A giant ape peels everything it eats, including things that have no skin. Apples, pears and walnuts lose their coats under one thumbnail in a single curl. So do turnips, cheeses lifted from dairy sheds, and on one recorded occasion a candle. The curls fall where the ape sits, and a line of them across a hillside, brown at the edges and tight as wood shavings, is how the animal is tracked. Orchard keepers read the line for direction and for how long ago it was laid. Dry peel is also good kindling, which is the only reason anyone gathers it.
The oldest account is a complaint from the parish of Tudeve, where a whole field of turnips lost its skins in one night. The clerk blamed boys from the next valley and fined their fathers. Their innocence took a generation to establish. The second account is better. Gerrit Maule, a miller at Nintide, watched one in daylight from his loft and wrote that it sat against his millpond wall, peeled forty winter pears, stacked the peels as high as his knee, and left without touching the mill. The ape has no interest in grain. By the time the terraces were surveyed, the peel lines ran eleven miles from the river to the ridge, and farmers in both valleys had stopped calling the animal a thief. They call it the Peeler now, though nobody has tested whether it answers.
The ape that works the Nintide terraces stands fourteen feet and weighs about as much as a loaded hay wagon. Its hair is slate black with a gray saddle across the shoulders, and its left ear is split into two lobes. It sits on terrace walls without cracking them, having learned which stones are laid dry. Each afternoon it walks to the same boulder on the ridge above Tudeve and scratches its back against it for a quarter hour, eyes half shut, one foot kicking slowly at nothing. The boulder has a groove as smooth as a saddle seat. The ape is touchy about bruises. Finding a pear with one soft spot, it sets the fruit back in the crook of its branch, carefully, and ignores that tree for the rest of the day.
Orchard people in both valleys say the same thing to newcomers: leave the top third of every tree unpicked, keep the windfalls in covered crates, and bury bruised fruit the same day.
- Classification
- Giant forest ape
- Habitat
- Orchard terraces and fruit forest
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 14 ft standing, 3,000 lb
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Orchard hills and river terraces
- Binomial
- Simia decorticans
- Diet
- Fruit, tubers, bark, honeycomb
- Temperament
- Placid, touchy about bruised fruit










