You Are Not Ape

Chapter 9

Caesar soon joined Maurice, who still stood looking after the disappearing Mary, a sad wistful expression in his eyes.

"Thank you and Luca ... for helping her lay Koba to rest," Caesar said quietly.

"Luca and I were happy to do it. We both knew you would have done it, yourself, if it had been possible," Maurice answered his friend solemnly.

"I think almost everyone heard her song," Caesar commented as the ape girls' blonde head finally disappeared around a corner. She has grown up so fast," Caesar remarked, almost to himself.

Maurice nodded.

"Do you remember when we found her?" Caesar asked the Orangutan. "When ... he ... found her?"

The hunt was going very well that day, extraordinarily well. They had taken so much game they almost couldn't carry it back to the village fast enough. Caesar's part of the hunting party went on ahead, preparing to head back to the village. But Koba and some few others were still out, stalking.

There pray was finally in sight. Koba stood stock still, his spear at the ready, and then just as his kill would have been perfect, and would have brought down the biggest deer the apes had ever seen, he froze, letting it gallop past him.

"Why did you do that?" Gray signed angrily.

"Quiet!" Koba barked.

He held up a hand, his head cocked, listening to something.

"Did you hear that?" he asked Gray.

Gray and the closest apes around him only gaped at him and shook their heads, hearing nothing.

Koba had almost convinced himself that he had imagined it, when it came again, a short cry, gone almost as soon as his ear registered the sound.

"Wait here," he told the other apes.

It took nearly an hour as Koba tracked the intermittent sounds. And just when he was about to give up and sat slumped on the ground, feeling frustrated and defeated and a little sheepish for chasing ghosts, he saw it. One tiny little foot poked out from underneath a fallen log.

Koba gasped in shock, and bounded over to the fallen log. It did not take him long to free the owner of the foot. She was the skinniest saddest looking Ape infant girl child he had ever seen, not that he had seen many. But this poor little thing looked as if she did not have a cry left in her. Her ribs stuck out painfully beneath her almost hairless skin. The most fur she had was on her head and around her neck. A light orange ruff stuck out around her neck, Koba thought it looked almost like an Orangutan's fur. And on her head, was a thick shock of hair so blonde it was almost blindingly white.

Koba had never felt so frightened in all his life, not even in his time in the human's labs or being locked in Tommy's cage at home when Tommy was at his most drunken and violent. Trembling slightly, he held the baby tenderly in his hands. He had no mate yet and no children. He was not too sure what to do, so he let out a long loud distress call to draw the others to him. Caesar's wife had just given birth to the Ape leader's first son not more than two days before, and Rocket's wife was also expecting their first child at any moment. Koba thought maybe they might know what to do. But even as he let out his calls and he cradled the baby against his chest, she began to snuggle against him, whining very softly.

Something in Koba's damaged heart melted then. He began to slowly rock back and forth, holding the child close. She nuzzled at his chest, and he gave a gentle bark of a laugh.

"I Have no milk for you, my sweet one," he murmured to the child.

At the sound of his speaking out loud, the child snuggled even closer to him, and whimpered even more excitedly than before.