Chapter Chapter 4 · The Apes

pringing with almost

incredible swiftness, for so large and awkward an animal, in an effort

to head off Clayton.

With a low cry she sprang toward the cabin, and, as she entered, gave a

backward glance which filled her soul with terror, for the brute had

intercepted her husband, who now stood at bay grasping his ax with both

hands ready to swing it upon the infuriated animal when he should make

his final charge.

“Close and bolt the door, Alice,” cried Clayton. “I can finish this

fellow with my ax.”

But he knew he was facing a horrible death, and so did she.

The ape was a great bull, weighing probably three hundred pounds. His

nasty, close-set eyes gleamed hatred from beneath his shaggy brows,

while his great canine fangs were bared in a horrid snarl as he paused

a moment before his prey.

Over the brute’s shoulder Clayton could see the doorway of his cabin,

not twenty paces distant, and a great wave of horror and fear swept

over him as he saw his young wife emerge, armed with one of his rifles.

She had always been afraid of firearms, and would never touch them, but

now she rushed toward the ape with the fearlessness of a lioness

protecting its young.

“Back, Alice,” shouted Clayton, “for God’s sake, go back.”

But she would not heed, and just then the ape charged, so that Clayton

could say no more.

The man swung his ax with all his mighty strength, but the powerful

brute seized it in those terrible hands, and tearing it from Clayton’s

grasp hurled it far to one side.

With an ugly snarl he closed upon his defenseless victim, but ere his

fangs had reached the throat they thirsted for, there was a sharp

report and a bullet entered the ape’s back between his shoulders.

Throwing Clayton to the ground the beast turned upon his new enemy.

There before him stood the terrified girl vainly trying to fire another

bullet into the animal’s body; but she did not understand the mechanism

of the firearm, and the hammer fell futilely upon an empty cartridge.

Almost simultaneously Clayton regained his feet, and without thought of

the utter hopelessness of it, he rushed forward to drag the ape from

his wife’s prostrate form.

With little or no effort he succeeded, and the great bulk rolled

inertly upon the turf before him—the ape was dead. The bullet had done

its work.

A hasty examination of his wife revealed no marks upon her, and Clayton

decided that the huge brute had died the instant he had sprung toward

Alice.

Gently he lifted his wife’s still unconscious form, and bore her to the

little cabin, but it was fully two hours before she regained

consciousness.

Her first words filled Clayton with vague apprehension. For some time

after regaining her senses, Alice gazed wonderingly about the interior

of the little cabin, and then, with a satisfied sigh, said:

“O, John, it is so good to be really home! I have had an awful dream,

dear. I thought we were no longer in London, but in some horrible place

where great beasts attacked us.”

“There, there, Alice,” he said, stroking her forehead, “try to sleep

again, and do not worry your head about bad dreams.”

That night a little son was born in the tiny cabin beside the primeval

forest, while a leopard screamed before the door, and the deep notes of

a lion’s roar sounded from beyond the ridge.

Lady Greystoke never recovered from the shock of the great ape’s

attack, and, though she lived for a year after her baby was born, she

was never again outside the cabin, nor did she ever fully realize that

she was not in England.

Sometimes she would question Clayton as to the strange noises of the

nights; the absence of servants and friends, and the strange rudeness

of the furnishings within her room, but, though he made no effort to

deceive her, never could she grasp the meaning of it all.

In other ways she was quite rational, and the joy and happiness she

took in the possession of her little son and the constant attentions of

her husband made that year a very happy one for her, the happiest of

her young life.

That it would have been beset by worries and apprehension had she been

in full command of her mental faculties Clayton well knew; so that

while he suffered terribly to see her so, there were times when he was

almost glad, for her sake, that she could not understand.

Long since had he given up any hope of rescue, except through accident.

With unremitting zeal he had worked to beautify the interior of the

cabin.

Skins of lion and panther covered the floor. Cupboards and bookcases

lined the walls. Odd vases made by his own hand from the clay of the

region held beautiful tropical flowers. Curtains of grass and bamboo

covered the windows, and, most arduous task of all, with his meager

assortment of tools he had fashioned lumber to neatly seal the walls

and ceiling and lay a smooth floor within the cabin.

That he had been able to turn his hands at all to such unaccustomed

labor was a source of mild wonder to him. But he loved the work because

it was for her and the tiny life that had come to cheer them, though

adding a hundredfold to his responsibilities and to the terribleness of

their situation.

During the year that followed, Clayton was several times attacked by

the great apes which now seemed to continually infest the vicinity of

the cabin; but as he never again ventured outside without both rifle

and revolvers he had little fear of the huge beasts.

He had strengthened the window protections and fitted a unique wooden

lock to the cabin door, so that when he hunted for game and fruits, as

it was constantly necessary for him to do to insure sustenance, he had

no fear that any animal could break into the little home.

At first he shot much of the game from the cabin windows, but toward

the end the animals learned to fear the strange lair from whence issued

the terrifying thunder of his rifle.

In his leisure Clayton read, often aloud to his wife, from the store of

books he had brought for their new home. Among these were many for

little children—picture books, primers, readers—for they had known that

their little child would be old enough for such before they might hope

to return to England.

At other times Clayton wrote in his diary, which he had always been

accustomed to keep in French, and in which he recorded the details of

their strange life. This book he kept locked in a little metal box.

A year from the day her little son was born Lady Alice passed quietly

away in the night. So peaceful was her end that it was hours before

Clayton could awake to a realization that his wife was dead.

