Free Dawn of the Planet of the Apes by Greg Keyes Page A

it, and how he said so. Babbling in wonder.
    Like Clancy, for God’s sake.
    But he had been eight. Clancy didn’t have that excuse.His uncle had cut a trail with his machete, and Malakai reflected that at that time, he had never seen a machete used for anything other than cutting vegetation. It was like being caught up in a magical tale, carving a tunnel through the green forest that might have been growing on a cloud. To him, it had felt as if
anything
might happen. For long moments, he had almost forgotten the tight emptiness in his belly, and the look of his mother and sister when he last had seen them—drawn, emaciated.
    His uncle would point to this and that and call each thing a sign. To Malakai, they mostly just looked like bent leaves and scuffs on the ground. But there was one place even he could spot, an area where branches and leaves had been crushed in a roughly circular area. Some of them looked almost as if they had been woven together.
    “A gorilla nest,” his uncle told him then. “And not very old.”
    They continued on for a bit, and then his uncle suddenly stopped. Malakai thought something was the matter. But then his uncle pointed across a little valley, and there they were.
    He had tried to imagine them from his uncle’s stories, but this was a case where the story did not match reality.
    His heart pounded as they moved closer, coming to within ten yards. He could still feel that, the hammering in his chest, the cold of the mist on his skin, the smell of the broken vegetation, the thinness of the air in his young lungs.
    And the gorillas.
    They watched his uncle and him arrive, peering with almost human regard. The largest, a silverback, crouched a yard or so off of the ground, on a bent tree. Malakai thought they would be attacked, but the gorillas seemed only curious. A small one—a toddler—came over and brushed his uncle’s legs before running back to his mother.
    He remembered a story he had once heard, about a god who had three sons—Whiteman, Blackman, and Gorilla. Blackman and Gorilla sinned against their father, and so the god took his favored son Whiteman to the west, along with all of his wealth, which Whiteman inherited. Gorilla and his kin went to live in the forests. Blackman remained where he was born, but was impoverished, yearning for the wealth inherited by Whiteman.
    His mother didn’t like the story because it wasn’t Christian. But for the young Malakai it had created a certain longing. His father, after all, had been a white man, and he had gone west, to America, where all men were rich, and left him to starve with his mother and her people. He dreamed that one day his father would return, and lavish gifts upon him, although his mother said it would never happen.
    Yet Malakai was the descendent of both brothers. Shouldn’t some of the wealth fall to him?
    Maybe one day.
    And at last he was seeing the descendants of the third brother. How amazingly like men they were. According to the story, these were his cousins.
    He wondered if a white man or a black man could make a son with a gorilla mother.
    * * *
    Malakai almost grinned, remembering that childish thought. Looking back, he knew that the story of the three brothers was just another deplorable remnant of European colonialism. Gone was his youthful naïveté.
    He turned back to camp to get his things and found Clancy was awake, scribbling in a little book of some sort in the dim gray light of dawn. Like him, she had probably been stripped of her phone, computer, and such.
    “Good morning,” she said.
    “It is,” he said, surprising himself.
    “Do you like sleeping outdoors?” she asked.
    “I once swore I would never do it again,” he told her. “When I came to America, I raised my fist and promised myself that from now on I would sleep in soft beds and on clean sheets.”
    “Sort of like Scarlett O’Hara,” Clancy said.
    “The rich woman who was so sad to lose her black slaves?”
    “I guess that was