Free Through a Window by Jane Goodall Page B

like a stuffed toy, was swept from the tree. He seemed almost to float through the air, his arms and legs spread-eagled, as though he was lying flat out on some buoyant but invisible air mattress. As he hit the ground, rock hard after the fierce suns of summer, there was a sickening thud. A moment later came two strangled, heart-wrenching exhalations, then silence.
    I was shaking when I moved toward his body. He lay as he had fallen, on his back. His eyes were closed. I looked up at Pom,
left alone so suddenly in the tree. She was staring down at the ground. Very slowly, as though afraid, she climbed down and approached her infant. Cautiously she reached out, and gathered up the tiny form. To my utter astonishment he gripped her hair and clung, unaided, as she moved away. I had been certain he was already dead.
    For the next two hours Pom rested and groomed her infant. No mother could have shown more concern, more solicitude. Pan suckled for a long time, then leaned against Pom, with his eyes closed. When he did move, it was very slowly and, not surprisingly, he seemed quite dazed. I assumed he was, at the very least, suffering from concussion. Presently Pom gathered up her battered child and carried him up into a tall tree to feed.
    Unfortunately this happened the day I was due to leave Gombe. The boat was waiting and I could not follow the tragedy through to the end. Three days later, when Pom was next seen, Pan was dead. Presumably he sustained internal injuries or a fractured skull—or both. By a strange coincidence, three weeks later, in Dar es Salaam, a little boy, the seven-year-old son of my neighbour's cook, fell from a coconut palm and landed, like Pan, on his back. He was rushed to the hospital where they found extensive internal damage, including a ruptured liver. They patched him up as best they could, but he too died a short while afterwards.
    It would be unfair to blame Pom entirely for the accident, to accuse her of negligence. It could have happened to any infant. Yet I cannot imagine Fifi losing a child in this way. For Fifi, like Flo before her, like all really attentive chimpanzee mothers, is alert to potential danger. Often she "rescues" her infant before the child itself has shown any sign of distress or fear. After Pan's death, I began to watch carefully whenever Fifi, with one of her infants, fed up in a palm tree during a strong wind. Always the infant stayed close to her. Although I could not determine
whether that was due to Fifi's concern or the apprehension of the child, in some ways it comes to the same thing: if the infant is extra cautious it is probably at least in part because its movements have been firmly restricted in similar circumstances in the past.
    Pom, after the tragic death of little Pan, became sick, lethargic and so emaciated we thought she might not recover. Her relationship with her mother now became, if anything, even closer, and they were seldom apart. I remember one day when they did accidentally become separated. Pom searched for Passion for almost an hour, frequently whimpering softly to herself, and from time to time climbing tall trees and gazing out from these vantage points in all directions. To some extent she may have been helped by occasional whiffs of Passion's characteristic odour for, as she travelled, she repeatedly bent and sniffed the trail or picked up leaves and smelled them carefully before dropping them. When eventually mother and daughter were reunited, Pom rushed up to Passion with small squeaks of excitement and pleasure, and the two groomed for over an hour.
    As we shall see, the life histories of Fifi and Pom have continued along very different lines. Pom, after her mother's death, became increasingly solitary and eventually left the community for good. Fifi, by contrast, has become one of the most high-ranking and respected females in her group, maintaining close friendly relations with the adult males and many females too. She has also become