Knowing the creature was up there made it impossible to sleep. It didn’t seem to matter how exhausted I felt, I was simply much too afraid of being eaten. Yet eventually I must have drifted off, because the next thing I remember was waking up to see the sky bright once again. To see the sunshine-dappled ground and feel the heat on my limbs was a huge relief, and all thoughts of the snake vanished. But with the sun and the rising mists came thoughts of home. Why had my mother still not come for me? Surely she should have been able to find me by now? But my only companions, now as yesterday, were the monkeys, who whooped and chattered and swung among the branches up above me, as playful and carefree as I was dispirited and scared.
Now they were used to me, the troop didn’t take a lot of notice of me. Apart from the older ones, who acted as the parents and who seemed to want to keep an eye on me, most of the monkeys ignored me. There were more of them than I’d first seen – looking back now, perhaps thirty – and though they seemed happy enough with my constant presence, they didn’t include me. They had no idea that to me they were lifesavers, friends. They just allowed me to stay close, and I was grateful.
I was also able to watch them and learn about my surroundings. Where food was concerned, I made a habit of copying. I assumed that the seeds, nuts and fruit they favoured would all be acceptable for me to eat too. Some things were spiny, some were bitter and unpleasant, but I generally just copied, trying things I saw them relish.
Not that I ate everything the monkeys did – far from it. At no point did I ever even think about trying to catch and eat a lizard. The idea made me gag. I also found out by trial and error that I didn’t like the taste of flowers, grass or insects, and that fruit, nuts and berries were the best things to go for. But not all of them. Almost immediately, I learned my first crucial rule: that brightly coloured berries, however enticing they looked, were, without exception, to be left alone.
Figs seemed to be prized over any other foodstuff, and a monkey with figs was a monkey who was hounded. Most of the thieving seemed playful, but where figs were concerned, no one was left alone. And I shared their love. Those first days in the jungle gave me one lifelong passion. To this day, prepared in traditional Colombian style, figs are still among my favourite fruits.
Not all foods gave themselves up easily, and watching the monkeys made me realise another truth: that you had to work for some of the tastiest morsels on offer. There were many different kinds of nuts in our patch of the rainforest, and though I could see from a distance that the monkeys could obviously find their way into the shells, it wasn’t clear to me how they went about it.
But there was one monkey who always seemed to let me get a little closer than the others. It could have been a boy or a girl – I had no idea how to tell the difference – but in my mind, he was a boy monkey, a medium-sized animal who stood out to me because of a spot of grey fur on his belly. He was playful and bold, but most important for my purpose he seemed very good at breaking into nuts. I would watch him for ages, trying to see what he was doing, and then hit upon the idea of leaving nuts for him to ‘steal’ from me, in the hope that I could work out how he did it.
Sure enough, he obliged, snatching up the nut I had ‘dropped’, putting it to his ear and shaking it, presumably to check if it was ripe. I didn’t know what sound would tell him this but whatever it was, it was the right one because, as I trailed him, he then seemed to cast around the forest floor, looking for something hard on which to crack the nut. Finally he found a rock that seemed to serve his purpose, because it had a dimple – a small hole in it – in which the nut could be placed, enabling him to whack it open with a piece of branch, without it rolling away as he struck it.
I watched this simple yet clever process several times. It would vary: sometimes the resting hole would be in the fallen trunk of a tree, other times the tool in his hand would be a piece of rock. But every time the result would be the same. The nut would split, and the monkey would pop a tasty prize into his mouth. Monkey see, monkey do! I remember thinking to myself as I searched for a tool with which to crack my own nuts.
Those first couple of days with the troop saw me spending almost all of my time trying to satisfy my hunger. The jungle was generous in her offerings, and as well as the bananas, figs and nuts there were all sorts of different fruits to try.
Once again, I learned from the monkeys. They loved uchuva, guanabana and guava unreservedly, but with other fruits they were clearly more picky. One particular fruit, the lulo, they would always seem to test first: shaking and sniffing the big orange globes before deciding whether to pick them from their bushes. I would come to learn there was a good reason for this. The unripe fruits were incredibly sour. It was the same with the curuba (which looks a little like a fat gherkin). They would only touch the yellowish-brown ones, leaving the green ones well alone. The monkeys also ate leaves, which I found I couldn’t stomach, and a variety of insects and grubs.
But life in the jungle in those first days wasn’t just about feeding. Or playing and grooming and chattering, come to that. For the monkeys, it was also about survival. To my new family, this meant having territory, and, crucially, protecting it from intrusion by other monkey troops. And this, I soon came to learn, meant fighting.
The first time I saw the monkeys fight with intruders, I was terrified. I simply couldn’t understand what was going on. One minute they were all playing, above and around me, and the next there was the clatter and crash of breaking branches as they massed in the canopy and fought. On this occasion it was with monkeys that looked different from the ones I knew. They had reddish fur and had come from I knew not where. The sound of the violence above me was petrifying, the noise of their screams as they fought so intense and horrific that I scrambled to escape it, hiding under a bush and clamping my hands over my ears. And when they came down again, the intruders presumably having being beaten, I was shocked by the sight of the blood around many of their mouths. Had they eaten the other monkeys? Or had they just wounded them to frighten them? And if I displeased them in some way, might they decide to turn on me?
It was a stark reminder that I was in a dangerous place, with dangerous animals, but when I thought about how the monkeys had treated me since stumbling upon me, I decided they must have accepted that I posed no threat. Why else had they not driven me away with screams and bloody violence? Why else had they let me stay so close to them?
Ever anxious for reassurance, I decided that perhaps they had seen me being abandoned. Perhaps they had seen how the men had so callously dumped me, and, understanding my plight, had taken pity. It was comforting to think that they seemed to accept that I wished them no harm and only wanted to be their friend. And, as I watched them start cleaning the blood from their mouths, I could only hope they didn’t change their minds.
5
No one came.
The day passed, as did the next day, and the one after that, and still there was no sign of my parents. There was no sign of anyone. No one human, at any rate. My hope of rescue, which had been at the front of my mind since I’d been abandoned, was fading as fast as the flower pattern on my dress.
It perhaps wasn’t surprising then that slowly, over a period of time I can only guess at, I began to stop hoping to be rescued. Instead I found myself blocking out all thoughts of home and concentrating on my strange new jungle life.
Each new day turned out to be exactly like the last one. The jungle would wake at the hot insistence of the sunlight, the steam rising in fragrant clouds as the light shafted down through the branches. I would watch the monkeys – being careful not to annoy them – and follow them to find food, then watch them some more. This would continue till the sun disappeared beneath the trees and the night suddenly dropped its curtain of blackness. I’d then find shelter where I could and crave sleep.
The
