CHAPTER 7: BABOON ESCAPE
After a breakfast of leftover rice, Somerai reflected in her notebook on the previous days events. She wrote down how she had felt after Shanti had been killed. Putting her thoughts down on paper allowed her to release and let go of these emotions and left her mind feeling lighter.
After packing her stuff, she set out again towards her destination, the mountain with what looked like a monkey atop of it.
She was starting to enjoy these long walks in nature. They gave her time to organise her thoughts and think things through, sometimes even stimulating her creativity.
This would happen when thinking about a problem and out of nowhere an anonymous thought would pop into her head at an unexpected time.
Up ahead of her Somerai noticed two rocky outcrops, one on either side. Two hills converging in a little valley with a pathway running through the middle. It was a place ripe for an ambush.
The two hills sat directly next to each other with a winding pass between them covered in a thicket. It was daybreak but still this didn’t look like a good place to tread as being caught between two hills would see her exposed.
As she was starting to run out of time, she decided to take a chance and head through the pass.
All of a sudden on both hills on either side of her a troop of baboons started to appear one by one. It was like a scene out of Planet of the Apes. Ten turned into fifty, soon it was at least a hundred on both sides.
Unconsciously, instinctively, to draw together all that she knew about them and as she did not have her smartphone on her, she began googling information about baboons from her mental hard drive.
She clicked on the folder in her head containing all the knowledge and experiences she had amassed about the animal over a lifetime. To access this information, emotion and unique images played.a key role in recalling memories and knowledge.
She thought back to the ridiculous images of baboons robbing tourists of food in Cape Town. They were omnivorous opportunists and were known to open car doors. They often travelled in troops of at least fifty. There was an alpha male who protected the group and who could be challenged by younger males as they came of age.
She asked herself the question: “Why are they here?”
From revisiting what she knew about baboons it was clear they were on the lookout for an easy meal. Baboons had long and sharp canines that could puncture and inflict devastating wounds. They were known to be aggressive to humans and if they singled out an infant they could kill it. If this number of baboons attacked, Somerai stood no chance.
In an obvious predicament, like Robocop she followed a structured process of observing her surroundings to assess and identify threats.
The alpha male looked circumspect but not particularly aggressive.He was not showing his teeth, making himself big or moving around sharply.
On the opposing hill there seemed to be another younger, dominant male that stood out proudly at the front of the group.
She took a Sherlock Holmes approach and began looking for clues to understand and label the situation. Through acute observation she noticed something that stood out, a fresh scar on the alpha male’s shoulder, which from the oozing blood could not have been more than a day old.
She zoomed in on the dominant male on the other hill. As he moved around he seemed to be limping on his left leg suggesting he’d been in a fight recently or simply fallen of a tree.
Based on this evidence, she made the assumption that the younger male had made a challenge for the throne a few days ago and injured the alpha.
From the evidence in front of her, she used reason and logic to build out a predictive model in her mind about what had happened between the two males.
She went into clairvoyant mode. In her minds eye she saw the young male challenging the alpha to a duel, a vicious fight ensued with the young male only being narrowly defeated due to lack of experience. It had been a close fight.
Her conclusion as she saw it was a split group with two leaders challenging each other for total control.
After collecting intelligence and weighing up the situation, she then asked herself:
“How can I get out of here safely?”
To predict what they would do, she identified the primary goal of the baboons which was often to find food in their surroundings. She felt that if she offered a banana to the younger male, the older male would not allow it.
She put herself in the shoes of the alpha male, if he had barely won the fight the day before he could not allow the young male to be seen as the provider of the group.
Then she put herself in the shoes of the young male. It had been a close fight the day before and if he got another chance to topple the alpha he would take it.
In this way she developed an internal proposal for a sequence of actions to take, to get herself out of the situation without injury.
She would offer the younger, dominant male a banana. If he did not take the bait she would have to make a run for it to the river or at the last resort grab some stones or a branch to defend herself.
She tested out her hypothesis by taking the banana out of her bag, making sure they all saw it… and acting like she was going to throw it to the younger male.
The Alpha male screamed furiously, jumped down the rocky outcrop and made his way toward her flashing his canines.
Both troops followed and surrounded her on either side.
Without hesitation she tossed the banana towards the younger male and in the blink of an eye it was on like donkey kong!
The alpha charged toward the younger male.
She made a run for it.