The Thieving Monkey

“Aah-yee-haw!”

The sound of someone sneezing wakes up Marcelle.  She is in a tent on top of her Land Rover in Africa.  Sleeping beside her, Ian snores.  Ian hasn’t sneezed, because sneezing and snoring at the same time is impossible.  

Marcelle rolls onto her belly and peers out the tent window.  In the gray, pre-dawn light, she sees a trash can, a fire pit, a picnic table and a tree.  She doesn’t see any people — but she does spy a monkey creeping down the tree.  When the monkey reaches the ground, it glances around with suspicious eyes, then scampers away. 

 “Aah-yee-haw!” 

That’s not a sneeze, Marcelle realizes.  It’s a monkey call.  The monkeys must be telling each other it’s safe to come down from the trees. 

Marcelle shakes Ian.  “Wake up! Monkeys!”  As the rising sun turns the sky pink and gold, more monkeys clamber out of the trees. 

“Monkeys steal anything they get their hands on, so be careful,” warns Ian.  “They’re a nuisance.”

 “Nuisance?  Nonsense! Haven’t you heard the expression, ‘More fun than a barrel of monkeys’?”

 “Aah-yee-haw!” calls a monkey.   

Marcelle and Ian climb down from the roof of their Land Rover.  While Ian builds a fire to boil water for tea, Marcelle brushes the mud out of the passenger seat of the Land Rover, then gets in to study the guidebook.  

She knows there are a whole bunch of different monkeys in this world (two hundred and sixty-four to be exact) — so to call a monkey, “a monkey” is very inexact.  There are monkeys with tails, and monkeys without tails; monkeys that hoot and holler, and monkeys that sound like the wind blowing through trees.  There are monkeys that speak sign language and even monkeys that ice skate (though these are rare and never seen in the wild).  

In the campsite, the big brown monkeys with red bottoms as shiny as balloons are called baboons.  But what are the gray monkeys — like the one peering through the windscreen of the Land Rover? He has a black face and bushy white eyebrows that wiggle as he looks inside. With his tiny black hands pressed against the glass, he stands — revealing the bright blue balls that identify him as a Vervet monkey.

Marcelle exchanges the guidebook for her camera and climbs out of the car to snap a photo.

“Take a picture of that baboon’s red bottom,” says Ian. 

“Nobody wants to look at a picture of a baboon’s bottom,” sniffs Marcelle. The baboon pushes over a trashcan and picks through the garbage.

“Where’s our miner’s light?" Marcelle asks. "I want to clean out the mud that got in the car yesterday.”

“My miner’s light is in my backpack,” Ian says. 

Marcelle puts her camera on the picnic table and heads to the Land Rover.

Ian shouts, “Shoo!” and waves a Vervet away from the camera, which he rescues and points at the baboon’s red rump. Click. 

Ian hands the camera to Marcelle. “Like I said, don’t leave anything lying around.”

Marcelle stows the camera. She shakes dried mud from Ian’s backpack, dons the miner’s light, and continues shaking and brushing mud from their luggage. 

“When I finish cleaning, I’d like a shower,” she tells Ian.

“I’ll check out the shower block," says Ian, who knows better than to suggest that they go on a game drive first and clean later.  When Marcelle flips into cleaning mode, she is unstoppable. She once made the bed with him still in it. 

Ian returns to report that the shower is primitive. “In order to heat the water, I would have to build a fire — unless you wouldn’t mind a cold shower.”

“I’d like a hot shower, please.”

“It’ll take a while for the water to heat up.”

“Fine. I’ll reorganize the kitchen boxes so we can find things more easily.”

While Ian collects wood and hauls it to the shower block, Marcelle swings open the back door of the Land Rover to survey the kitchen. A shelf holds boxes with dishes and cookware. Below the shelf is a mini fridge and a box of dry goods with a packaged bread loaf on top. She is about to set the dry goods box on the ground to get it out of the way, when she spies the watching monkeys. 

“Oh no, you want me to put this on the ground so you can steal from it, but I’m not going to do that. I’m onto you, monkeys.” Instead, she switches the dry goods box to the top shelf and moves the crockery box below so she can organize it. 

She sings as she works: “Happy birthday to you, you live in a zoo, you look like a monkey, and you smell like one, too.”

Bonk. Something soft hits her on the head. She looks up to see a Vervet monkey scampering away with her bread. 

“Hey!” she yells, chasing the monkey. “You drop that!”

The monkey tears the plastic off the loaf and digs its hands into the bread, feeding itself as fast as it can.

Marcelle stamps her foot and shakes her fist, “You rotten monkey!”

Ian laughs behind her. 

“What’s so funny?”

“The sight of you chasing that monkey.”

“This is not funny. We’re only on our second day in the bush and already we’ve been stuck in the mud and lost our whole supply of bread.”

A baboon scares away the monkey, grabs the loaf and climbs onto a tree branch where he devours the remainder of the bread in fistfuls.

“Curse you, too, you big baboon!” shouts Marcelle.

Ian laughs harder. Marcelle scowls at him. “If it’s survival of the fittest out here, I’m not sure we’re fit.”

“You’ll feel better after a hot shower,” says Ian.  “And now I’d like to have my tea.” 

“Without toast,” says Marcelle. 

“I think everything is going just fine,” Ian says. 

If Marcelle could see into the future, she would tell him to think again. 

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