CHUMPO'S STRANGERS

Chumpo finds himself with a life of relative luxury

Chumpo was enjoying life.

He suddenly found that his every desire was being fulfilled, and the only effort he had to expend from day to day was deflowering young b*****s, an art he was getting so fond of it took him almost no time at all, much, maybe, to their disappointment.

In return they came to him with food. It wasn’t always to his own personal taste, but he ate it anyway, even when he suspected it had been doctored by jealous males who resented having their own b*****s used by him when he was in a randy mood, which was, apparently, most of the time.

“The gods,” he told them, “are pleased with you and there will be food aplenty when you forage today, for such is their word to me.”

It wasn’t the gods that had told him that juicy bit of knowledge, but his own observation. It had been a balmy season with just the right amount of rain, and he knew that meant good harvests when the time came. It was something he knew instinctively, and so did the rest of the monkeys of the forest. They’d always known it. Such knowledge they would have said was part of their DNA if they had the faintest idea what DNA might be, of which more later.

But instead of listening to their instinctive knowledge the rest of the family listened to Chumpo and decided that Chumpo must certainly be in well with his gods, and offered him the tastiest fruits and the freshest meats to please both them and him.

And he found himself walking ever further through the forest as he did what he called thinking.

It was a huge forest and stretched just about all the way round the world, though there wasn’t a monkey who could have told you that anything could stretch round something unless it was spherical, and they had no idea want spherical meant nor what shape their world was.

It could be confusing being primitive!

The forest in those ancient times was divided by the creatures that called it home, into personal areas that they rarely wandered far from, and there were many tribes of monkeys, all with their heroes and heroines, all with their lovers and deflowering males, and all with their home territories. But they rarely interacted because there was no need to. They hardly ever suspected that others existed, and if they did stumble across an unfamiliar creature, lost and in what they looked on as their forest, there was extra meat in the that day. They didn’t trust strangers at all. After all, strangers represented competition and resources were often insufficient for them without some louse-infected individual from far away thinking he might share it.

And on one of his ‘thinking’ walks Chumpo came across strangers.

Now, he was but the one and they were half a dozen. He was becoming slightly slow, what with being overweight as a consequence of a more than adequate diet, and they looked to be lithe, young and fit. Instinct told him to attack and demolish them and maybe even gorge on the tastiest bits, but something akin to common sense suggested me might be better off hiding.

He chose to hide, and watched them carefully.

At first he thought they might be identical to his own tribes-monkeys. He knew members of his own family well enough, but there were others in the tribe, those who lived on the periphery of their area, with whom he shared little and was less likely to immediately recognise. And these were almost like those, but superficially different, and he soon worked out that he was unlikely to know them. After a brief and very clandestine examination of them he knew full well that they were strangers.

For a start, their grunting was incomprehensible to him. His own group had what could only loosely be called a language, but they all made some sort of sense of what each other was grunting. But these grunts, and he could hear them quite clearly, were devoid of any meaning to him.

Then there was something about their eyes. They were, all of them, too close together, and he found himself almost instinctively wary of those with the wrong sort of eyes. Altogether, he didn’t like what he saw and rather than risk life and limb by introducing himself warily, he decided to withdraw and maybe, if he could muster up the concentration, think about what to do.

So he furtively reversed until the sounds of alien grunting had faded into the distance, and then, slowly for fear of getting lost, he made his way back to his own territory. It was quite a long way and the marks on tree bark he had made on his way out weren’t always easy to see. But the length of his walk gave him an opportunity to slowly elaborate in his own mind on his adventure until he could tell it straight.

And he knew what he had to do. If any of those strangers with their close-together eyes and alien tongue should venture anywhere near his tribe they must be destroyed, or terrible things might happen and he didn’t like the idea of that.

So, once home and refreshed by consuming the flesh of a fruit that was deliciously juicy, he gathered as many to him as could be spared. Those out foraging couldn’t come, obviously, and half a dozen b*****s with new nippers stayed in their nests, tit-feeding their young. But just about everyone else, from the most geriatric monkey to a couple of toddlers chasing each other round and round the old central tree put in an appearance.

“My friends,” he grunted, his guttural tones almost juicy, “my friends, the gods and their night lights have spoken. My friends, take heed. There are creatures designed to look like us, but they are different. Their words are wrong and their eyes...” here he pointed at his own eyes so that everyone knew what he meant, “their eyes are too close together.”

There was a sudden silence followed by an incomprehensible gibbering of guttural voices, the tribe of monkey families grunting their shock at what they had just heard.

Chumpo nodded slowly and fondled a young b***h with a generous chest, and she glared at him, then giggled.

“And the gods have said to me,” he continued, “that these pretenders are evil. That they are not us though they might seem to be like us. And if encountered they must be killed. And the good thing is, the gods say, they make good eating!”

There was a loud cheer at these words, and Chumpo smiled to himself. He had given the slow minds of his audience something to think about.

What he didn’t know, and what wouldn’t have mattered had he been aware of it, the difference between the strangers and himself was just a matter of one or at the most two elements out of billions in their DNA. But he had given birth to racial intolerance which would accelerate down the millennia into a long future, moving with evolution from species to species, right up to the present day and the way politicians, with cunning and wit, attempt to mould populations with fabrications of their own.

© Peter Rogerson 31.10. 19