The Impenetrable Forest

by Thor Hanson

  “Empazi,” one of the trackers whispered urgently, pointing down among the leaves. We followed his gaze and suddenly saw the ground seething. A thick column of safari ants swarmed across the clearing, millions of red-bodied workers flanked by lines of inch-long “bulldogs” equipped with menacing pincers.

  “Ants!” Medad translated needlessly. “Hurry!”

  We high-stepped across the glade, stamping our boots and brushing ants from our legs in what was probably a perfect reenactment of Mubare group’s exodus the night before. Cursing and slapping, we escaped with only a few needle-prick bites, but something about the practiced way Medad and the trackers plucked ants from their socks told me this wouldn’t be my last encounter with safari ants in Bwindi. We pressed on and soon came to another set of nests, complete with requisite dung, a few hundred yards up the slope.

  From there the trail grew rapidly fresher, with redolent, barnyard-smelling spoor and leafy stems still wet from chewing. The trackers advanced carefully now, their panga swings barely audible as we sneaked up the hillside. Suddenly, a new sound brought everyone up short: a single grunt, deep and clear, the way a malamute might bark if it weighed four hundred pounds.

  “Engagi?” I asked, whispering one word of the local dialect I’d been sure to memorize in advance.

  Medad smiled and nodded. “Yes. A gorilla.”

  We continued slowly up the slope, and the trackers started making low, coughing noises, an imitation of gorillas feeding or at rest. I glanced back at the British couple. They looked sweaty and mud-streaked but wired with excitement, eyes as wide and expectant as my own. Another grunt and a long sigh sounded from up the hill but closer, much closer.

  “They are moving,” Medad told us. “We must be careful.”

  Suddenly, a shadow detached itself from the greater dimness, a brief image of ponderous grace glimpsed through gaps in the foliage. My first thought was that it must be the lead tracker, so human were the movements. But then she came fully into view, walking hunched forward on her knuckles with a baby clinging to the black ridge of her back, and all thought fled before awe and a far less profound realization: HUGE. REALLY HUGE.

  She strutted past and out of sight without a glance in our direction, but the baby’s head turned and regarded us with a long, brown-eyed blink before disappearing into the green. Then the undergrowth rustled, and a pair of juveniles tumbled down the slope, two stout, round bodies covered in thick hair. They pawed at each other with teeth bared in mock smiles, rolling through the leaves like shaggy inverse snowballs. Their play brought them eventually to a dark mound in the undergrowth, and they climbed up to begin a series of daredevil leaps into the surrounding branches. When one of the youngsters began to wander in our direction, the dark mound reached out and gently pulled it back.

  “Silverback,” Medad hissed, and the shadow coalesced before my eyes into the prostrate form of an even larger gorilla, twenty feet away through the bracken.

  Ruhondeza lay sideways with his head facing toward us and feet stretched out of sight behind the wide bulge of his stomach. I watched his children clamber back across one burly arm and had to recalibrate my entire notion of gorilla scale: torso like a tractor tire, tree-trunk legs, and head like a scrap-iron barrel, carved with a Rushmore face. Adult males average twice the size of their female counterparts, and even lying down, Ruhondeza carried every pound with a looming sense of authority.

  We watched for several minutes as the juveniles wrestled and played around him, a tranquil family picture interrupted only by the sound of Ruhondeza’s occasional, rumbling sighs. Huddled together and hemmed in by walls of vegetation, the gorillas looked intimate and infinitely tender.

  I stayed in the back of the group, watching through a narrow gap in the foliage while the tourists crowded forward, snapping photo after photo and struggling to hold their cameras steady in the weak light. Their shutter noise eventually disturbed Ruhondeza’s slumber, and he shifted, turning his massive, peaked head to look in our direction. I met his gaze through the undergrowth, and we both moved sideways to get a clear view. Finally he looked away, and I sat back in wonder, disbelieving that this would all become a part of my daily routine, that soon I might see recognition as well as curiosity in those calm, intelligent eyes.

