CHAPTER 4

The slow life was, in a word, refreshing.

That is not to say it was always easy: Mike and his troglodyte brethren lived balanced on a knife's edge of survival, allowing them to forget for only the shortest, sweetest moments that almost every element of their surroundings would prefer them dead, and would conspire to arrange for it given the most humble opportunity. The plants, the bugs, the beasts, the spores: all of them were hungry, relentless, and untroubled by conscience.

In the wet season it rained, and then even the water itself seemed determined to wipe out the little troop -- floods, monsoons, quicksand, the bacteria of something rotten spreading down the stream to poison whosoever should want a drink. The wind was wicked; the sun cruel; the air a cloud of disease-laden mosquitos.

But, in time, the wet season passed. Only one chimp was lost.

The hilltop had changed considerably in the wake of Mike. Now, instead of nests on the ground, they slept in hammocks slung between the trees with tough, twisted-fibre ropes Mike manufactured from dried vines sealed with oil boiled from the fat of bushbabies, vervets and blue monkeys. Some of the chimps had become quite adept at the rope-making process, and had even introduced innovations to Mike's clumsy weave. Two of the taller, straighter trees had been stripped of most of their branches in order to serve as crow's nests for sighting predators before they approached too close. Raised between them was a bundle of food stores, their supports coated with sap to dissuade insect thieves; it was a constant arms race against the ants.

At the heart of this simple village was a fire-pit ringed with stones, in and of itself Mike's single greatest contribution to improving daily life for himself and his friends. Over it they cooked their meat and softened edible roots, boiled their drinking water, cured hides, disinfected wounds, and huddled around against the weather's most unsympathetic fits.

"You've got to love fire," Mike would opine.

"Fire hot good," agreed the chimps. "Dance fire, nice fire."

Though Mike had many times attempted to explain the purely mechanical nature of flame, the chimpanzees could not or would not resist the urge to personify it. While Mike patiently demonstrated the methods of firecraft, the chimps insisted on appealing to and deconstructing apparent instances of fire's emotional life, its preferences and grudges, its desires and appetites, its sometimes curiously disconnected way of meting out justice...

"Fire burn! Fire angry!"

"The fire isn't angry -- you just shouldn't muck with it when you've got grease on your hands. Grease is flammable."

"Fire bite punish fire."

"No, the fire is not punishing you. You've just got to wash your hands."

Mike would then shake his head as the chastized chimp would skip washing and instead proceed to feed the fire something they believed it found delicious, like strips of fast-burning bark or dried-out bricks of mulch. Appeasing the fire's feelings of retribution was, to the chimp mind, vastly more important than following Mike's instructions.

"Good nice," the chimp would coo soothingly. "Nice fire good."

Mike had named the chimps, either arbitrarily or in connection to some physical or behavioural characteristic. For their part, the chimps quickly developed gestural short-hand for each name -- a sort of abstracted flick loosely connected to the sound or the action representing the individual. Mike's name, for instance, was simply the sign for the letter M. The young male Mike had designated as Climber identified himself with the sign for "pull."

It was Climber now who hooted from his perch in one of the watch trees. Mike looked up. Climber signed broadly due to the distance between them: "Bad coming."

Mike whistled. The chimps around him stopped whatever they were doing and looked to him. "The baddies are coming," he said in a carrying voice, his hands jogging to echo the words. "I want a bragging party out front, and pincer platoons to the flanks. Slingers to your stations. Go, go, go!"

The apes hurried into position. Mike strolled around the fire-pit, keeping an eye on their well-rehearsed preparations. His clothes were a mash-up of shreds of uniform bound with hides and furs, his lengthening hair kept out of his eyes with a bandana of tough leather. His boots were Canadian Forces standard issue, black as pitch and tough as kevlar. He glanced back up the watch tree to Climber, his brow raised in inquiry.

Climber pointed to his own eyes, then indicated a direction. He squinted at his fingers for a long moment and then carefully raised six. He pointed finally to his genitals.

