4

"What time did you tell them we would be back?" Tugg asked after they had been walking a while.

"I told 'em high noon." Hezzy answered. He was just ahead, created a path with his machete. Ting, ting, ting was the sound with each swipe. The front man's job was clear. Clear the path directly in front of you. The second man's job was to scout out everything else around them. Tugg was alert and nothing happened in the first direction for a while.

It was quick going. Hezzy was a magician with a blade, yet they yielded no results. They doubled back and tried a different route. It was on the fourth route that they heard the grunts again. Hezzy stopped, panting. He slowly reached for his canteen on his belt, only to find it empty. Saying nothing he motioned to Tugg for a drink… Ears open for all signals. Three minutes later, distinct talking. It was in front of them and to the left. They crept closer.

From the shadows we had a view of their entire village. They weren't orangutans, they were much shorter. They were not in a bai, but a clearing made from hands. The floor was clean of litter, and small huts had been erected from the trees. They looked like chimpanzees but walked on their hind two legs. The largest one was walking in the middle looking tough. It was a female, for her teats stuck out prominently and there was a young one walking next to her, holding her hand. The others around the 'village' were engaged in various sexual acts and one was doing something with a stick. They stood quiet in the shadows of the forest.

Suddenly they heard a snap followed by a snort. It came far out and to the left of the clearing but there was an immediate response from the group... Mostly fear and a lot of screaming. Neither man had moved, they were as frightened as everyone else and if they did move, they might compound the problem. Most of the beasts ran away upright, but a couple of younger ones were on all fours. After around two minutes, things began to calm down. Whimpers and sighs from the surrounding beasts, but the large female had stayed erect and at attention in the middle of the clearing. The only difference with her was that her young one was nowhere to be seen. She turned around and went to the edge of the clearing opposite them and returned to the middle with a stick that was four feet in length.

She screamed a challenge in a loud voice towards the sound that they had all heard. "Aroooooyeeaaaaaaaaah-ah-ah-ha!" she cried, and waited. A moment later, she was answered with a call.

"Ooooh Ah Ah oooo! Oh Ah Yaaaaaa-ah!" came the response from the forest.

You need not imagine what was going on in either Hezzy or Tugg's head at the moment. They had seen the devils of hell themselves, so you would think that nothing would frighten them. You would be wrong. Living through something that horrible only reinforced everything else in the world. Once the human mind had been exposed to something so terrible, not much else seemed normal. It happened to most. Doctors call it: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Maybe nature calls it: "Waking up." The issue is, once you are woken, you can't get back down.

And with a great crashing and a great many of fears, out from the jungle stepped an enormous gorilla, walking on his hind legs, carrying a spear. Later, Tugg would describe it as a Gigantopithecus Blacki, but all Hezzy would say about it was that it was 'A Damned Sasquatch.' What it was, remains a mystery for us, but I will go so far to describe it to you. If you are a book reader I would like to refer you to a couple of stories that it most definitely isn't. It was not similar at all to Robert E. Howard's description of the horrible beasts that Conan the Barbarian faced, nor was it the more current bizarre grey-furred beasts of Michael Crichton's book: 'Congo'. Though each story does take place in the deep Congo, these fanciful imaginations are rooted in myth, where the issue that was happening in front of our two protagonists is something closer to the line of science and fact.

The being in front of them was close to seven foot tall, almost twice as tall as the small female, and it was covered in dense black fur. It was stooped over, like an old man, every now and again using one of its knuckles to help it. But it was no gorilla that either man had ever heard about. To make things even more bizarre, it greeted the female with a gentle kiss on the nose with its lips.

In the presence of the larger giant, the rest of the (now diminutive) beasts were humble and submissive. He gently sat in the middle of them all and they brought him what appeared to be sugar cane and figs as well as guava and other fruits. As he was eating, the females all came to him. He laid back and was fed by them and then they began to lay on him and stroke his body. What accompanied the feeding was cooing and flirtation with the females as to what could only be described as foreplay. One by one he had relations with all of the females there and then they all lay down for a nap. The entire process of this was no less than forty minutes.

After this, in a most astonishing moment, the large male turned and looked directly at the two men. Evidently, he had known they were there the entire time.

It was dusk by the time Hezzy and Tugg returned to the camp. Moise, Christian and E-man were in the middle of a game of Gin Rummy but put it away when they saw their faces. Hezzy and Tugg hadn't talked about it with each other and would not talk about it with the men. They were distant and when they returned, automatically eating some fruit and drinking water. They went about their tasks without communication and their eyes never met the others. Without conversation they both lay down for sleep leaving the three cameramen to do the camp cleanup.

The next day, instead of travelling on their east track, they ventured north. Tugg and Hezzy had figured that if "Blacki" came in from the south, that was their only hope. The cameramen overheard their conversation and Moise demanded to hear about Blacki but stopped cold when he looked into Tugg's eyes. E-Man was still adamant about it until Hezzy brought his blade into a tree with a solid thwunk.

"Next person ah hear talkin 'bout it, is gonna get hisself a new mouth." he said slowly.

Not one of them brought it up after that until they were well past what Tugg considered to be the danger point. Hooking east, they made for Lake Telle.