"Grandpa, I understand you had some pretty exciting adventures when you were young."
"You heard right, Jeffrey. I traveled the world - to darkest Africa, to lightest Antarctica, and every shade in between. It's still a wild world out there but, of course, it was even wilder 70 years ago."
"What were you doing on those trips?"
"Mostly I was looking for rare birds, but we were employed by big museums to learn all we could about foreign lands, and the animals and plants that lived in them. We discovered things that nobody even knew existed."
"It must have been dangerous, at times."
"You bet it was. You never knew what you were going to run into - dangerous animals, severe weather, very rugged terrain, and often no way to communicate with the outside world, or to get help. No 'smart phones' or Internet, in those days. We were really all on our own, with usually no support if we got into trouble."
"Wow. Did you get into trouble?"
"Oh, yes, pretty frequently. We always managed to get out without anybody dying, but we had some pretty bad injuries. One time, a team member broke his leg miles and miles from any help. We had to carry him through the jungle for three days before we could get him to a doctor. That turned out okay in the end, although I think he always had a kind of gimpy leg - a bad limp."
"Wow. What was your personal worst problem?"
The old man took a minute to think, running the details of various incidents through his mind. "Well, I don't know if this was the worst thing that happened to me, but it was certainly memorable. An orangutan may have saved my life."
"An orangutan? You mean like a big hairy ape?"
"Well, medium sized, anyway. Certainly hairy. Do you want to hear about it?"
"Definitely!"
"Well, let me see. This was in Indonesia, fairly early in my career. We had been traveling through the jungle for days and days. I guess our local guide knew approximately where we were, but none of us did. We were having a great old time, finding new stuff every day, but it was hard work. There were no trails, so we were using machetes to cut our path.
"On the day in question, it had been raining. Well, it was usually raining, but this was an unusually heavy storm, and everything was extremely slippery. I lost my footing, and fell down a long, steep slope. I never knew for sure if I had sliced myself with my own machete during the fall, or if I had run into something. However it happened, when I regained my senses, I had a long jagged cut down the side of my face. Here, Jeff, it you look close, you can still see the edges of the scar."
Jeff looked. "I see what you mean, Grandpa. That was a long cut. It must have been pretty serious."
"Oh, it was. The slice was bad enough, but the jungle was one big steaming pot of bacteria and fungi, with disease-carrying mosquitoes flying around overhead. If I didn't succumb to the actual injury, infection seemed inevitable. My companions were prepared to walk me out to medical help, but that would take days, and I don't think any of us thought I would make it, alive.
"We got a major surprise when our guide told us that there was a doctor not far from where we were. He'd take me there, then come back for the others. It wasn't just unlikely; it seemed impossible, but he was confident, and he started off with me through the jungle. I suspect the others thought they'd seen the last of me. I was near delirium, I think, so I just went along without question.
"My first impressions were pretty vague, because of my condition, but I realized we had come to a little clearing in the jungle, where there was kind of a half-building - a roof of limbs and leaves, supported by long poles. My guide set me down in it, and I think he must have left me almost immediately, to go back to the others. I was kind of in and out of consciousness, but I opened my eyes when I felt someone leaning over me.
"'You're an ape,' I said. 'Technically, an orangutan,' the ape replied. 'And you're Human. I won't hold that against you, if you don't hold my ape-ness against me.' That was really all I remembered for some time, and I had to piece the details together after I regained consciousness.
"My first big surprise was to see that my 'doctor' was a female..."
"That was your first surprise?" Jeff interrupted.
"Well, when an ape is either a naked Human or a naked orangutan, the male-female differences are evident."
"Grandpa, I know that! I mean, wouldn't your first surprise have been that your doctor was an orangutan, or maybe that the orang spoke English?"
"Oh, I see what you're getting at. Well, I'd been there almost a week, in and out of consciousness, but I guess I just felt those things were 'givens,' by that time, and my first really new information was that my doctor was a female of the species.
"The other new information was that I felt remarkably good - like I hadn't even had an accident, or spent a week in near-delirium. In fact, when I felt my face, there was no bandage, and I could barely trace a scar with my fingers. Not only was I not dead, I seemed to be cured!
"Of course, at that point, I had no idea what had been done. This is what she told me.
"She had taken the leaves from a local plant, and chewed them up in her mouth without swallowing them. Then, she'd used her fingers to take some of the resulting paste from her mouth, and then applied the paste to my wound. She did this several times, then covered the entire wounded area with the chewed-up paste."
"It didn't bother you to have stuff from an ape's mouth smeared on your skin?" Jeff asked.
"I wasn't in any condition to object but, with all of the other toxic and infectious stuff all around, I probably wouldn't have even wondered if the Doc had brushed her teeth recently.
"Anyway, she continued the treatment for five days, by which time the wound had completely closed. About that time, our guide arrived to check on me - well, probably to assure that I'd gotten a proper burial. I left with him to rejoin the group, and we eventually made our way back to Civilization. By the time we got back here, the scar looked about like it does now."
That seemed to be the end of the story. "That's quite a tall tale, Grandpa, but I thought you were going to tell me about a real adventure."
"Jeffery, my boy, that was a real adventure. I guess I should tell you a little more. I met the doctor's husband and their two children. They lived at the hospital by themselves, but there were a lot of other orangs nearby. Doctoring had been practiced as long as anyone could remember. She had learned her trade from her father, and she had a brother who was also a physician. The husband and kids spoke English almost as well as the doctor, but they were more fluent in French. Many of the orangs spoke French, as there had been much more contact with that nationality over the years than there had been with the English. I asked if any Frenchmen had made personal contact with them, and she replied in the affirmative. I expressed surprise, because certainly no word about French-speaking orangs had reached the outer world. She expressed the opinion that the French were rather superstitious, and also very concerned about their credibility. It didn't surprise her that they had kept information about French-speaking apes to themselves.
"Oh, one other thing, I asked her the name of the medicinal plant she had used on my injury. She doubted it had a Latin name, because it probably wasn't known to Science, but she was happy to show me the plant, and let me take samples with me."
"So, Grandpa, you're saying that this is an actual true story?"
"I am, indeed. We didn't include anything about it in our official reports - well, nobody in our party really believed me and the guide. They didn't know how I was cured, but talking apes were not among their surmises. We probably wouldn't have included it, anyway, because -like the French - we were concerned about our own credibility. We had made so many odd and exciting discoveries, we were afraid some of them wouldn't be believed. In our official report, we decided to include only those findings supported by specimens or photographs. We kept the other information in our private papers, for possible future research, but we didn't want to tax the scientific community's belief in us.
"There's one more surprise. When we got back to the States, I took my vegetation samples to the National Museum. They actually had the plant in their collection, identified as Fibraurea tinctoria, a climbing vine quite common where we were. It had been brought from Asia a couple hundred years ago, and its healing properties were fairly well known. The botanists at the museum told me the plant contains substances with anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, antioxidant, pain killing, and anticarcinogenic properties. It had been used as a treatment for dysentery, diabetes, and malaria. Not surprisingly, none of the information available on the species lists any association with orangutans.
"When you asked me to relate one of my adventures, I immediately thought of this one, because of an article in 'The Guardian' just a couple of months ago. A group of scientists from Germany are in Indonesia, doing a study of orangutans, and they saw a male orang rubbing plant material on a face wound. The description was just like what Dr. Orang did for me."
"That's cool! Did the ape talk to them in German, or English, or French?"
"No, apparently all their investigations are being done at a distance. No actual contact with the animals. So, the secret of the Jungle Physician remains with us. Still, it's nice to know that they now think that orangs might be smart!"
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