Mike understood: a war party of six males approaching from the south. Rival chimpanzees, piercing their territory.

"They must be new to the neighbourhood," chuckled Mike. "Slingers: look south! Beaters: to your marks!"

The hilltop fell silent. Mike squatted low by the pit. At the edge of audibility he detected the twig-snap, mulch-crunching approach of the six alien chimpanzees up the south face of the hill. When the footfalls and quiet grunts came close enough Mike nodded to the beaters. The beaters, in turn, yanked and sawed on long ropes attached to a series of young, flexible treetops extending around the hill: the net effect was that the brush all around the invaders began to shimmy and shake, surrounding them in a wash of white noise and petty distractions.

He heard the invaders holler in confusion. From experience Mike knew this would be enough to send most of them fleeing back the way they had come, but there was always a couple stalwart or foolish enough to make a charge uphill. Indeed, seconds later a large, black-faced male burst out of the bush on the periphery of the village, his arms waving in rage and panic.

He came face to face with the bragging party, a line of three females who launched into a furious campaign to intimidate him with flailing arms and shouts. The invader was not impressed; he made little rushes at them, smacking the dirt. The bragging party retreated a few steps at a time, drawing him into the clear. Then the invader caught sight of Mike behind the bragging party and froze, eyes wide. He reared up on its hind legs and roared, sharp yellow teeth casting off strings of saliva.

Mike made a quick gesture. "Fire!" he called.

The bragging party fell back, dropped to the ground, and pulled squares of hard bark over their heads. The invader was pelted by stones launched from leather slings swung by invisible attackers hidden behind leaf-stuffed screens in the foliage surrounding the village. The ordnance came from several directions at once and, while most of the stones missed their mark (the chimps had really terrible aim), the bewildering volley was sufficient to convince the foreign ape to beat a hasty retreat.

"Beaters stop!" yelled Mike. The bushes stopped shaking, providing the fleeing invader with a clear course to safety away from the hill, the sides of his escape route reinforced with two pincer platoons of hollering chimps. As he passed them they gave chase, screaming at the top of their lungs.

A few moments later all parties returned to the hilltop. Mike did a quick head count, then nodded to himself with satisfaction. "Stand down," he said. "We're all clear, guys. Good work!"

The chimps pant-hooted happily and congratulated each other. The babies were pulled out of hiding and Gourmand resumed tearing the carcasses of the morning's prey into strips suitable for easy cooking. Young Edgar and Bella watched intently, fascinated by the work of Gourmand's chipped-stone blade.

After supper everyone gathered for their favourite pastime: taking turns posing inside the window-frame of the piece of charred aircraft fuselage they'd retrieved from the crash site. Mike sat on the ground and laughed along with the gang as Flirt and Glutton did a well-loved slapstick routine in which they kept smacking into one another. The chimps howled, making the distinctive staccato grunts Mike had come to know as the voice of their comedic appreciation.

He did a routine, too, re-enacting moments of physical hilarity from The Simpsons television show -- a show to which the chimps had obviously had much exposure in their prior life. "D'oh!" cried Mike. The chimps fell on their sides, gasping for air.

Later, Mike swung lazily in his hammock as the chimps pursued one another in a fresh battery of mating games. When the courtships started Mike knew it was best to keep clear, as strong emotions were sometimes roused and jealous chimps had a fierce and sometimes blind temper. Any of these gentle creatures could snap Mike's bones without significant effort, given the wrong combination of circumstances.

Mike's throat felt raw on account of using it to say eight or nine things in a single day. When they weren't concerned about rival gangs encroaching on their territory the times when speaking was called for were few and far between; among close friends, the most meaningful kinds of communication were accomplished by eye, body and smell. So rarified were the situations that actually necessitated speech that Mike began to wonder whether warfare -- whether the need to have precise orders understood by groups -- was the impetus that propelled speech into man's daily habit. Almost no other part of life required it, when one stripped away the extraneum.

Twilight came and the moon rose, a crisp crescent of silver between bands of scalloped cloud. The chimps left off from their pursuits to look up at it in wonder. "Sky banana," they signed reverently. "Banana sky."

