Bonobo

The Bonobo female I last remember took a look at my Rolex and was curious about how I wound the movement. She looked at it, she looked me in the eye, and she listened to the damn thing tick. She was almost human. We used to take them cut up sugar cane, split oranges, and bananas—and I used to marvel at how the chimps, with a short stick of sugar cane, would chase the red-ass baboons around inside a huge cage. The baboons were two or three times larger, with canine teeth many times longer—but the chimps knew how to use a stick, and would howl to tell anybody who didn't see.

We let the baby chimps out of their cages into the trees, to play. Adults were too difficult to re-cage so remained imprisoned... And I don't know how many actually survived the Zoo's total loss of funds during the civil war... how many died, how many lived... The ones who lived were probably used in AIDs experiments—and, of course, later died.

I remember how a researcher had caught her glasses in a Bonobo baby's hair. The mother, who could have torn the researcher limb from limb, raced across the lab. If she'd wanted, she could have killed her. Any other kind of chimp, hearing its child's cries, would have. Instead, she very delicately looked at the caught hairs and with the utmost care disentangled them. That chimp—THAT CHIMP—had more humanity than most people. The Bonobos were to ordinary chimps as ordinary chimps are to monkeys, but that, and a sawbuck, just gets 'em a cuppa java...