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aim. He hurled the fruit and watched with bated breath, but this time it clipped the top of the statue’s wing and ricocheted off down one of the paths.
    Disappointed oohing from the monkeys; then, much to their amusement, Breri shouted, “Fetch, boy!” to Mico, who had to scamper down the path after the fruit, the sound of his brother’s mocking laughter in his ears.
    How Mico hated all this. Breri and his friends were practicing throwing skills they’d been learning in the cadets, but Mico had been made the “collector,” which meant he had none of the fun of hurling fruit and all the work of scurrying around restocking the ammunition dump.
    He found the kiwi, scooped it up and while he was there combed through the long grass looking for any other fruit that could be used. But as he made his way back, he heard his brother shout, “Too slow! Too slow!” urging his friends to take up the chant. Mico braced himself—Breri loved playing rough, and when he and his friends started whipping one another up, trouble was never far behind.
    Sure enough, when Mico emerged from the undergrowth he was bombarded.
    “No! Leave off!” Mico protested as the fruit splattered around him, but his indignation just encouraged Breri, who howled with delight.
    Fed up with the stupid joke, Mico turned and scampered off just as an orange winged his right ear.
    “Come back! We were only messing around!” he heard Breri call after him.
    “Find your own fruit!” Mico retorted angrily, and he kept going until he reached the safety of the main cemetery cross path, where some females were busy sorting and grading a pile of cashew nuts.
    Mico stopped by a tree to break off a chunk of bark rich in sticky gum, but just as he started chewing, a stray orange from the throwing game rattled out of the undergrowth and bounced manically down the path. Intrigued, Mico chased after the orange and picked it up; it was heavy with juice, but surprisingly hard. Was this what made it so lively? Mico wondered.
    He started experimenting, bouncing the orange, throwing it, rolling it down the sides of sloping tombs to see how far it would travel; he scrambled up the tallest pyramid he could find and unleashed the fruit.
    It picked up speed until it was hurtling down the tomb; then, as it hit the plinth at the bottom it bounced off, flew through the air and plopped into the dense undergrowth at the base of the cemetery wall.
    “Nice one!” Mico laughed and chased after the orange.
    Finding it, though, was not so easy—the tangle of shrubs made it hard to move, forcing Mico to lie on his belly, his hand flailing around. Finally, his fingers brushed against the smooth waxy skin. He plucked the orange to safety and checked there was no damage. Then, just as he was about to slither back out of the shrubs, Mico noticed a neat hollow in the base of the perimeter wall….Something had been placed inside it.
    He crawled closer and saw a small bundle, carefully wrapped in bamboo fiber. Someone must have stashed a delicacy here, perhaps a succulent piece of honeycomb. With his stomach rumbling in anticipation, he reached out and took the bundle, but when he unwrapped it, Mico was astonished to find a small carving painted in beautiful colors.
    Three monkeys were perched side by side on a branch—the first covered its eyes with its hands, the second covered its ears, and the third clamped its hands over its mouth.
    Strange. It had obviously been made by humans—Mico knew how much they loved their gaudy, intricate objects—but what was it doing here, hidden in the base of the cemetery wall?
    One thing was sure, if it had been stolen from one of the street markets the thief couldn’t have been anyone from Mico’s troop, because the carved monkeys weren’t langur—they were rhesus. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make the carving, carefully painting the brown fur, the pink faces, just like…
    Mico felt his guts tighten as he remembered. Just like the