Through a Window (11 page)

During the second year of Figan's reign two of the students—David Riss and Curt Busse—asked me if they could follow Figan, monitor his movements, behaviour, and relationships with other chimpanzees, for fifty consecutive days. I was not sure. Perhaps this would be too much of an intrusion into his life, make him uneasy or irritable. But there was a precedent—six years earlier Flo had been followed for sixteen days in an attempt to witness the birth of her last infant (the attempt failed as the baby was born at night). Flo had not appeared to mind at all, and Figan was as tolerant of humans as she had been. And so I agreed—on condition that the follow be called off if Figan became upset.

The marathon began on 30 June 1974 and continued until 18 August. David and Curt, each accompanied by one of the field staff, spelled one another every four days, so that while one of them was clambering around the mountains after Figan the other was writing up the information he had collected—and resting after the arduous four days of following. The fifty days with Figan gave us invaluable data about the behaviour and social life of one of the most powerful top-ranking males Gombe has known, at a time when he was at the zenith of his career.

In those days, when all the students gathered together for dinner, there was a great exchange of information every evening. Many were the tales told around the tables in the mess. There were Caroline Tutin's accounts of the sex life of the various females, Anne Pusey's descriptions of adolescence, Richard Wrangham's stories of feeding and ranging behaviour, and countless anecdotes concerning the development of infants re-counted by the various young people involved in the long-term mother-infant study. And now we had, in addition, daily reports on Figan.

During the fifty days there were two sexually popular pink females, and Figan monopolized them one after the other. The first of these was Gigi. Large and sterile, Gigi, who has shown one sexual cycle after another since 1965, uninterrupted by pregnancy and childbirth, is, in many ways, rather masculine. She has a mind of her own and does not submit readily to male bullying. There was no doubt but that, during the days when she was fully pink, she controlled Figan's movements and thus those of his entire group. One day, for example, when the chimps were headed towards a stand of
kifumbe
fruits, Gigi suddenly left the trail and plunged into the undergrowth. Figan and Faben followed at once, while the others hung about, waiting. Some climbed to feed on other fruits nearby, the rest sat or lay on the ground.

Gigi made for a nest of
siafu
—those vicious, biting driver or army ants that are such a delicacy for the chimpanzee. Upon arrival at the site she broke a long straight branch from a nearby bush, removed the side branches, then carefully stripped the bark until she had made a smooth tool, about three feet long. She reached her hand a short way into the opening of the nest and, for a few seconds, dug frantically until the ants began to
swarm out. Quickly she plunged her tool into the nest, waited for a moment, then withdrew it covered by a seething mass of ants. With rapid movements she swept the stick through her free hand, pushed the ant-mass into her mouth, and crunched vigorously. As the ants poured out of the nest in ever greater numbers, agitated by the intrusion, Gigi climbed a sapling nearby and, reaching down with her stick, continued her meal. Every so often she had to slap frantically at her feet and kick at the trunk to repel those ants that were finding their way to the source of the raid. Now that she was using one hand to hold onto the sapling while she fished with the other, she had to transfer the tool to one foot between each dip, thus freeing a hand for sweeping the ants into her mouth. Nevertheless, despite these difficulties, she persisted.

Figan, meanwhile, had begun to fish for
siafu
as well. But after only ten minutes he left his tool and rushed away to pick off the ants that had crawled up his arms and legs. Faben then picked up the abandoned tool but after fishing for only a couple of minutes he too gave up. The two brothers then started off in the direction of those delicious
kifumbe.

Gigi, however, did not follow. She had positioned herself, by this time, on a low branch directly above the nest and, from this place of comparative immunity, continued to feed on ants. So Figan and Faben sat and waited. After a while Faben lay and closed his eyes. But Figan gradually became more and more impatient. Seven times he uttered his characteristic "Let's go!" grunt, but Gigi completely ignored these pleas. From time to time he shook little branches at her, requesting that she should follow him. But he did not do this very vigorously, and she paid absolutely no attention. Only when she had been fishing for forty-five minutes (with an average of about two stickfuls of ants per minute) did she finally give up and join Figan. Then the three of them moved after the rest of the group.

