The Girl in the Henhouse
When Jane was a little girl, everybody thought she was lost.
She was not lost. She was in the henhouse.
Jane wanted to know something. She wanted to know where an egg came from.
She asked a grown up. The grown up said, "It just comes out, dear."
That was no good at all. So Jane decided to go and see for herself.
First she followed a hen inside. The hen squawked and shot straight back out again. Cluck. Cluck. Cluck.
So Jane worked it out. She would have to be there first.
She crept into the henhouse and sat down in the straw in the corner. And she kept very, very still.
She sat still. She waited.
She waited a long time. Hours and hours. Her legs went stiff. It got hot and dusty and dark in the corner.
Out in the garden, people were calling. "Jane! Jane!"
A policeman looked in the hedge. He looked up a tree. Nobody looked in the henhouse.
Then a hen settled down close beside her.
Everything went quiet.
And Jane watched the egg come.
She ran to the house to tell her mother, so excited she could hardly speak. Her mother had been looking everywhere. Her mother had even called the police.
But her mother did not shout. She sat down and listened to the whole story.
Jane grew up. And she did the same thing again.
She went far away to a forest in Africa, in a country called Tanzania, to watch wild chimpanzees. Nobody knew much about them then.
The chimpanzees ran away from her. Every day, they ran away.
So Jane did what she had done in the henhouse.
She sat still. She waited.
Not for hours this time. For months.
Slowly, the chimpanzees stopped running.
Then one day Jane watched a chimpanzee she called David Greybeard. He picked a twig. He pulled all the leaves off it.
He poked the bare twig into a termite mound. A termite mound is a big hard hill of dirt, full of little insects like ants.
Out came the twig, covered in termites. And he ate them.
Jane sat there in the trees with her heart thumping.
Because he had made a tool. A tool, like a spoon, or a little fishing rod. And grown ups had always said that only people made tools.
One girl. One henhouse. And then the whole world had to change its mind about who makes things.
