I telephoned the dealer from whom we had gotten N’Pongo and asked him about the possibilities of obtaining a female gorilla. He told me he had just been offered one, a year or so younger than N’Pongo, but now, owing to the political situation in Africa, the price had increased and he was asking fifteen hundred pounds. There followed two days of soulsearching. I knew we could not afford that amount of money in a lump sum, but we might be able to do it if it were spread over a period. Once again I telephoned the dealer and asked him whether he would consider letting us have the animal on instalment terms. To his credit and to my relief he agreed and said that his representative would bring her over to Jersey in a week’s time.
The whole zoo waited for that day with bated breath. I, prompted by a slightly acrimonious conversation with my bank manger, spent the week by having a collecting box made, over which hung the notice: ‘We have bought Nandy on the instalment plan. Please help us to keep up the instalments.’ So Nandy arrived, crouched in a crate that I would have considered small for a squirrel. She, like N’Pongo, appeared to be in perfect condition: her fur was glossy, she was fat, and her skin had a sheen like satin, but at first sight of her it was her eyes that impressed me most. N’Pongo’s eyes, as 1 have said, were small and deep set, calculating and full of humour. Nandy’s eyes were large and lustrous, and when she looked sideways she showed the whites of them; but they were frightened eyes that did not look at you squarely. They were the eyes of an animal that had little experience of human beings, but even that limited experience had given her no reason to trust or respect them. When we released her from her cage, I could see the reason; right across the top of her skull was a scar which must have measured six or seven inches in length. Obviously, when she was being caught, some over-enthusiastic and intrepid human being had given her a blow with a machete which had split her scalp like a razor slash. It must have been a glancing blow or her skull would have been split in two. With such an introduction to the human race, you could hardly blame Nandy for being a little antisocial. This great slash was by now completely healed, and there was only the long white scar to be seen through the hair of her head, which reminded me of the curious imitative and quite unnecessary partings that so many Africans carve in their hair with the aid of a razor.
We kept Nandy in a separate cage for twenty-four hours, so that she could settle down. The cage was next to N’Pongo’s, to enable her to see her future husband but she evinced as little interest in him as she evinced in us. If you tried to talk to her and looked directly at her face, her eyes would slide from side to side, meeting yours only for a sufficient length of time to judge what your next action might be. Eventually, deciding that the wire between herself and us rendered us comparatively harmless, and preferring not to look at us, she did turn her back. She had such a woebegone, frightened face that one longed to be able to pick her up and comfort her, but she had been too deeply hurt, and this was the last thing she would have appreciated. It would take us, I reckoned roughly, at least six months to gain her confidence, even with the example of the pro-human N’Pongo.
The morning when we let her into the cage with N’Pongo was a red letter day, but fraught with anxiety. He had by now become so well-established and was such a fearfully extroverted character that he obviously considered he was the only gorilla in the world and all human beings were his friends. We did not know how he would react to Nandy’s sullenness and anti-human attitude. Although for twenty-four hours he could see her in the cage alongside him, he had shown absolutely no interest in her presence. Thus when the great moment of introduction came we stood by with buckets of water, brushes, nets, and long sticks just in case the engagement party did not come off with the same romantic swing that one expects from reading women’s magazines. When all was ready, we opened the shutters and Nandy, looking thoroughly distrustful, sidled her way from the small cage into N’Pongo’s comparatively palatial quarters. There she put her back to the wall and squatted, her eyes darting to and fro with a curiously suspicious yet belligerent expression on her face. Now that she was actually in the cage with N’Pongo, who was sitting up on a branch, watching her with the same expression of uninterested mistrust that he reserved for some new item of diet, we could see that she was very much smaller than he—in fact, only about half his size. They sat steadily contemplating each other for some minutes, while we on the other side of the wire did hasty checks to make sure that all our buckets of water and so on were easily accessible.
This was the critical moment: the two gorillas and ourselves were frozen into immobility. To any spectator who did not know the circumstances we would have appeared like one of the more bizarre of Madame Tussaud’s exhibits. Then N’Pongo stretched out a black hand with fingers like great sausages, clasped the wire, and rolled himself carefully to the ground. There he paused and examined a handful of sawdust, as though it were the first time he had ever come across such a commodity. In a casual, swaggering manner, he sauntered in a semicircle which took him close to Nandy, and then, without looking at her, but with the utmost speed, he reached out a long powerful arm, gripped a handful of her hair and pulled it, then hurried along the perimeter of the cage as though nothing had happened. Nandy by nature has always been—and I fear will always be—a little slow in the uptake, and so N’Pongo was some six feet away before she realized what had happened. By then the baring of her teeth and her grunt of indignation were quite useless.
The first round, therefore, went to N’Pongo, but before he could get exalted views of male superiority I felt that we should bring up our second line of defence. We removed the buckets and nets and produced two large dishes full of a succulent selection of fruits. One was presented to N’Pongo and one to Nandy. There was one slight moment of tension when N’Pongo, having examined his own plate, decided that possibly Nandy’s contained additional delicacies which his lacked, and went off to investigate. Nandy, however, still smarting under the indignity of having had her hair pulled, greeted N’Pongo’s investigation of her plate with such a display of belligerence that N’Pongo, being essentially a good-humoured and cowardly creature, retreated to his own pile of food. For the next half-hour they both fed contentedly at opposite ends of the cage.
That night N’Pongo, as usual, slept on his wooden shelf, while Nandy, looking like a thwarted suffragette, curled up on the floor. All through the following day they had little jousts with each other to see who would occupy what position. They were working out their own protococlass="underline" should Nandy be allowed to swing on the rope when N’Pongo was sitting on the cross-beam? Should N’Pongo be allowed to pinch Nandy’s carrots even though they were smaller than his own? It had the childishness of a general election but was three times as interesting. However, by that evening, Nandy had achieved what amounted to Votes for Female Gorillas, and both she and N’Pongo shared the wooden shelf. Judging by the way N’Pongo snuggled up to her, he was not at all averse to this invasion of his bedroom.