BA troop staged a raid on camp today, an effort that I can only describe as one giant kisheshe (Swahili for (loosely translated) “clusterf***”).  I have never seen BA troop come into camp.  Clearly their visits are rare and opportunistic; one definitely gets the sense of watching a loose, simian adaptation of Lord of the Flies as they scrabble around nervously for any treasures they can discover before they are stoned to death by humans or chewed to bits by one of their own.

Let’s start with some context.  DC troop, the 66 member behemoth, spends most of its time in camp, where the clever females, toting around their umpteenth child, try door handles and locks “just in case” and where cheeky juveniles snatch at your pants as you walk by, almost like 13-year old boys taunting you from a street corner.  Males loll in pathways, legs spread, airing their junk, while females pick nits out of their fur and children play with your shoes and eat your t-shirts if you leave them outdoors.  Everyone in DC is relaxed and confident, no male too shy to just take whatever you have if it looks vaguely edible.  Camp is old hat for these guys.  Then there’s AC troop, the other troop I follow.  From time to time they wander into camp as well, a bit more skittish, but still plenty comfortable passing three hours licking a cement wall.  Shikoku, who grew up in DC, enjoys terrorizing tourists, and I’ve seen Maat non-chalantly jump into someone’s kitchen and come back with a mango (of course, this is before he died of a massive head wound).  Though wary of humans because most have felt the sting of a well-aimed rock, both DC and AC can spend hours in camp without stress hormones geysering out their ears.

Not so for BA.

I’m not sure whose idea it was, but clearly someone scouted ahead because suddenly we were all booking it down the beach like it was D-Day.  I’ve run after a baboon a time or two, but usually they are running FROM something.  This was a full-on storming of the castle.  They entered camp with total conviction and promptly began to crap themselves (literally…Augosti 2, alpha-male extraordinaire, left a dookie on my front porch).  They ran in every direction like children in a candy store being hunted by an insane mime, at turns beside themselves with the plethora of goodies yet so unbelievably scared they daren’t stop in any one place longer than three seconds lest they be skewered and skinned alive.  I was following Whitlow, who we all just call by her acronym WTW, and she was pacing around like she was in that KB Toys toy run they used to show on Nickelodeon.  She dashed around licking walls and stones, nosing into doorways and empty pots, and displacing inferiors (she’s pretty high-ranked so there was A LOT of displacing).  In turn, Antigua, a young male, followed her around, displacing her, all of them angling to lick a certain part of the wall mostly because someone else was just licking there.  Fights broke out constantly, males ruffling their fur and whipping out their canines like vampires, females lighting into one another until the camp was filled with screams.  Everyone was on edge.  The slightest movement sent someone running and they grunted to each other constantly in solidarity, a sound that crescendoed until it began to sound like a nervous tick (baboons grunt to let other group members know they are there).

But being anxious in a place you’re promised will be magical inevitably leads to poor decision making.  Certain she would get some righteous treats amongst the humans, WTW grabbed the first vaguely food-seeming item she could find, with Sufi, a large male with a tear in his nose, following in hot pursuit.  Once she’d settled on a thin branch of a tree, Sufi eyeing her a few feet below, we discovered that she was madly chewing away at a huge bar of soap.  Over the course of five minutes she ate most of it and my stomach squirmed in commiseration over the heinous diarrhea she’s going to have later this afternoon.  She dropped the last bit of it and Sufi gamboled down the tree to scoop it up, swallowing it in two wholesome bites.  A healthy dose of gastrointestinal distress for Sufi too, I suppose.

They didn’t stay in camp long.  Hyped up on adrenaline and more jumpy than a war vet with PTSD, they burned out quickly, returning to the beach to lick stones and calm themselves.  WTW went back a few times with some of the big males and higher-ranking females, but the handicapped stayed behind, afraid to brave the dangers of a world peopled by, well, people.  People with a penchant for rock-throwing.  Akarura, a gutsy female in many regards, with a bum leg that makes her tripod most places she goes, didn’t even bother to invade.  Running isn’t her strong suit and beach rock-licking would just have to suffice.  Walidi also opted out, tangled up in her baby, Walita, who would have made running difficult.  In fact, the only one who seemed relatively calm during the whole endeavor was old, decrepit Shirati, who hung around well past lunchtime, napping behind my house until DC troop returned.