faultlines

on living with monkeys, and friendships, and rain

On every walk this week, I see rainclouds hugging the horizon, purpling the liminal space between ocean and sky. They wisp and bulge and bubble and feather, each heralding a slightly different breed of weather. The air is heavy with a unique scent; a cold mix of rain and salt, the perfume of a wild island descending into winter.

On one walk, as I sit on the white sand and look out to the North Atlantic, the clouds gather above me. I catch the scent of rain just a second before it falls, and for a moment I am swept back in time; away from this beach, this ocean, these skies, back to a tropical Caribbean island ruled by monkeys.

I love it when this happens, when a mind falls through a crack in space and time. I think of these moments as faultlines; fissures in physics where we slip back into a former self, or out into a different self, or forward into a maybe-self.

This faultline, on this beach, folding me into the seam between two distant islands, has been forged through the scent of water and a tingling of the skin just before the first rains fall.

I learnt to pay attention to these sensations from the monkeys. Just as the afternoon storm clouds rolled across their tropical island, just before the clouds broke open and a torrent of water fell, the monkeys would gather in the treetops and coo.

For six months, I worked on a little island ruled by rhesus macaques. I was asking questions about their sociality – specifically, about why friendship evolves – through behavioural experiments. The monkeys could choose whether or not to engage in the experiments. Really, the monkeys were in charge in every sense. I ate lunch in a cage, watching them roaming their tropical island through bars. I kept my distance at all times, unless distance was not something they desired (my favourite female often sought me out to sit in my shadow). Many of my pencils were stolen by curious babies. And a lens cap. Almost my notebook, too. The monkeys ruled the roost. I was a bystander, a watcher, an alien in their midst.

Just before the rains came, the monkeys’ coos were gentle, just like the first drops of water, but the noise grew and grew until it was a chorus of coos, a torrential downpour of monkey song heralding the change in weather.

At first, I would know to seek shelter because of their coos, but after a while I became primed to those very first warning signs of rain, too. That delicate scent. The change in the air. I smelt the rain and knew the monkeys were about to sing.

The first time this happened – quite early in my time with the monkeys – I felt a kinship with them that I had not felt before. A morsel of understanding of their perception, their experience. But I felt that same kinship many times after, as I watched the monkeys navigate all the most brutal parts of life by tending to all the most tender.

Rhesus macaque society is hierarchical, strict, built through aggression and alliances. Males gain status with age, experience and aggression. Their fights can be brutal, loud, long. Injuries are common. Once, to escape a fight, a male swam so far out to sea that I lost sight of him.

Still, at least as a male there is a chance to change your place in society. Females have no such freedom. Their social position is inherited from their mother and cannot be changed. There is no such thing as social mobility for females. The lowest ranking female will spend her life eating when everyone else is done, drinking when nobody else wants water, and moving out of the way of others. She is likely to die sooner than her peers, and there is not much she can do about it.

Except, that is, make friends.

In the world of female rhesus macaques, friendship is the beauty amongst the brutality. There is so much aggression, so much angst and worry and injury, but, buried in amongst it all – or, perhaps, threaded from the very same fabric – there is so much tenderness.

Friendship in macaques does not look so very different to friendship in humans. In the hot, slow afternoons, the forest would be scattered with groups of girls, combing their fingers through one another’s fur, cuddling, reaching out to touch one another’s babies, nodding off in one another’s company.

It took a while for the monkeys to accept me, or, rather, to become indifferent to me. But one afternoon, as I sat amongst the undergrowth watching a female in the distance, a group of girls approached me and sat just a couple of metres away. They chirruped and chattered and groomed, every now and then glancing up at me, but otherwise entirely at ease in my presence.

the ladies, dozing in the undergrowth

Amongst the stress and brutality of monkey life, the gentleness with which these females groomed one another – fingers diligently working through another’s fur, quiet coos coming from their pursed mouths – was beautiful to see. But friendship is more than that for the monkeys; it is lifesaving. Monkeys, particularly female monkeys, have a better chance of surviving if they have many (or high-quality) friendships. This is true across a huge number of species, humans included.

An odd thing about studying the evolution of friendship is the number of times I heard something along the lines of “but the monkeys aren’t really friends though, are they? It’s just functional. They just use each other to survive.” It is odd because it is such a common misconception, but it is so inaccurate. If a person doesn’t consider non-human relationships to be “real” relationships, then all relationships, including ours, are not “real”. They are all “functional”, have all evolved because they aid in survival and reproduction, and they have the same molecular underpinnings.

Human friendship is not special.

The unnameable warmth of friendship is everywhere, in so many species. It is functional for all of us – humans included – but that doesn’t make it any less wondrous, does it? Perhaps it makes it more wondrous, that we are not alone in our experience of relationships. We are just a thread in an unfathomably huge web of connection.

How boring it must be (as well as incorrect) to think otherwise, but it seems to me that many people feel a compulsion to flatten down other animals’ experiences of the world. I can think of a fair few reasons why someone might want to do this. It is hard to exist as a human while also being acutely aware of the lived experiences of other animals – animals it is almost impossible to have no negative impact on, even if we actively try. But to put us on a pedestal is, in my opinion, a cowardly way to exist. I would much rather experience the deep joy and grief and wonder and confusion of kinship with nonhuman species than the utter loneliness of putting humans on some imagined pedestal.

And so it is, as I lift my face to the sky and feel the first droplets of rain, that I am thinking of monkeys, rainclouds, coos, friendship, connection, webs, threads, gentle hands grooming through fur, tender friendships existing in the face of adversity.

And what joy, now, in this cold winter rain, on this cold winter isle, to watch as two ravens swoop overhead, the low cronk of their conversation carrying me forward.

What joy, to fall into a faultline and climb back out to a world, rain-shimmering, reminding me of its magic.

a curious juvenile who really wanted to run off with my camera

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