  5

  Dances like a Chicken

  Love carefully. The person you so cherish might be the special one to lead you to your grave.

  —Uganda AIDS Commission billboard, 1993

  “The man with the radio who dances like a chicken. He is quite mad, I think.”

  “Yes, and a drunkard!” Tom bellowed, laughing as the bent, skinny figure lurched across the dirt courtyard, clutching a shortwave radio and strutting in time to its noisy blasts of static.

  Late morning sun glared down from a cloudless sky, casting sharp-angled shadows across the benches outside Annette’s place. We sipped orange sodas, waiting to meet a group of Tom’s neighbors and share a taxi ride to the village home of Susan’s parents. It was my last full weekend with the Ntales before moving permanently to the Impenetrable Forest, but our activities promised to be far less festive than royal fence building. Susan’s younger brother had died the previous morning, and we were on our way to the burial.

  “He was only twenty years but very sick,” Tom had explained. I thought immediately of AIDS but said nothing. In Uganda, where researchers estimated between 10 and 20 percent of the population was HIV positive, everyone had lost friends and relatives to the disease. Posters and billboards throughout the country preached safe sex, and people talked constantly about the hope for a cure, but rarely in reference to any specific person. When it struck close to home, the virus was still an uncomfortable topic.

  “Susan will be gone for some days,” Tom went on. “To be with the mother.”

  Traditionally, neighbors and friends stayed for a continuous three-day vigil at the family home, so the immediate relatives would never be alone with their dead. The men built bonfires every night to drive away spirits, while the women gathered inside, cooking to feed the guests and preparing the body for burial. In recent decades, the sheer number of deaths had necessarily led to a shorter mourning period. Closer friends and relations still stayed with the family, but most returned home after a single night.

  During my time at the Ntales’, Tom and Susan attended funerals, burials, and last rite ceremonies at least once a week. “We have lost a neighbor,” Tom would say, or, “It is a friend from the church.” Twenty years of oppression and civil war, followed by the worst AIDS epidemic on the continent, had made death a routine part of daily life in modern Uganda.

  “That’s how it is to live here,” Tom told me one morning, bleary-eyed from another all-night vigil. Attending funerals was a social duty, but people regarded most deaths practically, with phlegmatic acceptance, reserving true grief for only their closest family members and friends. Their stoicism arose from necessity, but its history extended back far beyond HIV and the Obote-Amin years.

  For untold generations, Ugandans lived a lifestyle of subsistence hunting and farming, plagued by malaria, tribal warfare, and the sometimes-tyrannical rule of their traditional kings. While admired for establishing complex court systems and organized administrations, Uganda’s local monarchs often governed with brutal authority and little regard for the lower classes. During his stay in 1862, Speke witnessed numerous executions in the court of kabaka Mutesa I. The king showed a great interest in the killing potential of European guns, ordering the death of his subjects as casually as he shot the cows and birds roaming the palace grounds:

  The king now loaded one of the carbines I had given him with his own hands, and giving it full-cock to a page, told him to go out and shoot a man in the outer court; which was no sooner accomplished than the little urchin returned to announce his success, with a look of glee such as one would see in the face of a boy who had robbed a bird’s nest, caught a trout, or done any other boyish trick…. I never heard, and there appeared no
curiosity to know, what individual human being the urchin had deprived of life.

  Sir Gerald Portal, leader of Britain’s mission to Uganda in 1893, noted that “In the days of the late King Mutesa, and during the first years of the reign of Mwanga, executions on the most trivial pretext were of daily occurrence, not only at the capital and by command of the king, but all over the country, and at the mere will of these batongoli, or district chiefs.” Common people didn’t fare much better in the neighboring kingdom of Ankole, where the bahima, or ruling class, were said to never touch the ground, and would ceremonially walk across the backs of prostrate peasants and spit into their open mouths.

