ABSTRACT
It was pitch dark outside on a cold, cloudy January morning in 1993 when I left the research house to spend another day with the most graceful of the apes, the white-handed gibbons of Khao Yai National Park in Thailand. I had no idea then that I would soon be witnessing events I had only heard or read about in books on birds and a few mammals and had not imagined would unfold right in front of my own eyes. I entered the forest at the “village,” a point where I regularly crossed over from my human world into the world of the rain forest and its creatures, a world I had all my life wanted to see. I had named this spot, which was nothing more than two small rows of old longhouses on stilts where a few rangers and their families lived, to create a reference point where I, being a proper scientist, would always note the exact time of “entering” and “leaving” the forest. Doing so gave me a precise measure of how many hours and minutes I had spent in there. My wristwatch read 05:56. I scribbled the time down in my tiny notebook—quickly so as not to lose precious “forest-time”—by the dim beam of my small hand-held torch, stuck under my left armpit for that purpose because I have never liked the much more popular head-lamps.
