From the field: Yakushima

August 17, 08:25

We were taking instructions on observing macaques along a road following the western coast of the island. I wonder if they enjoy the view? or if they can even see it? The macaques sit on the last rocky outcroppings before the forest plunges into the sea. Perhaps they were just drying off from the morning’s short rain.

With a rustle of bushes, another macaque rushes out of the forest and onto the road, shrieking at the Sunbathers, who in turn cry back. They seem to block the path of this individual, a mother cradling her dead infant: its stiff body—the “lifeless body of a living thing”—pressed to its mother’s side, with one straightened arm hanging away, cruelly, unnaturally. The mother made it through the line of Sunbathers and clambered off the road, down a wall, and toward the forest below.

What was going through her mind?