Now, don’t get me wrong.  There are some great teenage boys out there: respectful, fun, frightfully entertaining.  I should know because I taught many.  But in the baboon world, teenage boys seem to mostly suck.  They’re all bravado and chest-popping, unable to challenge the big boys so the pick on their moms.  And me.

In many ways a teenage male baboon is just like a teenage male human.  They’re gangly and awkward, their limbs getting long quickly but without any muscle to back them up.  Their faces stretch to an approximation of their future selves but it mostly just makes them look skinnier.  Their voices deepen.  They roughhouse with each other constantly, gnawing on and surprising their friends, chasing each other in crazy, spirited loops, bumping into old ladies as they go (no apology).  But in a world where dominance is key, you have to start practicing early, so teenage males become street corner punks, scaring young women as they walk by, charging old ladies, threatening mom.

In my groups there are exactly four teenage males.  And all of them but Aloso has given me attitude.  Culprit Number One (and chronic offender) is Windmill (the guys call him “Winimili” because Windmill is hard to say in a Swahili-speaking mouth).  Windmill has threatened me numerous times: raising his eyebrows, slapping the ground in front of me, given me a hard stare-down.  I not-so-affectionately refer to him as “Winimili The (insert really bad word here)” every time I see him.  We are not friends.  Never have a deserved any of his advances, yet whenever I’m close to him, I eye him askance because I know he’s thinking evil thoughts.  In one of our last meetings (thankfully we don’t have many more), I sauntered past him in pursuit of a female and when I stopped to write something down the little twat either firmly grabbed my pants or actually nibbled my leg.  By the time I whirled around to give him a hard look, he had moved off.  Jerk.

Next comes Yalimu.  To be fair Yalimu is just a devoted member of his family and has only really threatened me when he thought I was getting fresh with his little brother or older sister.  Both times though he gave me a little fake charge, an eyebrow raise, and defiant little ground-sweep (males do this a lot to threaten others, sweeping their hand across the ground in front of them to make a little noise).  The rest of the time Yalimu just eyes me warily, the only baboon I can safely say 100% doesn’t trust me.  After 7 months together he still runs off when he sees me coming (though several minutes later he’ll forget I’m even there).  He would definitely pick a fight if he had to, though.

And, finally, there’s Antigua.  Antigua is older than the other boys and usually doesn’t involve himself in their games, or their antics.  In fact, until today, I sort of thought of him as being much more mature.  Of course, then, while walking across a log he turned around and swatted a tiny little kid who fell of the log and landed at me feet, screaming.  Surprised (and always wary of screaming babies, since they may bring angry males), I took a step back and looked up to find Antigua standing stiff-armed, eyebrows raised to high heaven, ready to lunge.  I turned away to avoid eye contact and he eventually moved off.  But how is it that Wambura’s fall was my fault???  HE was the one who pushed her!  Vaguely indignant, I avoided Antigua the rest of the day (though baboons tend to hold grudges for approximately 28 seconds at most).

Of course, these are only the teenage males I know.  I’m also routinely harassed by the young turks who live in camp, some of them snatching at my pants as I walk by, or, as happened yesterday, dipping themselves in bravado and threatening me from the office window (whenever I walked close to them, they promptly scattered).  Soon they’ll be roar-grunting, stiff-arm-threatening, thick-shouldered males and then I won’t have to worry about them.  But then, of course, there will always be a new batch of young upstarts who like making the white lady stumble.

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Our camp has garnered two permanent residents in the last month.  It’s uncommon for any  baboon to live outside a group for any amount of time, but Shirati and Shamba both have found a home here (perhaps for slightly different reasons) and they have certainly made camp life more interesting.

We’ve discussed Shirati before: old, gangly dude, kind of shriveled, kind of pathetic.  Well Shirati, seemingly finished with the itinerant wanderings of your typical baboon troop, showed up one day and never left.  No matter what group is in camp Shirati pretends to be part of it, and if there is no group he just sits forlornly by himself picking at the grass.  I see him out my window every morning, sloping by in his bedraggled way and I offer him a sunny, “Good morning!” which he invariably ignores.  At lunch time he likes to sit outside Shukuru’s house (Shukuru cleans up around the offices and lives in the main part of camp with her adorable daughter, Shamila, who is my best friend) watching her dish up food and grunting softly.  In baboon speak, these are affiliative grunts, sweet little “aren’t we buddies?” grunts.  It’s like Shirati’s begging.  It makes me want to give him a hamburger and a hug.

Every day I see Shirati, he looks more and more unkempt.  His hair, already thin, has completely evacuated his right shoulder, causing most people to wonder if he’s sick.  But the fact that he’s looked more or less like this since I met him in January suggests it’s all part of his old man decline.  He’s balding and retired and if he were a human, he’d play shuffleboard on the weekends and nap during reruns on the GameShow Channel.  But for now he’s a sad little fixture in camp, pitied by most, ignored by the rest, patiently waiting to die.

