Birth of the Planet of the Apes

Journey's Beginning

Alex started walking down the highway, "So um...what kind of tracks are we looking for?" he stopped when he didn't hear her following and turned around.

Riley had taken a spot on the ground and pulled out a giant map of California, a pencil to take notes, and a compass.

"Are we not tracking the ape?"

She didn't miss a beat, "I know what you're thinking. Some tracker right..." she wasn't wrong, "Well, if you haven't noticed, there was a bit of rain last night." Alex looked down at his feet and squished them on the wet pavement as she kept talking, "It doesn't really matter how good a tracker you are, looking through fresh mud is near impossible, so, I've had to change the strategy a bit. Luckily for everyone, with you here it should make life a lot simpler," she said, folding out the worn, but still intact USGS map flat on the sidewalk. She oriented herself north with the compass and turned the map accordingly, "Do you remember where the ape colony was?" she never took her eyes off the map.

Realizing that Riley was still more experienced in these things than he was, Alex sat down on the map's opposite side and looked hard at the many roads, trails and geographies covering it.

"Anytime now, Slim," she was sarcastic, but not harsh.

"It...um..." he thought for a few seconds, trying to come up with something helpful, "I know it was near a waterfall...and...the dam was maybe a fifteen minute hike from their border."

Instead of making a snarky remark at him for not knowing exactly where it was, Riley nodded and marked the dam with her pencil. "Do you remember about which direction you guys went to get there? How big was the waterfall?"

Details from last year started to come back to Alex slowly. He had always been good at remembering details, a helpful skill when he drew from memory, though, he had to admit he was impressed with himself for remembering things he had only seen for a couple of days.

"We went up the left side if the river..."

"Okay, west side, Redwood creek," she marked it.

"I know we went uphill the whole time, our camp looked like it was part of a clearing."

"And the waterfall?"

"Massive,"

She smiled and shook her head slightly, "Massive isn't the best thing to go off of there, Alex. Wide massive? Tall massive? Niagara falls massive?"

"Tall massive," he made an exaggerated move of his hands to illustrate what he meant, "It ran down a whole cliff!"

Riley was unexpectedly confused. She stared at the map like it was going to tell her something she didn't know.

Alex noticed her confusion, "Was 'tall massive' not enough either?" He started thinking about other things to describe the colony with, like that it was a fortress of pulled up trees stabbing into the air like fingers, or that it was decorated with all sorts of bones and spears like ornaments on a Christmas Tree. The ape colony wasn't subdued in its message of 'stay out' at all. It basically screamed it!

"No...'tall massive' was fine," Riley said, spinning the pencil in her fingers habitually, "It's just...well...there aren't any waterfalls like that within a hundred miles of here. The waterfalls all over Muir Woods are little trickily ones, nothing to the scale you're talking about."

Alex was the one confused now. He was certain the waterfall had been at least a hundred feet high and was as loud as a highway, that is, if the highways were still running. It was in this muddling of thought that it occurred to him he had taken his pencil to paper shortly after he saw it. Along with the few pictures of Caesar and Maurice he had drawn, the ape colony had had the greatest impact on his memory.