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.