He started with the chimpanzees, who were closest to him, still softly hooing. It was a very bad decision.
As soon as he stepped with his bolt cutters off the cement apron near the pavilion entrance, and toward their cage, the chimps whimpered a few times, then exploded. LIKE US, NOISY AND SHOWY, read their sign. If they were “like us,” they were a particularly earsplitting example of Homininae. Their screams were like the sound of several children being stabbed to death. Cuthbert gave a stupid grin, and with his wobbly hands got to work on the fence. He dimly sensed that he was facing something bigger than he could handle. The four chimps started shoving each other against the fence. One of them, a dominant male named Buddy, climbed right up the back of a smaller, younger teenager, and grasped the fence. He glowered down at Cuthbert, slapping his hand against the cage. The teenager, Ollie, peered up and barked at Buddy, whipping his head from side to side. Cuthbert wasn’t sure whether the chimps were scared or angry or both.
The indoor viewing window and the building’s main doors were armed with loud, guardhouse-notifying alarms, but the outdoor cage itself, which served all the different primate exhibits, was not, and Cuthbert’s bolt cutters flew through the fencing with little effort. Within minutes, he had created a rectangular door, loose on three sides, and before he could finish a fourth, the chimps had shoved the door open a few inches.
Ollie sidled toward the gap and pushed his arm through. He managed to grab hold of the sleeve of Cuthbert’s jumper and tore it asunder as if pulling a tissue from a Kleenex box. The chimps shrieked and passed the sleeve around. Cuthbert was a little shocked and engrossed for a few seconds, but he kept working. With every new cut, he loosened his “door” to the greater structure, and the chimps drove it open more. Finally, Ollie heaved himself nearly through, but just as the young chimp was about to clear the cage, Buddy vaulted down, and yanked Ollie back, jealously. Ollie scraped his forearm badly on the fence’s jagged opening, and screamed banefully.
What happened next came with a grim celerity. The injury somehow turned Cuthbert into an enemy in the chimps’ eyes. All four of the chimps piled out of the cage, and set upon him. They knocked Cuthbert down and Buddy bit him viciously on the nose, tearing a nostril away from his face. Cuthbert barely seemed to feel it; he wisely rolled onto his stomach and balled up. The others made waa-bark noises, as if egging Buddy on, but Buddy broke off the attack and stepped back. He whimpered again a few times.
There was a comparative silence, and the chimps seemed to be checking each other’s fur for something, inspecting. They began hooing again.
Buddy finally spoke. He said to Cuthbert: “You stay away from us, geeza, you stay away.” Cuthbert raised his head cautiously. He could barely open his eyes, and blood dripped fast off his face. He pressed the heel of his hand, shaky as ever, against the ripped nostril. It did not hurt, but a squinty feeling filled his eyes.
Cuthbert said: “A’m not your enemy, I’m not. I’m your ally.”
Buddy shook his head. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t ever say a word to me, geeza. You are a friend of the otters, and the cats.”
One of the other chimpanzees grabbed the bolt cutters and jammed them into the ground between Cuthbert’s feet. Cuthbert was astonished, frozen with wonder. The chimps’ dexterity and cleverness were beyond anything he expected.
Then Buddy and Ollie each took hold of one of Cuthbert’s arms, and he gripped his bolt cutters. They dragged him past the gorilla exhibit, the cutters banging, across a concrete verge, to the macaques, THE ALL-ROUNDERS, according to their sign. They dumped him down in a pile.
Their strength had given him goose pimples, and he wore a weird smile. It seemed he had always only seen old pictures of chimps in powerless or sweet poses: Ham and Enos strapped to their flight couches on the Mercury test flights; nameless pan troglodytes being given HIV-filled jabs in some Swiss lab; Jane Goodall cradling an infant chimp in her khaki arms, sticking a milk bottle in its mouth; Emily the “Chimp Wife” sneaking into the British Museum. But these London chimpanzees seemed powerful and confident and malicious.