Gorillas in the Mist

by Farley Mowat

  The letter, scribbled on aerogram paper in a moment of black depression, was to have a galvanizing effect on the Prices.

  Gradually the traumatic effects of this dire tragedy subsided, and by September Dian was installed in “the upper house” on the de Munck plantation, at the foot of Karisimbi. From there she began probing the forests for traces of gorilla habitation. She planned to begin her survey as close as possible to the gorilla ranges with which she had been familiar in the Congo and then work her way eastward, deep into the rain forests on the Rwandan side of the border. On her first day out she climbed with her porters and a park guide to alpine meadows at twelve thousand feet where she camped within shouting distance of the Congolese border. It had been a depressing trek—the slopes were infested with lyre-horned cattle ranging through the hagenia forest zone where gorillas might otherwise have been expected.

  The following morning produced a more optimistic result.

  We were only about half an hour from the border, and I couldn’t resist the impulse to check a portion of the Mikeno-facing slopes of Karisimbi inside the Congo where my old Group 2 gorillas often ranged. Luck seldom plays a part in this type of work, but on that day it certainly did. I literally bumped right into Group 2 without even having to track. It had been nineteen weeks since I’d last seen them, but they definitely recognized me and held their ground at fifty feet after some initial alarm cries and chest beating. I was thrilled to note that one of the females had given birth during my absence, and all the animals seemed in good health. As happy as the contact made me, it also reinforced my desolation at having lost these animals permanently.

  Turning her back upon the Congo, Dian then struck out to the east, into the unfamiliar forests of the Rwandan slopes of Mt. Karisimbi. For ten days she explored and each day became increasingly alarmed and incensed at the vast number of cattle roaming illegally in the national park with their Tutsi herders. Worse, she was constantly finding and destroying poachers’ traps. Worse still, she was forced to watch in helpless anger while her park “guide” accepted duiker meat and bribe money from the numerous poachers they encountered. It seemed to her that this part of the park, at least, was beyond redemption, and for the first time she began to wonder whether Rosamond Carr had been correct in thinking there were no gorillas left in Rwanda.

  On the tenth day of her search Dian traversed the barren upper alpine reaches of Karisimbi’s northern summit to see what the other side of the mountain might have to offer. From her thirteen-thousand-foot lookout she could see arrayed before her, curving in a gentle arc into the eastern haze, the entire range of the Virungas. With mounting excitement she swept her binoculars over the rolling saddle terrain between Karisimbi and Mt. Visoke to the north. To her delight, the habitat appeared to be exactly right for gorillas. This, she felt immediately, was where she should set up her camp.

  Early in the morning of September 24, 1967, Dian and Alyette de Munck made a last check of the contents of their heavily laden vehicles and set out down the volcanic track toward the highway. Dian’s vintage Land Rover blazed a trail through pelting rain and deepening mud for Alyette’s Volkswagen “combi” van. Their destination was the plantation of a Dutch foreign-aid worker who lived conveniently close to Mt. Visoke. As overseer of a Common Market scheme to introduce the pyrethrum plant as a cash crop in Rwanda, he knew the mountain region and its people well and had agreed to help get Dian’s equipment up the mountain.

  Dian had only recently learned of the pyrethrum project and was appalled at its effect on the Parc des Volcans. Under this ambitious foreign-aid project, ten thousand hectares—more than a third of the land previously enclosed within the park boundaries—was being cleared of bamboo and hagenia forest and turned over to farmers. These smallholders received their tiny plots free, on the condition they devote half the land to the cultivation of pyrethrum, the daisy-like flowers of which were dried and shipped to Europe to be used in the manufacture of an organic pesticide. The Rwandan government and the aid workers saw the project as a way of easing, in some small measure, the pressure of Rwanda’s exploding population. But for Dian the scheme was an abomination that would shrink the already inadequate remnant of forest range suitable for gorillas past the danger point for their survival. In the coming months she would mount an angry—and unsuccessful—campaign against the pyrethrum project.

