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She wanted to go to Africa too, and talk to the animals, and live with the apes.
She set up camp, far from any human dwelling. That first night, Jane lay awake listening to new sounds— the croak of a frog, the hum of crickets, the laugh of a hyena, the hoot of an owl— and looking up at the stars. She knew she was Home.
She saw the chimps accept the rain, not look for shelter, as we do. And she kept notes about it all. “You have to be patient if you want to learn about animals,” she wrote.
Jane named the chimps. To her, each one was different—just like us. A gray-bearded chimp was the first to approach Jane. She named him David Greybeard.
David Greybeard let Jane come close. She watched him shape a stick into a tool to dig for termites. Before this, nobody knew that wild animals made tools.
“Chimps all around me. What a day— chimps near, chimps far, old men, young men, ladies, children, babies, teenagers— the lot,” she wrote.
All across Africa, forests were being cut down, and the chimps were losing their home. Poachers were shooting grown chimps and kidnapping their babies to sell to laboratories, to the circus, and as pets.
Jane hated to leave her friends, but she knew she must. She traveled to big cities and small towns the world over, month after month, year after year, asking for help to save the chimps and the forests.
Jane returned to the forests of Gombe whenever she could. She climbed up to the Peak, calling “Hello!” to the streams and hills and trees, David Greybeard at her side.
And when she went back to civilization to speak out for the chimps, Jane carried with her the peace of the forest— the forest in Gombe where she talked to the animals like Dr. Dolittle, and walked unafraid like Tarzan, and watched and wrote, and opened a window for us to the world of the chimpanzees.
“I wanted to watch wild animals, not animals in cages,”
Jane, the “white ape,” wrote while in Africa, “This is where I belong. This is what I came into this world to do.”
