Through a Window (8 page)

Pom's adolescence was more turbulent. By then the bond between herself and her mother was very close indeed—even
closer, in some ways, than that between Fifi and Flo. Passion would always back up her daughter during squabbles with other community females and Pom had become assertive and aggressive in her dealings with them. When Passion was not close by, the others would often retaliate, picking a fight with Pom. But if Passion was close enough to hear her daughter's screaming she would race to her defence and mother and daughter together would then punish the female concerned. And Pom typically tried to help and support her mother in the same way.

One such incident is clear in my mind. I had followed Pom all morning and was watching as she and another female, Nope, fished for termites. Presently we heard pant-hoots, then some screams, about half a mile to the west, further down the valley. Both females stared towards the sounds but while Nope at once returned to her feeding, Pom continued to gaze westward. After a few moments there was another outburst of calling. Nope paid no attention, but Pom gave a little grin of fear, reached to touch Nope, and continued to look towards the distant group. A minute later came the frenzied screaming of a chimpanzee being attacked. Instantly, with a squeak of fear, Pom was off, racing towards the sounds. There was, fortunately for me, a rough trail and I was not left too far behind. We ran for about five hundred yards and then, as I burst through a tangle of vines, I saw that Pom had joined her mother and was grooming her. Both Passion and Prof, who was up in a tree above, were bleeding from fresh wounds, received, without doubt, during the attacks we had just heard. An adult male charged towards us, hit out at Passion and her daughter, then charged away, leaving the family alone.

Even during the periods when Pom was pink and went off in search of sexual gratification, Passion often went with her. And if Pom did travel with the males on her own, she usually returned quite soon to the reassuring company of her mother and little Prof. Not until her sixth pinkness was Pom observed to sleep with a group of males far away from her family.

Unlike Fifi, Pom was seldom taken on consortships—and at least part of the reason lay in her unusually close relationship with Passion. I well remember one hot September afternoon in 1976, when at midday I found Pom accompanied, as usual, by her mother and brother. With them was Satan—and he was trying most desperately to lead Pom away to the north. Pom, however, had no desire to go with him. Again and again, hair bristling, eyes glaring, Satan swayed vegetation at the young female, then moved off in his chosen direction, looking back to see if she was following. Again and again Pom ignored these summonses. Several times, exasperated, Satan swaggered around Pom, threatening her. And when this happened Pom, screaming loudly, rushed to Passion for comfort. Then Passion, tough old bird that she was, glared at the big male and uttered a string of angry—and surely abusive—waa-barks. Once Satan attacked Pom, and immediately Passion, with furious barks, hurled herself at her daughter's assailant, hitting him with her fists. Satan was probably as surprised as I was! He left the daughter and turned on the mother—but he only attacked her mildly. Passion and Pom then groomed each other for a long time while Satan sat, glowering, nearby. After this he made only two more swaggering attempts to impose his will—and then, nearly four hours after I had first encountered them, he gave up and went off on his own. Pom had been well chaperoned!

The birth of a first baby, is, for the mother, an event of epic significance. And in Fifi's case the birth was of great significance for me also. Indeed, during the eight months of Fifi's pregnancy I was almost (but not quite!) as impatient as I had been during my own pregnancy four years earlier. Would she, as I predicted, be the same kind of mother as Flo? We first saw her baby in May 1971 when he was about two days old. Remembering the wild sexual adventures of his mother's adolescence, we named him—naturally enough—Freud! Just as expected, Fifi was from the start a relaxed and competent mother. Like Flo before her,
she was tolerant, affectionate and playful. And she too showed some of the behaviour that had been unique to her mother.

One day, when Freud was just a few months old, a student called to me: "Isn't that what Flo used to do?" And there was Fifi dangling Freud from one foot while she tickled him just as Flo had played with Flint! Until then, no other mother had been observed to play in that special way. Fifi had tried when, as a child, she played with little Flint, but in those days her legs had been too short. Now she imitated Flo to perfection.

