Captivity
by Debbie Leigh Wesselmann
Summary
Dana Armstrong is no ordinary primatologist. In the 1970s, she was the little blond girl with a chimpanzee for a sister, a participant in her father’s psychology experiment that sought to narrow the divide between species. Now, decades later, Dana wants nothing more than to forget… but as director of a chimpanzee sanctuary in the woods of South Carolina, she cannot.
Dana arrives at work one morning to discover that someone has set loose a group of particularly dangerous chimpanzees….As Dana scrambles to determine who was responsible, pressure mounts from all sides--from local protesters; from animal rights groups; from the university that oversees the sanctuary; from an old nemesis bent on destroying her….As political and personal tensions rise in the human world, the chimpanzees have their own crisis, events that Dana, more than ever, cannot afford to ignore.
Captivity is a unique, surprising world unto itself--a high literary work, a page-turner, and an issues novel all at once.
Excerpt
One
Dana loved dawns like these, when the world was blinded by humidity. The October fog caressed her throat with a lush moisture that made her want to throw her head back and drink up its coolness before the sun burnt it off. From the empty dirt and gravel parking lot, she could barely make out the form of the main building and knew only by memory where the electric fence lay. She could imagine she had emerged from her truck not in South Carolina but somewhere else entirely—another country, another continent.
A hunched figure about four feet tall raced through the halfdarkness. Dana cried out and clutched her briefcase strap so fiercely it buckled in her grip. She peered into the mist. Nothing—no movement, no sound to track. She dropped her briefcase to free her hands and began to pant-hoot, softly at first and gradually louder and more urgent—Hoo, hoo, hoo—until her voice erupted into a shriek—WRAAAAA, WRAAAAA. From inside the electric fence, several chimpanzees called back, but another, closer one hooted behind her.
Dana jerked her head toward the hoot, which she immediately recognized as that of Barafu, a female chimp who had arrived at the sanctuary from a medical laboratory only the month before. Through the fog, a dark shape moved along the branch of a nearby tree before it stopped and settled almost invisibly into the surroundings. Dana could not believe it. Until now, Barafu had sat impassively in her holding cage, chewing her fingers until they bled, staring with the glassy, heartbreaking incomprehension of someone who had endured too much.
Dana removed her lunch from her briefcase, took an apple from the brown bag, and crouched beneath the tree. At first, she could not get her legs comfortable, so she shuffled, finding the right droop to her butt, the right tension in her thighs, a balance to her body that connected her to the earth. As much as she hated to admit it (and would not to anyone other than herself), her body no longer stretched and settled as easily as it once had. She prodded the pine needles with her free hand as though she were foraging for food. From the tree, Barafu watched, but the mistguarded her expression, so if she was curious or fearful, Dana could not tell.
Dana grunted, then took a crackling bite of the apple. With a fluid motion, she stretched the fruit toward Barafu, offering, watching the chimp for the moment when the fog brushed away from her face and Dana could judge what was going to happen next.
Barafu stiffly—in a manner far too elderly for her age—began her descent. The two primates, chimpanzee and human, faced each other in the lifting fog. The chimp brought her hand across her nose, wiping it, and stared at the apple. She lifted her gaze to Dana’s with an unspoken question in her eyes: May I have that apple?
Reviews
“Unforgettable…. With empathetic insight, the author precisely observes both human and animal behavior"—Publishers Weekly starred review
“A riveting plot with exciting characters to hold you spellbound until the last page”—Library Journal, starred review
Author's Biography
Debbie Lee Wesselmann is the author of Trutor & the Balloonist, which was named by Amazon.com as one of the top ten small press books of 1997, and The Earth and the Sky. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Fairleigh Dickinson University, she lives in Pennsylvania, where she teaches English at Lehigh University.