High above Lake Tanganyika the dust of the universe glittered, stretching from the Western Congo horizon all the way over to the shelter of the Mahale Mountains, dark and writhing silently with life above our flickering campfire. Nothing in the world has ever tasted like that first breath of Tanzania. I could not imagine having never smelled her — like chocolate, wood smoke, rich, thick, blood red earth. Waves licked the shoreline as we let the campfire dim. To this day, it amazes me people don’t pay more attention to the sky. It gazes at us from a billion years away, through all the smoke and dust we’ve blown over the earth, and we billions rush and get things done and never once look up at a perfect blue, oblivious to the fact that that there’s a whole orchestra of sparkling eyes waiting invisible behind the curtain of a normal morning. That night, staring up into it, I saw not the comforting embrace of the universe, but that sparkle of eyes. Waves lapped the sand.

I thought about Pim. He’d come very close, that day.

We had taken the dhow across the waves to a remote strand and ventured up into the jungle to meet Darwin. He was no longer the leader, but they all loved him anyway, so Elton said.

His beard tickled the front of his hard, hairy chest. He twisted a leafy shoot in his mouth, knees bent, naked, glancing our way then, chewing, let his gaze drift into the trees, watching the colorful birds flit across the canopy, thinking of what I can only imagine was poetry.

Christmas sat cross-legged on the dirt path with her three children, who had already worn themselves out. Her breasts sagged nearly into the dirt and, staring at us, studying us, pulled one of the little ones closer. My grandmother died when I was three. I saw her hands, on that dirt path, tugging a naked, shivering form to her body — ebony, covered with hair, fingernails long and cracked, fingers thin and gentle and betraying so much warmth. She stared at me.

We went off in search of Pim. Per Elton, he’d been banished from the group for his crimes. Chimpanzees don’t have a criminal code — at least, not a written one — but from what Elton told us, Darwin and Christmas had made the right decision. Something howled through the forest up ahead. Elton quickened the pace.

I adjusted my mask and breath fogged up my glasses. Branches snapped against my face. Elton was about ten yards in front of me. The rest were some distance behind me. A camera hung around my neck.

Elton crossed another dirt path, hacking at the forest ahead with his machete. I stepped onto the dirt and the woods shook with a ripping, rattling scream. From the left I saw trees shake and quiver, heard it coming closer. A sound like a trumpet, long and drawn out, but with the traces of a human voice. Pim burst from the bushes, rotting teeth glaring, dark eyes glittering. Foot over fist he ran straight at me.

“Don’t move.”

Every sound on earth dropped away. All I felt were Pim’s feet slamming into the forest floor. I could see his muscular thighs, his stone forehead, his tensed wrists and I could smell the forest on him and where he had slept in the rain and the dirt and he was now close enough for me to see him blink, to see his eyes, sparkling and black, and the ground shook and my knees rattled in their joints, like I’d been standing next to a freight train, and he passed below, a shadowy vortex, not two feet away, barely missing my foot, throwing aside a curtain of brush and crashing back into the jungle. I recognized Darwin as he leapt up, barely dodging him, whooping and laughing, smiling. Echoes of their screams rang out in the sun.

Back at camp I sat behind my tent. Several blue-bottomed Vervet Monkeys hung from the trees, staring at me. Their gray fur shone soft, like that of kittens, in the afternoon light. One of them rotated its head, trying to figure me out.

The campfire had died. Pim’s eyes glared at me, glittering, from up above. I heard ripples on the surface of the lake and knew it must be hippos.

“It’s late,” said Elton, “We’d better turn in.”

I dreamt of the sky embracing me, of Vervet Monkeys playing guitars in the trees, of Darwin tracing a painting in the dirt, of Pim sleeping in fallen leaves, of Christmas and her three children, staring up the road at me. I slept better than I had ever slept in my nineteen years.