Togar.

The first thing Togar remembers isn't a face: it's the forest seen from above, moving. His mother carried him clinging to her hair, crossing the canopy branch by branch, and he, hanging from her, watched the green slide past below. Even now, up high still feels to him like the good place, and down below a little less his own.

He lives in the canopy of the Leuser Ecosystem, in the north of Sumatra, beside Bukit Lawang, where the forest ends and the cleared land begins. He's a Sumatran orangutan infant: reddish fur, grey face, six years old, and a childhood ahead of him that will last years. Up high, among the tall trees that bear fruit almost all year round, he wants for nothing as long as his mother is near.

He doesn't come down to the ground if he can help it. His arms are enormously long and his feet grip like hands, so he hangs, swings and holds on to any branch with an ease that seems perfectly ordinary to him. His whole life fits up at that height: the tree where he slept last night, the one that will be loaded with figs next week, the branch he watches from.

Togar's family is tiny: his mother, Tiur, and him. The orangutan is the most solitary of the great apes; each adult lives in its own patch of forest, without crowding together. The only close bond, the longest there is in the animal kingdom after that of people, is the one between a mother and her infant, and Togar's entire world is made of it.

His father doesn't live with them. The big males each go their own way, off on their own, and they don't raise young. Togar knows him only by hearsay — or rather by ear: he's that long, deep sound that arrives at dawn, from far, far away, from the next valley over. A big flanged male letting the world know he's there. Nothing more.

Nearby, on her own branch, is grandmother Rumondang, Tiur's mother, an older female whose canopy overlaps with theirs. They cross paths now and then and she leaves him the best ripe fruit, the kind she's already had a chance to taste. She keeps the old names of the forest's trees. When she calls him, she just says "Tog." Those are Togar's presences: two, and a voice at daybreak.

His own people call themselves, without making a fuss of it, the people of the forest, or the ones up in the canopy. It isn't poetry: it's what they are, the ones who live up high, in the trees. In the northern lands, the people down below have always had the custom of leaving them in peace, of not touching them, because they look too much like them: the hands, the face, the infant clinging to its mother. That old respect is the solid ground the people stand on.

What breaks things is what's new. The forest shrinks at its edges and splits from within: the canopy is felled for plantations, and what's left is cut into pieces by tracks carved out by machines. Each season there's less unbroken canopy to cross and more scattered patches, further and further apart. A family left without its trees has nowhere to go.

Grandmother Rumondang tells of a whole hillside that one year woke up cut through by a new clearing: the families on one side never crossed over to those on the other again. Togar still doesn't fully understand that story. He hears it as the evening falls, when it's not yet time to make the nest, and he goes quiet.

At four, Togar invented a game no one taught him: pointing at each fruit so his mother would tell him its name. The fig. The durian. The mangosteen. The one that stings and can't be eaten. The one you have to open with a stick. Twenty times a morning, the same question — and what's this one called? — until it lodges inside him.

It's not just the name. With each fruit he stores away in his head where the tree stands and in which moon it bears, just as his mother does — she moves through the forest without ever getting lost, as if she carried a map no one else can see. Togar is beginning to fill in that map. He already knows a few trees by heart: the fig tree, the durian tree, the old trunk where there's sometimes honey.

He learns by watching. It's his people's way: an infant spends years glued to its mother and gets everything from copying her, from asking and from paying attention. For Togar, learning isn't a chore; it's his way of being with her. Each thing he gets a little better at is a while longer at her side, on the same branch.

Every evening, before sleep, an orangutan builds itself a fresh nest by bending branches in the canopy. His mother does it in a moment, with her hands, almost without looking. Since he was two, Togar has been attempting the same thing beside hers, stick by stick, just the way he sees her bend them. And almost always it comes apart under him.

The first time he nearly fell. He grabbed hold, laughed, and tried again the next day. Since then he makes a nest every evening, and almost all of them collapse, and almost all of them he tries again. He doesn't call it failure. His is the stubborn determination of an infant who wants to do it himself: he shows off the half-made nest — "look, I made one" — and adds, without any drama, "it fell apart, but almost."

Infants start practicing the nest at six months and don't master it until they're five. Togar is right in the middle of that. His line, the one he repeats when something won't come out right, is always the same: I can't do it yet, but one day I will. He says it about the nest, about the little stick, about everything. And he means it, absolutely.

One day, at five, he watched his mother slip a stick into the fruit that stings — the one guarded by little hairs that dig in — to get the seeds out without hurting herself, and into an old trunk to reach the honey and the insects. Togar looked for his own stick, tried it, couldn't do it, tried it again. And he kept it.

He doesn't let go of it even to sleep. It's his tool, pretend and real at the same time: with it he imitates his mother, with it he practices, and he carries it everywhere. He still pulls out more hairs than seeds, but it's his, and it's the clearest proof that he's learning the trade of being grown up before he's able to be.

That stick is no ordinary toy. Using sticks to get at honey or open a fruit doesn't come built in: it's a technique that's learned, that mothers pass to their infants, and that each valley of the forest does a little its own way, like a custom. Togar is receiving it from Tiur, gesture by gesture, without knowing that one day he'll pass it on to another infant in another canopy.

Underneath all of Togar's joy there's a fear, and it isn't of death: it's being left alone in the canopy before he knows how to manage. It's a very specific fear, the fear of an infant of a people whose childhood lasts years and years. If his mother isn't there, who teaches him the nest? How does he know which fruit to eat? That's why he holds on tight, why the "one day I will" always comes with a "not yet."

One morning, in the next canopy over, neither the mother nor the little one Togar used to pull faces at from tree to tree were there anymore. The grown-ups spoke very quietly about some who come up to take the infants away. Togar didn't understand it. He only noticed they were gone, and that night he burrowed deeper into his mother's nest and wouldn't let go of her. He didn't make his practice nest that day.

Since then, some nights he asks to be told again which one is the honey tree, until he falls asleep. And sometimes, without meaning to, he asks in a low voice: you're not going to go away, are you?

The first time Togar heard the long call, he was four and it frightened him. It was before dawn, above the forest: a deep sound he'd never heard, coming from far, far away. He clung to his mother. She didn't move. She told him it was a big flanged male, from the next valley over, and that that's what the males do when they grow up.

It's the voice that carries farthest in the whole forest. The call of an adult male can be heard from nearly a kilometer and a half away: no other Asian great ape's voice travels so far. Togar tried to imitate it right there and out came a tiny little squeak. Since then, when he hears it at dawn, he goes very still, listening to what he will become.

Because that's his horizon. One day he'll have that voice, and wide flanges on the sides of his face, and his own patch of forest to roam alone. Some males take years for the flanges to come in, and until then they live a different way. Togar has a very long way to go. For now he practices the squeak, and it doesn't come out right, and he tries again.

There's a time of year when the forest fills with fruit all at once. The trees bear all together, and then there's hardly any need to travel to eat. His mother takes him from canopy to canopy the whole day long, both of them stuffed with figs and durian, bellies full, ripe fruit within arm's reach. These are Togar's best days.

He learned, without being told, that such abundance doesn't last. That behind it come the lean seasons, when you have to know the trees by heart and travel farther to find food. That's why he asks so much, why he stores every tree in his head: for when the forest won't give it all so easily.

But that's for later. Right now it's the good season. Togar eats, leans against his mother for a while when the sun beats down, and at dusk builds his practice nest beside hers. Almost always it falls apart. As it gets dark he climbs into his mother's, holds on, and asks her for the story of the honey tree. Tomorrow he'll try the nest again. One day it will hold him all night long.

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