Lisa Jones-Engel is a forceful, direct person with years of experience among Asia’s nonhuman primates. She loves her subject animals but doesn’t romanticize them. As she and her assistants started drawing blood and taking oral swabs, her husband and Feeroz, followed by the male students and me, headed back to the shrine for another round of trapping. Now that we had shown our methods, and our devious intentions, it was dicey to say how the troop might behave. “If the monkeys in the last half hour have figured out their plan of attack,” Lisa commanded us, “you just retreat.”
