The chimps soon roused the nearby, and most rare, mountain gorilla named Kibali, who was living in isolation because of his grouchy temperament. He was the last wild-born mountain gorilla on earth.
He had arrived from the Congo, via Uganda, the year before, all four hundred pounds of him, and he never quite adjusted. His mother and a young sister had been shot to death before his eyes by Interahamwe fighters where he’d lived, up to then, under a canopy of ayous and sapelli trees. He’d been led away from their bodies on three separate leashes.
Kibali was hobbling in circles around his night room, fingering his lips with a twitchy boredom. The room served as an indoor presentation area in the day. Its brick walls were daubed a pale green, a lame attempt to simulate “rain forest” tonality from an era nearly gone on earth, but a colossal, eight-foot-long window of toughened glass—for viewing—made Kibali look like a glum man at a bosonicabus stop.
He picked up a bunch of wood wool and shredded, lurid junk-food wrappers, which were regularly given to him for nest-building. He pulled the soft wad apart in his long black-nailed hands, and tossed the pieces away. A food-wrapper scrap, stuck in Kibali’s neck fur, bore the phrase you can see that Lena has the goods to please all “passengers” on Bonk Air . . . Many gorillas in captivity like to construct messy nests before bedding down each night, but Kibali had stopped making nests. He was just throwing bits around. He received no comfort from the hoots of the chimps; instead, he felt compelled to strike things and to beat his chest.
Not long after he had arrived at the London Zoo, he had been introduced to a group of biosoftware-cultured females—his potential retinue. But the females had recently been sent, temporarily, to an animal shelter the zoo operated in Bedfordshire. The exile was for their own safety. Kibali had bitten one of their scalps, and nearly broken another’s arm. He was supposed to be having a “cool down.”
He made a belching sound, then a set of aggressive chuckles. He ran a few meters, ducking under draping two-inch-thick ropes. He batted at an enormous nylon ball across the cramped, mustard-smelling room. It bounced off the ceiling so hard, it hit the floor once and bounced against the ceiling again; considering the low height of the ceiling, however, the feat was not especially surprising. He scrambled atop a large plywood box in his chamber so that he could peer through a window slit and look out toward the disturbances. He slammed his fist against the wall, and screamed. He felt excited; something was happening, he sensed. He was trying, in his gorilla way, to ready himself.
At the zoo, his depression thrived. He had begun slapping food bowls away and pushing keepers away with a force that bordered on the dangerous. He interacted less and less with the public and sometimes threw balls and giant toys at them. They bounced off the fencing, and the humans had a laugh.
Now Kibali’s back was turning silver, but he would never be able to start his own troop. His penetrating, shrewd black eyes mismatched his degraded captivity. He was developing angina pectoris of late, a result of his sedentary life and the chocolate bars and éclairs one errant zookeeper would sometimes give him, furtively. Guests would normally see Kibali through the humiliating window and try to get him to look at them with those eyes; their tapping on the window annoyed him to no end, triggering the ache in his chest and left shoulder.
The chimps seemed to be laughing at him. Kibali roared. He did not like chimp-noise. It reminded him of humans. He ran out of his night quarters into the tall but narrow outdoor section of his living space. When he saw the man, he quieted for a moment, stifling a groan. This human did not seem to hold much hope for him, but he would wait and watch. It was astonishing to be visited at this hour. Something unusual was afoot, and much like this man, he, too, felt he had nothing to lose.
“You,” he called to Cuthbert. “You are headed toward the chimpanzees. Do not go there.” But Cuthbert could hardly hear the noble gorilla, for his head was now a proverbial barrel of monkeys.
tell them the lord of animals comes
IT NEARLY BROKE WHAT WAS LEFT OF CUTHBERT’S own mangled heart to hear the primates cry to him. “Please now please now please now please now,” the putty-faced rhesus macaques kept hollering. “Now now now now now help!” Five golden tamarins, their elegantly styled red manes puffed with anxiety, crowded onto a horizontal tree limb and simply repeated a mysterious phrase—we promise you—but at wildly different pitches and volumes, and Cuthbert was beginning to feel unable to cope.
“Hang on then,” he kept saying. He could not stop listening, but the more he listened, the more sure he became that the “monkeys” ought to be freed right away.