    10

    10

    10

    c ame as a shock.  The baby hadn't been sick.  Fossey couldn't

    understand what had happened to it.    The naturalist and her aides

    hunted through the forest, looking for the remains of the body,

    expecting to find it in one of the spots where the gorilla group had

    fought with a rival band.  But Fossey found no corpse whatsoever at

    the battle sites.

    Finally, acting on a hunch, Fossey and her African helpers

    collected all of the dung the gorillas had left during the previous days.

    After all their years following this group the researchers were able to

    identify which dung came from which gorilla.  For days the humans

    painstakingly sifted through the foul-smelling excrement.  Finally,

    Fossey found what she'd been looking for-- 133 bone and tooth

    fragments from an infant gorilla.  Where were these fragments?  In the

    deposits left by the dominant female and her eight-year-old daughter.21

    The  mother  of  the  dead  baby  came  from  a  social  level  these

    female gorilla aristocrats despised.  She was an outcast the well-placed

    ladies frequently mocked and bullied.  Her presence simply could not

    be  tolerated  in  proper  company.    Her  child  was  beneath  contempt.

    Fossey concluded that the head female and her daughter had attacked

    the infant, killed it, and eaten it.22

    There was more than mere cruelty behind this murder of a

    helpless baby.  Effie, the aristocratic female who had apparently led the

    infant-killing effort, was heavily pregnant.  Three days after the brutal

    incident, she gave birth to a baby of her own.   Effie had acted like the

    ambitious wife in a harem who fights to eliminate the children of her

    rivals.  Through infanticide, she had become the only female with four

    children in the group at one time.   She had ensured that she and her

    brood would be the tribe's ruling class.  By doing so, she had turned

    the entire group into a support mechanism for her own brood.

    Effie was very much like Livia, the most powerful woman of

    Rome in the days a little less than two thousand years ago when that

    city was reaching the peak of imperial power.  According to  Robert

    Graves' careful reconstruction in I, Claudius, Livia--like Effie--was one

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