Jennie by Douglas Preston

of her, so we concluded that everything was going to be all right. Then one night I became amorous, and before I knew what was happening Jennie was on top of me, screaming and hitting, clearly distressed. When I tried to push her off, she bit my arm. It was not a serious bite, just a quick pinch, but it surprised me. As far as we knew, she had not bitten a human being before.
    When I related this story to Harold Epstein, he asked if I was familiar with Dr. Jane Goodall’s research on chimpanzees in Tanganyika. Goodall had made the interesting observation that infant chimpanzees become violently upset when males mate their mothers, and often try to interfere with and prevent the copulative act. Harold was deeply interested in Jennie’s reaction and he felt that it showed this kind of behavior must be genetically programmed.
    That was the end of Jennie’s nights in our room. We forced Jennie to sleep in the spare bedroom. It was a long, painful process, entailing many sleepless nights while we listened to Jennie’s muffled screams echoing through the woodwork. She felt she had been given shabby treatment indeed. She never did reoccupy her tree house, except during the day. The spare bedroom became Jennie’s room forever.
    Jenny, we came to understand, had a highly developed sense of justice. She sincerely believed that she was human and should enjoy all the perquisites pertaining thereto. She would not allow herself to be treated in any way different from how we treated our children. If she perceived a difference—if, for example, Sandy was given a candy bar and she wasn’t—she took it as a great injustice. Her sense of fairness was almost as highly developed as it is among human siblings, who, as any parent knows, are ready to protest any hint of favoritism.
    Not long after Jennie arrived Harold asked me whether Jennie had ever seen herself in a mirror. Harold took a scientific interest inJennie and questioned me at length about her behavior. In this case, I thought back and realized that, in fact, she had not. Much has been written about the chimpanzee concept of “self.” Cognitive tests using chimpanzees and mirrors have proven, beyond doubt, that chimpanzees do have a sense of self.
    That evening, Jennie saw herself in a mirror for the first time. We wondered how she would react, since it was clear to us that she considered herself human and probably never realized she looked any different from the rest of us. It was our first “experiment” with Jennie. I removed the dressing mirror from Lea’s closet door and placed it at the top of the stairs. Then we called Jennie.
    She came bounding up the stairs without a care in the world, but when she reached the top and saw her image in the mirror, she stopped dead. Her hair bristled up and she “displayed” by swaggering about, stamping her feet on the floor, and staring aggressively. When the image did not flee as expected she became angry and charged. Naturally, her double showed equal fearlessness and charged right back, and this frightened Jennie half to death. She skidded to a halt and backed off screaming and grimacing in fear. Then she turned and fled down the stairs. If she had a tail it would have been between her legs.
    At the bottom she gathered her wits and crept back up. Again, she had the unpleasant experience of seeing this black, hairy creature staring at her from the mirror. She stood there transfixed. Suddenly her expression changed. What was this? The ugly brute was wearing a hat just like hers! Her hair gradually subsided as it dawned on her that the image in the mirror was of
herself
. She took the hat off her head and looked at it, and put it back on, and went up to the mirror and ran her hands all over the mirror’s surface. Then she simply walked away.
    After that, mirrors held no interest for her, and she ignored them. It was not until much later that other experiments showed just how complex