LONGCHIMP'S DISCOVERY

Putting one and one together, and making three...

There was one astounding piece of ignorance that left not only Longchimp but all of the tribe’s males in a dark and very secret place.

As has been previously recorded, he was spectacularly equipped in the reproduction department. It could be seen as he walked along or, as he occasionally did, swung from tree to tree. And he knew what it meant. Or rather, he only partly knew want it meant.

Like his ancestors (and unknown to him he was actually a direct descendant of Chimpo, the first monkey to suspect there might be such a thing as abstract thought largely because said Chimpo spent a great deal of his spare time deflowering any b***h in sight and then almost, but not quite, thinking about things.

And when it came to his carnal choices it wasn’t just the neighbour’s daughter but also the neighbour’s wife, and to make things seem fair it wasn’t only his own b***h but his own daughters too. Chimpo had been very versatile in the mating department, as had his own sons and grandsons after him, including Chumpo, dead and buried for many a hear by then, but not forgotten.

And part of that random effort had been Longchimp. In the crazy interweaving of genetics he was actually an unsuspected great-grandson of the original Chimpo, unsuspected because another horny male actually took care of him as a father should and anyway, fatherhood didn’t actually mean very much.

No, the ignorance had more to do with cause and effect than pleasure. Like all males before him he thought the crowning moments of any and every day involved a session or two with attractive (and sometimes unattractive, even occasionally downright ugly) b*****s. It had always been thus. It’s what this tribe of monkeys did. They couldn’t help themselves and in all honesty the gene pool swirled with such abandon that there was always a great deal of diversity in it.

But the act of deflowering a b***h was looked on in isolation. To Longchimp it was fun, and that’s all. And the same might be said of the b*****s he impregnated with such gay abandon. They found it fun too. The pleasure was far from being one-directional. And that was it. There were no obvious consequences.

As a totally separate thing, quite often the b*****s gave birth to their young. Remarkably often, if the truth be told, and sometimes it was commented almost idly that so and so’s little one had an uncanny resemblance to this or that hoary old male. But there was no suggestion of paternity in the talk because, silly as it might sound to we of considerably later generations and a very different species, not one of them connected the fun with the appearance of new nippers a few months later. They were two different events, the one an antidote to boredom and the dangers involved in hunting and scavenging and the other essential ingredients of a growing society, a way nature had designed to replace the old and the dead with new stock.

It was Longchimp who got to thinking about such esoteric matters. Whereas others got to doing it, and doing it aplenty before dosing off, he occasionally recovered from a carnal bout by mulling over events, and one day, weary from the day’s activities (he’d actually pursued a fat old rabbit half way across the known forest until he caught it and ripped it to pieces before filling his belly with it) he basked in the sun and recalled a mental image of one of the latest nippers to have been born. It wasn’t to any one of the b*****s he accounted as his own but to one of his favourites anyway.

And he thought, that little one has about it the look I have when I gaze at my reflection in the mirror pool…

Then the thought stopped, to be replaced by a new one. Why is it that only the b*****s have the nippers?

He’d witnessed the birth of new ones and hadn’t particularly fancied the idea for himself, but something about the arrangement struck him as being unfair.

He would have been hard pressed to suggest why he thought it unfair, but he did. The b*****s cared for the young and thus were released from expected duties, collecting nuts and fruits and even herbs, that sort of thing. Instead their t*****s grew large and they fed the young from their own bodies, and that meant their demands for food were always higher when they had young to feed like that. He supposed it made a sort of sense and went with the awful territory of squeezing a youngster from their bodies, but the very laziness involved in motherhood was, to him, an inconsiderate male, unfair. He wanted a dab at it the pluses but not the minuses!

He was high on such elevated thoughts when a loud squealing came from not so far away, and he’d thought that he was basking lazily where nobody could see him and he could digest the rabbit in peace. But there was a desperation about the sound, and he thought he recognised it.

Some time earlier, he couldn’t have said whether it was weeks or months or what either weeks or months were, he had spent a remarkably beautiful time with a particular b***h, one who was noted for the hugeness of her beautiful eyes, and subsequent to that she had started to develop the sort of stomach that indicated there might be a new nipper on its way.

And he was certain it was that b***h squealing so alarmingly.

He leapt to his feet and sniffed the air, intent on finding what might be afoot. His nose told him quite a lot. He could normally tell what the weather was like merely by sniffing it, and other things, like the acrid aroma or faeces, warned him when one of the tribes-monkeys had emptied their bowels where maybe they shouldn’t, and the sweetness of flowers when some b***h or other had foraged for blossoms in order to decorate their nests.

This time he smelt blood.

He decided to go and see what had caused the noise. If it was a fellow monkey in dire trouble and dying out there in the wild forest it might be worth investigating if only for the meat a corpse might provide him with.

He didn’t have far to go before he came upon the wide-eyed beautiful b***h he had thought it sounded like, and she was propped up against a mound of soil that had been produced by one of those pesky creatures who lived underground and who were hard to capture by a hungry monkey.

“You’re moaning?” he asked, the question stating the obvious.

“I have been ill,” she said, weeping, and he rarely saw monkeys of his tribe with eyes that watered let alone engaged in full flooded weeping.

He saw what she meant. It wasn’t her that was ill but the tiny scrap of fur that she had produced, for it was a tiny infant, too small to be born, he thought, and when he looked at it and the way its tiny eyes gazed back at him, he gasped.

He recalled his own reflection in the mirror pool.

He was looking at a scrap of moist barely alive meat, and when he gazed in awe and consternation a sudden light clicked in his foggy mind.

“My son,” he whispered.

The b***h smiled at him, but she had no idea what he meant by son.

© Peter Rogerson 03.11.19