“It broke off the arm, hurt him on the head, and opened the stomach and removed the kidneys,” Semata said. But the chimp was rough and strong, and the fatal damage occurred fast. The boy’s screaming brought other villagers, who helped the mother give chase. The chimp saw his chance, grabbed her two-year-old son by the hand, and ran. Her four young children were with her that day, as she combined mothering with hard fieldwork, but she turned her back to get them some drinking water. “A chimpanzee came in the garden as I was digging,” Ntegeka Semata recalled during an interview in early 2017. That was the day when a single big chimp, probably an adult male, snatched the Semata family’s toddler son, Mujuni, and killed him. But on July 20, 2014, scary tribulations gave way to horror-a form of horror that has struck other Ugandan families as well. They had helped themselves to jackfruit from a tree near the Semata house. The chimps had been coming closer for a year or two, prowling all throughout Kyamajaka village, searching for food, ripping bananas from the trees, grabbing mangoes and papayas and whatever else tempted them. They could barely grow food for themselves, and now a group of desperate, bold, crop-raiding chimpanzees threatened their livelihood, maybe even their safety. Life was already hard enough for Ntegeka Semata and her family, scratching out a subsistence on their little patch of garden land along a ridgeline in western Uganda. This story appears in the August 2020 issue of National Geographic magazine. Editor's note: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence that may be upsetting to some readers.
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