  Coming from this history of subjugation, Ugandans have viewed more recent trials like colonialism and Idi Amin as simply the latest in a long series of hardships. In the case of AIDS, people are aware of the threat, but they don’t live in fear. A person could struggle to avoid HIV but still die from malaria or tuberculosis, or there could be another war. Aunt Florence summarized the viewpoint perfectly one evening over a cup of wine. She had just received news of a death in the neighborhood and shook her head with a sad laugh. “Life is short,” she told me, raising her glass, “so drink up.”

  Musevini’s government was attacking the AIDS crisis with a straightforward public education campaign. Billboards in every town and posters throughout the public schools might have been having an effect on the younger generation, but adults were slow to change their habits, and the epidemic continued spreading through long-established customs of polygamy and widespread extramarital sex.* I once asked Tom how many years he and Susan had been married, and he looked shocked.

  “But we are not married!” he exclaimed, amazed I could have misinterpreted the situation. He went on to explain how he had eight children from seven different women: “My first job with the Ministry was in Masaka. For two years I stayed there, and I produced a kid. Then I was transferred to Kyambogo-side, this small place going toward Jinja. There I produced another kid. Then I shifted to Kampala…” His progeny were scattered throughout south-central Uganda and ranged in age from two to twenty, but he assured me that he had never been officially married. “You have one legal wife, whom you marry, but these others”—he made a dismissive gesture—“what are they?”

  We finished our sodas, and Tom bought a round of munanasi before his friends finally arrived. By the time we all reached the funeral, more than two hundred people were already crowded into the small, dusty yard. Susan’s family home stood close to Entebbe, a stout farmhouse with rusted tin roofing and mud-brick walls, set back from the highway among tall mango trees, narrow fields of arrowroot, and a stand of drooping bananas. The mourners crouched on straw mats and sat on benches in any available scrap of shade, talking softly while a hot breeze riffled the mango leaves above and cars rushed by on the busy Entebbe Road.

  We joined several men in the wavering shadow of a ragged banana tree. Tom’s bearded face was clenched and turned down in a stern frown, and he dabbed sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. The rest of the group grew somber as well, from sadness perhaps, but also because we were too late to find good seats in the shade.

  Across the yard I spotted DK, a regular at Annette’s place. He was standing near the house with a cut banana leaf balanced on his head like a long, green-billed hat. When he saw me he smiled and gave a friendly wave, the grin incongruous, like something neon among the sea of dark, solemn faces.

  Before the service, Susan emerged from the house and came over to greet us. She knelt carefully, keeping the crimson folds of her goma out of the dirt. We wouldn’t meet the rest of the family, Tom explained, because it went against custom to socialize with your in-laws. Baganda tradition forbids men from even stepping under the same roof as their spouse’s mother, an African twist on the long-running mother-in-law jokes in Western cultures.

  Susan returned to the house as they brought the simple wooden coffin outside, setting it carefully in the middle of the yard. A black-shirted priest followed, and everyone bowed heads for the first prayer. Two hens and a sickly rooster pecked the ground at our feet, clucking and squabbling until someone shooed them into the cookhouse and shut the door.

  The service was Catholic and long, a sermon and bible readings in Luganda, interspersed with prayers and singing. There were no hymnals. People knew these verses from long practice and seemed to anticipate each song before the pastor could even announce it. They sang loudly but without enthusiasm, staring unfocused into the distance. I stole glances at Tom, but he too looked disinterested, even bored as the funeral dragged on. Everyone prayed and chanted mechanically until the whole ceremony had the feeling of mourning by rote. As the coffin was lowered into a grave behind the family home, the mother and two sisters suddenly lunged forward, wailing and keening, but without tears.

  I watched with curious sympathy, struck by memories of another funeral I’d attended recently, for a childhood friend who died in a house fire shortly before I left the States. At his service, the shock and grief were palpable. Our sorrow was tinged with outrage, pervaded by the feeling that death had come too early and cheated him out of the best years of his life. In Uganda, however, people don’t expect to lead long lives. Where the average person reaches only forty-two years of age, any man in his midthirties could expect to be called muzee, “old sir,” a title of honor. Elderly people received even greater respect, in part from a simple appreciation that they had managed to survive their lives.

