The Pursuit of an Unknown Ape
From Chapter 6
““As I turned from the flames and focused on the individual standing in the darkness, I saw he was unusually tall and had spectacularly thick arms, and shoulders that were excessively broad.
“In a moment of self-awareness, I turned the rifle around, but it was sliding in my palm. It was then I began to make out thick hair on the man’s arms. As he lumbered toward me, I didn’t move or breathe. And then, to my amazement—I could see now it was not a man, but some type of unusually tall ape or a gorilla that was astoundingly bipedal and upright—the creature sat down at the fire opposite me on the large log we had placed there across two stones.
“The animal remained sitting for a minute, during which time I tried without much success to discern its features. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The animal cocked its head. Then it stood up without haste, appeared to look at me, turned its back, a portion of its brown coat briefly visible in the fire’s light as it headed toward the woods. Then it disappeared. In seconds, I heard branches snapping one after another, like the sound of fireworks in the waning hours of July 4th, growing farther apart and fainter.
“When I awoke the next morning, I was certain I had dreamed the incident. I remembered looking at the stars and how they had seemed inappropriately wide. ‘That was probably a dream,’ I told myself. ‘Or a delusion. Or it’s exhaustion and the interminable rain and not knowing what will happen that’s getting to me. Maybe I have malaria. Is this what sleeping sickness is? Maybe a snake bit me. Or a spider. And there are sorcerers, after all ….’ A void opened before me, and all manner of wild imaginings flew to fill it. I looked at my arms and pulled up my pant legs to examine my ankles. But it was not the pain of dying that most concerned me; it was losing the chance to carry out the plans I had for my future.
“So, while I was frightened at first, I was also oddly relieved that evening when the creature returned. I was particularly glad to see that it looked about the same as it had the previous night, only perhaps taller. ‘That means I’m not ill,’ I thought. ‘No, I could still be ill. Or I could be well but hallucinating in this one area, or ill but consistent in my hallucinating.’ The beast, which appeared to be three or four feet taller than Stanton—the tallest member of our crew—sat by the fire on the same log as before and rested its colossal arms between legs as thick as tree stumps. ‘What kind of ape, or whatever it is, sits on a log by a fire?’ I thought.
“My companions still had not returned. I considered that, given the animal’s size, there was no shooting or outrunning it. Also, it seemed unafraid. It seemed, in fact, relaxed. So, I forced myself, shaking as I was, to retake my seat. I thought, if it hasn’t attacked, it may not. Perhaps it had already eaten. Maybe it had eaten the whole crew—which would explain both the animal’s languid manner and my colleagues’ continued absence.
“The creature didn’t move when I sat. And as time passed, I tired of waiting. It is possible to be terrified and bored at once, you know—at least, it was for me. In any case, I had been hibernating for days and wasn’t going to stop everything because an ape with about the same dimensions as a polar bear had lodged itself in camp.
“I stood and began cooking. The creature moved its neck and head as if peering around the flames to see what I was doing. I kept looking to my side to watch it, wondering whether it was observing me in preparation for an attack. I pondered what type of teeth it had. I pictured, for a moment, a tiger tearing flesh from a scrawny deer. Maybe, I thought, it’s a vegetarian. The creature pointed at the soup pot, which I was holding over a flame. For a minute, I said nothing and didn’t move.
“‘What, what, you want some of this?’ I said, hardly whispering, and shocked to hear my words. The creature grunted. ‘The thing is clearly nonverbal,’ I thought. Then, ‘But what am I saying? Of course, it can’t talk.’
“Soon, I had to relieve myself and there was no talking myself out of it. ‘I’ll be right back,’ I said, as if there were a need for politeness. Before leaving, I set the soup pot close to the fire.
“When I returned, I found the creature leaning over the fire. Its broad back was to me. It seemed to be moving something back and forth with its trunk-like arm. I approached slowly. ‘What is it doing?’ I wondered. ‘Is it heating a log, so it can hit me with a burning log?’ Then it turned its head, neck, and shoulders and looked back at me, the ladle in one hand, the soup pot in the other. I wondered whether it would smash my brains with the pot. “That would be an impressive use of a tool,’ I thought. ‘But on the other hand, why not use its fist?’
“I came out of my thoughts when the creature ladled the pot’s contents into a bowl and, unblinking, held the dish toward me. Stunned, I neglected to reach for it. The beast looked at me with its roundish, slightly droopy, and penetrating eyes. Then it looked down at the soup, and back at me, until, hesitatingly, I reached up and took the bowl. Then it took some for itself and sat. It lifted the dish and poured the contents into its mouth, a little at a time.
“And so, we ate across from each other like old friends. And suddenly I felt unusually calm. That was about the time I began to question whether I might have created this animal myself, out of my own fear. And then I wondered about my sanity and whether I still had it. And then I was struck by the indignity of it all—that is, if I had indeed become unstable. Was it possible, I thought, I had lost my sanity so easily when so many explorers had had to spend years crossing the jungle, losing all their teeth, and losing their flesh to disease and leopard attacks, failing to find the source of a river, backtracking 1,000 miles based on rumors of ancient ruins that weren’t there when they arrived, and reading letters from home announcing a divorce, or a child’s passing, or the death of a child never met, and going blind from illness, before, toothless and sightless and penniless, they finally succumbed to mental disintegration, to the spirit-crushing weight of it all.
“‘On the other hand, maybe this thing is real,’ I thought. ‘But if that’s the case, there must be some explanation for my companions’ disappearance other than being eaten by my guest, who seems, somehow, better mannered than any of them.’