Fifi continued to spend most of her time with her own mother during Freud's first year of life, but disappointingly, Flo showed little interest in her grandson. Sometimes she peered at him and, as he grew older, she tolerated him when he occasionally held onto her hair. But by then Flo was very old indeed; she had barely enough energy to get her frail body through each day and there was none left over for luxuries such as playing with her daughter's infant. Freud was only fifteen months old when his grandmother died.

And what of Pom and her first baby? She was almost exactly thirteen years old when Pan was born. I had expected her to treat him much as she herself had been treated as an infant but in this case (fortunately for Pan) my predictions were largely wrong. Pom was most definitely a more attentive and tolerant mother than Passion had been. Indeed, when first I watched her with her baby, carefully supporting him during travel whenever he lost his grip, it seemed that she had the makings of a really considerate mother. But there was something lacking: Pom did not develop anything like the degree of maternal proficiency and concern shown by Fifi.

Indeed, in some ways Pom's behaviour did reflect the manner in which she herself had been handled as an infant. She found it difficult to cradle Pan comfortably when he was small—or else she simply couldn't be bothered. Often, as she sat in a tree, the infant would slip down off her lap and hang on frantically with
wildly kicking legs as he tried to pull himself back up again. Only when he whimpered did Pom look down and, appearing slightly surprised, gather him back onto her thighs. But she seldom made any attempt to make a better lap and often, after a few minutes, he slipped down again and the sequence was repeated. Pom, like Passion, tended to move off without first gathering her infant; but unlike Passion, Pom almost always hurried back at his first whimper of distress. It seemed that she always expected Pan would be able to follow, but was instantly concerned when she found that he could not. Pom, like Passion, was not a playful mother, but Pan did not suffer as a result since Pom continued to spend most of her time with Passion and her new infant, Pax. And Pax, just a year older than Pan, was the perfect playmate.

Pom, for all that she was a far better mother than I had expected, lost this first child. I was there to witness the horrifying accident that led to his death. It was one of those violently blustery mornings in August when the wind roars down the valley in great gusts, tossing the tree tops and sweeping on to wreak havoc over the lake. For about half an hour I had been lying on my back watching Pom and Pan as they fed on oil nuts forty-five feet above me. Pan was almost three years old, able to poke the occasional fruit from its horny case though preferring to beg for a half-chewed one from his mother. For a while he clung tightly to Pom's hair, made nervous, as most chimps are, by the violent wind. But then he got bold and ventured further afield despite the gale. Suddenly a really fierce gust lashed savagely at the fronds and Pan, like a stuffed toy, was swept from the tree. He seemed almost to float through the air, his arms and legs spread-eagled, as though he was lying flat out on some buoyant but invisible air mattress. As he hit the ground, rock hard after the fierce suns of summer, there was a sickening thud. A moment later came two strangled, heart-wrenching exhalations, then silence.

I was shaking when I moved toward his body. He lay as he had fallen, on his back. His eyes were closed. I looked up at Pom,
left alone so suddenly in the tree. She was staring down at the ground. Very slowly, as though afraid, she climbed down and approached her infant. Cautiously she reached out, and gathered up the tiny form. To my utter astonishment he gripped her hair and clung, unaided, as she moved away. I had been certain he was already dead.

For the next two hours Pom rested and groomed her infant. No mother could have shown more concern, more solicitude. Pan suckled for a long time, then leaned against Pom, with his eyes closed. When he did move, it was very slowly and, not surprisingly, he seemed quite dazed. I assumed he was, at the very least, suffering from concussion. Presently Pom gathered up her battered child and carried him up into a tall tree to feed.

Unfortunately this happened the day I was due to leave Gombe. The boat was waiting and I could not follow the tragedy through to the end. Three days later, when Pom was next seen, Pan was dead. Presumably he sustained internal injuries or a fractured skull—or both. By a strange coincidence, three weeks later, in Dar es Salaam, a little boy, the seven-year-old son of my neighbour's cook, fell from a coconut palm and landed, like Pan, on his back. He was rushed to the hospital where they found extensive internal damage, including a ruptured liver. They patched him up as best they could, but he too died a short while afterwards.