The horror of the situation came to him very slowly, and it is doubtful

that he ever fully realized the enormity of his sorrow and the fearful

responsibility that had devolved upon him with the care of that wee

thing, his son, still a nursing babe.

The last entry in his diary was made the morning following her death,

and there he recites the sad details in a matter-of-fact way that adds

to the pathos of it; for it breathes a tired apathy born of long sorrow

and hopelessness, which even this cruel blow could scarcely awake to

further suffering:

My little son is crying for nourishment—O Alice, Alice, what shall I

do?

And as John Clayton wrote the last words his hand was destined ever to

pen, he dropped his head wearily upon his outstretched arms where they

rested upon the table he had built for her who lay still and cold in

the bed beside him.

For a long time no sound broke the deathlike stillness of the jungle

midday save the piteous wailing of the tiny man-child.

CHAPTER 4. The Apes

In the forest of the table-land a mile back from the ocean old Kerchak

the Ape was on a rampage of rage among his people.

The younger and lighter members of his tribe scampered to the higher

branches of the great trees to escape his wrath; risking their lives

upon branches that scarce supported their weight rather than face old

Kerchak in one of his fits of uncontrolled anger.

The other males scattered in all directions, but not before the

infuriated brute had felt the vertebra of one snap between his great,

foaming jaws.

A luckless young female slipped from an insecure hold upon a high

branch and came crashing to the ground almost at Kerchak’s feet.

With a wild scream he was upon her, tearing a great piece from her side

with his mighty teeth, and striking her viciously upon her head and

shoulders with a broken tree limb until her skull was crushed to a

jelly.

And then he spied Kala, who, returning from a search for food with her

young babe, was ignorant of the state of the mighty male’s temper until

suddenly the shrill warnings of her fellows caused her to scamper madly

for safety.

But Kerchak was close upon her, so close that he had almost grasped her

ankle had she not made a furious leap far into space from one tree to

another—a perilous chance which apes seldom if ever take, unless so

closely pursued by danger that there is no alternative.

She made the leap successfully, but as she grasped the limb of the

further tree the sudden jar loosened the hold of the tiny babe where it

clung frantically to her neck, and she saw the little thing hurled,

turning and twisting, to the ground thirty feet below.

With a low cry of dismay Kala rushed headlong to its side, thoughtless

now of the danger from Kerchak; but when she gathered the wee, mangled

form to her bosom life had left it.

With low moans, she sat cuddling the body to her; nor did Kerchak

attempt to molest her. With the death of the babe his fit of demoniacal

rage passed as suddenly as it had seized him.

Kerchak was a huge king ape, weighing perhaps three hundred and fifty

pounds. His forehead was extremely low and receding, his eyes

bloodshot, small and close set to his coarse, flat nose; his ears large

and thin, but smaller than most of his kind.

His awful temper and his mighty strength made him supreme among the

little tribe into which he had been born some twenty years before.

Now that he was in his prime, there was no simian in all the mighty

forest through which he roved that dared contest his right to rule, nor

did the other and larger animals molest him.

Old Tantor, the elephant, alone of all the wild savage life, feared him

not—and he alone did Kerchak fear. When Tantor trumpeted, the great ape

scurried with his fellows high among the trees of the second terrace.

The tribe of anthropoids over which Kerchak ruled with an iron hand and

bared fangs, numbered some six or eight families, each family

consisting of an adult male with his females and their young, numbering

in all some sixty or seventy apes.

Kala was the youngest mate of a male called Tublat, meaning broken

nose, and the child she had seen dashed to death was her first; for she

was but nine or ten years old.

Notwithstanding her youth, she was large and powerful—a splendid,

clean-limbed animal, with a round, high forehead, which denoted more

intelligence than most of her kind possessed. So, also, she had a great

capacity for mother love and mother sorrow.

But she was still an ape, a huge, fierce, terrible beast of a species

closely allied to the gorilla, yet more intelligent; which, with the

strength of their cousin, made her kind the most fearsome of those

awe-inspiring progenitors of man.

When the tribe saw that Kerchak’s rage had ceased they came slowly down

from their arboreal retreats and pursued again the various occupations

which he had interrupted.

The young played and frolicked about among the trees and bushes. Some

of the adults lay prone upon the soft mat of dead and decaying

vegetation which covered the ground, while others turned over pieces of

fallen branches and clods of earth in search of the small bugs and

reptiles which formed a part of their food.

Others, again, searched the surrounding trees for fruit, nuts, small

birds, and eggs.

They had passed an hour or so thus when Kerchak called them together,

and, with a word of command to them to follow him, set off toward the

sea.

They traveled for the most part upon the ground, where it was open,

following the path of the great elephants whose comings and goings

break the only roads through those tangled mazes of bush, vine,

creeper, and tree. When they walked it was with a rolling, awkward

motion, placing the knuckles of their closed hands upon the ground and

swinging their ungainly bodies forward.

But when the way was through the lower trees they moved more swiftly,

swinging from branch to branch with the agility of their smaller

cousins, the monkeys. And all the way Kala carried her little dead baby

hugged closely to her breast.

It was shortly after noon when they reached a ridge overlooking the

beach where below them lay the tiny cottage which was Kerchak’s goal.

He had seen many of his kind go to their deaths before the loud noise

made by the little black stick in the hands of the strange white ape

who lived in that wonderful lair, and Kerchak had made up his brute

mind to own that death-dealing contrivance, and to explore the interior

of the mysterious den.

He wanted, very, very much, to feel his teeth sink into the neck of the

queer animal that he had learned to hate and fear, and because of this,

he came often with his tribe to reconnoiter, waiting for a time when