Through a Window (6 page)

T
HE GOMBE STREAM
Research Centre grew from small beginnings to become one of the most dynamic field stations for the study of animal behaviour in the world. The first two research assistants joined me in 1964. It was not long before we found that there was more work than we three could manage, even though Hugo, my husband, was there to help as well. And so we sought additional funds to employ additional students. Almost all of them fell under the spell of Gombe and repaid our faith in them by helping us to collect more and ever more information about the lives of the chimpanzees.

By 1972 there were sometimes as many as twenty students, for by then we were studying not only chimpanzees, but baboons as well. There were graduate students from a variety of disciplines, mainly anthropology, ethology and psychology, from universities in the United States and Europe. And there were undergraduates too, from the interdisciplinary human biology programme at Stanford University and from the zoology department of the University of Dar es Salaam. The students slept in separate miniports—little aluminium huts hidden away among the trees near camp—but everyone gathered together in the mess for meals. This was a functional cement and stone building down on the beach, built by my old friend George Dove, at whose camp on the Serengeti Hugo and I had stayed when Grub was a baby.

George had built offices, too, and a kitchen with a wood stove. And he had installed a generator so that we could have some electricity: this meant that we could work more easily at night and also enabled us to operate a deep freeze that made catering less of a nightmare. George even built a little stone house for us to use as a dark room.

Life at the research centre was busy. In addition to the main business of observing the animals and collecting data, there were weekly seminars at which we discussed research findings and planned ever better ways of collating the information from the various studies. There was a spirit of cooperation among the students, a willingness to share data, that was, I think, quite unusual. It had not been easy to foster this generous attitude—initially many of the graduate students were, understandably, reluctant to contribute any of their precious data to a central information pool. But clearly this had to be done if we were to come to grips with the extraordinarily complex social organization of the chimpanzees and document as fully as possible their life histories. I was helped not only by many of the students themselves, but also by Dave Hamburg, head of the department of psychiatry at Stanford University. It was he who had brought in the human biology students. And although these young people seldom stayed more than six months at Gombe, they had been so well prepared before they arrived in Africa that their contributions were very valuable.

Most important of all for the long-term future of the research at Gombe, though we did not know it then, was the training of the Tanzanian field staff. From 1968, when one of the students fell over a cliff while following chimps, and tragically lost her life, it had become the custom for each student to be accompanied in the bush by a local Tanzanian. Then, if there was an accident, one of the two could go for help. Gradually these men had acquired knowledge that made their assistance invaluable: they knew all the chimpanzees by name and could identify them for
newcomers, and they were experts at finding their way around the rugged terrain. By 1972 they had begun to collect data themselves—for example, marking the travel route of a target chimpanzee on a map, noting who he or she associated with during the day, and identifying the various food plants that were eaten. The graduate students relied quite heavily on this pool of data, and so they worked hard to ensure that the field assistants were well trained. From time to time I held seminars in Kiswahili, the language used across East Africa, during which we discussed various aspects of chimpanzee and baboon behaviour, and I talked about other non-human primates in different parts of the world. And so the field staff gradually became better informed, more interested and more enthusiastic.

I felt immensely proud to have been responsible for bringing this group of people together, and the quality and quantity of information that was being gathered was extraordinary. Yet there were times when I thought back to my early days at Gombe with real nostalgia—the very early days, when my only companions were my mother, Dominic the cook, and Hassan who drove the little motor boat into Kigoma for supplies. I had worked incredibly hard, forcing myself to climb to the Peak at dawn and remaining out until the mountains were already shadowed by the coming night. There were no weekends, no holidays. But I was young and physically fit and I gloried in it. And I was on my own. I could travel through the forests knowing that the only beings I would meet all day would be chimpanzees, or baboons, or some of the other wild creatures that inhabit the lush valleys or the more open mountain slopes. But change had been inevitable: there was no way in the world that one person, no matter how dedicated, could have made a really comprehensive study of the Gombe chimpanzees. Hence the research centre, the growing number of people moving about in the forests, the decreasing likelihood of spending hours at a time in absolute solitude.

In truth, by 1972 I was spending only very short periods
with the chimpanzees, despite the fact that, apart from the three months a year that I spent teaching a course in the human biology programme at Stanford, I was living permanently at Gombe. This was because, after spending the previous few years watching chimpanzee mothers raising their infants, I was trying my hand at bringing up a child myself. It had become quite clear to me that a close, affectionate bond with the mother was important for the future well-being of a young chimpanzee. I suspected that the same was true for humans, and the work of men such as Rene Spitz and John Bowlby confirmed this. I was determined to give my own son the best start I could. And so, while the students spent most of their time in the field, I spent most of my time with Grub. (Although his real name is Hugo, he is still known as Grub to his family and closest friends even now.) I usually worked at administration and writing in the morning and did things with Grub in the afternoons.

Of course I kept abreast of all that was going on in the chimpanzee community. The conversation each evening, in the mess, was very rarely about anything other than chimpanzees and baboons. I was able to follow, albeit vicariously, the dominance rivalry between Humphrey, Figan and Evered. I received daily bulletins on the adolescent exploits of Flint and Goblin, Pom and Gilka, and on Gigi's sexual adventures. Moreover, I almost always saw at least one or two chimps during my daily visits to camp.

Occasionally Grub and I had chimpanzee visitors at our house on the beach. Once Melissa and her family wandered along the veranda and peered through the weldmesh windows of the living room, just after someone had brought Grub two pet rabbits. There are no rabbits at Gombe, and the chimpanzees were clearly fascinated. Goblin, filled with the intense curiosity of adolescence, continued to hang onto the window, staring and staring, long after his mother and little sister had lost interest and left. Incidentally, they were terrific pets, those rabbits, quite housetrained, very affectionate and extremely entertaining. And they taught me a lot—I had no idea until then, for example, that rabbits enjoyed meat. And I was even more startled to watch them hunting and eating spiders!

