The orang, or mias, hides in the swampy jungles, and very rarely comes to the ground. The natives regard them as a sort of sacred object, and have a great horror of killing them. Indeed, a person who kills a man-ape, they regard as a murderer; and so when Wallace announced to his attendants that he wanted to secure several specimens of these "wild men of the woods," they cried, "Alas! he is making a collection: it will be our turn next!" And they fled in terror.
Wallace then hired another set of servants and resolved to make no confidants, but just go ahead and find his game.
He had hunted for weeks through forest and jungle, but never a glimpse or sight of the man-ape! He had almost given up the search, and concluded with several English scientists that this orang-utan was a part of that great fabric of pseudo-science invented by imaginative sailormen, who took most of their inland little journeys around the capstan. And so musing, seated in the doorway of his bamboo house, he looked out upon the forest, and there only a few yards away, swinging from tree to tree, was a man-ape. It seemed to him to be about five times as large as a man.
He seized his gun and approached; the beast stopped, glared, and railed at him in a voice of wrath. It broke off branches and threw sticks at him.
Wallace thought of the offer made him by the South Kensington Museum: "One hundred pounds in gold for an adult male, skin and skeleton to be properly preserved and mounted; seventy-five pounds for a female."
The huge animal showed its teeth, cast one glance of scornful contempt on the puny explorer, and started on, swinging thirty feet at a stretch and catching hold of the limbs with its two pairs of hands.
Wallace grasped his gun and followed, lured by the demoniac shape. A little of the superstition of the natives had gotten into his veins: he dare not kill the thing unless it came toward him, and he had to shoot it in self-defense.
It traveled in the trees about as fast as he could on the ground. Occasionally it would stop and chatter at him, throwing sticks in a most human way, as if to order him back.
Finally, the instincts of the naturalist got the better of the man, and he shot the animal. It came tumbling to the ground with a terrific crash, grasping at the vines and leaves as it fell.
It was quite dead, but Wallace approached it with great caution. It proved to be a female, of moderate size, in height about three and a half feet, six feet across from finger to finger. Needless to say that Wallace had to do the skinning and the mounting of the skeleton alone. His servants had chills of fear if asked to approach it. The skeleton of this particular orang can now be seen in the Derby Museum.