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park habitats were all, of course, quite secure against breakouts. However, during the chaos and insanity that accompanied the Great Death, someone at the park apparently opened their habitat entry, releasing them. Otherwise the ogres would have starved to death.
Initially on their release, they no doubt dwelt in and around the city of Kunming, preying on domestic animals and the infrequent human survivors of the plague. They probably increased rapidly at first. The females begin to produce offspring between ages 9 and 11, biennial twins being the mode where conditions are sufficiently favorable. Very soon they must have had to leave the city to find sufficient food. For a time they probably did well preying on livestock, but over the first few decades, forests would have encroached more and more on the cleared land, while livestock would have decreased. The ogres must have transferred their attention increasingly to deer, wild pigs, etc, which must have flourished in the young pioneer forests. Thus the ogres no doubt continued to find reasonably good hunting until the dense young forests had closed their canopies and darkened. Then the supply of large game animals must have decreased markedly, and the ogre population would have leveled off or even decreased.
There were additional reasons that ogres were not to prosper for long in the Upper Yunnan region. Adapted to a much drier climate and open, mostly sunny savannahs and steppes, the very humid forest climate of the Yunnan Plateau proved unhealthy for them. Apparently they had done well enough in the zoological park; it was open to the sun, they had a heated refuge from the rain, and presumably there was apparatus which dusted them occasionally with fungicides. And of course they were well fed, with their food medicated as necessary.
But in the dark, damp, Yunnan forests, ogres are subject to chronic and sometimes acute fungal dis-
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eases of the skin, especially of the genitals and toes. In the wild populations of today, despite centuries of natural selection for resistant genes, such fungi are particularly damaging to infants, who contract them from the mother’s pudenda during birth. Such infants frequently become blind. Too, jungle rot of the feet rather often hobbles adolescent and adult hunters to a greater or lesser extent, enough to hamper hunting and make them dangerously surly toward other ogres.
Further, ogres had evolved in much more open country. They were intelligent enough to modify their hunting methods to heavy forest, but they could not modify their physical equipment. Genetically, they were what they were. And in heavy forest, there was not a lot of big game to eat, while monkeys and wildfowl were seldom within reach. Furthermore, tigers and leopards began to wander in and establish themselves, providing serious competition. No doubt they sometimes even preyed on the ogres, though mostly they must have learned not to.
Meanwhile the scattered human survivors had been multiplying too, and learning to live effectively as hunter-gatherers and gardeners. When ogres came into conflict with established humans, no doubt the humans at first must have died and been eaten, or moved out of the district, carrying reports of the ogres with them. In time, however, the humans responded with spears, arrows, axes, and swords.
Squads of well-armed and truculent humans patrolled the marches of their settlements, and when ogres ravaged a hamlet, a force of humans was likely to track them. Such punitive expeditions often ended in the death of the ogre predators.
Presumably the ogres learned to fear humans. Certainly the humans feared ogres. Stories of ogre savagery, told before fireplaces, became a rich part of the folklore of southwestern China.
From rather early in the post-plague era, humans
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skirmished with humans from time to time, and not all the ravaging of Yunnan farm settlements was by ogres or rogue tigers. Thus in time there came to be organization and chiefs, and eventually kings and armies. And between local wars, the early local “kings” sent patrols out to hunt and kill ogres. Thus the ogres were forced back into the rougher, more remote country, where wild populations persist today in scattered small bands. A party of would-be heroes can still make a name for themselves by going hunting in the wild Hengduan Mountains and bringing back the scalps or hands of one or more ogres. And more than a few would-be heroes have been killed or even eaten in the attempt.