Bananas were a sore spot for the chimps. They missed them terribly. Any analogue of a banana's shape, like the crescent moon, and any analogue of its colour, including dozens of varities of flower, earned their instant and deepest regard. In the resemblance to their cherished fruit they saw a connection to the original prototype, a byway for worship and a way to touch what wasn't there.

Solemnly they mimed the peeling their index fingers, eyes locked on the above.

Mike sighed. He, too, would like a nice banana.

The next morning was quiet, dry and warm. The sky banana had long since set. There was, however, an uneasy feeling in the air and the chimps eyed the forest around their hill nervously. Mike knuckled his eyes and slipped out of his hammock, raising an inquiring brow at the closest chimp.

"Dinosaur smell," signed Tattler.

Mike frowned. "Huh?"

"Dinosaurs," echoed Glutton seriously. "Dinosaurs again."

"There's no such thing as dinosaurs anymore."

The chimps regarded him sceptically.

"...Are there?"

A sound began to permeate the forest, and it caused all of the little hairs all over Mike's body to stand on end. The chimps hooted worriedly. In the distance, something giant growled. Mike could feel it through his boots.

His eyes narrowed. He shook his head, then whistled loudly. "Recon squad -- form up!"

The reconnaissance squad moved carefully through the bush with Mike at the head flanked by two roving-eyed young males carrying stone-tipped spears. As they proceeded westward the Earth-rumbling growl clarified into the rumble and chortle of machines at work: the noise grew steadily louder, and soon Mike could detect the acrid perfume of diesel, oil and exhaust.

They stopped at the riverbank. Beyond a thin line of scrub on the opposite side, a clearing was being razed. An occluding blanket of tan dust was swept aside by the breeze and then Mike saw them: massive vehicles in grime-speckled red, orange and yellow -- all the gay colours of the dirtiest, grandest machines of heavy industry. Those closest to the river flexed cavernous metal scoops on the end of long, articulated necks, carving gouges in the ground.

"Bad dinosaurs," signed Flirt somberly.

Mike didn't know how to feel. The tree-smashing, root-tearing work of the machines was terrifying, loud and violent -- yet on the other hand his heart skipped a beat when he saw the distant figures of human beings moving between them, waving and calling to each other, their aluminium coffee flasks flashing in the morning sun.

"Holy crap," whispered Mike. "People!"

Mike had sighted the workers, and the workers had sighted the chimps. There was a flash as someone's field glasses reflected, and then a few of the men jogged over to a giant dump-truck's cab and hopped down again with rifles. Mike signalled a hasty retreat. The chimps looked at him in confusion. "Guns!" said Mike, signing ferverently.

The chimps scratched their heads. Clearly, in their prior life there had been no call or desire for them to possess a firearms vocabulary.

Edgar, however, came to appreciate firearms in a visceral way as he was shot in the chest. He tumbled over backward without making a sound, and when Mike turned him over he found his face frozen in an attitude of surprise. Blood chugged steadily from the hole in his torso, pooling under the ape's armpit. The echoes of the firing had yet to fade completely from the air and Edgar was already well dead.

The workers cheered. Mike looked up. The chimps around him were fleeing, crashing headlong and carelessly into the bush behind him, howling in fear. In seconds they were gone.

The workers splashed across the river.

They were white men. They murmured to each other in South African English as they toed Edgar's corpse with their workboots. "Ag man, that was some shot," said one. "You pegged that monkey like it was right in front of you. Aweh!"

"It's not a monkey, it's a chimp."

"Same difference, baas. Is it any good to eat?"

"Naw. Kaffirs'll probably eat it anyway, though. Might as well drag it round. You lot: get this in the bakkie."

When Mike saw the rude way the men hefted Edgar like a sack of sticks it took every ounce of self-control to keep him from leaping down out of the tree branches above them to throttle someone. He flexed his hands ruefully, feeling the familiar ache in his right from the moist air. He knew any action would be regrettable: he was no match for four armed men alone.

