Once More With Footnotes

could be so easy? I'd rather have written Night Walk than The Colour of Magic, because I remember my sheer delight in reading the "seeing through other eyes" scenes.
     
                  But I'll remembe r most his skill as a speaker. He knew how to be funny. The little polite cough and rumble before he made a comment was like a Stealth bomber taking off, with much the same ultimate effect.
     

This was written a few years ago. How have things changed? There have been small victories achieved by patience and careful negotiation, and my hat — all my hats — are off to the people who have engineered them.
     
    Even so, the central facts don't change. The orangutan needs the forest. A lot of forest. And humans want it, t oo, both for what it can make and what's left when it's been felled. You don't have to be much of a pessimist to wonder about the likely life of the species as a truly wild creature. A field here, a plantation there ... and eventually, the apes will have n owhere to retreat to except the reserves. That's around the time we'll need a miracle.
     
     
     
     
     
T he O rangutans A re D ying
     
                  Maybe half of them went in the last ten years. In another ten, unless there's a miracle, look for them only in zoos and a few parks. A nd this is one of our relatives I'm talking about here. There may be as few as 15,000 of them left. That's the fan base for a third-rate football club.
     
                  Forget all that stuff about how much DNA we share. It does not mean a lot; we share quite a lot of DNA with tats, and more with goldfish than you may think. Orangutans ate like us. They are intelligent. They use their imagination. They think and solve complex problems. They have personalities. They know how to lie. It's simply that their ancestors stayed i n the trees while ours climbed down to tough it out on the plains.
     
                  We're going back to the trees now. We're going back with chainsaws. A few years ago all I knew about orangutans was that they were the sad ones sitting with a piece of cardboard on their heads down at the duller end of the primate house. Then, in one of the early books of the Discworld series I created a librarian who was an orangutan. I did it because I thought it would be mildly amusing. As a piece of creativity it took me all of fifteen seconds. Sorry, but it really did. There was no lifelong fascination, no point to make. It was just a joke. On a different day, the Librarian would have been an aardvark.
     
                  The series became inexplicably popular, the Librarian caught the imagination of th e readers, one librarian praised me for "raising the status of the profession" and various organisations started paying me money to go and talk to them. This embarrassed me somewhat, until I heard about the Orangutan Foundation.
     
                  I rang them up. I said, " I seem to be getting all this money, would you like it?" A cautious voice said, "Yes?"
     
                  Then it got serious. I became a Trustee. I sit in at meetings in London in a state either of despair or anger. Sometimes what I hear makes me want to slit my wrists, b ut often it makes me long to slit someone else's.
     
                  The Foundation is a support organisation for the work of Dr. Birute Galdikas at Camp Leakey in Tanjung Puting. She has spent thirty years studying orangutans in the wild, but increasingly she has had to w ork to ensure that there are any left to study. When I visited her at the camp six years ago, to do a short film, there was still some optimism, some feeling of bridges built, contacts made, some hope that with goodwill all round there was a way that apes and men could co-exist.
     
                  I have an affliction peculiar to life-long journalists. In some circumstances I get detached and go into a sort of "Record" mode. Then I go and write things down, and the mental film is developed, as if writing things down makes t hem real.
     
                  I remember every detail of my visit like a jewel. I'm damn sure I wouldn't have felt the same about aardvarks. I remember that the eyes of orangutans are the eyes of people, in a way that the eyes of dogs and cats are not, and how the orangutan s would pinch the soap and go and wash themselves in the river, and how the camp's motorboat had to be anchored in mid-stream because