John Sayles - The Anarchist's Convention and Other Stories

Lisa pulls on her still-damp underpants, tugs on the two pairs of thick hiking socks, all the while scanning the trees for the ape. She pulls a sleeveless undershirt over her head, struggles into her fatigue pants and jacket. The cloth is dry but stiff with sweat, her skin begins to itch immediately. She works the leather of her heavy waterproof boots till she can jam her feet into them, fingers aching as she pulls the laces tight. Lisa wraps her thick utility belt around her waist, straps on her watch. She smears bug repellant on her face, neck and arms. She uncases the binoculars and looks into the treetops through them.

Warden crawls out of the tent, sleepy-eyed, and makes a passing grab at her bottom. He feels only the extra notepads in her back pocket. He is spotted with dried, grayish dabs of zinc-oxide ointment covering his skin eruptions. He squats and begins to tinker with the backpacks. Lisa moves away from the tent, searching above with the glasses.

Flummmph!

A stream of urine and loose, yellowish feces cascades onto Lisa from above. Esau hoots, shakes the branch he hangs from violently, then swings off with the sun at his back.

"Oh. Oh shit. Oh my God. Oh — "

Lisa is splattered, the binoculars dripping, she grimaces and looks down her front.

"Oh my God. Oh look, it's, look, all in my hair — "

Warden pokes at a splat of feces with a stick. "Mostly fructivorous," he says. "But probably some insects and birds' eggs. Got to get his protein somewhere."

June ro — Subject ape's reaction to the presence of L. and me is what we expected. Since we began following him night and day, ape has remained in trees, traveling by brachiation and feeding on fruit and bark in the treetops. Ape expresses aggression towards us in various manners of display:

i. Staring — Ape will cease brachiation and stare at us, body rigid.

s. Hitting away — Fanning the air in a shooing gesture towards us.

3. Attacking — Directed rush falling just short of contact with us, hair erect, movement exaggerated and jerky.

4. Threat sounds — These often accompany the other three displays:

a. Kiss-squeaks

b. Raspberry

c. Loud and repetitive'lork' noises

d. Exaggerated chomping

e. 'Ahoor' howls

f. Barks

g. Grumphs

h. Combinations of these

So far subject is the only Schiffman's we've come in contact with. Ape travels and feeds within a range bordered by the river that is overlapped by the ranges of at least two bands of gibbons. Ape begins feeding around 7 a.m., continues for roughly two hours, then rests for two to three hours in a tree. Feeding and brachiation then resume until sundown. Ape does not travel at night, sleeps high in a favored lodge tree. Covers 4,000 to 20,000 feet in a day. Hopefully ape will soon be fully habituated to our presence, and our observation will have no effect on his behavior.

The ape is swinging away, silhouetted in the sun, zigging and zagging rapidly through the forest canopy. Warden struggles below, hacking wearily with the machete, now and then switching it to his left hand for a few strokes. Lisa offers to take the point for a bit, but no, he says, she can't cut fast enough, they'd lose him. Sweat stinging his eyes, tramping over the swampy, root-tangled section of forest, Warden grinds his teeth and tries to keep the ape in sight, tries to transfer all his resentment for it into his machete stroke. It won't keep still. Warden is sucking wind through his ears, the vegetation glows phosphorescent green before him, throbbing in and out of focus, a bright scarlet edge outlining its form. He is dizzy, he can't feel his legs. He glances back at Lisa. Her GI shirt is soaked, she moves in his wake with solemn concentration. Warden stumbles, stops.

"What's the matter?"

"You've got to rest, Lisa. I don't like your color."

"I'm all right. I can go on."

"I can't have you collapsing on me." Warden tries to gulp air as silently as possible. "He's not going to come down and help me carry you back to camp."

"I can go on."

"We can catch up with him later. If you could see the way your eyes look, all — "

"Honey, what's that on your arm?"

It is a green leech, fat as a little finger. A shudder runs through Warden, he fights not to cry out.

"Get it off me, quick! The grease, where's the grease, dammit!"

Lisa pulls the tube of thick grease from her back pocket, looking at the pulsing leech as if it were a specimen on a glass slide. She seems to be taking her time.

"Come on, come on!"

Lisa squeezes the tube till the leech is completely covered. She scans the treetops, waiting. The ape has stopped and is feeding just up ahead.

"He sure likes his privacy."

"Privacy is a human concept, Lisa. Only a human concept. He's afraid. When he stops being afraid he'll stop running. How are you doing?"

"Huh?"

"Have you got your wind back yet?"

"I said I was all right. You sure you don't want me to do the machete for a while?"

Warden realizes he is still gripping the machete tightly, his knuckles squeezed white. "Is that thing ready yet?"

Lisa flicks the glob of grease and insect off his arm with her finger. "Maybe," she says, "the less we press him the less he'll run. He's got to eat sometime."

Warden begins to contradict her, then holds still. Eating wasn't only a human concept.

By the second semester they were together Lisa was comfortable with her position in between the faculty and the student body. It was all right for Warden to bring her to get- togethers among the younger faculty, and the men would gather around her whenever she came. But Warden decided he didn't like parties much anymore. Lisa refused to give up her student friends, which put him in an awkward position, and she had grown a little too familiar with the department staff. Not that Warden wanted her creeping around in awe of his colleagues, it was just — appearances, maybe, just an un easy feeling he got about how quickly she had adapted to the role of faculty girlfriend.

There were some rough moments. Over spring break Lisa went home and while she was there slept with an old highschool friend. Nothing important, she told Warden, just one of those things. He didn't like to see her acting so coldblooded about it when he knew something must be disturbing her pretty badly to pull a stunt like that on him. And shortly after that he got involved in a thing with a woman in the Psych Department, nothing really, nothing worth telling Lisa about.

Psych was feuding with Biology again and the Environmentalists wanted their own department. There was pressure from every direction, and Warden felt vaguely irritated much of the time. He had to get tough with Lisa in her studies, she'd been slipping. "If you're ever going to amount to anything," he told her, "anything more than just another good-looking lab assistant, you'd better get on the stick right now." She worked hard, he had to admit that, it left her very little time for parties or her other friends and she wasn't able to go home for midsemester break. The time with just each other was good, Warden felt, they needed it.

Some rough times. He had a long article to write, two survey courses to hold down, plus the strain of having to truck out to the zoo three times a week to do observation for his department head's book on the group dynamics of baboons. It wore at his patience and there were a lot of arguments with Lisa. He had her soccer star in class, her exboyfriend, who was something of a bust academically. Once, grading a really awful paper the boy had done on sexual dysfunction in captive animals, Warden very nearly wrote "You should talk" on it. That was the kind of mood he was usually in. It was a wonder he and Lisa survived the semester intact.

Behavioral Observation HamadryasBaboon (Papio hamadryas)