Not so for Shamba.  Shamba was born in DC (the main camp troop) but transferred next door to DA, where he wreaked general havoc for several years.  He’s the first baboon I heard horror stories about from the guys as we traipsed past DA on our way to find BA, swinging a wide arc around him because, in the past, he’d been known to pick fights with researchers.  Well, for some reason Shamba has decided to return to his roots, group living be damned.

Our first encounter with him was about three weeks ago when Ashura bustled inside quickly to get some eggs.  Thinking she’d be out of the kitchen for 20 seconds at most, she didn’t latch the door (our kitchen is a separately little building next to our house).  But then, opening the flat of eggs, she cut herself and while I was fetching a bandaid, Shamba snuck into the kitchen and started to go to town.  Ashura rushed out to confront him, swinging the door wide and chucking a stone.  Shamba lunged at her and I was pretty sure she was a goner, but she managed to leap back.  Then she grabbed a broom and actually went into the kitchen WITH him.  I stood in the window, frozen in awe of what I saw as blatant stupidity.  But Ashura, luckily, succeeded in sweeping Shamba out of the kitchen, an avocado clamped in his jaws and we all high-fived over the fact that no one died.  Half an hour later Shamba charged Carson (another researcher) as she came out of the bathroom (also a separate building) and she locked herself inside, calling my name for several minutes (I was watching TV).  But this was a fluke we decided.  When he came around again we made sure the doors were latched and he eventually moved on.

Then this last week stories began surfacing of a big male baboon who was charging children and adults when no food was in sight.  In general, baboons don’t do this.  If you have food on you, your chances of escaping are indirectly proportional to how gutsy the baboon is (females aren’t really a concern…they rely on wits rather than brute strength), but foodless, you shouldn’t be a target.  Well, no one told Shamba.  TANAPA (Tanzania National Parks) wanted to have a meeting about what to do about this baboon and how to determine who it was (my expertise was called on).  While decisions were being made, Kara (another fellow researcher) was given a good ol’ fashioned stiff-arm threat my Shamba and then, just yesterday, he charged me while I was brushing my teeth (we had a great western standoff where I walked outside to spit, saw him, and we both stared at each other for a solid second or two before he started barreling towards me…I ducked inside quickly and slammed the door…I felt like I was in Jurassic Park).

Then, yesterday afternoon Anton (head baboon researcher) talked with the park warden and she matter-of-factly said, “We’re going to shoot it.”  Anton suggested we dart it and move it instead.  She didn’t see the point.  He argued and explained and finally she told him that it would be shot tomorrow evening so we were welcome to try what we liked before then.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I think Shamba is a total prick.  But shooting him for behavior that is partially learned from people being careless with their food hardly seems fair.  So, a bit wary of what the park warden meant by tomorrow evening (the baboon easily could be shot the next morning or the next week…timelines are tricky here), we hatched a plan to meet at 7:30 this morning to dart Shamba, wrap him in a burlap sack, and boat him as far away as possible before the drugs wore off.  I tossed and turned all night thinking about how this might not go well.

The next morning I got to our meeting spot at 7:28 to find Faridu waiting to tell me, “He’s already gone.”  I thought they’d shot him.  After a bit of conversation, though, it became clear that the vet, Idi, had seen Shamba early, darted him, and zoomed off in a boat to deliver him to his new home far away.  It was very anti-climatic.  I was disappointed.  To comfort myself, though, I chose to believe that a conspiracy was afoot and that they had actually shot him and only pretended to have relocated him.  Or that they had gotten the wrong baboon (none of us baboon people were there to see who they actually darted and carted off).  It might be minorly hilarious if Shamba shows up this afternoon to steal my dinner and some other poor, confused soul is now wandering a distant beach with no idea what hit him.  Minorly hilarious, that is, until Shamba tries to eat my face off again.

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I just finished my last follow on my first baboon.  Meaning: one baboon down, ten more to go.  For this momentous occasion, I chose to wash my hands of WTW (the acronym for Whitlow), the power-walking, slightly attitudinal high-ranker of BA troop.  If WTW were a person, she’d be one of those skinny 60-year olds who still runs marathons and starts off everyday with a wheatgrass banana smoothie.  She’s inordinately peppy for an 18-year old and has only one speed: overdrive.  However, since it was our last two hours together, I thought she might give me a break.  And early signs suggested she was on board.  After lolling under a tree for awhile, she climbed up another nearby and started to take a short nap.  Then, when Wizara, an even higher-ranker, cleared out of the nearest palm nut tree, she scuttled up there to get her fill.  I got complacent.

