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Mr. Lawrence also drove us around the perimeter of his vineyard. He was a renaissance man, a man of great and many passions, but two of them ruled above the rest like a king and queen: one was the fate of the animals on this earth, and the other?—wine. Mr. Lawrence was an avid and passionate oenophile. His ranch was—is, I should say—located in Grand Valley, a wine-growing region on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. The vineyard was a large swath of his property that no animals were allowed into. Not even me or Clever were allowed to go there. Maybe he didn’t trust us not to pick and eat the grapes that grew in gorgeous plump dew-dappled bunches all along the rows of long fences, and if so, this distrust was probably an accurate one. I loved the smell of the vineyards, though, and in the future Clever and I would take many a long walk together along the perimeter of the vineyard, breathing the fruit-sweeted air and discussing philosophical subjects.

We toured the grounds of the ranch all day, visiting the barns where the less adventurous of the Lawrence Ranch animals slept in beds of straw beneath tracks of red glowing heat lamps that hung from the high ceilings of these structures, these huge metal barns that were more like airplane hangars, built cavernous enough to comfortably house elephants and rhinos. We saw the clear black water of a creek trickling over smooth stones beneath ledges of ice, descending from a spring in the nearby mountains. We saw the antelope and the gazelles, the gnus and the gemsboks, the emus, ostriches, zebras, and Bactrian camels. A huge humid glass enclosure full of plants and trees housed smaller animals: wombats, monkeys, lemurs, gibbons, echidnas, and tapirs. Who would have thought that there would be a remote expanse of acreage somewhere in the Wild West of Colorado positively teeming with all manner of exotic animalia, a secret peaceable kingdom hidden deep in the mountains of the New World?

XXIII

In 1970 (twenty-five years before I arrived at the Lawrence Ranch) Dr. Henry Troutwine, a cognitive research psychologist at Princeton University, initiated the Clever Hands project, now mostly famous for being widely regarded as a failure.

At the time the Clever Hands project was the most ambitious, well-organized and well-funded experiment in ape language acquisition to date. Dr. Troutwine acquired a male infant chimpanzee from Bill Lemon, a rogue psychologist at the University of Oklahoma. Lemon was a staunch Freudian, which is extremely unusual for a research psychologist. Lemon was also a chimp breeder. He owned a farm just outside of Norman, Oklahoma, where he raised and kept a menagerie of exotic animals—among them a large group of chimps that he kept on an island in the middle of a lake on his farm. Lemon was intensely interested in experiments in cross-fostering chimps in human households. He would lend out his infant chimps to research volunteers (most of them his graduate students) to raise in their homes as human children. Lemon had promised to sell Dr. Troutwine an infant chimp for his experiment as soon as one became available; so, although Troutwine had not yet fully set up the logistics of the experiment, when a baby chimp was born at the Lemon farm, he jumped at the chance to acquire him. Troutwine bought the baby from Lemon and brought the two-week-old chimp back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he had him placed as a foster child in the home of his first volunteers, the Saltonseas.

Millicent Saltonsea was a psychologist, and her husband, Winn Saltonsea, was a ponytailed poet who dressed in white linen pants, came from a patrician line of old money, and spoke with a Locust Valley lockjaw. For the first year of the project, Clever Hands—as he was whimsically dubbed—lived with the Saltonseas and their four young children in their palatial estate in the suburbs of Princeton. Troutwine’s idea was that Clever Hands would be brought up in a human environment, co-reared