Mike watched them go, teeth clenched. They slogged across the river and joshed with each other as they hauled the body up the opposite bank and then swung it on the count of three into the back of a truck.

"One, two, three." Boom!

Mike closed his eyes.

When he returned to the hilltop the chimps greeted him with anxious looks and worried pants. He told them Edgar was gone, and that the men who rode the dinosaurs had killing sticks that could take away any one of them. The chimps were scared. "What do?" asked Climber, grabbing Mike's shoulder. "Where hide?"

"We have nowhere to go," answered Mike slowly. "There is nowhere to hide. The dinosaurs are eating the forest. They may even want to eat our hill."

They chimps drew close to one another. Many of them reached out to touch Mike for comfort. "What do?" asked Climber again, shaking his head. A dozen sets of brown eyes rested on Mike, wide and pleading.

The ambient sounds of the forest were suddenly very loud. Mike's heart was pounding in his chest. He swallowed, then put his chin up.

"We fight," he declared crisply. "We make war. We stop the dinosaurs."
5/6

The subterfuge was, in a word, hilarious.

Mike watched from a safe distance through his recently purloined field glasses, witnessing a pantomime in which two chimps brazenly approached the camp of four researchers from the National Geographic Society and began performing various antics. One chimp climbed aboard the shoulders of his companion and then the tottering, living totem wobbled around stiffly, the upper chimp offering his hand to shake and pretending to doff an invisible hat.

The researchers were shocked and instantly engaged. They fell over themselves to grab their cameras from their cases, to dangle microphones by the chimps, to jot hurried notes into their books. Mike grinned, knowing what was coming next.

In an homage to a classic episode of Star Trek, the chimps hopped apart and then dragged from the bushes a piece of limestone into which Mike had laboriously carved the words: NO KILL I. The chimps stood on either side of the limestone and slowly, clearly signed over and over again, "Life precious, life precious."

Despite the distance Mike distinctly heard one of the researchers cry out, "Oh my God!"

Mike turned from the field glasses to give Climber a curt nod. "Take your team in."

While the National Geographic researchers were entirely hypnotized by the chimps' apparent plea for interspecies clemency, Climber and his team slunk through the grass with clods of weeds strapped to their heads. Climber slipped inside the equipment tent. A moment later he reappeared and began handing out items one by one to be ferried back by his teammates: four air-rifles and eight boxes of tranquilizer darts.

Climber whistled like a Zuma songbird, then scooted quietly after the team. At this signal the performing chimps seemed to suddenly become bored with the researchers; they simply dropped their hands, turned around, and scampered off into the bush. The researchers looked at each other in surprise and disappointment, then fell to examining the limestone.

The chimps regrouped with Mike by the stream. "Good work," smiled Mike. "Let's have lunch."

Chimpanzees are always enthusiastic about lunch. They pant-hooted in delight and made a headlong dash for the hilltop.

"That was awesome," said Mike to Climber. "Keep it up, and I'll promote you to man."

Climber saluted and then scrambled off after the others.

Mike took a moment to lolligag by the scarecrows. Upon close inspection they wouldn't fool a one-eyed man with cataracts, but from a reasonable distance they were sufficient to give a roving band of rival apes pause. The scarecrows were made of stolen sandbags stuffed with leaves, dressed in fluorescent yellow safety vests; each stood at guard with a long stick in place of a gun. They were connected to the beaters' rope network, and thus could be caused from a remote distance to shimmy and quiver in an aggressive if faintly epileptic fashion.

With Mike's focus diverted to the dinosaurs, they had been forced to resort to semi-automatic defenses such as these to keep the territory clear. There wasn't enough attention to go around.

The days were busy.

Mike hiked up the hill. Preparations were well under way for tonight's daring sortie. For weeks Mike and his troglodyte kin had been waging an unrelenting campaign against the clear-cutting and construction efforts, and as of last night their opponents had upped the ante by dispatching round the clock patrols of security guards armed with guns and machetes, dour-faced skinny black men who smoked Chinese cigarettes and muttered to each other in a guttural, choppy-sounding language Mike couldn't fathom in the least.