“After dining, the beast left quickly, disappearing into the trees. I stared into the enveloping darkness, wondering whether I had seen it. Lightning bolts flashed across far off sky, and thunder, mollified by the great distance, continued its low rumble. Again, I touched my forehead and neck for signs of fever. After a while, it was clear the creature wasn’t returning. ‘If only I had documented the event,’ I thought. ‘So stupid of me not to get the camera after it first came.’ And this observation, Jonathan, you may find enlightening: thinking these things, I still didn’t retrieve it.”
From Chapter 1
Some had seen the spotted ape along the Snake River on moonless summer eves. Others had observed it as far north as the Green Swamp, where it taunted campers in the black of night, and in the daytime evaded camera lenses with the proficiency of a ghost.
Once, describing his efforts to find that animal, Uncle Frank recalled meeting another primate. That creature differed in many ways from the spotted ape, but especially in one key area—it was real.
It happened in Africa, he said, and until that moment, I didn’t know he’d traveled there. Of course, there was much I didn’t know, but not because my uncle was secretive. In fact, whenever he managed to visit during my youth, he would invariably recount one of his exploits—some of which, I have come to suspect, happened.
Uncle Frank was hardly nineteen when he traveled by boat, foot, and canoe through the jungles of central Africa. What led him there was unremarkable: a desire for adventure, a thin wallet, and an imagination that fed off the mystery of unknown places.
And then there was, of course, his connection to the natural history museum—Uncle Toby. Toby was not an uncle biologically speaking but had been adopted as such by Frank’s parents well before Frank’s birth infused the title with meaning. Toby worked at the museum and through his position, was friendly with, or at least tolerated by various naturalists, zoologists, museum curators, and individuals of lesser repute.
Toby labored in a remote basement of that sprawling facility where, in return for an unremarkable salary, he cleaned and inventoried items removed indefinitely from public view, and then cleaned them again. Stored in the basement’s many rooms were, among a multitude of other items: Native American grinding stones; ancient tusks; tens of thousands of stuffed birds; an array of stick bugs and beetles in rows of endless cases in endless drawers; and the skull of a rare ape.
Toby seldom left that subterranean world—only for food, and to visit Uncle Frank’s mother, and for occasional card games in which he inevitably lost more money than he had in his wallet.
As it turns out, Toby so little desired to go home (he had neither a wife nor children) that he acquired a second job as a consultant to private zoos and person wanting to impress their friends with a lion in their backyard. “Who would take what’s wild, mysterious, and beautiful and lock it in a cage behind a house?” you might ask. Uncle Toby’s clients would. One once paid him to help procure an albino crocodile, which, according to legend, the man kept in his basement under the glow of artificial lights and which—also according to legend—he employed for purposes too gruesome to mention now.
As for the “different” primate referenced at the outset of this narrative, the obscure animal had nothing to do with the excursion to Africa, at least as far as Uncle Frank understood. He only knew they were in search of an elusive bird for which certain individuals in the U.S. would pay a great deal of money.
When Toby first offered him the job, the youthful Frank asked whether there were really men who would pay so much for a bird. “Do you know how much an Arab sheik will pay for a single white gyrfalcon? $50,000,” Toby said. This was in the early 1960s, understand. Today, the amount would be unimaginable.
After that brief exchange, it never occurred to Uncle Frank to question the morality or legality of the trip or to consider that it might have some purpose other than the stated one: he was simply grateful for the chance to go on an adventure and escape New England.
“You won’t read about this ape,” Uncle Frank told me one day. “Incidentally, I call it an ape, but I’m not certain what it is. It’s well known among a small group of naturalists. But you’ll never hear of it from them, and you won’t find it in the local zoo or Encyclopedia Britannica or even online, and, except for one or two obscure authors of books long out of print, no one has written about it.”
“Are you talking about cryptozoology?” I asked. “Like this was some kind of Sasquatch?”
“No. But remember, Jonathan, in the early 1900s, the Komodo dragon and giant squid were cryptids. That is, until scientists, presented with their bodies, were compelled to recognize their existence. And I haven’t mentioned the okapi, which wasn’t discovered—and when I say ‘discovered,’ I mean by westerners—until 1901. And that only because they had the help of Pygmies, who likely had hunted it for millennia.”
“The okapi?”
“But when I speak about this animal—yes, the forest giraffe—I am not talking about a creature that eludes generations, that everyone wants to find, and that may or may not exist. My creature, he is very difficult but possible to locate. Granted, you would have to go to Africa and trek through jungle—”
“So, it still exists.”
“Yes.”
“But then why does no one capture it?”
“Well, it’s not easy. One expedition may have succeeded. But the fact is, very few people know of it anymore. And those who know—well, they tend not to say so. If you talk about a thing that seems so improbable, though it’s true, people will doubt your sanity. And then there are those who would rather, who would strongly prefer that it not exist. And there are a few conservationists in that part of Africa who try to conceal its existence, encouraging those who learn of it to keep silent. And it doesn’t help that the animal itself is severely standoffish.
“But even setting aside such influences,” he said, “there’s something about human nature that’s a kind of buffer, a perpetual discourager to those who might otherwise venture to believe.”
He paused and looked at me steadily, running a hand over his beard. “But there’s one more thing. I haven’t told you the most important point. You’ll keep this between us?”
“I always do,” I said.
“I know how you look at me sometimes. But you see, it may be here as well, in this country. In fact, in New England.”
I scratched my head. Searching the room, a photo on the desk caught my eye: there was my uncle, thirty or so years earlier, and a tallish, rake-thin black fellow, each man with an arm around the other’s shoulder, grinning, and behind them, a waterway of some kind, perhaps a river.
Through the windows behind his desk, I observed the yard stretching to the edge of the ravine, evergreen trees beginning to sway in the strengthening gusts, and two or three boulders sitting alone in the fading grass. It was one of those late fall days when a cold grayness blankets the earth, tree branches claw at the windows, and you wonder whether there ever was a thing called summer.