I arrived before dawn in the misty forest surrounding Angkor Wat, camera in hand and heart open to whatever the jungle would reveal. The air was thick with humid warmth, the stone temple walls softened by creeping vines, and the distant chatter of macaque troops echoing through the ancient trees. I had heard stories of wild piglets and baby monkeys in these woods—but nothing could prepare me for her scream.
The oldest mother of her troop—a wise, grey-furred macaque I came to know as “Mama LongTail”—sat quietly in a moss-covered tree root, holding her baby close. The baby, half-monkey and half-pig-ish in its piggy posture (it seemed the forest had gifted us a curious hybrid metaphor), nursed at her side. For a long time, all was calm and sacred. But then I watched the moment shift.
Mama LongTail gave a small signal—a soft grunt and a gentle push. The baby stiffened and looked up at her with vulnerable eyes. Then she said no more milk. She pulled back, chest rising and falling in slow rhythm, and the baby recoiled. It let out an anguished, raw scream that echoed like thunder among the temple stones. It wrapped its tiny pig-ish body around her throat, trembling. The air seemed to still.
In that sacred moment I felt time stop. I watched a creature so young and innocent, so utterly reliant on the mother’s gift, face the heartbreak of transition. The oldest mother, seasoned by years of forest trials—storms, hunger, lost siblings—held the baby with a mixture of tenderness and duty. She knew this moment was inevitable: the baby must begin to stand on its own two feet.
The wild forest is rarely kind. I sensed the emotional tumult: the baby’s angry cry, sounding like a piglet more than a monkey, the oldest mother’s sorrow, and even the trees seemed to hold their breath. I captured the video: the baby launching into a high-pitched screaming fit, the mother’s arms tightening, the forest shadows dancing.
As I watched, I realized this wasn’t just an animal moment—it mirrored our own human rites of passage. How many times in our lives have we had to let go? How many times have we had to say: “No more milk,” meaning: “You must grow.” I thought of U.S. readers, of American mothers and fathers, of children bristling at the moment the bottle is taken away, the security blanket withdrawn, the dependence ended.
The baby child in the forest screamed and thrashed until, exhausted, it collapsed into the mother’s arms and closed its eyes. Mama LongTail sat there, patient and unshaken, and let the storm burn itself out. Eventually the baby began to climb again, tentatively, its voice calmer, its body stronger.
Later I found a still image of that moment—a pig-monkey hybrid cradled by the oldest mother, set against ancient temple stones.
(Embed video here)
