Endangered by Eliot Schrefer Read Free Book Online

bounced over the dirt road, then finally turned a corner and vanished.
    The only one of us to run after the bike was Otto, who dashed forward on all fours. He got only a few yards, when he fumbled and fell in the dirt. He looked back at me in confusion. I expected to see him angry or upset, but his expression was wistful. It said: Why has my father gone away again?
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    My mom locked herself in her office for an hour. I sat on the floor outside her door, listening as she called the Ministry of Environment, then various other government contacts. With everyone she talked to, she started calmly and then got angry when they couldn’t help her; the space from one emotion to the other kept narrowing until eventually she was like, “Hello, is this Monsieur Ngambe? Mbote , monsieur, thank you for taking my call. A TRAFFICKER HAS TWO BONOBOS AND YOU IDIOTS WON’T HELP ME!”
    She slammed down the phone one last time. There was only an ominous silence from inside her office.
    When the door whizzed open, Otto got scared and climbed to the top of my head, gripping me by covering my eyes. I pushed his hands up to my forehead so I could see.
    â€œSophie,” my mom said quietly, “no one will be able to save those bonobos. Patrice and Clément are off looking for them, but it doesn’t look good.”
    â€œI’m sorry, Mom.”
    She put her face in her hands. “How could you, Sophie?”
    â€œI’m sorry! I’ve told you a million times.”
    â€œI’ve spent years trying to put an end to the market in baby bonobos. Slowly, they stopped appearing in Kinshasa. In one moment, you reestablished it.”
    I lifted Otto’s hand so it looked like he was waving at my mother. “But she saved me!” I said in a fake bonobo voice.
    Instantly I knew it was a mistake. Her face darkened with fury, but she didn’t say anything, buried her anger, and held me. Held me like she knew I really needed to be held. She whispered against my ear, because she couldn’t hold it in: “Sophie. You know the only way they can get a young bonobo is by killing its family, yes?”
    I’d known it but not really known it. I started imagining what horrors Otto had endured: the murder of his mother as he clung to her, having her shriek and bleed all over him as he saw the rest of his family butchered and smoked. And not just that terrible moment: It had been followed by weeks fighting the cord tied around his waist, surviving hundreds of miles of canoe travel down the Congo River to Kinshasa, all the while remembering his mother chopped down.
    Otto squirmed out from between us, gasping from my crushing hug, and sat on my mom’s head.
    I needed her to say it wasn’t my fault, even though I knew it was. I took her hand. “I know we’re a very lucky family, Mom, that I’m so blessed I get to go to high school abroad and that when I’m here we don’t have to worry about having food to eat. That I’m one of the only people in Congo who can decide to give a man sixty dollars that I was going to spend on notebooks.”
    But she wasn’t going to let me off that easily. “If you were that man, Sophie, with no belongings in the world and no job, what would you have done? His only way to feed his family was to go back into the jungle and kill more bonobos so he could steal two infants so some rich girl would give him five months of income on a whim. So he did it.”
    She had to say that. The bonobos meant too much to her not to make that point to me. I told myself that even as my heart broke.
    â€œSo would I,” she continued. “If you were starving, I would kill as many bonobos as it took to keep you fed.”
    I knew she was upset about the two infants, but she wasn’t making me feel any better. I did see what I had done wrong. “Don’t you realize how guilty I feel already, Mom? It’s not like I meant for all of this to