WTW stayed up the tree for about 15 minutes or so and then jetted down the trunk with her walking shoes on.  I adjusted my fanny pack and took off after her.  She wasn’t running, but she walked with purpose, which usually means I have to dive and tunnel through branches and vines, each taking its turn to whip me in the face, poke me in the eye, or just plain trip me up.  But I stayed with her.  Patting myself on the back, I watched her climb another tree and settled into watching her trying to suck sap from its branches.  Twenty minutes to go.  Easy.

And then, suddenly, she was gone.  Sufi had been interested in debating the finer points of Lake Tanganyika boat travel and the cost of paying for a boat myself when I looked up and WTW simply wasn’t there.  “She has to be there,” Sufi insisted, neither of us believing she could have sneaked down without our knowing.  Well, wily little bad word, she had.  So, Sufi and I started the mad kind of random searching that is beyond frustrating because you haven’t the slightest clue which way she’s gone.  I climbed up a ravine of sorts, found Wirdet then Wokora, but no WTW.  I negotiated the slippery fallen leaves and steep incline, waddling along at an angle, trying to listen for the rustle of someone else in the debris.  Nothing.

After twenty minutes of searching, though, I heard Sufi’s familiar “Oooo! Oooo!”  Double “oo”s are always good news.  One “oo” means, “Where are you?” or “I am here”.  But two “oo”s, at least in this context means, “I’ve got the little sumbitch!”  Unfortunately, Sufi was ooing from down a mountain and across the river.  I briefly debated about winding my way back to the vague path I had climbed up, but deciding this would take too much time, just started blazing down hill.  Mostly I managed a controlled fall, Tarzan-ing from vine to root to tree trunk as I slid sometimes on my feet, sometimes on my butt, from seemingly sturdy clump of twigs to sturdy clump of twigs.  I briefly considered not going over a mini cliff but then decided it would probably be okay.  It was.  A few other times I thought, “Hmm.  I seem to keep sliding.  If I don’t stop in the next .7 seconds, it could be bad.”  But eventually I made it to the river.  I attempted to skip across on stones, which never works out for me, and, shoes wet, plunged into the thick machaka (vines) across the way, oo-ing and oo-ing as I tried to use my surprisingly faulty sound radar to locate Sufi (at one point, I thought he was actually back across the river).  But, after another four of five minutes of crawling, I birthed myself into a mini-clearing where Sufi stood, arm outstretched to indicate the baboon WAAAAY up there in a tree.  I thanked him, brushed myself off, and finished my follow.

I’m hoping the others are feeling a little bit more generous about the end of our 30 hours together.

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1) Little Andrea, my fuzzy black namesake, went missing a few days ago.  Alas, it was not meant to be.

2) Yamba, one of my intrepid-yet-dowdy females, disappeared last week.  The guys think she died in child birth.  I’ve decided she was eaten by a leopard.  We smelled something horrid a few days later but did not investigate.  Another one bites the dust, as they say.

3) A rather menacing male baboon named Shamba (which means “farm” in Swahili) has taken to hanging around our house after he successfully broke into the kitchen and stole an avocado.  Ashura had to fight him off with a broom and later he tried to break into the toilet while Carson (another researcher) was having a pee.  I swear at him when I see him from the window.

4) Little baboons sometimes sit outside our window and then see themselves reflected in the glass of a cabinet we have in our living room.  Thinking these are other baboons, some of them try to greet themselves, pulling back their ears and doing that creepy Hannibal Lecter tongue thing that means “howdy!”.  Others try to start fights with themselves.  None of them has figured out who the baboon inside our house really are.

5) Baboons stole my shoe a few weeks ago.  Soon I’m expecting to see some non-human primate tromping through the woods wearing an entire wardrobe composed of clothes they’ve pilfered from me over the last 7 months.  Jerks.

6) Winimili (real name “Windmill”) tried to start a fight with me two days ago.  I politely declined.  When he slapped my pants it was all I could do not to kick him in the face.  Worst teenage punk EVER.  We were already mortal enemies but now it is ON.

7) Later that same day itty-bitty Walita couldn’t contain her curiosity any longer and tried to groom my head.  It was sickeningly adorable.  Being an objective scientist blah blah blah, though I couldn’t let her continue.

8 ) Shamila, my best friend in camp (she’s 1.5 years old), can now say my name (sort of).  Faraja, the other child I might steal when I leave in two weeks (and who can’t say anything, let alone my name), has taken to running to me, big ol’ dimples in his cheeks, when I come up the path.  We usually have a delightful one-side conversation about him tummy and then I continue on my way.

9) Unarasika, the youngest female I follow, still enjoys presenting to me (i.e. putting her butt in my face).  It has become awkward now that my data sheets are filled with side comments of “presents to researcher (again)”.  After one present she too tried to groom me.  It’s like these animals are trying to unravel my thesis one follow at a time.

10) The price of soda has gone up from 600 shillings to 700 shillings.  That is almost $0.45 a bottle!

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