The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Forest by David Quammen Page A

the water; he knew boats. He owned a canoe, a good one, sturdy and long, made from a mahogany log with his own hands, and he spent his days in it. He was a young man with no wife, no children, and just a bit of an appetite for adventure. He had fallen away from his natal community at an early age, becoming a loner, because his father died and the village came to despise his mother, suspecting her of sorcery based on a piece of bad luck and a grudge. He took this as a deep personal bruise; he despised the villagers in return, screw them, and went his own way. It suited him to be alone. He was not an observant Bakwele. He never got circumcised.
    The Voyager ate fish. He ate little else, in fact, besides fish and bananas—and sometimes manioc, which he didn’t plant or process himself but which was easily bought with fish. He liked the taste and he loved the idea of fish, and there was always enough. He knew where to find fish, how to catch them, their varied types and names. He drank the river. That was enough. He didn’t make palm wine or buy it. He was self-sufficient and contained within his small world.
    He provided fish to his mother and her two younger children, as I see him, a loyal son though an alienated neighbor. His mother still lived at the fringe of the old village. His surplus catch he dried on racks, or in wet season smoked over a fire, at his solitary riverbank camp. Occasionally he made considerable journeys, paddling miles upstream or drifting downstream, to sell a boatload of fish in one of the market villages. In this way, he had tasted the empowerment of dealing for cash. Brass rods were the prevailing currency, or cowrie shells, and sometimes he may even have seen deutschmarks. He bought some steel hooks and one spool of manufactured line, which had come all the way from Marseille. The line was disappointing. The hooks wereexcellent. Once he had floated downstream as far as the confluence with the Sangha, a much larger river, powerful, twice as wide as the Ngoko, and had ridden its current for a day—a heady and fearful experience. On the right bank he had seen a town, which he knew to be Ouesso, vast and notorious; he gave it a wide berth, holding himself at midriver until he was past. At day’s end he stopped, slept on the bank, and next day reversed, having tested himself enough. It took him four days of anxious effort to paddle back up, hugging the bank (except again at Ouesso), climbing through eddies, but the Voyager made it, relieved when he regained his own world, the little Ngoko River, and swollen with new confidence by the time he beached at his camp. This might have occurred, let’s say, in the long dry season of 1916.
    On another occasion, he paddled upstream as far as Ngbala, a river town some miles above Moloundou. It was during his return from that journey, as I posit, that he stopped at Moloundou and there, in his boat, where it was tied for the night in a shaded cove just below town, had sex with a woman.
    She wasn’t his first but she was different from village girls. She was a river trader herself, a Buy ’em–Sell ’em, several years older than he was and considerably more experienced. She traveled up and down the Ngoko and the Sangha, making a living with her wits and her wares and sometimes her body. The Voyager didn’t know her name. Never heard it. She was outgoing and flirtatious, almost pretty. He didn’t think much about pretty. She wore a print dress of bright calico, manufactured, not local raffia. She must have liked him, or at least liked his performance, because she returned to his boat in the shadows the next night and they coupled again, three times. She seemed healthy; she laughed merrily and she was strong. He considered himself lucky that night—luckyto have met her, to have impressed her, to have gotten at no cost what other men paid for. But he wasn’t lucky. He had a small open wound on his penis, barely more than a scratch, where he’d been caught by