Togar.

It's the game Togar came up with all on his own, with no one to teach him: point at a fruit and wait for his mother to tell him its name. The fig. The durian, which you smell before you see it. The mangosteen. The one that stings and can't be eaten. The one you have to open with a bit of skill. Twenty times each morning, the same question, until the name lodges inside him.

Up in the canopy of the Sumatran forest where he lives, rising early means starting the food round early, when the fruit is at its best. Togar follows his mother from tree to tree and goes asking about everything he sees: about the ripe fruit and the green, about what he already knows and what's new to him. Learning, for him, is just this: asking without tiring and keeping the answer. An orangutan infant spends years like this, with its curiosity lit from daybreak on.

With every fruit he learns, Togar keeps something more: where the tree stands and at what point in the year it bears. A map no one else can see takes shape inside him, the map of the whole forest, tree by tree. He's still missing hundreds, but he already knows a few: the fig tree, the durian tree. His mother moves through the canopy without ever getting lost, and he's copying that way of keeping everything ordered in his head.

And then there's the dawn. Some mornings, above the forest, a long, deep sound arrives from far away: the call of an adult male orangutan, which can be heard from a kilometer and a half off, farther than any other voice in the forest. Togar goes still, listening to it before the day starts. It's the voice he'll have when he's grown, and for now it's too big for him. The call fades, the sun rises, and his mother sets off on the morning round with him right behind.