Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: The Official Movie Novelization

9

Blue Eyes and Ash stood in the shallows of the river early the next morning. Mist still drifted in the high valleys, and the sun had just risen high enough to shine down on the river. The gashes from the bear’s claws the day before were still raw, but they were starting to scab over. More than anything else, Blue Eyes was still embarrassed because he had gone after the elk too fast. He had ruined his father’s plan, and almost gotten himself killed. That felt worse than the tears in his skin.

He was also angry at his father for not trusting him. Who could have known a bear would be there? If he wasn’t stuck to his father’s side, Blue Eyes knew he could have led one of the hunting groups. He could have brought down an elk himself, or been part of one of the groups that had divided the herd.

Ash had done that. He’d talked about it all the way from the village down to the river. His father, Rocket, let Ash do things that Caesar would never let Blue Eyes do. It drove Blue Eyes crazy that Caesar treated him like a baby. And it was Koba—not his father—who had tried to make Blue Eyes feel better last night. All Caesar thought about was Blue Eyes’ new brother.

All of this went through his mind as he stood, cold water rushing around his feet and spear poised, looking down at the water and waiting for a fish to move so he could see it. The trout in the river blended into the rocks, and when the sun got higher they would move to other parts of the river to hide from birds. It was hard to get them, but worth it when you were sitting around a fire eating them.

There. Blue Eyes saw the flick of a fin, and all of a sudden the shape of the fish was obvious. He stabbed down and missed, the spear point grating on a rock. As fast as he could, he stabbed again, but the fish was long gone. Ash laughed from his spot just upstream.

Let’s see you do better, Blue Eyes signed.

Ash took a step into deeper water, up around his thighs, paused—and struck. He hooted with delight, drawing his spear back and holding it level with the water. A trout thrashed and wriggled on the end of it.

That’s how you do it, he signed with the hand not holding the spear. Blue Eyes couldn’t stand it. Ash did everything right. Everything was easy for him. And his father let him hunt. Blue Eyes could feel his temper rising. Caesar had taught him control, but it was hard. He got his spear ready again, looking from the water to Ash, who set the butt of his spear into the riverbed so he could reach the fish he’d gotten.

Ash caught the fish and dragged it off his spear, looking smug—and then the fish flipped out of his grasp. He dropped his spear and snatched at it, catching it by the tail for a moment. But it was too slippery. It wriggled free and dropped back into the water.

Now it was Blue Eyes’s turn to laugh as Ash charged through the shallows after his quarry. Blue Eyes saw it go past him. He slapped the water, trying to catch it, but missed, still laughing. Ash bounded along the rocky riverbed. Blue Eyes followed, splashing him on purpose. The fish was gone, he knew. They would never catch it now.

Ash headed for a rocky overhang on the inside of a river bend, as if the fish might hide there. Blue Eyes caught his eye as they stomped through the water.

You’re supposed to hold it by the gills, he signed. He laughed harder as Ash splashed him, then shoved him out into the water.

Blue Eyes tripped over a rock and fell. He sprang back up and went after his friend, who had splashed around the rock, and then stopped short. Blue Eyes swatted at the water again, but Ash didn’t move. Blue Eyes called out to him and churned his way over.

Then he, too, froze.

From where they were standing next to the rock, shallow rapids spread out into the middle of the river just downstream, with the deeper, quiet water at the outside of the bend on the other side. The overhung rock formations created another slow-moving eddy, with a sloping open bank.

On that bank, squatting with his hands in the water to fill some kind of container, was a human.

Blue Eyes had never seen a live human. He’d seen a dead one, once, on the road that crossed the river. He had been very young and only remembered being surprised that the corpse had so little hair. And he had seen pictures, had heard stories, and this definitely was a human. Male, skin the color of wet sand, a little patch of fur the color of a young chimp’s. Blue Eyes did not know how to read humans’ faces, but if he had seen this expression on an ape, he would have thought the ape was scared.

Very scared.

The human stood up, his round bottle dropping onto the bank and spilling its contents. He took a step back and grabbed at something on his belt. It was dark and made of metal. He held it in both hands, his arms straight. A small hole in the tip of the metal thing was pointed right at Blue Eyes and Ash. Blue Eyes felt like he knew what the metal thing was, but it took a moment for his mind to start working again after the shock of seeing a human, alive, almost within shouting distance of the ape village.

Gun, he thought. That was the word. He remembered the sign, a wiggle of the thumb with a finger pointed out.

The sound of the gunshot was the loudest thing Blue Eyes had ever heard.