I raised the gun as the chimpanzee inspected a bunch of bananas, close enough that I could hear him softly grunting. Taking aim, I leaned back against a tree to control my trembling. My weight made the giant banana leaves rustle overhead, and he turned to face the noise. He walked unsteadily a few feet in my direction at first, clutching a bunch of bananas to his broad chest. Then he dropped the fruit and broke into a four-limbed run straight at me.
In the mid-1990s, that chimp, named Saddam, started to attack and kill children in the villages near Uganda's Kibale National Park. Groups of wild chimps, including those I came to study, sometimes hunted red colobus monkeys and other animals, but Saddam was the only one in the area known to prey on humans, which is why he was named for the dictator. One victim was grabbed from a blanket as her mother was picking millet nearby. Saddam later pulled a small child off the back of a woman digging in a cassava field. He grew bolder, and by the summer of 1998, he had attacked seven children, killing at least two of them. (Though it is difficult to be absolutely sure, he is believed to have been solely responsible for the spate of attacks.)
Horrified by the violence and fearful that their harmless study chimps would become targeted by angry villagers, Kibale's primatologists sent a trained tracker named Kateeba Deo to find Saddam. Deo could examine a piece of dung and tell you the size of the chimp who produced it. But he had no experience with guns, so he needed an armed companion.
That was me: a college freshman crazy about monkeys and anything to do with them. I was in Uganda taking a summer course in wildlife management. One of the researchers taught me to use his Telazol-loaded dart gun, which would incapacitate the chimp from a distance, so a villager could then dispatch him with a machete.
As we entered the bush on the first day of the hunt, Deo told me that, unlike most chimps, Saddam was a loner. It was very likely that the rest of his group was decimated by deforestation and poaching. Saddam, though, had adapted to life in what remained of the forest around the village of Ruteete. He had learned to avoid humans when possible but became a skilled raider of their crops. When there were no suitable trees, he made nests on the ground.
Saddam's home range was vast, and the forest was dense (where it hadn't been cleared). After each sighting by a villager, his trail quickly went cold. So instead of following him, we decided to stake out places Saddam was likely to turn up — usually, one of the village's makeshift banana-beer breweries. Saddam was drawn to the smoky, overripe bananas. He had even been seen drinking handfuls of the beer from the hollowed-out trees where it fermented.
We kept watch all day, every day, for more than a month, sweating in the shade of banana trees and passing time by chewing sugarcane and whittling sticks into toothpicks. Finally, on one Thursday afternoon in late July, Deo touched my shoulder and pointed to the trees in the back of the banana grove. They had started to shake. A chimp's black shape came in and out of view as he slowly moved toward us. At last he emerged — Saddam, without a doubt — knuckle-walking toward a huge stack of fermenting bananas. When I practiced with the gun, I was able to hit targets smaller than his torso from the same distance. But then he started to charge.
Through the sight of the rifle, I watched Saddam come at me. All I had to do was squeeze the trigger. But I stood frozen as he advanced to within a few feet. I braced myself, but suddenly Saddam pivoted right and stormed noisily into the forest. That was the last time I saw him.
I returned to college for my sophomore year, happy to get back to a place where most problems could be solved with a well-crafted excuse. A few months later, just before a midterm that seemed so incredibly important to me, I received a letter from Deo informing me that Saddam had finally been stopped: a group of local hunters armed with spears, and a ranger with a rifle, surrounded him in a marsh and killed him. They tracked him there from the scene of his last violent act: the slaying of an 18-month-old girl.
David Goldenberg is a writer in San Francisco.
E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission.
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