Endangered: Chapters 6–13

He’d disappear from my hands, and I’d look around for him, getting panicked, until I’d hear a telltale raspy laugh and find him dangling from a ceiling fan, revolving on one of the blades.

I’d walk into the nursery with him, and the others would come over curiously, but Otto would clutch me hard and whimper until we left.

From my description, he thought they were kata-kata — “cut-cut” in Lingala — a catch-all local term that could refer to renegade guards or deserters from the Congolese or Rwandan or Zambian armies.

To reiterate, as many as a thousand people in the capital are already dead in street rioting, with reports of many more.

The governments of the United States of America and Belgium have already announced their intent to evacuate all citizens and France is expected to follow

It was something about the way Patrice said “this time”; assassinations and coups were baggage the Democratic Republic of Congo had been lugging on its own for a long time.

The consensus in our group was that people who stayed inside weren’t being killed, but the radio had said nothing about that, and we’d agreed on it only because it made us feel better.

Any citizens of the USA, or EU countries with Belgian reciprocity agreements, will be airlifted out of Kinshasa’s N’Djili Airport at 20:00 tonight on marked UN planes.

As the political upheaval settled down, the mamas would take care of him alongside the other nursery bonobos — but it was only because he’d bonded with me that he’d pulled through and survived.

An officer stood in front of them, a slender man with a blue cap that somehow looked both rakish and sloppy on his head.

The officer stalled for a moment, like he was mentally searching his protocol book for how to handle this particular situation.

Farther down, embedded into the base of a tree and hidden by palm fronds, was the delay switch for the enclosure’s entrance.

I slowed, crawling over thick branches that arched through the air like tentacles before diving into the fertile soil and becoming roots.

And for the time being, at least, we were stuck in a paddock with wild animals.

I crouched in the mud with Otto, smelling filth and listening to the slaughter and unable to stop the flash flash flash of imagined images going along with the voices of the people I’d grown to love as they were silenced, witnessing their last moments in my mind until the familiar voices were gone, leaving only the unknowable Swahili of the rebel soldiers, occasional gunfire accompanied by laughter, and the crashing ruckus of pillage.

Though I was intimidated by the prospect of facing the apes, I was far more willing to risk my life with them than with the kata-kata.

An image came back to me, unbidden, one of the earliest of my life: Dad insisted I be sent to preschool at the Catholic school in the posh Gombe district, and when my mom dropped me off I bawled and bawled, begging her not to leave me alone.

He ripped up a shoot growing out of the rotting trunk and started peeling away its bark to get at the green pith inside.

As if to rub in my ineptitude, Otto handily pulled away a shoot and munched away.

She kept looking sideways and all around, but despite her nervousness she reached a tentative hand forward and patted me twice.

My dad was the opposite, gliding past everyone like a car passing pedestrians, but what he did have was this quiet focus.

Songololo kept pulling on it and screaming, yanking her leash taut, which made it impossible to turn the stake so it would pass through.

Songololo had rummaged through my pack, grabbed a handful of granola bars and a pair of socks, and was now running across the clearing.

I sat on our sleeping rock, watching the bonobos forage while I puzzled how to get out of my predicament.

Anastasia feinted at me, hurling sticks and leaves and dirt and whatever else she could manage to grab.

She staggered and recoiled; I hadn’t hit her hard, but the metal — its hardness or smell — had her spooked.

I had an idea about the order of their hierarchy by who was grooming whom.

Those would have to come from the next tree over — I’d have to climb back down, go up the other tree, and hope I could reach across in the rain without plummeting to my death.

It was unnerving to be suspended high above the ground, but the nest felt sturdy — surprisingly sturdy, as good as a store-bought hammock.

Bonobos screamed above me, and branches thudded against my back and then my face as I contorted through the fall.

I was in the air for another second before sharp leaves raked my face as I hit the upper fronds of a bushy branch, sinking in until I stopped, panting, mired in brambles.

She could have given up on her mother, but she was obsessed with trying to get Anastasia to love and take care of her, even though Anastasia acted as though she didn’t have a daughter.

Every time one food source was depleted, the bonobos discovered another.

The matriarchy revealed itself only at times of stress.

He learned a game from them that everyone else enjoyed with gusto but made my heart stop: They’d climb the highest tree they could find and then, after a few minutes of goading, drop to the ground, saving themselves from splattering by grabbing a branch at the last possible moment.