  The Dutchman had agreed to arrange porters for the climb up Visoke, and the two women found forty shivering men awaiting orders in a tin-roofed pyrethrum-drying shed at the foot of the mountain. The rain was now alternating with hail that beat down on the tin roof with a thunderous din, and the porters were noisily demanding either a delayed departure or higher wages for venturing out in such weather. In the minds of these two determined women there could be no question of delay, so while Mrs. de Munck negotiated payment, Dian set about assigning loads. Soon the men were strung out, barefoot, in single file along the muddy path leading to the foot of Visoke’s steep slopes, their burdens balanced atop their heads as they slogged through the glutinous mud. The two women fell in at the rear of the line.

  They marched for four kilometers through the ravaged and still-smoldering remains of virgin forest before reaching the new park boundary, 8,600 feet up on Visoke’s mist-veiled slopes. Dian was astonished afresh at the mass of people they encountered along the way. The curious stares of innumerable men, women, and children followed every step of the journey.

  The Parc des Volcans began where the clearing and cultivation ceased. One moment the party was in recently cleared, already densely populated farmland, the next they were in the looming silence of the dripping, moss-shrouded forest. They climbed for three hours, following a steep and muddy trough made by herds of elephant and buffalo. Twice Dian ordered a halt and prepared to pitch her tents in what seemed to her a suitable campsite; but each time the chief porter and guide objected, assuring her there was a better spot farther on. At 4:40 in the afternoon, with sunlight finally gleaming through the canopy of foliage, they found themselves emerging into a long, narrow meadow on a 10,000-foot-high plateau where the saddle joining mounts Visoke, Karisimbi, and Mikeno reaches its highest point. The clearing was richly carpeted with grass, surrounded by heavy forest, and dotted with ancient, moss-draped hagenia trees. A swift-flowing stream tumbled through the meadow. It was, as the porters had promised, an ideal campsite. It was also the most beautiful place Dian had ever seen.

  The porters set about erecting the tents, one for Dian and, at the other end of the clearing, one for the camp workers she would recruit that evening from among the porters. They had been at work only a few minutes when the unmistakable pok-pok-pok of gorilla chest beating reverberated through the gathering darkness on the steep slopes behind the camp.

  Lying exhausted in her cot that night, Dian savored the moment.

  — 7 —

  Her acute sense of destiny moved Dian to record the precise time of the founding of the research camp she would name Karisoke—from mounts Karisimbi and Visoke. It was 4:30 P.M., September 24, 1967.

  Had she fully divined the nature of that destiny, she might also have noted the time that evening of the appearance of a hundred-odd head of cattle and two Watusi herders who slowly drove their animals through the meadow across the creek from her tents. Or she might have noted the arrival time of two Batwa poachers who strolled nonchalantly through the clearing carrying bows, arrows, and spears, and who volunteered to show Dian the location of a gorilla family they had encountered only forty-five minutes from the camp.

  Dian chose to ignore the herders for the moment, but was hard-pressed to decide whether to run the poachers out of camp or accept their offer. In the end she followed them to the gorillas, but issued a stern warning that from this day forward neither cattle herding nor poaching would be tolerated in her part of the park.

  This news must have been greeted with incredulity by the Tutsi and Batwa alike. Both peoples had ranged the Virunga slopes since time immemorial—the Tutsi usin
g the meadows and open woods for grazing, and the Batwa hunting everywhere for meat and hides, both for their own use and to sell to the Hutu farmers down below. Although the park had been legally off limits to hunters and herders since its establishment by the Belgians several decades earlier, the mountain people had long since worked out a comfortable arrangement whereby they supplied the poorly paid park guards with meat and milk, and sometimes cash, in exchange for immunity. Although this arrangement was so well established as to be virtually sacrosanct, Dian decided that the park rules had to be enforced. She was so adamant about this that she was soon at loggerheads with Alyette de Munck and Rosamond Carr.

