His mother didn’t like the story because it wasn’t Christian. But for the young Malakai it had created a certain longing. His father, after all, had been a white man, and he had gone west, to America, where all men were rich, and left him to starve with his mother and her people. He dreamed that one day his father would return, and lavish gifts upon him, although his mother said it would never happen.
Yet Malakai was the descendent of both brothers. Shouldn’t some of the wealth fall to him?
Maybe one day.
And at last he was seeing the descendants of the third brother. How amazingly like men they were. According to the story, these were his cousins.
He wondered if a white man or a black man could make a son with a gorilla mother.
Malakai almost grinned, remembering that childish thought. Looking back, he knew that the story of the three brothers was just another deplorable remnant of European colonialism. Gone was his youthful naïveté.
He turned back to camp to get his things and found Clancy was awake, scribbling in a little book of some sort in the dim gray light of dawn. Like him, she had probably been stripped of her phone, computer, and such.
“Good morning,” she said.
“It is,” he said, surprising himself.
“Do you like sleeping outdoors?” she asked.
“I once swore I would never do it again,” he told her. “When I came to America, I raised my fist and promised myself that from now on I would sleep in soft beds and on clean sheets.”
“Sort of like Scarlett O’Hara,” Clancy said.
“The rich woman who was so sad to lose her black slaves?”
“I guess that was inappropriate,” she said, coloring a little. “I just had that image of her raising her hand, and swearing she would never go hungry again.”
Malakai shrugged. “I swore that, too,” he said. “And yet here I am, sleeping on the ground, and hungry.”
“And agreeing that it’s a good morning,” she added.
“All right,” he said. “Try not to become irritating.”
He gathered up his things as she continued writing, and then set off. Clancy looked up, and called after him.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Where do you imagine?” he replied. “I’m tracking the apes.”
“You’re not going to wait for Corbin?”
“No, I think not,” he said.
“Fine,” she said, stowing her notebook and standing up. “I’m coming with you.”
He shrugged and waited for her to prepare. Then they went down the embankment, and he found the trail again.
“Did you hear anything last night?” he asked. He kept his voice pitched low.
“I thought I did,” she replied. “An orang, maybe. It might have been nothing.”
“No,” he replied. “I heard it, too.”
They walked in silence for a bit.
“I don’t know very much about orangutans,” he admitted. “My experience has been mostly with African apes.”
Clancy was frowning, and it seemed in danger of becoming her permanent expression. The happy, babbling girl of yesterday seemed gone—perhaps forever.
One can only hope, he mused.
“There’s an old zookeeper’s joke,” she said.
“Oh, yes?”
“One night while locking up, the zookeeper accidentally drops his keys in front of the gorilla cage. Next morning, the keys are still there, so he picks them up. Another time he drops his keys in front of the chimps. They all start screaming. He looks down, sees that he has dropped his keys, and picks them up. The next night, he drops his keys in front of the orangutan cage. The next morning the keys are gone, the orangutan is gone, and so is every other animal in the zoo.”
“Not exactly a joke, is it?” He smiled. “So they’re smart.”
“It’s more that they’re deliberate,” she said. “They take their time. They don’t freak out the way chimps do. They are really good problem-solvers.”
“Do you suppose it was an orangutan that organized the—I don’t know—prison break?”
“Orangs are sort of solitary,” she said. “They don’t live in social groups the way chimps and gorillas do. But sure, maybe. I mean, none of this makes any sense to me. Sure, some apes could escape from a zoo or shelter or whatever. But everything they did after that—and the way they’re behaving now—it’s completely out of the box. I almost feel like there have to be people involved in leading them.”
“People in ape suits?”
She actually smiled at that.
“I don’t know about that. But apes can be trained to do things way outside of their natural behavior. What I would like to know is what they were being taught in that shelter.”
“Well, that’s a hypothesis,” Malakai said.
“You’re making fun of me,” she said, accusingly.
“No,” he replied. “I was thinking along those lines myself. And I’m also wondering what our contractor friends have to do with all of this.”
“They’re a little scary, aren’t they?” Clancy said.
He nodded.
“You’re scarier,” she said.
“And yet here you are,” he replied.
“Yeah,” she said. “Here I am.”
They had been on the trail about fifteen minutes when Malakai’s walkie-talkie started squawking, demanding his attention. By that time they were well up the southwest slope of Mount Tamalpais. The trail continued along the ground, and in some cases the chimps had left the trees entirely to traverse grassy meadows.
He took out the walkie-talkie and answered it.
“Youmans,” he said.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Corbin demanded, his voice thin and metallic on the small speaker.
“Hunting for apes,” Malakai said.
“Well, get back down here,” the mercenary demanded. “We’ve got three more bodies.”
“Your men shot them?”
“No. These had old wounds. Probably got them in the fight on the bridge, and just now died of them.”
“Are they near the others?”
“No, down the other way. Almost to the beach.”
Malakai considered that for a moment.
“I’m going to follow this trail out,” he said. “Then I will be back down.”
He shut off the transceiver, and stuck it back in his pocket.
“Three apes died of old wounds, all in one place,” he mused.
“Chimps have been known to drag dead bodies around,” Clancy said. “If they had several dead, they might have put them together.”
“Or they might have moved them miles, to make us look in the wrong place.”
“That’s—”
“Un-ape-like,” he said. “Yes, I know.” He slowed to a stop. They had been crossing a field, but now they came back to a tree line—and there the tracks ended. The last ones were quite fresh.
“They traveled on the ground while it was dark,” he said. “Then they took to the trees.”
“Chimps stay in trees at night,” she replied, giving him a strange look. “They would be terrified of traveling on foot in the dark.”
“Yes, you’ve already noted that. But if they had to travel, it would be best way. You can’t swing from branches you can’t see. And as well, they left us this nice trail—and I guarantee you that if we keep going in this direction, we won’t see a single ape.”
“So you think they’re deliberately misleading us?”
“I do,” he replied.
“This gets weirder all the time,” Clancy said.
Caesar wondered briefly if it had been a mistake to send Koba back to Maurice’s group. The one-eyed chimp was good in a fight, and it would be good to have him there to protect the wounded. The thing was, Caesar hoped to avoid a fight, and Koba was somewhat impulsive. He had attacked Will, after all.