Chapter 7

Blair Fortner awoke from a groggy sleep. What had hit her on the back of the head with such force? A two-ton truck?

She'd never felt such a hard, unceasing heaviness. Something had struck her at the base of her spine.

She pressed her palms down onto the ground and lifted her shoulders. Her long blonde hair drooped out in front of her. What was under her hands? A thick, gnarled mat of jungle bush and twigs. Who put this in her tent?

Her head throbbed with the pain of an unknown beating. What had she done to deserve this one? What crime had she committed to be allowed to feel such onrushing pain. The sights in front of her eyes blurred up and focused.

Then, they blurred up again and the grogginess returned. She sank back down to the mat and rolled over.

The sun shone through the leaves and made her wrinkle up her forehead. Who had taken the roof off her tent? And why? Maybe the same person that clubbed her.

She rolled over onto her side and sniffed. Her nostrils were clogged up. What with? Having been hit unconscious could do that? Then, she smelled a strange smell.

What was it? Putrefaction? Moss and water? An animal smell. Animals, of course. There were a lot of them in the jungle.

But where was she? If only her vision and her clear head hadn't disappeared she could probably figure it out.

Pretty quick, too. But those things failed to materialize. Instead her head zigzagged in pain and visions. Images of strange hairy beasts...

"Oh, God!!!" she cried out, sitting up too fast. She felt like another blow had been struck on the back of her head. She fell back down onto soft, bristly matting. Where the hell had they taken her? Those apes. All those apes. There had been too many of them to count. Where had they all come from? And why hadn't her father protested?

Her father? Where the hell was he? Oh, yes, napping. It must have been afternoon. But the sun would indicate that it was early morning. Dawn.

Then, a little cloud drifted off in her head and things began to clear up suddenly.

I was carried off, Blair thought to herself.

Carried off by that big ape... the one that escaped. Juko, named for what the native men called him. He had come for her. She was bending over her foot locker and that huge beast had reached out and patted her back side.

Then she had stood up and felt his hand on her. He had ripped her nightie. She looked down to see if her memories jibed with what the physical reality was.

Yes, indeed. A big chunk of her nightgown was definitely missing. And her tit was jutting up, pointing toward the sky.

She had been kidnapped by a gorilla! So where the hell had he brought her? Slowly, slowly, she sat up and gazed around. She was in some sort of nest. A gorilla's nest. A place to hide. Some sort of nest up in the tree tops. A home. A gorilla home.

And here she was, lying here in some gorilla's bed. Maybe Juko's. She heard the sound of an angry bird flying overhead. She followed his cry and watched as he landed on a nearby branch.

She peered over the edge of the nest and found that she was very high up indeed. But she knew gorilla habits well enough to know that this was only a temporary home. They had a nice warm cave down below somewhere. A little den where they all congregated.

This was just their temporary resting place. So where were they all just now?

Why had they abandoned her up in the top of a tree like this. There were vine ropes hanging everywhere. From above and from below. It would have been easy to just untie one of them and swing right out of that place. Just like Tarzan. Or Jane, actually. More like Jane.

She stood up to test her footing. Again her head swam and she sat down. She edged herself a bit closer to the danger point of the edge of the nest. She grabbed a hold of one of the twisted brown rope vines.

She would swing right out of there and take it on the lam. Fly back home. Then a thought struck. She had no idea where she was. She had no idea where home was. And she knew what could happen to a human alone in a strange, forbidding jungle.

She didn't even have her hunting knife with her!

She was wrapped in a torn nightgown. With nothing on her feet to protect her against the ravages of thistles, poison snakes, deadly swamp burrs that stuck to the soles of the feet and burrowed into the bloodstream so thick they clogged the arteries to the heart, leaving the recipient to die a slow, agonizing death.

No, that sort of thing wasn't for her. She would stay put a few minutes until she could think clearly.

She couldn't go anywhere. She was a prisoner here. She might as well have been in a cage. In fact, she was in a cage. Just as her father and she had put Juko into that cage trap, now she was sitting in a trap.

And to leave that trap meant certain death. Either a slow, painful one or a sudden, unexpected one. She heard a chattering sound and looked over to a neighboring tree to see a bunch of monkeys sitting on a branch, lined up like crows on a telephone line.

They were chattering and pointing at her. Giggling and making fun of her!!!

"All right, all right," she said back to them, "so I look pretty ridiculous. So what? So do you, ya know that?"

The chattering heated up a bit.

"Damned hecklers," she said, "everybody wants to get into the act today."

That's what it felt like to her. Everybody wanting to get into the act to tease and torment her. Everybody wanting a piece of her time, her body, her consideration.

Why the hell things had to turn out so strange, she couldn't fathom. She closed her eyes a moment and wondered what Cathy was doing right now.

Probably shopping for a wedding dress for her marriage to Harold Rhymer.

