The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys (11 page)

Beside the water butt, and drinking from it, was a woman. And she was not just any woman, she was the woman who’d first drawn me here. My heart leapt at the sight of her. It was a sign, I felt sure, that I’d been right to approach. She was a mother and if she just looked in my eyes, then perhaps she’d love me the same way as she loved her baby.

What an intense thing it is – this human need to be loved. It’s one of the most profound things that make social animals social. Just as the monkeys cared so much for one another, so I had learned that these human animals did too. And that was all I wanted: to be loved by them and cared for. And all it would take, or so I believed, was for a mother to see that need in my eyes.

But she didn’t. As I stood there, not knowing quite when to reveal myself, she turned from the water butt and saw me. And her response was the opposite of what I’d expected. Yes, she looked into my eyes, but all I could see in hers was fear. She started skipping away immediately, keeping her eyes on me as she did so, as if I wasn’t like her but some disgusting, filthy creature, utterly repellent to her.

Her fear didn’t seem to diminish as she backed away from me. If anything, the more she looked at me, the more afraid she became. She began stumbling over stray objects in her panic, and all the while she kept shouting at me, over and over. I didn’t know what she was saying, but it was clear that she wanted me to go away.

Whatever it was, the drama of her delivery drew attention from other people, and as I tried to make myself as small and submissive as I could, a well-built man came running from one of the nearby huts, obviously keen to find out what was happening. He wore a fabric headband into which were stuck a pair of feathers. One was a bright gorgeous blue, the other a deep green, and as well as these he wore other brightly coloured jewellery made of beads. He also had two stripes – one red and beneath it one black – daubed in some kind of paint, across his cheeks.

I instinctively knew he was the chief here. I knew about leaders from my monkey family, of course. In our troop, it wasn’t Grandpa who ran things. For one thing, with his injured arm, he sat down too much and just raised an eyebrow at the things that went on. Our chief was younger, bigger and definitely stronger. He could snap big thick branches that others could not, and this made the whole troop respect him. He was forceful and pushy, and definitely not my favourite, but that was troop life. He was the one we trusted to lead us.

This man was like that monkey: confident and strong. And, having seen me and clearly not found me at all frightening, he approached me accordingly. I watched his eyes narrow as he appraised what he saw. Now it was my turn to be terrified again, because he immediately reached out and placed a strong hand on one of my shoulders, while his other hand grasped my face and pulled it forwards.

If he was shocked to see me there, or in the least bit confused by me, he didn’t show it. And his inspection of me took no time. While my heart thumped in my chest and my limbs quaked in terror, he opened my mouth to inspect my teeth, pulled my head down to see the back of my neck and all the time mumbled some incomprehensible babble. The job done, he simply shooed me away.

As a gesture, it was unmistakeable. The monkeys would do it. It was the sort of gesture a bigger, stronger monkey would make if a smaller, weaker fellow monkey tried to steal their nuts. I was devastated. Couldn’t he at least give me a chance? I tried begging to him, making gestures to convey my wish for food and shelter. But my voice and actions were those of a monkey, not a child, and he took not the slightest notice, just kept on shooing me.

Yet still I persisted. They had so much food and shelter! I needed so little and could help them so much, yet he was implacable and now began to push me. His hands were rough, his strength considerable, and he was determined to be rid of me, even making a gesture that I immediately understood – of a finger being dragged across his throat in great anger.

I needed no further encouragement to go then and ran back into the undergrowth before slinking away into the jungle, feeling wretched. I didn’t stop till I was back in my own territory, with my dear, familiar monkeys, who seemed, if not exactly thrilled that I’d returned to them, at least happy, as they always were, to let me stay.

I learned a valuable lesson that day. And an enduring one, too, because it resonates with me still. Family is not just about who you appear to belong to, or what it says on your birth certificate, or who you look like, or even what they’d find if they studied your DNA. Family is found anywhere you are loved and cared for. That might mean friends or foster parents, a group or even a charity. What matters far more – so much more than chemistry or ancestry – is that precious bond, that reassurance that they won’t let you down.

