He stared, snorted more loudly, took the first pace and halted, his eyes flickering from side to side.
Come.
This time he grunted and followed her up beside the stream, into the shadows. Behind them the hidden cameras watched them go. It was about twenty minutes before they returned to wait for the others to wake, to take them out, and show them what they had discovered.
The advance team had found the place, about three hectares of real forest they could actually reach. The rains that had stripped the mountain bald had washed most of the earth out into the sea, but here and there the shape of the underlying rock had trapped pockets of soil on which fresh growth could begin. The lower end of this patch was a steep-sided valley, thick with shrubs and saplings. Farther up it closed to a sheer-walled ravine, beyond human reach, where older trees still rooted deep into the rock. Out of sight over the bare ridges on either side ran a tall electric fence. The humans camped in the dying cocoa groves well over a kilometer below.
There were remote-controlled cameras hidden throughout the area. The idea was that everything the chimps did would be filmed, with Eva helping by seeing they were often in camera range and also by setting up events and interactions to stimulate them. SMI would edit the film for wildlife programs, and suitable sections would also be dubbed with sophisticated human voices and used for commercials for Honeybear. There ought to be enough in the can after three weeks’ filming for everyone to go home. It was silly, trivial, a total waste of time and money, but none of that mattered.
It had looked as if it were going to matter at first. When they’d found out what it was going to cost, the accountants had tried to object, but by then the news had gotten out (Grog’s friends had seen to that) that World Fruit was planning to take twenty chimps to a natural habitat for an experimental period, and see what happened. The bare rumor had done more for their sales than a whole season of commercials. From being world villains they found themselves world heroes. The expedition was news. By nightfall billions of eyes would have seen that first shot, the dark shapes of two chimpanzees knuckling in silence away into the trees.
Lana was awake, inspecting Wang. Abel was already at the door, peering out bright-eyed, too young to be frightened. Dinks was stirring. The stale reek of the crate was horrible after the live air. Eva beckoned from the door to Lana, who huddled back against the crate wall. She beckoned again. Then behind her a new noise started, a loud repeated hoot as Sniff stamped to and fro in front of the four crates, threshing the ground with a branch he had broken from a bush. The familiar sound seemed to encourage Lana, who came to the door and peered out. Eva put her arm around her and kissed her, encouraging her, telling her this was a good place. There were faces at the other doors now, and the sight of one another, and of Sniff displaying to and fro, seemed to give the chimps heart. Several came out into the open, sniffing and staring around. Eva could feel their wonder, their excitement and nerves. It was all so strange, so unprepared-for. And yet, and yet . . . How many of them, besides herself, had dreamed the dream? Surely she couldn’t be the only one.
Suddenly a half-grown male called Berry broke from the trance. He rushed up the slope, tore a branch from the nearest bush and rushed to and fro, beating the branch around and hooting, half in imitation of what Sniff had been doing and half in sheer excitement and joy. The others watched him for a moment and then began to move too. They gathered at the edge of the stream and stared amazed at the rushing water. Eva joined them and crouched down to drink. The water had a sweetish, mineral taste, quite different from the many-times-treated water in the troughs of the Reserve. Perhaps the drugs made you thirsty, because almost at once the rest of the group was doing the same. When Eva rose and turned she saw Sniff and Herman sitting side by side, chewing steadily at some leaves they had torn from a bush.
There had been a lot of discussion back home about whether and how to feed the chimps during the experiment. Botanists on the preliminary expedition to the island had reported that there was enough food in the ringed patch to support twenty chimps for three weeks, provided they knew what to look for. Probably only some of the leaves were edible, and one particular bush was fairly poisonous but tasted so bitter that you knew at once and spat it out. (Eva had tested some of the samples the botanists had brought home.) There were wild fig trees, and mangoes that must have seeded from crop trees planted by people before the mountains went bald. There were roots too, probably, if you knew what to look for, and ants’ nests and grubs under the bark of old trees up the ravine. Three hectares wasn’t a lot for twenty chimps—it would be looking fairly bashed around by the time they left. Eva had been especially interested in everything the botanists could tell her. It was going to be more important than people knew. But for the moment she was thankful that Dad and the others had decided they would have to come in at night while the chimps were sleeping and leave extra food around.
She knuckled over to Herman and put her muzzle close to the fist that clasped the leaves. He cuffed her casually away—he was a big young male, strong and not very intelligent, but placid and with less than the usual share of male chimp mischief. Sniff had seen the exchange. He snapped a few twigs from the bush and passed them to Eva, who took them and munched experimentally. The taste was faintly nutty, and all but the young leaves at the tips took a lot of chewing. Not many vitamins there, she guessed. Not much else either. Chimps in the wild, Dad said, used to spend two-thirds of their day looking for food and the rest eating it when they’d found it.
By now the rest of the group had gathered around and was snatching twigs from the tree and trying the bushes nearby. Billy found a bitter one and spat the leaves out with a grunt of disgust, then went and washed his mouth out in the stream. They were used to being fed in their caves soon after they awoke, so they kept making trips back to the crates to see whether breakfast had come yet. Eva was hungry too but waited. She felt it was important not to always be the one who did things first.
In the end it was Sniff. He took Herman by the wrist and led him to the gap in the bushes he and Eva had found earlier. At the opening he turned and beckoned to Eva. Come. She rose and signaled to Lana and Dinks, but it was Abel, who nowadays associated Eva in his mind with amusements and games, who came scampering across. Beth followed, tut-tut-ting, so Lana picked up Wang and came too. Eva turned and led them into the shadows, aware by the sounds behind her that the rest of the group would trail along.
By midmorning they were up in the ravine. They had found figs and a trailing plant with sweet yellow berries and some slow white grubs in a mound of dead leaves—they tasted like shrimp without the sea flavor—and a bog plant with long pale leaves whose midrib you could crunch like celery. They had also begun to learn that trees were not as easy to climb as they looked, especially if you were used to the rigid steel branches welded to the pillars of the Reserve. Herman had one crashing fall into the bushes below and rose bewildered, still clutching the branch that had snapped on him. By now they’d eaten enough for the moment, and it was getting too hot to move, so they rested.
There were two trees of the same kind, with smooth gray many-forked branches, growing low down from opposite cliffs of the ravine and meeting over the rush of water. Two hidden cameras up in the cliffs were trained on the place, but Eva hadn’t needed to coax the others there. They had found it of their own accord and swung themselves up, draping their bodies into crooks and crotches, making a pattern of dark strong shapes against the snaking gray branches. They twitched or scratched or groomed for a while at a neighbor, or moved lethargically to a fresh perch or to join another chimp, but for the most part they stayed still.