Monkey Wars (43 page)

With bodies measuring up to thirty inches, and tails another forty inches, the langur are large, athletic and strong.

According to Hindu legend, a langur monkey was once caught stealing mangoes from a giant's garden in Sri Lanka. As punishment, the giant set his tail alight. Although the langur escaped, his face and hands were burned, which is why although their fur is gray, the langur have black hands and faces to this day.

The langur eat leaves, fruit, and buds and flowers, along with insects and tree bark. Living in medium to large groups, langur troops will usually have one dominant male, but things can get pretty bloodthirsty….

Sometimes adolescent males who have been expelled from the main group form a bachelor pack that returns to harass the troop.

If the bachelor pack manages to kill the troop leader, they can get locked in a bloody power struggle, killing the infants of the previous leader, then killing each other until only one dominant male remains alive.

Smaller than the langur, rhesus monkeys have brown or gray fur and pink faces. They are mainly plant eaters but do supplement leaves and roots with insects and small animals.

The rhesus are notorious for moving from rural areas into the cities, where they pilfer and beg food from humans, sometimes becoming a serious nuisance.

Rhesus troops can be very large, up to 180 individuals, and their social hierarchy is matriarchal. They interact with each other using sounds (coos, grunts, warbles, screeches), facial expressions (the “fear grimace” and the “silent bared-teeth” face) and gestures.

Even though the species is often called the Barbary ape, it is in fact a monkey. It's found in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria and Morocco, in parts of Libya, and most famously on the Rock of Gibraltar, where the Barbaries often invade human settlements. (In the novel, they came from far-off lands, where they had terrorized humans.)

Male Barbaries regularly form coalitions with other males, which change frequently, as the male ranking in the hierarchy changes often.

There is a longstanding myth that holds as long as Barbary apes exist on Gibraltar, the territory will remain under British rule. By 1942, at the height of World War II, their numbers had dwindled to just seven monkeys, but such is the mystique around the Barbaries that the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, personally ordered that their numbers be replenished.

A clear dominance hierarchy organizes bonnet troops; there is an alpha male, who is the most dominant, followed by a beta and a gamma male. Such acute rank consciousness fed directly into the characteri
zation of Morton and Soames as colonial aristocrats.

Lip smacking is a very common behavior trait, and they have other, distinctive alarm calls to alert the troop to predators like pythons or leopards.