I thought hard over the coming days about what had happened to me and how to cope with it. A new feeling had now wormed its way into my consciousness. Somehow I knew that I really belonged in the human world, but I had been turned away. I felt raw and rejected, unwanted and hurt. Where did my future lie, now that my own kind had rejected me? But again and again I kept coming back to the same truth. That my family were the ones who had never let me down. Because the monkeys hadn’t, had they? Even though I’d tried to replace them. Even though I’d been so dismissive and so disloyal to them. I realised I must put all thoughts of humans firmly out of my mind. The monkeys, not the humans, were my family.

Life, after a time, continued as it had always done, and as the days passed so my yearning for life at the camp faded. I did go back from time to time, but now it was for purely practical reasons. There was food there that I liked, and I was very adept at stealing it. So why wouldn’t I? But that was where it ended.

Indeed, I immersed myself ever more joyfully into my jungle life. And life, in every form there, was abundant. It seemed that every single day I would see something different, be it a shimmering bird, the way the light danced around a puddle, a new path, a different vista, an unfamiliar call or song.

One of my most favourite of all the small creatures was a tiny pinky-beige lizard that, bizarrely, had a transparent belly. I could actually see the colours of the food in its stomach, which enthralled me. But I had to be patient to earn my pleasure. It was a shy little thing and would only come out if I sat and waited patiently for a very long time. Other lizards, in contrast, had no need to hide. They could lie and doze on a branch and just make themselves invisible by looking exactly like their surroundings.

The ants were real workers, as everyone knows – always busy, always rushing, and forming long trains of cargo, carrying leaves that were so much bigger than they were into the holes that led down to their colonies. They would never stop – not for a second – and if you planted a finger in their way, they just swerved around it. I recall spending many happy times just sitting in the dappled shade, playing traffic controller to those poor ants, sending them on all sorts of obstacle-avoiding detours.

I had also become less fearful around most of the birds there, many of whom seemed wonderfully wise and beautiful to me now. I was still wary around parrots, but other birds made me happy. There was a nosy toucan that would often sit a couple of branches above me and keep an eye on every single move I made. He had a dreadful call – the most annoying, rasping croak of a bird call – but he was so friendly I forgave him for his lack of musicality. His friendship was much more important.

My favourite singing bird was one I’ve later identified through pictures – the Mirla bird, a kind of everyday-looking blackbird with orange legs, who more than made up for his lack of fine plumage by having the most amazing song – one I often used to imitate, having discovered I had quite a pretty voice of my own.

Perhaps because I was older and more understanding of the jungle rhythms, the days now had a greater sense of order. The early mornings, when the sun began peeping shyly through the canopy, were mostly spent in what felt like a shared endeavour. It seemed every creature would rise and join in the universal chase to find food. But as the sun’s heat increased with every inch it slid towards its zenith, so the middle of the day saw a common search for rest with a jungle-wide siesta. All the birds would quieten down, the general activity levels would slow, and, for those that could, there was a general move upwards into the canopy, in pursuit of cool air and an escape from the intense heat. In those quiet times I would often hear far-away sounds – including the distant roar of a waterfall that I hankered after finding but never did. I wonder if it still roars there today.

I had also developed a new interest in plants and flowers, and doing craft with them, for want of a better word. I would pick juicy green leaves and smash them with a rock, adding a little pond water too. The leaves were generous and would very soon reward my efforts by releasing a coloured liquid I could then use as paint. Trial and error soon taught me which leaves made the best colour, and, successful in this, I conducted further experiments. I could make orange using the seeds of a pomegranate-like fruit, the interior of which was the brightest shade of orange I ever saw. I could soon make a whole rainbow of pretty paint colours to play with, mixing the juices of seeds, nuts and flowers. I would then use the resulting liquids to decorate not only my skin but also bark, rocks and branches, not to mention any monkey who interfered with my art class.