Chimpanzees have been known to seize and eat human infants, and so that Grub would have maximum safety Hugo and I had built our house on the beach as the chimpanzees seldom went there. The baboons, however, were often on the lakeshore, and our house was in the heart of the range of Beach troop. As a result, I spent more time watching baboons than I ever had before. This was not only a good learning experience in itself, but it gave me a new perspective on chimpanzee behaviour, pinpointing ways in which it differs from that of monkeys, such as baboons. Chimpanzees are clearly more "intellectual" than baboons—as demonstrated by their use of objects as tools, for example. But baboons are very much more adaptive than chimps. There are baboons all over Africa, from north to south, east to west, whereas the chimpanzees, with their cautious and conservative natures and their much slower reproductive rate, are found only in the equatorial forest belt and surrounding areas.

From the very first, the baboons at Gombe, bold and opportunistic, were quick to try any imported human foods they could get their hands on—and almost without exception, they found them highly desirable commodities. There has been a constant battle of wits between the humans at Gombe on the one hand and baboons on the other—a battle won, only too often, by the baboons. In vain did we make rules: no food to be eaten outside; no food remains to be thrown out except in covered rubbish pits; food that has to be carried from one place to another must be covered; house doors must be closed at all times. Everyone tried to obey the rules but there were always times when someone forgot, or was in a hurry, or thought, "Well, there aren't any baboons around now." And those are the moments baboons wait for.

The baboon Crease was an inveterate thief. He used to sit patiently for hours, concealed in some thickly foliaged tree behind one of our houses, far from the rest of his troop. If we forgot to latch the door, even for a few moments, he would seize the opportunity to make a quick raid. Many a loaf of bread, handful of eggs, pineapple or pawpaw did he snatch from the shelves before we imposed heavy fines on careless behaviour that led to such depredations. Once he stole a two-pound tin of margarine, newly opened, and sat, consuming the contents slowly and with apparent relish, for the next two hours.

One day Grub, highly excited, told me an epic Crease story. It began when a water taxi (as we call the little boats that carry passengers up and down the lake) broke down near the research centre. The boat was pulled up to the edge of the beach, the outboard engine was taken off for repair, and the passengers got out to stretch their legs. Somehow Crease got wind of the fact that there was a load of cassava (manioc) flour on the empty boat. Without hesitation the old reprobate jumped aboard. But even as he ripped open one of the sacks, and began stuffing the food into his mouth, the boat started to drift out into the lake. Then, suddenly noticing that the shore was receding, Crease panicked. As he leaped from one side of the boat to the other he kept bumping into the ripped sack so that clouds of white dust rose from it, making him sneeze. Finally one of the students took pity on him and, weak with laughter, pulled the boat back to shore. Crease disembarked with undignified haste, frosted like a Christmas decoration.

In fact baboons, unlike chimpanzees, can swim. Sometimes, when the water is calm, the young baboons go into the lake for fun, even diving down and swimming underwater. During aggressive incidents a baboon will sometimes escape from its persecutors by running out into the lake and waiting there until things have quietened down.

Lake Tanganyika is said to be the largest body of uncontaminated water anywhere: it is the longest lake in the world and the
second deepest. Great storms sometimes sweep its length, stirring the surface into huge waves. Almost every year a few fishermen are blown miles out towards Zaire, some never to return. And there are other dangers, too, lurking in the crystal depths of the lake. The crocodiles have gone now, but there are water cobras living among the great rocks that march out into the water at the headland of each bay. There is no anti-venom that will save you if you are bitten by one of these long, sleek brown snakes, with black bands around its neck. That was why I always worried about Grub when he was swimming in the lake. Yet in most ways Gombe was a wonderful environment for bringing up a child.

Grub spent much of his early childhood pottering about on the shores of the lake, and it was probably there, surrounded by traditional fishermen, that he acquired his passion for fishing. As a small boy he showed unbelievable patience when it came to untangling some hopelessly snarled fishing net. Whereas I would have given up after the first few minutes, he would persist for a whole morning, and sometimes into the afternoon, until at last the net was neatly laid out on the veranda, complete with floats, ready to set before nightfall. And then, after the excitement of examining the catch the next morning, the whole laborious process had to be gone through again.

When Grub was five years old, he began a school correspondence course under the direction of a series of tutors—young people filling in a year between school and university, glad of the opportunity to see Gombe and the chimps in return for their services. But there was still much opportunity for fishing and swimming in the lake. It was at this same time that Maulidi Yango came into Grub's life. Maulidi, who was employed to help with the cutting of trails through the forest, has a splendid physique and is as strong as an ox. Newcomers to Gombe would sometimes be startled to see what appeared to be an entire tree moving ahead of them along some trail: and then, somewhere under the
tree, they would see Maulidi! Easy-going, with a great sense of humour, Maulidi became Grub's childhood hero. Indeed, Grub maintains that Maulidi had more influence in shaping his character than anyone else outside the family. It was a commonplace sight at Gombe to see Maulidi stretched out on the sand while Grub swam, Maulidi paddling a canoe while Grub fished—or Maulidi eating his midday meal and enjoying his midday siesta while Grub waited. They have remained firm friends.

One morning Grub came to tell me that Flo and Flint were near the mess. By this time Flo was a very old lady indeed. Her teeth were worn down to the gums and she had trouble finding enough soft foods to eat. We gave her extra banana rations in camp and when she came near the house I always gave her eggs. But even so she gradually became more and more frail. Still, from time to time, she showed flashes of the indomitable spirit that, undoubtedly, had enabled her to live to such a ripe old age.