He had reasoned that attacking the machines themselves would be a poor strategy. If the men could not work, they would have nothing to do all day but beat the bushes in search of the vandals. Instead, Mike had directed the campaign toward the supplies: by constantly interfering with the flow of food, drink and tobacco, the workers became disgruntled at their employer's failure to contain the situation and their insistence that work continue uninterrupted. So the men worked, and as the days went by they hated their employers more than the unseen saboteurs.

Mike had seen the fat airplanes come in. He knew the men had recently been resupplied. Thus, it was his plan to disrupt their sense of hope at its zenith, to foul the water and steal the food and burn the cigarettes just when the men were about to feel bolstered and relieved. He was optimistic this sudden reversal in fortune would persuade them to rebel against their employers, to initiate a work stoppage.

The only trick would be to incapacitate the armed guards before they could act. Hence, the tranquilizer rifles.

Mike checked on the chimps, overseeing their work. They no longer jingled as they moved, for Mike had long ago figured out how to break their collars. Their identification tags now hung over their hammocks. He took a few moments to roll around in the dirt with the juveniles, then made sure poor Glutton was comfortable, lying in a hammock with a splint on his fractured leg. "Looks like it's healing up nicely," said Mike.

"Itchy," signed Glutton gloomily. "Hungry."

"You're always hungry."

"Itchy," the chimp repeated sullenly.

Mike found a twig and carefully fed it into the dressing, then scratched at Glutton's leg. "Better?"

Glutton closed his eyes and sighed with contentment. "Love M," he gestured vaguely, yawning.

"I love you too, Glutton."

The afternoon aged. The sun began to sink. The voice of the forest slowly changed from daytime sounds to twilight sounds. The suppertime flowers exuded their stink as the dinosaurs' growls quieted one by one. The men laughed and swore and smoked as they parked their vehicles and ambled back toward their camp in the river valley. The new security guards passed them in the dirt-clod fields, but they did not exchange greetings. The two kinds of men were as alien to one another as chimpanzees and monkeys.

The sky was still pink, but the land was in shadow. Mike gave a nod to his troupe. "Let's move."

A tall, lanky security guard with a shaved head leaned on his rifle as he smoked, watching birds flock over the trees. Every few moments he spat in the dirt and shifted his pose. Mike hunkered low in the grass in order to silhouette the man against the sky for a clear shot, then squeezed the trigger: the air rifle barked. The guard grunted, slapped at his thigh, found the dart, then whimpered quietly and folded into an unruly pile.

"Wow," whispered Mike. "That was fast. This stuff must be dosed for rhinos or something."

He slunk along to the next sighting spot while a trio of chimps scampered over the sleeping guard and headed for the nearest supply trailer. The next guard took a little longer to succumb than the first, but within five minutes he had ceased crawling along in the dirt and had rolled over onto his side with his thumb jammed in his mouth, snoring loudly.

The next team headed for the water locker. When a third guard fell, the final team made for the shed where the daytime rations of cigarettes were stored along with the odd bottle of liquor for the foremen. The chimps had already learned to use the liquor to spread the fire, though they often went through four or five boxes of matches before getting a good strike. They tended to break the matches.

Mike was wiggling up to the fourth and final guard when the water locker erupted in a riot of noise: tumbling plastic vats, smashing bottles, hollering chimps. The guard's head snapped over. "Eh!" he called, unslinging his rifle.

Mike fired his own rifle but missed. The guard was running now, bearing down on the locker. Mike scrambled to his feet and beat the ground after him, propelled by worry.

The guard reached the locker and threw open the doors. Mike accelerated. The guard disappeared inside.

Heart hammering in his chest, Mike slid in the mud in front of the locker and sprawled awkwardly to the ground. He flipped himself over and then pawed through the darkness for his air rifle. He looked up just in time to see the guard ejected bodily from the locker, flying over his head in a high arc, then crashing down to the ground with a loud crack of breaking bone.

