Peter Dickinson - Eva

Sniff crossed last. His weight on the projecting butt of the branch, with no one to hold the inner end steady, dislodged it from the p’ile of boulders, and as he let go, the spring of the fence tossed it back inside the enclosure.

While the two mothers calmed themselves by fussing over their babies, Sniff and Eva crouched side by side in the howling wind and studied the route ahead. The first part didn’t look too difficult, a longish clamber across a slope of steeply tumbled boulders, but beyond that a rib of the mountain hid the next stretch and beyond that the angle became almost vertical, with the immensely steep slope of trees starting at the rim of a sheer cliff and rising into the cloud base above.

Sniff turned his head and grunted to the others to follow. When they paid no attention he went around and chivvied them from the other side until they began, reluctantly, to move. As soon as he let them alone they sat down and returned to their babies. In the end it was Eva who had to find a route, while Sniff herded the other two along from behind.

By nightfall they were barely halfway there. In the dead ground beyond the mountain rib they had found a sheer-sided cleft, like a great sword-cut into the mountain, only about thirty meters wide but impossible to cross. There were ledges here and there that they could have worked their way along, but none of them seemed to match with ledges on the opposite side. They explored for a crossing almost till dusk, and spent a bad night in a sheltered gully. They ate chow and drank from a pool.

Eva awoke the next morning in a blaze of light. The storm had cleared the cloud rack away and the sun was shining almost straight into their sleeping place. The sea was rumpled still, but a dark clear blue under a paler, clearer sky. A lot of the grove had been smashed flat. The moorings of the airboat seemed to have held, but one of the flivvers was on its side and the old factory by the harbor had lost most of its roof. Humans will be busy, Eva thought. Wonder how long till they miss us.

She heard the howler two hours later, very faint because by now they were farther up the mountain, climbing toward the point where, now that the cloud base was gone, they could see that the cleft seemed to close. They reached the place at last and made their way down, still with immense difficulty. It was almost sunset before they were in among the trees.

YEAR THREE,

MONTH ONE,

DAY FIVE

Living wild . . .

Hunted, in hiding, wary from dusk to dawn . . .

But living free.

Wang died on the mountain. It had happened on the first day of freedom. When Eva had left to explore their refuge with Sniff, Wang had been alive, huge eyes listless, panting, and Lana had huddled possessively over him, not letting anyone near. There had been the choice then to give up, for Eva to make her way somehow down the mountain, find Dad and Gerda, the expedition vet, get them back up (but how? Wind still too strong for the airboat, flivver useless so close to this kind of slope), and by then Lana would be hiding, refusing help . . . It would never have worked, Eva kept telling herself afterward. It was probably too late anyway—once small chimps started to go, even in the Pool, you usually lost them. Months, even years after, Eva would find herself pausing in what she was doing, because the same old arguments had started running through her mind, with the same old guilt and sickness in her heart. By the time she and Sniff came back, Wang was dead.

Lana had carried the body all next day, grooming and cradling and inspecting it at first, but by the third evening she was just trailing it around by a leg, like a child with a doll. Eva managed to keep herself awake that night. In the pitch-dark, moving by feel, she stole the body away and buried it under some stones she had laid ready while she could still see. When Lana woke she was puzzled, and searched around in a vague way but then let Eva groom her and be groomed in turn. Sometimes during the next few days she would seem to remember what she had lost and start searching and calling, but in a few minutes she’d give up and go back to whatever she’d been doing before. At no time did she seem to tell Eva, by look or touch, that she thought what had happened was in any way Eva’s fault. Before the adventure was over she had completely forgotten. None of that helped.

What did help was having to stay alive, and free. Finding enough food took up most of the day. There seemed to be less fruit here than there’d been in the enclosure, perhaps because it was farther from the cocoa groves and so there was less chance of crop trees accidentally seeding up here and growing wild. Inside the wood you found that it wasn’t one sheer slope but a series of natural terraces that had trapped enough soil for the trees to get and keep their foothold, so the floor of the wood was like huge steps, a narrow strip of soil slanting up to a section of naked cliff, and then more soil before the next cliff. To move from strip to strip you climbed a tree. A lot of trees and branches were down after the typhoon, and in places the tangle was too dense for even chimps to find a way through. There were two streams, which joined near the bottom of the wood and fell over the final cliff in a narrow smoking fall. Clinging to one of the last trees down there, you could look out over the sea and the harbor and watch the flivver and the airboat rise and come and start looking for you.

On their first afternoon of exploration Eva and Sniff had seen a group of humans, tiny with distance, standing on the far side of the great cleft. From their attitudes they seemed more interested in the cleft itself than the wood. She guessed they were arguing whether the chimps could have crossed it. There were other patches of trees scattered across the rugged slopes of the mountains, any of which might hide the fugitives, and all of them desperately difficult to search in the damage after the typhoon. The humans would have to land a team from flivvers, somehow. It would be tricky, but they might manage it on the other side of this wood, where the steplike terraces ran out across the bare rock of the mountain face. Eva thought they wouldn’t even try that until they found something to show that this was the wood the chimps were hiding in. The expedition hadn’t brought any special hunting equipment with them, but they could send for it. What would they use? Heat sensors? Infrared-detectors? Something like that, but it would take them a day or two to realize they weren’t going to find the chimps without, and then several more days to get the stuff flown out. By then, if Grog was right, other things should have started happening .. .

You could hear the buzz of the flivver long before it came past, and freeze. Eva made a point of giving the warning bark whenever she heard it, deliberately sharing her nervousness with the others. She didn’t want them getting used to it. The airboat was more of a problem because if the wind was right it could turn its engines off and drift along the mountainside in silence. Feeding chimps created a good deal of commotion in the treetops, bending and breaking branches to get at the tender leaves at the tips and generally crashing around. The typhoon had battered the trees enough for the damage the chimps did not to show, but in the hour or so before the evening rain, when the wind blew steadily from the northeast, Eva kept a lookout in that direction while she fed.

The airboat came past as regularly as if it had been running on schedule, last call before tying up for the night. Eva would bark a warning, which Sniff would repeat, and the chimps would freeze, invisible among the leaves, and watch it float by. It passed overhead at other times too. On the second morning it hovered for a while above the cliff beyond the wood. Objects dropped from the cabin at regular intervals. Eva could see the people up there in silhouette, holding things to their faces—binoculars? A shape changed, became familiar—a long-lensed camera. When the airship had gone and she went to see what had fallen, she found the dark ledges flecked with colored spots. Bananas, oranges. They would photograph them and check next pass to see how many had gone. If all the fruit vanished into the wood, that would almost certainly mean chimps had gotten them. She did her best to warn Sniff with grunts and grimaces, and he got the message and refused to let any of the others out of the wood. They were all, in any case, by now infected with Eva’s wariness of humans and other doings, and had enough to eat among the trees.