Jane (37 page)

This calmed me, and almost by magic the pain in my shoulder vanished. I felt steady on my feet, and the target came clear in my sight.

I released my fingers from the string and loosed the arrow. The bird was falling, lifeless, before I knew I had hit the mark. I turned and clasped Tarzan in a rough, triumphant embrace, then ran to retrieve my kill.

When I’d taken down my first antelope, Tarzan had run his hand over the animal’s flank, his fingers coming up deep ocher. He had painted my face with the pigment, and I’d worn the markings with quiet pride for days after. The Bowie had been put to a further use—to prepare a garment from that kill to replace my now-shredding native cloth. Tarzan showed me how to skin it and finally soften it using the edge of the blade, along with repeated drubbing on a stone set beside the warm pool.

When the hide was ready, he watched as I clothed myself in it. I moved to hang it around one shoulder like I had the Waziri cotton, but he reached out and pulled it down to my hips. I watched as he draped the thing this way and that, like some wild couturier pinning together his latest French creation. Finally he was satisfied with his placement, which closely approximated the tribal women’s “skirt.” I was speechless. My bosom was entirely uncovered. What shocked me especially in wearing this revealing garment was how unperturbed I was with my nakedness. I quite liked the feel of my breasts preceding me as I moved through the world. There was a bounce and shimmy as I walked, and when I brachiated through the canopy, they stretched and elongated. The sensation when I swam in the warm pool was one of unimaginable sensuality, the finest silk dragged slowly across that delicate skin.

Never had I thought of breasts as anything more than fleshy protuberances to be carefully covered, imprisoned in the hated whalebone corsetry. I could not deny the growing pride in my figure, lithe and strong and quick. I liked it when Tarzan gazed openly at me, whether I lay in repose in the nest or was in motion, running along the jungle floor, chasing through the liana.

I had become shameless. Utterly shameless. And it was, I decided, an excellent state of affairs indeed.

*   *   *

It was Tarzan’s way to swim almost daily. It was the moment in the day that he relished above all. He would stand high on the cliff above the pool nearest the nest. Its edges had sandy shores, but below the falls it seemed to have a bottomless depth. I loved to watch him straighten his back and square his toes on the black rock beneath his feet. There was no hesitation as he raised his arms high above his head, palms touching, and sprang, first rising and then streaking downward, breaking the water with hardly a splash.

This day we descended to the forest floor from the upper nest after our dawn greeting of
kudu.
The anticipation of the crashing falls never failed to excite me, but when we breached the curtain of water and beheld the sight of the loveliest of pools, I stood stunned and horrified.

Floating on the surface and strewn along the black sand beach were hundreds of fish. All dead. Upon examination, their delicate flesh disintegrated under my fingers—as though they’d been boiled alive.

Tarzan stared in dismay.

I remembered the warm tendrils of water the first time I’d bathed here. But this was something more. Volcanism, perhaps. But it was far beyond my capacity to explain.

He snapped off a banana leaf and wrapped a dead fish in it. “We will go to the Waziri.”

*   *   *

Tarzan and I squatted across from Chief Waziri and Ulu in the dirt of the charm doctor’s hut, as women were forbidden in the men’s house. Tarzan had asked the question about the cold pool turning hot, and there had been a very long silence that followed it. I could see Tarzan’s concerned expression. He would be wondering if he had spoken foolishly or somehow offended our hosts. Yet he remained calm, and I watched as he began breathing in rhythm with the chief, keeping his eyes respectfully on the dirt floor in front of him.

“Jaljuma,”
Ulu finally said.

Tarzan touched his hands to the sides of his head, a gesture that said he did not know the meaning of the word. In answer, the charm doctor stood and took hold of the central pole of his hut with both hands, pushing and pulling it with all his strength so that the house shook and small creatures living in the thatched roof fell down to the floor and scurried away.

“Jaljuma,”
Tarzan repeated with certainty. Clearly the word meant the shaking of the ground—an earthquake.