  With the body laid to rest, the pastor asked for donations to help the family, and everyone dropped something into his basket before filing out of the yard. Tom and I joined DK, Vincent, and most of the regulars to find transport back to Kajansi. The men began laughing and carrying on in high spirits as soon as the funeral was out of sight behind us, and we went directly from the taxi park to a bench outside Annette’s place.

  The skinny drunkard was still there, jerking around an alleyway with the unflagging stamina of true madness. In Uganda, each town had its cadre of the visibly unstable. With little professional treatment available, they simply became a part of the village landscape, cared for by extended family and the community in general with an almost affectionate acceptance. Some even gained a certain regional notoriety, like Mbarara’s man in burlap, the stone-throwing woman in the Ishaka taxi park, or the eternal hitchhiker, doggedly flagging every passing vehicle from his roadside village near Masaka. Nobody bothered the dancing man and his radio. In time, someone would probably bring him a meal.

  Annette greeted us with a jug of munanasi, and we launched into a boisterous round of matatu, the local card game. It’s a kind of complex crazy eights played at lightning speed, and named for the equally breakneck taxi vans that ply the Entebbe road. As usual, we divided into clan-based teams, Tom and I cheering, “Mborogoma!” whenever we won a hand.

  Coming immediately in the wake of a funeral, the scene’s brazen jollity felt contrived, almost eerie. Nobody mentioned the deceased or talked about the service. If there was any lingering melancholy, I seemed to be the only one feeling it, and I hadn’t even known the man. But he had been close to my own age, and I found myself wondering about him, wondering who was mourning his loss. Finally, my curiosity got the best of tact, and I asked Tom directly if Susan’s brother had died of AIDS.

  His face went stark and solemn in an instant, as out of place in the bustle of the bar as DK’s smile had been at the funeral. “Yes,” he said, and finished his wine in a gulp. “This one is terrible.” He paused for a moment, then turned toward me, taking in the whole bar with a nod of his head. “Look around you.”

  Michael and Vincent were arguing happily over the cards. A young boy walked by, selling sodas and skewers of roasted meat. Annette’s baby sat in the dirt, playing with a broken sandal, and the chicken man had finally stopped dancing; he stood stock-still, with the radio pressed against his ear like a shrieking plastic seashell.

  “Everyone you see here is carrying the virus,” Tom said quietly. “
Everyone.” And in his suddenly haunted eyes, I glimpsed for a heartbeat all the poignancy and grief that had seemed so absent from the funeral. We held that gaze for less than a second.

  “I will have you, Mborogoma!” DK laughed, calling us back into the game.

  Tom blinked and his smile returned in a flash. “Mborogoma!” he shouted back, and poured wine into our empty cups while DK shuffled, called the deuces wild, and dealt a new hand.

  6

  Sorry, Sorry, Sorry

  This roar was the most singular and awful noise I had ever heard in these African forests. It began with a sharp “bark,” like that of an angry dog; then glided into a deep bass roll which literally and closely resembled the roll of distant thunder along the sky. I have heard the lion roar, but greater, deeper and more fearful is the roar of the gorilla…. The earth was literally shaking under my feet as he roared, and for a while I knew not where I was. Was it an apparition from the infernal regions? Was I asleep or not? I was soon reminded that it was not a dream.

  —Paul du Chaillu

  from Wild Life Under the Equator, 1869

  My first major task in Bwindi Forest was to habituate the Katendegyere gorillas. Mubare group had been receiving paying visitors for several months, and that revenue had awakened park headquarters to the potential of gorilla tourism. Pressure from senior officials and increasing demand for tracking permits led to my marching orders: have the stubborn, aggressive apes of Katendegyere group calm enough for tourists by the end of the year.

  As I walked to the office one morning through birdsong and early gray light, I found myself hoping, as I hoped every day, that the trackers would be hungover.