We returned to camp with sorrow in our hearts, but two days later we redeemed ourselves and brought in the first new gibbons.  We were sitting on a bed of fragrant pine needles watching for a squirrel which had been chattering in the upper branches of a giant tree, when suddenly the wild call of the monkeys echoed up the mountain-side.

They were far away to the left, and we ran toward them, stumbling and slipping on the moss-covered rocks and logs, the “hu-wa,” “hu-wa,” “hu-wa” sounding louder every moment.  They seemed almost under us at times and we would stand motionless and silent only to hear the howls die away in the distance.  At last we located them on the precipitous side of a deep gorge filled with an impenetrable jungle of palms and thorny plants.  It was an impossible place to cross, and we sat down, irresolute and discouraged.  In a few moments a chorus of howls broke out and we saw the big black apes swinging along through the trees, two hundred yards away.  Finally they stopped and began to feed.  They were small marks at that distance but I rested my little Mannlicher on a stump and began to shoot while Yvette watched them with the glasses.  One big fellow swung out on a branch and hung with one arm while he picked a cluster of leaves with the other.  Yvette saw my first shot cut a twig above his head but he did not move, and at the roar of the second he dropped heavily into the vines below.  A brown female ran along the branch a few seconds later and peered down into the jungle where the first monkey had fallen.  I covered her carefully with the ivory head of the front sight, pulled the trigger, and she pitched headlong off the tree.

For a few seconds there was silence, then a splash of leaves and three huge black males leaped into full view from the summit of a tall tree.  They were silhouetted against a patch of sky and I fired twice in quick succession registering two clean misses.  The bullets must have whizzed too close for comfort and they faded instantly into the forest like three black shadows.

For ten minutes we strained our eyes into the dense foliage hoping to catch a glimpse of a swaying branch.  Suddenly Yvette heard a rustling in the low tree beneath which we were sitting and seized me violently by the arm, screaming excitedly, “There’s one, right above us.  Quick, quick, he’s going!”

I looked up and could hardly believe my eyes for not twenty feet away hung a huge brown monkey half the size of a man.  Almost in a daze I fired with the shotgun.  The gibbon stopped, slowly pivoted on one long arm and a pair of eyes blazing like living coals, stared into mine.  I fired again point blank as the huge mouth, baring four ugly fangs, opened and emitted a bloodcurdling howl.  The monkey slowly swung back again, its arm relaxed and the animal fell at my feet, stone dead.

It was a magnificent old female.  By a lucky chance we had chosen, from all the trees in the forest, to sit under the very one in which the gibbon had been hiding and she had tried to steal away unnoticed.