Tarzan had described to me these tremors that he had experienced all of his life. Some had been so small they could be felt only if he was walking on the ground, but some were so mighty they shook the trees, causing the birds to take flight from the canopy, and set the
manu
howling.

“Koho dak-lul ee jaljuma?”
Tarzan asked the headmen. Hot water and ground moving? Chief Waziri and Ulu had honored the ape-man by learning several Mangani words.
Dak-lul,
they knew, meant “pool of water.”

Ulu nodded.

But Tarzan’s expression was mystified. He turned to me. “How does the ground shaking make the cold water of the deep pool hot?” he said to me in English. Then he looked questioningly at Chief Waziri.

The man shook his head and touched his mouth to gesture,
I cannot say.
However, the worried expression on the headman’s face was clear to both of us.

“
Ekumbu lata gomali
Sumbula,” the chief said to the charm doctor.

“They speak of Sumbula, but they know nothing,” Tarzan said to me.

Then the two Waziri stood. The meeting had come to an end. Tarzan rose and I did as well.

Ulu said to him,
“Lata ntembe bongullo.”

Tarzan politely refused the offer of food, and we returned home no wiser than before.

*   *   *

Tarzan had come to trust my skill and wits enough to allow me freedom to move in a narrow circuit around the fig. But he always armed me with the Bowie, and his instinct to protect me assured that my solitary travels did not exceed a quarter of an hour without his gaining sight or sound of me. Unspoken as it was, I knew that Tarzan was bound and determined to make me his equal in self-sufficiency and competent to defend myself.

Despite the growing mastery of his native tongue, he chose oftentimes to be silent. Yet we were constantly “speaking,” employing a subtle language of bodily gestures and the eyes. Using both Mangani and English words. It was rich with nuance and proved altogether satisfying. I had never before conceived of how very verbal was my home society. How little anyone touched each other. These were human behaviors that, before now, I had never considered.
How cold and rigid was the civilized world!
Many times I simply thought a thing—
Where is my quiver
?
I would love a handful of ripe figs
—and there Tarzan would be, holding out the arrows or the fruit. In short order I came to view it as the normal state of affairs.

I had, I realized with astonishment, become a familiar forest dweller, and I found this deeply satisfying.

Our late meal done, we had climbed to the nest and stood together in a happily exhausted embrace. It was Tarzan’s way to fold his arms around me and simply hold me in perfect silence, my head on his chest, his hand over my breast, waiting for our hearts to begin beating in the same rhythm before we kissed and laid ourselves down to sleep.

I saw the foot-long brown viper as I lifted my head, dangling an arm’s length over Tarzan’s right shoulder. Its target was the back of his neck.
No time!
I thought.
No time!

“Down!” I cried, and in the instant he obeyed my command, I snatched his Bowie from its sheath and sliced in a broad, furious arc through the air where a moment before Tarzan had stood. The snake dropped in two pieces onto the nest floor, and both continued to curl and wriggle for a time, I watching in horrified fascination, Tarzan gaping at me with astonishment and gratitude.

The next morning, with little fanfare, we left for the Mangani bower. It occurred to me that while I was forbidden to graduate from Cambridge University, I had passed my courses at Tarzan, Lord Greystoke’s College of Eden.

I could not have been more proud.

The Great Bower

We arrived at the hollowed tree with little time to spare before losing the light. The climb down that had been so perilous for me the first time was now easily accomplished. On the narrow ledge, the monkey’s carcass was nothing but desiccated skin, fur, and bone, a circumstance that I appreciated and one that Tarzan found alarming.

“Tomorrow,” he whispered, “I must find another. They will smell our … presence.”

Just then the last rays of sun blinked out, leaving us in shadows that soon turned to pitch-black. Using my sack holding the journal as our pillow, we lay down and he pulled me into the crescent of his body. The excitement of the next days’ undertaking set my mind afire, but as was the case every night under Tarzan’s stewardship, I slipped effortlessly into slumber.