The following day, when Gigi's feeding preferences conflicted
with his, Faben left her and went off with the group. But Figan remained faithful. For a total of one hour and twenty minutes, spread over five different episodes during the day, he waited patiently while she fed, grumbling his soft "Let's go!" grunts from time to time. But only when she had quite finished feeding did she climb down and calmly follow where he led. By the following morning Gigi's swelling had waned and Figan's proprietary interest in her ended.

During those few days when Figan and Faben were both dancing attendance on Gigi, one most unusual event took place, when Curt was following them:

"Just after they'd left their nests I saw Faben mating Gigi," he told us that evening. "Suddenly Figan noticed and charged at them with his hair out. He actually stamped on Faben's back. He stamped three times, quite hard, and Faben screamed like anything, and then waa-barked as Figan charged off. Just a bit after that, Figan mated Gigi himself."

"That's about the only time Figan has minded sharing his female with Faben, isn't it?" I asked.

"I saw it happen one other time," said Caroline. "That was when Faben was mating in thick bush—I don't think Figan realized who it was for a few moments. They both looked surprised afterwards!"

When Patti went pink in her turn, Figan did not make any obvious attempts to prevent Faben from mating with her. And after she had subsided there were no more pink females for the rest of the fifty-day follow. It would be crude and altogether disrespectful to an alpha male to describe here David's observation, made six days after Patti's detumescence, which led him to suspect that Figan, sound asleep in his nest, was dreaming about the sexual delights of the previous weeks!

One evening Curt had an exciting story to relate. Figan, travelling with Faben, Satan, Goblin and four females, had begun hunting baboons. While Faben and Goblin sat below and
watched, Figan had climbed slowly towards a baboon mother and her small, black infant. But she was alert and, although he chased her a short way, she easily escaped.

"Do you know who it was?" asked Tony Collins, one of the students studying baboons.

"Yes. It was that A troop mother with the blind infant—what's her name—Hokitika isn't it?"

"Well, I'm glad she escaped," said Craig Packer, another member of the baboon team. We were all glad, although the future for a blind infant baboon was hardly rosy and, in fact, she died just one week later.

After that, Figan had remained up the tree a while, looking in all directions. Suddenly he had climbed to the ground and hurried lower down the slope. As he approached a tall, dead tree—little more than a post, with stumpy, broken-off branches—he had begun to move cautiously and silently. Peering through the foliage, Curt had seen, up near the top where the dead tree was thickly draped in vines, a very small baboon—little more than an infant. There was an adult male baboon feeding some thirty yards away, but he had taken no notice as Figan slowly climbed towards his intended victim.

"Fig suddenly made a rush towards the infant. He nearly caught it, too. But somehow or other it escaped and leapt to the ground. It was amazing—it must have been at least forty feet, that leap. And then the little thing landed right between Faben and Goblin!"

"Now I suppose you're going to describe a horrible, gory kill," said Julie Johnson, another of the baboon team. "I don't think I want to stay and listen."

"No, it was okay," Curt reassured her. "Just at that moment the male baboon finally arrived and there was a great commotion. The little bab got away. The male pitched into Goblin and there was a truly spectacular fight. I don't know how Gob did it, but somehow he won and chased off after the bab. And just at
that moment another big male arrived. We knew him—it was Bramble. He began to threaten Faben, and two female baboons joined in. Faben was quite scared and rushed up a tree."

"Didn't Figan help him?" I asked.

"No—he just sat and watched. In that same place where he'd almost caught the baby. Then, after a bit, he climbed down and the chimps all wandered away."

In fact, Figan and his group hunted relatively seldom during those fifty days. There were eight colobus monkey hunts and seven kills—Figan, who has always been a successful hunter, made three of the kills himself.

