Eva sat at the edge of the group and watched them. Deliberately she lived in the moment, refusing to think about what lay ahead. She could not imagine that she would ever be so happy again, so filled with tingling, sparkling peace. Of course it was too hot for scampering around, though the spray from the stream helped, but she could feel that there was more to the stillness of the chimps than that. It was something shared, like a song, the wonder, the amazement, the deep content, the sense of having come home. She did not have to guess but knew, because she could feel the awareness going to and fro among them, shared and real, that they understood what had happened. The part that mattered, anyway. All of them, wide awake, were remembering and recognizing the dream. If nothing else happened, or if everything she and Grog had planned went wrong, this hour, this noon, would have been worthwhile.
In the early afternoon Eva experimented with making herself a nest. She was going to have to teach the others, so it was important to get it right herself first. It was easy, once you’d learned to recognize the sort of branches needed, close and whippy enough to bend and then lace together, holding them in place with your weight. Later still, she seemingly accidentally coaxed the chimps up the southern slope outside the ravine to where the humans had left the day’s rations—mostly plain chimp chow, with enough bananas to go around. Sniff and Billy had their first set-to, not a proper fight, but bluffing and challenging, and then, before anything serious happened, settling down to intense close mutual grooming. They were still at it when the rain started.
It came almost in an instant, a few large drops rattling among the leaves and then a drenching downpour. Everything streamed wet. Twenty dark faces—twenty-one including Tod’s—stared disgusted at the sky, and then the whole group went knuckling rapidly from the hill for the cover of their crates. The crates were gone. Eva had known they would be and had heard earlier that afternoon the thud of rotor blades as a flivver lifted them away. The chimps halted and stared at the blank space in dismay. The stream was roaring now with a dangerous sound, which added to their alarm. Across the valley, below where the crates had been, stretched the electric fence.
The fence had become the biggest problem in the whole expedition. The sponsors nearly called it off because of the cost and difficulty, but everyone had agreed that without one the chimps would probably go roving across the barren mountain to other patches of forest, almost impossible for humans to reach, and be lost completely. Even as it was, the whole program was months late, because the fence had taken so long to build. There should have been sun and sparkling waters, instead of this daylong sauna.
Now the chimps gazed at the fence and the barren slope beyond. To their minds there was no other place the crates could have gone but down there. Several of them knuckled over to the fence to look, naturally enough reaching hands to grip the mesh as they did so. They leaped back with barks of dismay, then gingerly reached forward and tried again, snatching their hands back at the first tingle. Some of them perhaps knew about electric fences, because there were places around the Reserve where possible escape routes had been blocked with charged wire, but they wouldn’t all have explored that far.
The rain, if anything, was heavier now. For a few minutes they scuttered to and fro along the fence, as if hoping for a gap. Sniff, more purposefully, traced the line up the right-hand ridge and over to where it turned and climbed toward the cloud base. He paused at the angle, staring out over the barren, horrible rockscape, all streaming with thousands of individual tiny waterfalls, then snorted and turned away. Eva had followed, interested both in the fence and in Sniff’s reactions, and when he saw her he snorted on a slightly different, negative, note, and led the way back down into the valley. The others were already heading up into the comparative shelter of the trees.
In the ravine the stream was a foaming fawn torrent, but near its lower end rose a stand of broad-leaved palms, with dryish patches beneath them. Here they huddled together, their drenched pelts steaming. Night fell, and suddenly they were in total dark. By the time the rain stopped an hour later, they were all asleep, but Eva, restless, awoke and saw lights moving around. Her first thought was that Dad or some of his helpers had come up to check that they were all right, but then she realized that the lights were too faint and there were far too many of them, hundreds, thousands, blinking their different codes. Fireflies. Of course. She lay for a while, listening to the roar of the stream, and at last fell truly asleep.
Sniff explored the fence in the morning. Eva had expected him to, just as he seemed to have expected her to come around with him. It was another steamy hot day, but the cloud base was higher so that you could see most of the way up the mountain. Even for chimps the climb was stiff going—for the humans who had built the fence it must have been quite a task. Every so often Sniff would stop and gingerly touch the mesh, to check that the current was active all along. At other times he paused and simply stared at the mountainside, all brownish dull rock and scree, glaring with the heavy diffused light, plunging toward the sea. From up here you could see the grove spreading across the cramped plain at the foot of the mountain, the regular green rows mottled brown with disease.
During one of his pauses Sniff gazed at the area with deep interest, then grunted, nudged Eva and pointed, not at the grove but out beyond to the tip of the island, the little harbor with a ship loading, and in an open patch beside the buildings the SMI airboat tethered firm and the two flivvers, tiny as toys with distance. His snort expressed wariness and distrust.
The fence turned again, running sideways across the slope now, and climbed steeply to cross the ridge that lower down became the left-hand flank of their valley. At the crest Sniff halted. This was the highest point of the enclosure. From here you could see a whole new expanse of mountain, almost the same as the other side but steeper, with sheer cliff in places and in others loose rock at such a slope that it seemed poised for a fresh fall. There was another difference. About two kilometers away, nearer to the peak, was a large patch of dull green—trees.
They were too far off for Eva to tell whether they were real trees, or just bushes that had somehow retained their roothold on the incredible slope, but she could understand why they’d never been cleared—there was almost no way any human could reach them. She stared and stared. It was no use trying to work out a possible route—too much of the slope between was hidden—but she couldn’t help trying. “Take as many of the others as you can with you,” Grog had said. “If the worst comes to the worst you’ll have to go alone. Give me a month.” Grog had never been on the island—he’d only seen photographs. From them it looked as if there’d be places to hide and enough to eat. He couldn’t have known.
She heard Sniff grunt and turned. He was already climbing back down the ridge toward the ravine. Eva waited. She heard him crashing about below, and then he came back carrying a small branch he had torn from a bush. When he reached the fence he put the branch against it, at first just brushing the leaf tips quickly along and then withdrawing it. Feeling no shock, he pushed harder. The mesh bowed out under his weight, but the fence had been engineered to stand such attacks—Dad would know that the chimps were smart enough to try something like that if they chose—and the branch broke first.
Sniff wasn’t ready. He fell solidly against the wire and got the full force of the current. All his hair shot erect. He jumped back and might have gone tumbling helplessly down toward the stream if Eva hadn’t grabbed at his arm and caught him. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing. She eased him into a crouch, where he stayed gasping while she tried to calm him by grooming the trembling pelt along his spine. At last he gave a long sigh and straightened, then turned his head to gaze at the trees on the far slope. He got up, went back to the fence, and studied it minutely, his muzzle only a few inches away from the mesh. After a while, with a grunt of disappointment, he continued their exploration down the slope, but now didn’t pause either to test the current or to look at the mountain.