It would be unfair to blame Pom entirely for the accident, to accuse her of negligence. It could have happened to any infant. Yet I cannot imagine Fifi losing a child in this way. For Fifi, like Flo before her, like all really attentive chimpanzee mothers, is alert to potential danger. Often she "rescues" her infant before the child itself has shown any sign of distress or fear. After Pan's death, I began to watch carefully whenever Fifi, with one of her infants, fed up in a palm tree during a strong wind. Always the infant stayed close to her. Although I could not determine
whether that was due to Fifi's concern or the apprehension of the child, in some ways it comes to the same thing: if the infant is extra cautious it is probably at least in part because its movements have been firmly restricted in similar circumstances in the past.

Pom, after the tragic death of little Pan, became sick, lethargic and so emaciated we thought she might not recover. Her relationship with her mother now became, if anything, even closer, and they were seldom apart. I remember one day when they did accidentally become separated. Pom searched for Passion for almost an hour, frequently whimpering softly to herself, and from time to time climbing tall trees and gazing out from these vantage points in all directions. To some extent she may have been helped by occasional whiffs of Passion's characteristic odour for, as she travelled, she repeatedly bent and sniffed the trail or picked up leaves and smelled them carefully before dropping them. When eventually mother and daughter were reunited, Pom rushed up to Passion with small squeaks of excitement and pleasure, and the two groomed for over an hour.

As we shall see, the life histories of Fifi and Pom have continued along very different lines. Pom, after her mother's death, became increasingly solitary and eventually left the community for good. Fifi, by contrast, has become one of the most high-ranking and respected females in her group, maintaining close friendly relations with the adult males and many females too. She has also become the most reproductively successful Kasekela female to date. Whether Flo's main contribution to Fifi was genetic or through child-raising skills or through the equal mix of the two, the recipe worked. And her two eldest sons, who also received fifty per cent of their genes from their mother and who were probably brought up in much the same way, thrived on Flo's recipe too. Particularly the younger of the two, Figan, who became, for a while, the most powerful alpha male in Gombe's recorded history.

F
ROM THE OUTSET
it was obvious that Figan was endowed with exceptional intelligence: I gave many examples in my earlier book,
In the Shadow of Man.
Equally clear was his determination to attain an ever higher position in male society. He developed an impressive charging display. This display serves to make a chimpanzee look bigger and more dangerous than he may actually be—his hair stands on end; he leaps up to shake the vegetation; he drags huge branches noisily along the ground, then hurls them ahead of him; he picks up and throws rocks with such vigour that they fly unpredictably ahead, behind or to the side; he stamps and slaps loudly upon the ground or some tree trunk; his lips are tightly compressed, pulling his face into a ferocious scowl. And the wilder and more impressive his display, and the more carefully it is planned and executed, the better his chance of intimidating his rivals without recourse to actual physical combat—during which he himself, as well as his opponent, might be injured. The smaller the individual the more it behooves him to work on his display.

Even as an adolescent Figan was quick to notice and try to take advantage of any sign of weakness (such as sickness or injury) in one of the adult males. Then, while the higher-ranked individual was at a disadvantage, Figan hurled his challenge—his impressive charging display—again and again. Often he was ignored, even threatened. But sometimes his audacity paid off and the older male, at least until he had recovered, would hasten out of his way. Even a temporary victory of this sort served to increase Figan's self-confidence.

When Mike deposed Goliath and rose to the top-ranking position of the community Figan was eleven years old and, clearly, fascinated by the imaginative strategy of the new alpha. For Mike, by incorporating empty four-gallon tin cans into his charging displays, hitting and kicking them ahead of him as he ran towards his rivals, succeeded in intimidating them all—including individuals much larger than himself. All the chimps were impressed by these unique, noisy and often terrifying performances. But Figan was the only one whom we saw, on two different occasions, "practising" with cans that had been abandoned by Mike. Characteristically—for he was a past master at keeping out of trouble—he did this only when out of sight of the older males who would have been intolerant of such behaviour in a mere adolescent. He would undoubtedly have become as adroit as Mike had we not removed all cans from circulation.