  “You really must consider the traditions of the local people,” Alyette advised. “They depend, you know, on what they can get from the land. You must be fair to them.”

  Dian was unmoved.

  “The Batwa are poachers pure and simple,” she insisted. “They set their snares everywhere for the antelope and hyrax, and that’s bad enough, God knows, but they often end up catching gorillas too. I know, I know, the adults can break free, but they can be maimed for life by the wire nooses. And we both know some poachers deliberately kill gorillas and make souvenir ashtrays out of their dried hands to sell to the horrid tourist trade, and sell skulls and heads to the so called sportsmen who want African trophies for their rec rooms. Poachers catch baby gorillas for sale to zoos, too. There has to be strict enforcement of the park laws or there won’t be any gorillas left, and very little else either.”

  Nor did Rosamond Carr’s protests on behalf of the Tutsi cattle herders make much impression on Dian’s resolve.

  “The herders ruin the habitat, Rosamond, because they have far too many cattle. They keep ten times what they need, just for prestige. There are so many up here now—they churn the ground until it looks as if it were plowed. They crush the plants the gorillas eat, shut them out of the best feeding areas, and force them higher and higher up the slopes into the cold and wet until they get pneumonia. Those high altitudes are deadly for them. Let the Tutsi cut down their herds to only what they need and graze them outside the park.”

  Her disagreements with Alyette and Rosamond forced Dian to realize that very few people placed the same paramount priority on the survival of the gorillas that she did. But she remained inflexible.

  I came onto an empty poacher’s camp today. There was one flea-bitten, rack-ribbed dog guarding a lean-to fitted into a huge hagenia tree. The only other signs of life were fresh footprints that led up and down the trail. A newly killed duiker was lying on top of the roof of the lean-to. I offered the duiker to the tracker as bait to help me destroy the sixty bamboo sticks that the poachers had just brought up from below to use for setting snares. He went about the task willingly, helping me to break the heavier pieces. Once we had broken all the potential traps, I turned my attention to the inside of the lean-to and found a big bag of millet, which I threw to the four winds, a couple of hundred yards of rope especially woven for snare traps, and several chungas or big iron pots for cooking. Although I am not a thief at heart, I do believe in making things difficult for poachers, so I tied the chungas onto my African along with the snare rope and the duiker, and we left the camp apparently undetected except for the dog, who’d been regarding our doings with a malevolent eye from the nearby foliage. For all I know, the poachers were lined up beside him, glaring, but that doesn’t matter. At least I left the tattered red rags that one of them had left out to dry in the late afternoon sun—I’ve not been reduced to stealing a man’s clothing!

  The point of this story comes from the fact that I was accompanied by my friend Alyette de Munck, who has known Africa since birth. Because of this continent she has lost her son and nephew, and yet nothing can discourage her love of the land—and love is a trite word to describe such an affinity. So because of this poacher’s camp, a harmless afternoon’s stroll, which had previously been filled with the beauty of an isolated river flowing deep within the jungle fastness of wild orchids and liana and senna, turned into a heated argument between the two of us.

  As I stood there breaking bamboo snares one by one, she stood apart and in a very firm way asked what right I had, an American here in Africa for only a few months, to invade the rights of the Africans whose country this was. I kept on breaking traps, though I couldn’t help but agree with her-Africa belongs to Africans.

  My friend continued to plead her case.

  “These men have a right to hunt. It’s their country! You have no right to destroy their efforts.”

  Maybe she is right, for the country African living on the fringes of a park area has little alternative but to turn to poaching for his livelihood. But at the same time, why should one condone a man if he openly breaks the law-why shouldn’t you take whatever action you can against him. The man who kills the animals today is the man who kills the people who get in his way tomorrow. He recognizes the fact that there is a law saying he mustn’t do this or that, but without the enforcement of this law he is free to do as he chooses. If I can enforce the written rules of a supposedly protected park against the slaughter of animals, then I must do it. And so I continued to break bamboo, the reliable and flexible trap of the last game in Africa.

