Peter Dickinson - Eva

She knuckled over to Herman and put her muzzle close to the fist that clasped the leaves. He cuffed her casually away—he was a big young male, strong and not very intelligent, but placid and with less than the usual share of male chimp mischief. Sniff had seen the exchange. He snapped a few twigs from the bush and passed them to Eva, who took them and munched experimentally. The taste was faintly nutty, and all but the young leaves at the tips took a lot of chewing. Not many vitamins there, she guessed. Not much else either. Chimps in the wild, Dad said, used to spend two-thirds of their day looking for food and the rest eating it when they’d found it.

By now the rest of the group had gathered around and was snatching twigs from the tree and trying the bushes nearby. Billy found a bitter one and spat the leaves out with a grunt of disgust, then went and washed his mouth out in the stream. They were used to being fed in their caves soon after they awoke, so they kept making trips back to the crates to see whether breakfast had come yet. Eva was hungry too but waited. She felt it was important not to always be the one who did things first.

In the end it was Sniff. He took Herman by the wrist and led him to the gap in the bushes he and Eva had found earlier. At the opening he turned and beckoned to Eva. Come. She rose and signaled to Lana and Dinks, but it was Abel, who nowadays associated Eva in his mind with amusements and games, who came scampering across. Beth followed, tut-tut-ting, so Lana picked up Wang and came too. Eva turned and led them into the shadows, aware by the sounds behind her that the rest of the group would trail along.

By midmorning they were up in the ravine. They had found figs and a trailing plant with sweet yellow berries and some slow white grubs in a mound of dead leaves—they tasted like shrimp without the sea flavor—and a bog plant with long pale leaves whose midrib you could crunch like celery. They had also begun to learn that trees were not as easy to climb as they looked, especially if you were used to the rigid steel branches welded to the pillars of the Reserve. Herman had one crashing fall into the bushes below and rose bewildered, still clutching the branch that had snapped on him. By now they’d eaten enough for the moment, and it was getting too hot to move, so they rested.

There were two trees of the same kind, with smooth gray many-forked branches, growing low down from opposite cliffs of the ravine and meeting over the rush of water. Two hidden cameras up in the cliffs were trained on the place, but Eva hadn’t needed to coax the others there. They had found it of their own accord and swung themselves up, draping their bodies into crooks and crotches, making a pattern of dark strong shapes against the snaking gray branches. They twitched or scratched or groomed for a while at a neighbor, or moved lethargically to a fresh perch or to join another chimp, but for the most part they stayed still.

Eva sat at the edge of the group and watched them. Deliberately she lived in the moment, refusing to think about what lay ahead. She could not imagine that she would ever be so happy again, so filled with tingling, sparkling peace. Of course it was too hot for scampering around, though the spray from the stream helped, but she could feel that there was more to the stillness of the chimps than that. It was something shared, like a song, the wonder, the amazement, the deep content, the sense of having come home. She did not have to guess but knew, because she could feel the awareness going to and fro among them, shared and real, that they understood what had happened. The part that mattered, anyway. All of them, wide awake, were remembering and recognizing the dream. If nothing else happened, or if everything she and Grog had planned went wrong, this hour, this noon, would have been worthwhile.

In the early afternoon Eva experimented with making herself a nest. She was going to have to teach the others, so it was important to get it right herself first. It was easy, once you’d learned to recognize the sort of branches needed, close and whippy enough to bend and then lace together, holding them in place with your weight. Later still, she seemingly accidentally coaxed the chimps up the southern slope outside the ravine to where the humans had left the day’s rations—mostly plain chimp chow, with enough bananas to go around. Sniff and Billy had their first set-to, not a proper fight, but bluffing and challenging, and then, before anything serious happened, settling down to intense close mutual grooming. They were still at it when the rain started.

It came almost in an instant, a few large drops rattling among the leaves and then a drenching downpour. Everything streamed wet. Twenty dark faces—twenty-one including Tod’s—stared disgusted at the sky, and then the whole group went knuckling rapidly from the hill for the cover of their crates. The crates were gone. Eva had known they would be and had heard earlier that afternoon the thud of rotor blades as a flivver lifted them away. The chimps halted and stared at the blank space in dismay. The stream was roaring now with a dangerous sound, which added to their alarm. Across the valley, below where the crates had been, stretched the electric fence.

The fence had become the biggest problem in the whole expedition. The sponsors nearly called it off because of the cost and difficulty, but everyone had agreed that without one the chimps would probably go roving across the barren mountain to other patches of forest, almost impossible for humans to reach, and be lost completely. Even as it was, the whole program was months late, because the fence had taken so long to build. There should have been sun and sparkling waters, instead of this daylong sauna.

Now the chimps gazed at the fence and the barren slope beyond. To their minds there was no other place the crates could have gone but down there. Several of them knuckled over to the fence to look, naturally enough reaching hands to grip the mesh as they did so. They leaped back with barks of dismay, then gingerly reached forward and tried again, snatching their hands back at the first tingle. Some of them perhaps knew about electric fences, because there were places around the Reserve where possible escape routes had been blocked with charged wire, but they wouldn’t all have explored that far.

The rain, if anything, was heavier now. For a few minutes they scuttered to and fro along the fence, as if hoping for a gap. Sniff, more purposefully, traced the line up the right-hand ridge and over to where it turned and climbed toward the cloud base. He paused at the angle, staring out over the barren, horrible rockscape, all streaming with thousands of individual tiny waterfalls, then snorted and turned away. Eva had followed, interested both in the fence and in Sniff’s reactions, and when he saw her he snorted on a slightly different, negative, note, and led the way back down into the valley. The others were already heading up into the comparative shelter of the trees.

In the ravine the stream was a foaming fawn torrent, but near its lower end rose a stand of broad-leaved palms, with dryish patches beneath them. Here they huddled together, their drenched pelts steaming. Night fell, and suddenly they were in total dark. By the time the rain stopped an hour later, they were all asleep, but Eva, restless, awoke and saw lights moving around. Her first thought was that Dad or some of his helpers had come up to check that they were all right, but then she realized that the lights were too faint and there were far too many of them, hundreds, thousands, blinking their different codes. Fireflies. Of course. She lay for a while, listening to the roar of the stream, and at last fell truly asleep.

Sniff explored the fence in the morning. Eva had expected him to, just as he seemed to have expected her to come around with him. It was another steamy hot day, but the cloud base was higher so that you could see most of the way up the mountain. Even for chimps the climb was stiff going—for the humans who had built the fence it must have been quite a task. Every so often Sniff would stop and gingerly touch the mesh, to check that the current was active all along. At other times he paused and simply stared at the mountainside, all brownish dull rock and scree, glaring with the heavy diffused light, plunging toward the sea. From up here you could see the grove spreading across the cramped plain at the foot of the mountain, the regular green rows mottled brown with disease.