I am trying to identify a story that is about a family of gorillas which gets attacked by hunters.
The book starts by focusing on a male gorilla and his two mates, and their offspring. They live in a forest. There is some detail about the different personalities of these two mates.
One day, a group of hunters led by a man of Western European descent arrive in the forest, and attack the family of gorillas. The male gorilla attempts to defend himself and his family, but is shot along with the rest. The only survivor is the youngest offspring, who turns out to have been the target of the hunt: a young gorilla to be recruited into a circus.
The leader rests in a tent in the hunters' camp, with the caged young gorilla in front of him, and is otherwise alone. He has his rifle by his side and is drinking alcohol. He dozes off, but is awoken by the sound of a large man. He introduces himself and they talk to each other. The man says that once upon a time, the hunter was one of them (the large man's group). But one day, the hunter did something the others could not do: he smiled. The man says that the hunter then left his group to go out into the world. He gets up and angrily walks towards the hunter, and the man's torso turns out to have bullet holes. The hunter realises that this "man" is a 600lb gorilla. He picks up his gun and shoots the gorilla. He wakes up and finds that he has shot the gorilla infant in its cage. His whole trip has been in vain.
I read this story in the late 1990s or the early 2000s in Kerala, India. It was in Malayalam and possibly in my elder sister's SSLC textbook, but I suspect that the original was written in English. The units of measurements were pounds rather than metric. The textbook was not overly thick, and I think it contained other stories as well.
It's not the 1861 work The Gorilla Hunters, nor the 1992 novel Ishmael. None of the gorillas that appear in the Wikipedia category of fictional gorillas are related, nor are the works listed in the Magazines and literature section of its page on gorillas in popular culture.