Two chimps burst out of the locker, roaring.

"Holy crap you guys are strong," breathed Mike with relief.

Suddenly the field was illuminated by rows of floodlights on wooden poles. Grimacing and howling, the chimps threw their hands over their eyes. Mike tried to blink away the throbbing afterimages as a distant klaxon began to ring. The tossed guard was talking quickly into a radio, his repeated cries urgent.

Mike stood up and whistled with his fingers. "Retreat!"

Together the troupe barrelled across the field, making for the far fringes ninety-degrees removed from the actual direction of their home hill -- this was a practiced piece of deception meant to confuse anyone bright enough to try to track their prints the next morning, to lead them astray. This path also took them dangerously close to the territory of their troglodyte rivals and they usually made their approach stealthily. Tonight, however, they dashed aside the leaves and fled in an adrenaline-powered panic.

There were consequences. They were heard.

Mike detected the growl of jeeps in the blazingly-bright field behind them just as the bush ahead shook. Eyes reflected in the dark, and then the night was cut by aggressive howls. One by one Mike's troupe fell from their flight, knocked aside by rival chimps. In the dark the various tussles were a scintillating blur. Mike felt helpless and terrified. He swung his air rifle in vicious arcs, smacking aside the attackers and then shouting to keep them at bay while his kin made their frenzied escapes deeper into the forest.

Mike found himself surrounded by a ring of belligerent chimpanzees, and he considered that he may have just traded his life to save his friends. He took a deep breath and steadied the rifle in his hands, wielding it in a defensive stance as if it were a quarterstaff.

Seconds later, he was alone.

Mike blinked, hearing his assailants rushing away in a froth of leaf-ripping, twig-snapping urgency. "What in the --"

Someone clubbed him across the back of the head with something heavy. Mike dropped to his knees, his vision turning grey. "Crap," he managed to mumble before he dropped on his face...

He came to under the harsh buzz of cheap fluorescents. His head hurt a lot, and the back of his neck was sticky. Mike groaned.

"Baas, he's waking up!"

Mike was sprawled in a plastic chair inside a cramped trailer alongside filing cabinets, two messy desks and a battery of overflowing ashtrays. Three white men and two skinny guards were arrayed around him, their faces hard. One of the white men pushed closer, rolling a toothpick from one side of his lined mouth to the other. "What are you supposed to be then, eh? Some kind of Tarzan?"

Mike blinked, his head ringing.

"Answer me!" the man shouted, then slapped Mike across the face.

Mike was not bound but he was badly outnumbered and feeling not at all well. He thought he might throw up, and decided he might have a fairly serious concussion. With an awful, heavy feeling he recognized that he was on the cusp of re-entering that state he had vowed he never find himself in again: helpless, hopeless, imprisoned at the mercy of men of meagre moral fibre.

He said the first thing that popped into his head: his name, rank, and serial number.

"He's some kind of a soldier, baas," said one of the men.

The one with the toothpick grunted noncommitally. "What the hell is a Chinese soldier doing out here?"

"I'm not Chinese," rasped Mike weakly. "I'm Canadian."

"He sure looks Chinese, baas."

"I'm with the Allies," managed Mike.

"The Allies sent you to sabotage us?" demanded the toothpick man. "What's your mission, Tarzan? You'd better start talking now or you'll find yourself looking down at your tongue on the floor. Got that, doos?"

"Not on an Allied mission..."

"Gunther: give me your knife. This chink gwar needs some persuading, man."

Mike's breathing became quick and shallow. Sweat beaded on his brow. One of the men unsnapped a leather holster at his hip and withdrew a shiny blade that sang as it was freed. Its keen edge winked in the light. Gunther passed the blade to his boss, who spat out his toothpick onto the floor and gave Mike a terrible, cruel grin.

Mike felt a thousand times more dread than he had in the hands of the Allied jackals, for then it was only his own health he feared for. Now, in this new moment, he knew his failure would cost the lives of all his friends. Without Mike's help, they didn't stand a chance against men.