Nor did they make many journeys to the peripheral part of their home range. Once they travelled far to the south, penetrating the overlap zone between their community and the neighbouring Kahama community. They heard calls that were presumably made by Kahama chimpanzees and became very excited, embracing one another, grinning, travelling silently, and spending some time gazing southward from a high ridge. But nothing further happened, and presently they all returned to the north, displaying frequently and calling loudly, as though to release the tensions that had built up while they were close to strangers.

Figan, as might be expected, spent more time with Faben than any other adult male, and young Goblin was often tagging along with them. Figan also spent many days with Gigi, not only when she was pink, but also when she was flat and sexually uninteresting. And quite often he was with his sister Fifi and her infant son Freud. Most of his interactions with the individuals of this community were, at that time, relaxed and friendly. He was so clearly dominant over them that, except when there were moments of tension such as during a reunion, he had no need for violent demonstrations of strength and mastery.

Unless Evered was around. And then Figan, joined almost always by Faben, displayed with unusual frequency and vigour.
It was as though despite his position of great power, despite the support of his brother, and despite the memory of those clear-cut victories over Evered the year before, Figan still felt threatened by the rival of his adolescent days.

David was bursting with excitement one evening when, as usual, we had all gathered in the mess.

"I saw the most unbelievable attack on Evered today," he said. "The whole thing lasted for almost two hours."

It happened when Evered, by himself, joined the group. He didn't see Figan and Faben at once, for they were feeding in thick undergrowth. But suddenly they charged towards him and he rushed, screaming, up a tree. Figan and Faben displayed below him a few times, then they settled down on one of the lower branches of his tree and began, very calmly, to groom one another.

"It was pathetic," said David. "Evered was about twenty feet above them and he whimpered and gave little screams almost non-stop. He was watching them all the time, but they just ignored him and went on grooming.

"After that," David went on, "Figan and Faben left the tree and did some more fabulous displays. They charged about together—four times in the next half hour.

"Then came the actual violence. Figan started it—he went leaping up into Evered's tree and kept chasing him from branch to branch. After a bit Evered managed to leap to another tree, but Figan followed.

"And all the time Faben was charging about on the ground below and Evered was screaming, terrified out of his wits, and keeping as far as he could from Figan."

David paused. "It was awful really, watching it all," he said. "It was almost like seeing a cat playing with a mouse, because I knew that there wasn't any way that Evered could escape—unless they actually allowed him to."

By this time we were all caught up in the drama, tense and expectant.

"Suddenly Evered made a huge jump into a third tree," David continued. "Figan leapt after him and Faben suddenly rushed up as well and they had Evered sort of stuck between them. And then they both jumped him together, and they all fell and just went on fighting on the ground till poor old Ev got away."

"Poor old Ev" it was, for the brothers followed, and again cornered and attacked him. He managed to get into a tree and his persecutors continued to charge about in great excitement for a further ten minutes until, perhaps because another adult male arrived on the scene, Figan and Faben left and Evered, still screaming, was finally able to escape.

A month later Figan and Faben encountered Evered after a two-week separation. Curt observed the reunion which took place in a tall tree. It was tense and dramatic. Figan and Evered embraced, both screaming. The other chimps present were watching intently. They too were highly excited and screaming loudly.

"I was looking up, doing my best to see exactly what was happening," said Curt, "when the unimaginable happened." He paused dramatically and we all wondered what was coming next. "Well, you know what fear and excitement can do to your guts," Curt went on. "One of those wretched creatures—I'm pretty sure it was Gigi—suddenly let go. I was absolutely showered with warm shit!"

Of course we were sorry for him, but nevertheless the whole mess collapsed laughing while Curt tried to look pained and aloof. Poor Curt—he had had to leave all the excitement and go and wash off in the stream. He was lucky that there
was
a stream close by! Fortunately he was with Eslom, who had recorded the details of the fight that took place.

On that occasion Evered was set upon by five aggressors, for Humphrey, Gigi and an adolescent male had joined forces with
Figan and Faben. The attack looked—and sounded—incredibly violent and it was amazing that Evered sustained only a few small wounds. He stayed with the group for the rest of the day, but left before the others settled down for the night and was not seen again for another two weeks.