Eliot Schrefer: Hi, my name is Eliot Schrefer and I'm the author of Threatened. I want to tell you a little bit about how I came to write this book, and then I'll read an excerpt to you. This is the second novel in a planned quartet of novels about young people's relationships with great apes. The first book, Endangered, was about a girl surviving wartime with an orphaned bonobo by her side. And then Threatened is about chimpanzees, and a young orphan in Africa who winds up stranded in the jungle, and learns to survive by following along with a chimpanzee tribe.

It was interesting trying to write about chimpanzees, because writing about bonobos, which represent a more gentle side of our nature, I really came to see chimpanzees as kind of villains and really aggressive and violent, but when I was reading the works of Jane Goodall, who spent decades studying the chimpanzees, I really came to respect and love them. They have such a sense of family, and you can really trace going from chimp to chimp over the generations through Jane Goodall's writings, so it really helped me to come around to them.

Essentially, Threatened's a story about family and searching for family, and so it made sense that Luc, the main character, is an orphan in the beginning, and he winds up finding a family in an unusual place, in a community of non-humans, of chimpanzees, who I think ultimately wind up being the most vivid characters in the book. I'm going to read to you just from the very beginning of Threatened, the first page.

Chapter One: Franceville, Gabon.

I had never seen a mock man until the professor showed me one. I had heard them, of course. Many evenings, the chimpanzees would scream within the dark trees surrounding my village, their cries too strange for a person and too intimate for an animal. I still hear those shrieks these years later. Whenever they got too loud, my mother and I would huddle on the floor of our hut, her arms wrapped tight around me. "This is why you must always promise always to be home before dark, Luc," she would whisper. "If you're not, you'll become one of the kivili-chimpenze." The mock men.

I'd lean into the scratchy fabric of her boubou and wait for a hairy hand to come through the window. I'd imagine a lumpy head sniffing the air, black eyes staring into mine, lips pulling back from sharp teeth as the mock man lunged. I'd see us carried off into the jungle, one under each of the beast's arms. My mother's warning worked; I was always home and at her side before dark. Even when I was a little older and my village and my mother felt long in my past, I turned quiet and watchful at dusk. I would've loved to be safe in a home before the sky turned black. I just didn't have one to go to.