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the Primate Research Center as they search for evidence of the chimps. They find chimpanzee footprints in the wash near the cave, confirming that the runaways were indeed nearby. The news reporter, an eager and curious young man, squirms on his belly into the cave and finds the names scratched on the cave wall. He peers at it. He might have dismissed them as the idle scratchings of kids, except that the names match the names of the missing chimps. “Hey,” he called to his photographer, “Take a look at this.”
    The next morning’s newspaper displays Rachel’s crudely scratched letters. In a brief interview, the rancher mentioned that the chimps were carrying bags. “Looked like supplies,” he said. “They looked like they were in for the long haul.”
    * * *
    On the third day, Rachel’s water runs out. She heads toward a small town, marked on the map. They reach it in the early morning—thirst forces them to travel by day. Beside an isolated ranch house, she finds a faucet. She is filling her bottle when Johnson grunts in alarm.
    A dark-haired woman watches from the porch of the house. She does not move toward the apes, and Rachel continues filling the bottle. “It’s all right, Rachel,” the woman, who has been following the story in the papers, calls out. “Drink all you want.”
    Startled, but still suspicious, Rachel caps the bottle and, keeping her eyes on the woman, drinks from the faucet. The woman steps back into the house. Rachel motions Johnson to do the same, signaling for him to hurry and drink. She turns off the faucet when he is done.
    They are turning to go when the woman emerges from the house carrying a plate of tortillas and a bowl of apples. She sets them on the edge of the porch and says, “These are for you.”
    The woman watches through the window as Rachel packs the food into her bag. Rachel puts away the last apple and gestures her thanks to the woman. When the woman fails to respond to the sign language, Rachel picks up a stick and writes in the sand of the yard. THANK YOU, Rachel scratches, then waves good-bye and sets out across the desert. She is puzzled, but happy.
    * * *
    The next morning’s newspaper includes an interview with the dark-haired woman. She describes how Rachel turned on the faucet and turned it off when she was through, how the chimp packed the apples neatly in her bag and wrote in the dirt with a stick.
    The reporter also interviews the director of the Primate Research Center. “These are animals,” the director explains angrily. “But people want to treat them like they’re small hairy people.” He describes the Center as “primarily a breeding center with some facilities for medical research.” The reporter asks some pointed questions about their acquisition of Rachel.
    But the biggest story is an investigative piece. The reporter reveals that he has tracked down Aaron Jacobs’ lawyer and learned that Jacobs left a will. In this will, he bequeathed all his possessions—including his house and surrounding land—to “Rachel, the chimp I acknowledge as my daughter.”
    * * *
    The reporter makes friends with one of the young women in the typing pool at the Primate Research Center, and she tells him the office scuttlebutt: people suspect that the chimps may have been released by a deaf and drunken janitor, who was subsequently fired for negligence. The reporter, accompanied by a friend who can communicate in sign language, finds Jake in his apartment in downtown Flagstaff.
    Jake, who has been drinking steadily since he was fired, feels betrayed by Rachel, by the Primate Research Center, by the world. He complains at length about Rachel: they had been friends, and then she took his baseball cap and ran away. He just didn’t understand why she had run away like that.
    “You mean she could talk?” the reporter asks through his interpreter.
    —Of course she can talk, Jake signs impatiently.—She is a smart monkey.
    The headlines read: “Intelligent chimp