence of their females and young. Even when chimpanzees are hunting in groups these colobus males will charge and mob them fearlessly and usually succeed in driving them away. Perhaps this is because, although the colobus are smaller, they have long sharp canines and they almost always try to bite the hunter's genitals. Thus it is not unusual to see two or more chimpanzees leaping away through the branches with loud screams, hotly pursued by a couple of infuriated colobus monkeys. But what happened to Jomeo one day was utterly unusual. He was sitting, peacefully feeding on fruit and minding his own business when a large male colobus assailed him—out of the blue as it were. Launching himself from a branch above, the monkey landed almost on top of Jomeo and hit at his head, uttering the curious high-pitched threatening call of his kind. Jomeo, surprised out of his wits, gave a single startled yell and fled!

"And who but Jomeo," laughed Richard one evening, "would be put to flight by the sight of three baby porcupines rustling noisily and busily through the dry grass!"

Even an event that was essentially tragic ended by making Jomeo more of a comic figure than ever. Somehow he hurt his left eye. For more than two weeks the lid remained tightly closed, quantities of fluid dripped out, and it was obviously very
painful. We gave him antibiotics in bananas and eventually the wound healed, but it left him not only with impaired vision, but also with an eye half-white from scar tissue. He should have looked sinister—indeed, sometimes he did, especially when he peered out from thick foliage in the dim light of the forest. More often though it gave him a somehow rakish appearance. Poor Jomeo—not only the character but even the appearance of a clown.

Despite the fact that he eventually established his dominance over the adult females, Jomeo almost never showed any interest in bettering his position
vis a vis
the other males. He did have one long standing rivalry with Satan, who was about the same age as himself. We saw the first signs of this in 1971 when they were late adolescents and sometimes swaggered at each other with bristling hair when competing for food or during the excitement of a reunion. At that time it seemed that their social rankings were about equal, and these confrontations usually ended with the two rivals, grinning hugely, embracing one another. After a couple of years, though, Satan, after winning a few fights, asserted his dominance over the bigger male—unless Sherry was there to back his brother, in which case Satan, confronted by the fraternal team, would give way.

When Sherry began to challenge the lower-ranked of the senior males his displays were tempestuous, daring and imaginative. He would emerge suddenly and unexpectedly out of the bushes hurling huge rocks and flailing branches and fronds with such fiery zeal that the senior males would often get out of the way—thus boosting his ego so that he challenged his elders more and more often. Whenever his impetuosity got him into trouble, Jomeo—if he was there, and he almost always was—would charge over and display impressively in support of his younger brother. It seemed that Sherry was all set to rise to a high social position and there were many who predicted that, before too long, he would topple Figan—the reigning alpha at that time.

But then came a decisive defeat. Satan, exasperated by a long series of the younger male's disruptive displays, finally turned on him and attacked him fiercely, inflicting numerous wounds. Jomeo, as usual, rushed to Sherry's assistance and, although he did not actually attack Satan, displayed so violently around the conflict that Satan turned from his victim in order to chase the elder brother away. This almost certainly saved Sherry from even worse injuries.

That was a historic fight, for it brought to an end Sherry's bid for high social rank. After that, although he did sometimes fight the senior males, it was usually in the context of meat eating or sex—when, in other words, there was some immediate, material reward. But for the remaining few years of his life he never again strove for a high position for its own sake. Thus Sherry reacted to adversity rather as had brother Jomeo to that unseen attack ten years before. How different, these two brothers, from those males whose heroic struggles took them to the top and kept them there at whatever cost to themselves: Mike, Figan and Goblin.

But what of Jomeo's exploits with the fair—or should I say pink—sex? If a male can ensure adequate genetic representation in future generations, this will more than compensate for any apparent shortcomings in other spheres. Alas, in this respect too Jomeo was, by and large, a failure. It is even possible that he never fathered a single child. He lacked the nerve to compete aggressively with the other males in the excitable groups that surround popular pink females, he lacked the imagination to seize sudden opportunities for clandestine matings when his superiors were otherwise engaged, and he lacked the necessary social skills to persuade or bully desirable females to accompany him on romantic interludes
a deux.
Indeed, in this last respect, his record was dismal: he often tried to lead females away but usually he failed. To the best of our knowledge he only went on fifteen consortships in fifteen years and on almost all those occasions the females managed to escape from him before that crucial time during the last days of their swellings. Worst of all—oh poor Jomeo—seven of his ladies were, when he took them off, already pregnant with the offspring of other males.

Nevertheless, despite his idiosyncrasies and failures—or perhaps because of them—Jomeo eventually became a respected senior citizen in his community. He had so little interest in the power struggle of the high-ranking males that he posed no threat to those for whom status was of supreme importance. And so Jomeo was chosen as best friend, first by Figan (after Humphrey's death) and then by Goblin. And although both these dominance-oriented males had found it necessary to terrorize Jomeo and utterly subjugate him prior to accepting his friendship, once he had convinced them of his utter subservience he reaped the benefits conferred by alpha males on their acolytes—some protection from other senior males, and a certain degree of tolerance in feeding and sexual contexts.

Jomeo came to represent security for the young males, too. Often, during their early journeyings away from their mothers, it was old Jomeo to whom they turned for companionship, sensing his benign tolerance. Once I followed as he wandered from one food patch to another with no less than five adolescent males trailing peacefully in his wake. During the five hours that I was with them I did not see him threaten any of them—not even when they fed very close beside him. There was one time when Jomeo stood upright and reached high above him for a length of succulent vine that he spied coiling around a branch. No sooner had he pulled it down and commenced to chew on one end than Beethoven approached, took hold of a piece of it—where it bifurcated at the end—and began to chew as well. Granted Beethoven was his favourite, but even so I was amazed that the big male made not the slightest gesture of protest.

I have wondered so often about Jomeo's fascinating character, his strange lack of any sort of dominance drive. If he had not been wounded as an adolescent, would he have gone on to
become a high-ranking male? Probably not for, after all, his brother Sherry showed the same inability to cope with adversity. Was this a genetic, inherited trait? While this is possible, I suppose, it seems far more likely that it stemmed from the personality, the child-raising techniques, of their mother, Vodka. It is indeed unfortunate that I did not know Vodka well—she was too shy. But so far as we could tell she was a very asocial female, spending most of her time wandering, with her family only, in peripheral parts of the range. Prof, son of asocial Passion, has never shown any sign of wanting to dominate his fellows either. On the other hand, Figan and Goblin, who rose to be top-ranked males and who never accepted defeat for long, had mothers who were not only dominant, but also highly social—Flo and Melissa.