By the time I awoke, Tarzan had returned with the putrefying corpse of a small anteater. I stifled my repugnance, setting my mind firmly to ignore it, for I would be forced to work directly above the rotting flesh. But the moment I peered out at the scene of the waking Mangani village, all else fell away. I feasted my eyes on the matrons, their infants and the older
balu,
the young females in their own nests, and the males of indeterminate age. I asked Tarzan to enlarge the blind’s hole so that he might stand by my side and answer innumerable questions.

“What is that female’s name? And why does she have two
balu
of nearly the same age?” It was Gamla. Her sister had given birth just after Gamla had, then died. Gamla had taken her sister’s
balu
to raise.
Like Kala had done with Tarzan and Jai,
I thought.

“Who are the two youngsters wrestling on the ground? Are they brothers? Cousins? Unrelated? What do they eat? How far will they travel to forage?”

With the sun pouring down through the trunk, I had picked up the Claytons’ journal, written on the first blank page, “A Study of
Pithecanthropus aporterensus erectus
, the ‘Mangani’ of Gabon,” and was about to begin writing the first of my observations when the trees across the clearing high above us began to shake. I felt a sudden sinking in the pit of my belly, and Tarzan stiffened at my side.

I turned to him and saw the effort of unfathomable restraint harden his features and knots of tension in his neck and shoulders. His fists clenched into solid rock.

I spoke in the gentlest voice. “Tarzan, come away from here.”

I led him like a blind child, for he was blinded by the fury of Kerchak’s presence. He had not even laid eyes on the brute and was yet coiled tight as an overwound spring ready to snap. Strangely, the stories of Kerchak’s three murders left me more curious than terrified. Here, above the bower hidden behind the view hole, I felt safe, immune from his hideous brutality.

“Why don’t you go get us something to eat?” I said. “I’ll be all right here.”

He was too overwrought to speak, but he nodded and climbed dutifully away up the hollow trunk and disappeared.

The moment he was gone, I took my place at the blind. Kerchak had appeared and made his descent to the ground, thieving his breakfast along the way, terrorizing males, females, and
balu
alike.

The morning grooming of and groveling before the brutish tribal chief had begun. How to write about this creature in a scientific manner? Had my objective eye already been sullied by knowledge of Kerchak’s previous actions and character? Or must these be considered no more than hearsay? Did I dare write in this scientific documentation any more than the most dispassionate observation?

What a glorious dilemma to have
—a provocative and unstudied species literally at my feet and a singular partner in the endeavor to boot. I believed myself, at that moment, the luckiest woman in all the world.

Tarzan returned with enough fruit and nuts and sweet baby ferns to last us the day. He had, in his own way—I refrained from asking how—managed to calm himself so substantially that he was a great help with my study, despite Kerchak’s belligerent and overwhelming presence at the bower. It quickly became apparent that the Mangani were a naturally peaceful species. The mothers doted on their young with more physical affection than I had ever witnessed “civilized” women bestowing upon their children. If a Mangani mother moved from one place to another, the little one would ride on her back or chest. Constant grooming of her child’s fur was the most intimate of activities. The teat was at all times available, and as much a source of comfort as nourishment.

Of course my fondest observations were of those qualities that set the Mangani apart from other prehuman primates—their upright posture and their ability to speak. It thrilled me beyond measure that there were words of the language that I recognized when spoken by a member of the tribe, and I rather quickly learned the names of individuals, as the Mangani had the habit of preceding much of their communication with the name of the one to whom they were speaking, and identifying oneself with not a pronoun but a name. “Gamla,
yud b’zan
Kerchak” was clearly “Gamla, come groom me”;
“Eta, yud so kal,”
“Come, little one, drink my milk”; “Kai,
dan-do kob abulu
” was “Kai, stop hitting your brother.” It was all so human, I thought, and yet to see the creatures swinging so effortlessly through the trees with their overlong fingers or clutching a branch with that strange perpendicular toe left no question in my mind that Tarzan’s adoptive tribe was as far from human as it was similar.