  In a manner as unpredictable as their relationship had always been, Dian and Alexie maintained contact by mail—she in desultory fashion, while he wrote increasingly often and with supreme confidence that she would follow where he chose to lead.

  Alexie’s recent letters are mainly about leaving Notre Dame and transferring to the Chicago School of Divinity to major in comparative religion for his Ph.D. I am now expected to hurry back to the States and live with him in Chicago in a blissfully married state until he gets his degree, then his field work will take us to South America or northern Africa, where we will be happy ever after. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find my rose-colored glasses anymore, though he still seems to have his.

  Seeking allies, Alexie kept in touch with the Prices, and the news of Dian’s and the de Muncks’ chilling experiences in the Congo spurred the three of them into action.

  In the last days of September Alexie met the Prices in New York. An engagement ring was purchased, a flight booked, and Alexie dispatched on a rescue mission to bring Dian back to civilization. He boarded his plane confident that when offered the take-it-or-leave-it choice between marriage and continuing her studies, she would choose marriage.

  When he came face to face with her in her mountain camp, he was horrified. Dressed in torn jeans and faded windbreaker, her long hair matted with the rain, her eyes bemused, she seemed like some barbaric creature of the jungle.

  Alexie delivered his ultimatum—me or the gorillas—and was stunned when Dian turned him down. He persisted.

  “Marry me,” he pleaded, “and I’ll give up university. We’ll go to Rhodesia and take up farming. I don’t want us ever to be separated again.”

  Dian would not be moved. “Not possible, darling. You’d be giving up too much. We’ve both got a lot of things to do.”

  “Then we can do them together. If you must stay here, how would it be if I stayed on too … for a year … on condition that you’d leave this place then?”

  “Alexie, it wouldn’t work. Go back and get your Ph.D. Do what you have to do and I’ll do what I have to do. Perhaps in two years’ time, well, we’ll see how things look then.”

  He left the camp heartbroken—and humiliated. At Kisoro he wrote a farewell letter to Dian and left it in the care of Walter Baumgartel. He wrote, telling Dian to keep the ring or throw it into the stream near camp if she chose. His last words to her were, “You saw me cry, and that, my dear, was the last tear I will ever shed for you.”

  Although relieved that the affair was at an end, Dian was defensive too.

  He came up here like Sir Galahad, but who asked him to rescue me? He criticized everything here; said that the Rwandans hated me, that they called me a wild woman and wanted me out. Said I was making life impossible for my moth
er. He as good as forced me to throw him out.

  She told Leakey something of what had happened, and he replied, “I am delighted at the news that you have found a good place on Karisimbi, with plenty of gorillas, and I do hope that now things will become reasonable once more. In particular I hope that the young man who you say that you are having to be rude to realized that you don’t want him in your life. You’ve got such important things to do.”

  During the succeeding weeks, Dian found two more gorilla families, which meant that she was virtually assured of being able to locate at least one group to observe on any given day. Her total hours of gorilla observations were mounting swiftly.

  Other aspects of her life were also going well.

  She was making headway on an article for National Geographic. Three publishers had written to her expressing interest in a book to be based on her experiences with the gorillas. She heard from Cambridge University in England that she had been accepted for Ph.D. studies on the basis of her preliminary field notes, and she began preparing to attend her first semester there in the autumn of 1968. Meanwhile, she was reveling in the Virungas.

  I’ve been doing a great deal of survey work in the areas around the volcanoes. Because of this I’ve seen the most fantastically gorgeous country I never dreamed existed. Yesterday I found a river that tumbles down from Mt. Karisimbi to the Congo by a series of spectacular waterfalls…. I really felt as though I was the first white person ever to see it and gave up all thoughts of looking for gorilla for that day.

  Despite the physical hardships and the loneliness, Dian was now finding her solitary life a deeply satisfying experience. She observed herself in a series of highly evocative, somewhat transcendental musings.