"Ha!" she heard herself say out loud. Cathy would rather marry Rin-Tin-Tin than Harold Rhymer, she thought.

Civilization! How well she remembered it. And how little she thought of it, even now. Even stuck up here in the tree tops with nothing to do but stare at a batch of ham actor monkeys, she still liked the wilds better.

Too bad she didn't have a nice coat of bushy hair all over her body. She could stay here...

She stopped her thought train with another overriding thought. What the hell was she daydreaming of? Living here with the apes? Of being an ape herself? That was crazy thinking. Insanity.

She could be locked up for thinking such thoughts. Locked up and studied by psychiatrists as well as animal behaviorists for the rest of her natural days. She was a human, not a monkey. And speaking of monkeys, where were those ape types anyway? Had they moved out because they knew she was coming?

Had they packed their bags and moved just after dumping her here for punishment? Would they leave her here to starve slowly as punishment for the sins she had visited on her precious Juko?

A fitting end for a Zoologist. Being offed by the very beasts she had set out to study. To study and codify and list and pigeonhole and categorize. As if animals or humans could be turned into statistics and recorded facts.

Both were individuals. She couldn't imagine another beast acting like Juko. Could any other gorilla be so tender, so loving, so warm and cuddly? So fierce and loyal? So intelligent? So super strong and macho.

Yes, that word fit him better than any human she had ever known. He was macho. A super stud. An ape to put all human males to shame. What the hell had she been missing all her life that she had found in his arms?

And why was she lying here now dreaming about it when she should be planning her escape? Survival was possible in the jungle. If only she could keep a clear head about it.

There were shoes to be fashioned out of the broad palm leaves. She would work them together by splitting the vines into tiny rope strings. There would be food to be gathered. But first of all, she had to figure a way to get out of this nest!

A harsh, jabbering noise filled her ears and the tree top began to shake. It swayed back and forth and Blair had to grip a hold of the twigs to keep from falling out of the tree.

She looked out and saw the black, hairy top of a gorilla head popping up over the shiny green leaves of the tree. A gorilla face emerged next and she opened her mouth in terror.

What the hell were they going to do to her? She didn't have a prayer up here. She would be tortured or beaten or worse by these beasts and no human ear would even hear her suffering.

What a way to end it all!

She held her breath in expectation. The thing popped one enormous hairy foot into the nest and hoisted himself up effortlessly.

Blair watched as the big man in the gorilla suit, or so it seemed, advanced toward her. She wasn't sure if it was Juko or not. And the only way she would know absolutely is if he made any sexual advances at her. He had a very distinctive technique.

Maybe it was that sweet way he had of almost crushing her to death. Yes, she had begun to like it a little rough. Maybe sex had never been rough enough for her.

As if in answer to her desires, the huge male stood over her and glared down at her, blinking hard and beating his chest.

She recognized his stance and his actions. They were those of a male gorilla claiming his territory. And, in this case, she knew that territory meant her.

"All right," she said, lying back and watching the show with one eye on the ape and the other on the edge of the nest. She wasn't sure who was going to set foot in here next. Maybe Big Boy here had company.

The big ape began walking around on all fours, his thick, square head set in profile against the wild profusion of green behind him. He stalked her for several minutes before coming to a two-legged stance again.

Then, standing upright as any human creature could, he beat his thick, bony chest repeatedly and made loud, hooting noises in the back of his throat.

Blair still couldn't tell if it was Juko or not. And then, she gripped the nest in terror. Another intruder was entering her bedroom.

The tree shook and Blair kept a sharp look out around the perimeter of the tree top. She had no idea how that beast would come at her, or from where, and she wanted to be ready.

Another head appeared over the top of the nest. A less squarish head. A softer and slightly rounder head. The chest appeared and from its slightly curvier appearance, Blair knew a female had entered the nest.

The female brayed a disquieting welcome. She lifted her mouth to the sun and let out a string of loud almost chirpy sounds. Then, she, too, sank down on all fours and began to parade around in front of Blair.

Again the tree shook. Again Blair held the nest for dear life. And another gorilla rose into sight. A huge, dark male with a heavy torso. Bigger than the first beast who had entered. The size of a linebacker for the Detroit Lions. In full uniform.

The three hairy creatures circled her. They stalked her. She felt penned in and threatened. Again, the tree shook. She gripped the nest and felt her fingernails split into pieces at the sight that greeted her eyes.

Four of the biggest, hairiest, meanest, most fierce looking creatures she had ever seen or imagined she would see came bolting into view.

"Oh, dear," Blair heard herself say, "what the hell are you all doing here?"

The biggest and meanest-looking of them all reared up and beat his chest. The noise echoed throughout the jungle. He accompanied the beating with a long, low bone-chilling bellow.

The ape was assuming control of the others now. He turned to them and gave them the same verbal message. They backed off and sat in squatting positions, all of them facing her.