Monkey Business

Commotion shook the trees behind my house. Well, actually it was George shaking the trees, as I named him later. A young black spider monkey had escaped from the other side of the village and made its way towards the forest on the eastern part of the island. George would look down at us from the trees just behind the village to see if we would give him something to eat, as he had not yet readjusted to scrounging the bush on his own. Visits by George and conversations in monkeyish became a regular part of my day.

An old lady, eager to give the children a nature lesson, told a group of boys, “Look at that spider monkey. Isn’t it wonderful? We could catch it and sell it to foreigners!” I laughed, but to me this epitomized an unfortunate concept—using up unsustainable resources and selling them to buy western things that will break quickly in the harsh jungle environment and end up in a makeshift landfill on the forest’s edge.

Slowly George became braver. The monkey ventured out of the trees behind my house and, watching to make sure the humans were far enough away, he would run to the mango tree in front of my house to check for fruit. To my dismay, George found it especially enjoyable to swing around on my power cable. Another day, George caught an irresistible whiff of food from an open window in the house next to mine. Twice he stole the neighbors’ food, eating it in one of their hammocks, and this put him out of favor with the village.

After George became a nuisance, I saw the same old lady who had told the children how wonderful the monkey was, looking up an Asai palm and shouting, “You are a dog! You and your mother and your father,” a typical Ndjuka curse. Besides the humorous notion of a person standing on the ground cursing an animal invulnerably high by calling it another animal, this displayed another unfortunate tendency. While we should adjust to our environment, such as closing windows or sealing up food when wild animals are around, we tend to want nature to conform to us. We can change where we live of course, or catch the monkeys to sell them to foreigners, but sometimes it is best to modify our own behavior to take advantage of the good things around us.

George later met a dog who had come to visit Diitabiki with his owners. Early in the morning one Sunday, I heard a great hullabaloo as the dog yelped up at George on the roof, and George hooted back. George has been more cautions about wandering into the village in the past few days.