The boss paused in his advance, then cocked his head. The others did, too. Mike heard it: the sound of engines starting up. Machines rumbled and metal clanked.

"...What the hell?"

The engines roared suddenly closer. The boss ducked aside to look out the window but before he got there the entire trailer shook on its cinderblock foundations, rocking dangerously and casting file folders from their shelves in a slurry of hissing paper. The men were knocked off their feet and Mike spilled from his chair.

The trailer was struck again, the long wall denting. The lights went out and the trailer continued to lean, then keeled over completely and crashed down on its side. Furniture and cigarette butts rained to the new floor, battering the guards and the white men who cried out in alarm.

Acting on instinct, Mike threw himself toward the dark corner where he remembered the door to be. He caught its edges and hauled himself up, pushing out to the top of the teetering trailer and getting to his feet.

The flood-lit field was in chaos. Heavy equipment rumbled in all directions, turning in place, swinging their implements nonsensically, changing speeds, stopping and starting seemingly at random. It all began to make sense when Mike spotted Climber hanging out of the cab of a massive backhoe, waving his arms and roaring.

Mike realized that he was being rescued.

In the cabs of the other vehicles chimps were attacking the controls, pulling and pushing levers, tugging on the steering wheels, stabbing buttons with reckless abandon. "Holy crap!" yelled Mike. He jammed his fingers into his mouth and whistled for retreat.

The chimps saw him. With hoots of delight they abandoned their vehicles, leaping off as they continued to move, then scampering across the dirt toward the trailer. Hearing signs of life inside of it Mike jumped down and met them halfway, then coordinated their flight toward the woods. The chimps paused near him, wanting to touch him and coo, but Mike cast off their hands. "Go, go, go!" he screamed.

They went. Mike was about to fling himself after them when he saw that Climber was still inside his vehicle, eyes wide as a fleet of workers ran toward him and began climbing the treads of the still rolling machine. Climber screeched in fright and climbed on top of the cab. He threw bits of gravel at the workers and beat his chest.

"Climber! Jump!" yelled Mike.

The workers turned to his voice. "Shoot him!" called someone, and a dozen rifles clicked as they were cocked. Mike dropped to the dirt a split second before the air resounded with the overlapping cracks of gunfire.

He wormed his way into a ditch and then risked a look back. Climber hadn't been hit: the shots were aimed at Mike. Instead, Climber was grabbed by the leg and pulled down from the cab. He hit the treads hard and was then struck with the butt-end of rifles, forcing him into a large sack which was cinched up tight once he was inside. The workers kicked at the sack until it stopped moving.

Mike felt as if his heart were being ripped from his chest. He was immobilized by pain and horror, but regained his senses as another group of guards starting running toward the ditch he was in with flashlights and guns.

There was no choice to be made except to survive. Mike ran. There were a few more shots fired in his direction, and he heard the leaves tear around him as he tumbled into the cover of the forest. He pushed himself to keep going, reminding himself how many other chimps were counting on his leadership tonight.

Soon the fracas was behind him. With great weariness he plodded up to the hilltop, tears welling in his eyes as he met the gazes of his troupe. "Climber's been captured," he signed with shaking hands. "They took him."

"What do?" the chimps wanted to know. "What do, M?"

Mike sighed. He sat down beside the fire-pit, his head in his hands. The chimps gathered around him, whimpering worriedly. Mike looked up after a long moment. "You guys risked your lives to save me," he said slowly. "So, really, there's only one thing we can do."

Bella nodded seriously. "Plan," she signed.

"Yes," Mike agreed. "You're right, Bella. If we're going to save Climber, we'll need a plan. A really smart one, too."

"M smart smart."

Mike closed his eyes. "I don't feel very smart tonight," he said forlornly.

The chimps closed around him, and lay their hands on his shoulders, on his back, on his legs. They shut their eyes and gently knocked their heads against him, snorting affectionately.

"But I'll think of something," promised Mike. "I swear."