And, like any other little girl, I made jewellery. My time watching the children in the human camp had opened my eyes to new diversions and one of my favourites was collecting orchids, other flowers and long stems to make chains I would drape on anything I fancied. I would hang them around my neck, as the Indians did, but also around the jungle, for no other reason than to make the place look even prettier, which I think must be an instinctive female need. My favourite form of necklace was made from a string of what I now know were vanilla pods, and the sweet scent would linger on me all day.

But for all the distractions, the best thing in my life was my beloved monkey family, who I knew so well by this time that I could distinguish every single one. I knew when one was born and I knew when another died. I knew which child belonged to which mother and what strengths, skills and traits each individual monkey had. I suppose at first glance they might have seemed like just a big group of similar animals, but to me they were as different from one another as would be any human family member.

In their company, I felt safe, and the jungle had become my home. But I was soon to have it spelled out to me, horribly and brutally, that danger was never far away.

*

It was an ordinary day in the jungle. Most were. It might have been as much as a year after I had left thoughts of the camp behind me: it’s impossible to say. But given that I had once again lost interest in humans, I imagine that quite a lot of time must have passed.

Dawn arrived with its usual mad bustle of activity. The noise of the jungle traffic was never less than deafening as all the day creatures limbered up with the sunshine. But the regular cacophony was soon pierced by an immediate-danger call from one of the monkeys, which sent almost every jungle animal to seek shelter.

It was like a well-rehearsed fire drill. The birds were suddenly fewer, and those that remained airborne were now flying anxiously, high above us. The monkeys had disguised themselves as bulges of benign tree bark, and an eerie silence hovered over the suddenly stricken land.

Automatically, I followed the other animals in the dash to find a place of safety – in my case, this meant the hollow tree that had been my home for so long. Assuming I was close enough to get to it, it was always my chosen bolthole, and as I crouched there now, hidden from sight by some hastily grabbed fallen branches, I wondered what monstrous thing could saturate our land with so much fear.

I didn’t have to wait long for the answer. I could just about see out, but it was the noise that came first. A loud and unsettling sound that was strangely methodical. Even rhythmical. It sounded as if the undergrowth nearby was being chopped down, viciously and violently ripped up and cut away.

My hearing didn’t deceive me. That was exactly what was happening. First the noise grew.
Thwack
!
Rip
!
Slash
!, and
Thwack
! again. It was then accompanied, as the bushes terrifyingly close to me parted, by the sight of two white human men, both dressed in green clothing and carrying, as well as their fearsome glinting machetes, a variety of sacks, guns and nets. Had I not spent so long observing the Indian camp humans, these two creatures would have looked alien to me – a species of animal I might not have recognised immediately but one I’d instinctively have known to flee from. But knowing they were human gave me no reason to revise my opinion. They were monsters – everything about them looked monstrous – and the hair on my skin stood to horrified attention while my heart pumped a pulse through my head.

I held my breath as I watched them slash their way through the undergrowth, pushing my body as far back into the tree trunk as I could. I had no idea what they wanted or why they seemed so intent on destruction, but that question was soon answered. The nets, I realised as I watched them both, were for catching and stealing whatever creatures they fancied: first, a bright, unwary butterfly was scooped up in an instant, the net secured and slung over a shoulder.

Then their attention turned to birds. Again I watched mutely as they fired a different sort of net, this time to trap a parrot: a beautiful bird I had already seen that morning and which they tethered by the legs, causing it to flap in a panic, its elegant feathers drifting to the forest floor.

I tried to still my breathing. Would I be the next prey they captured? It seemed they had the means to catch anything they wanted, from birdlife to insects, lizards and snakes. No wonder that monkey had been so insistent in his warning. We were clearly all in very great danger.