The Impenetrable Forest

by Thor Hanson

  After years of chasing animals through the forest, Prunari Rukundema, Charles Kyomukama, and Mishana James no longer differentiated between level ground and Bwindi’s precipitous, mud-slick hillsides. They set a grueling pace up every incline and skipped nimbly down the slopes, wearing simple flip-flop sandals or plastic boots, with lunch pails balanced easily on their heads. I felt ridiculous flailing along behind them in my hundred-dollar hiking shoes and fancy rain gear, slipping and tumbling over tree roots and shrubs like a giant Gore-Tex pinball. Only Charles spoke any English, but they all soon learned to express their sympathy as I crashed and slid through the undergrowth.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” came their cries after every fall, a distinctive chorus that marked our path through the jungle as surely as raucous croaks announced the hornbill, or a screech the panicked monkey.

  My only chance to keep up lay in their fondness for tonto, the local banana beer. On mornings after a paycheck, market day, or any other time they could afford to tie one on, their speed through the forest slowed from breakneck to merely brisk. Sometimes, if waragi had been involved, they were still staggering, and I was able to get in a few sorrys of my own.

  That morning, I knew I was in luck when Prunari greeted me with bloodshot eyes and a mumbled, boozy-smelling “Agandi.” He and Charles set off at a weary march while I brought up the rear with Mishana, a tall, impossibly skinny man whose face knew only two expressions: pinched in nervous thought or leering a yellow-toothed grin. Today he was thinking as we started the long, vertical climb up Rushura Hill.

  After several quiet minutes, we heard a shout and Phenny Gongo caught up with us on the trail. Smiling and sober, he taunted the trackers in Rukiga before moving up to take the lead. With a strong work ethic and an excellent command of English, Phenny was one of Bwindi’s best ranger-guides. His mischievous sense of humor transcended culture and endeared him to the staff and tourists alike. We’d become friends easily, and he often used my Peace Corps address for the postcards, letters, and packages his new international acquaintances began sending him from around the world.

  A month before my arrival, Liz received a formal visit from Phenny and Hope Nsiime, our only female guide. After tea and polite roundabout greetings, Hope and Phenny turned to Liz with a curious hypothetical question: would the park or the gorilla program see any problem with having two ranger-guides who were married? Liz happily answered no, and the wedding went on to become one of Buhoma’s most legendary parties. Hope and Phenny were now expecting their first child, and talked eagerly about opening a restaurant across from the new campground.

  “The trackers are weak,” Phenny called back to me, laughing and swinging at an overhanging branch with his panga. “They are paying for last night!”

  “Ah, Gongo,” I answered, calling on one of my newest Ugandan English phrases: “On Rushura, we are all suffering together.”

  At more than 6,200 feet, Rushura Hill loomed high over Bwindi’s western park boundary and the Zairian border. The trail ran straight up through steep-banked banana shambas and millet fields along the park edge. With a hot tropical sun rising overhead, climbing without the benefit of shade seemed like suffering indeed, a penance that Katendegyere group put us through nearly every morning. They had lingered for close to a month in a shrub-choked valley two ridges south of the summit. Eventually, my legs grew used to the climb, but in those first weeks I gained a lasting empathy for every tourist who followed in the years ahead; some of them would turn around and give up their tracking permits after one look at the towering hillside.

  On the final incline we passed a row of tall Caribbean pines, an introduced species planted as boundary markers in the 1960s, when Bwindi was still a forest reserve. The smell of pitch and the hiss of wind through needles stood out from the humid green of the rain forest like glaring stage props, but at times their incongruity was comforting, an evergreen reminder of my home in the Pacific Northwest. As if to complete the picture, slate-dark rain clouds moved in to cover the sky when we reached the summit.

  We paused for water near the stump of a small tree, where someone had crossed into the park, cutting firewood. Only three years earlier, fresh stumps were all too common in Bwindi. Corruption in the Uganda Forest Department led to unchecked poaching and made illegal logging one of the area’s top industries. The struggle to upgrade Bwindi from forest reserve to national park status came at a critical time. Large mahoganies and other valuable hardwoods had been extracted from nearly 90 percent of the forest, while poachers had hunted leopards and buffalo to local extinction, and reduced the elephant population to fewer than twenty-five individuals. Lackadaisical rangers allowed people to encroach and settle inside the reserve boundaries, and long-term prospects for the forest looked bleak.

  Gorillas had survived in Bwindi for one primary reason: local people do not regard them as food. Unlike in West Africa, where apes are considered a delicacy and prized for their medicinal uses, Ugandan hunters tended to fear and avoid the large primates. In the late 1980s, nearly three hundred gorillas remained, living in obscurity in the rugged, high-altitude portions of the park. Although separated from the well-studied Virunga population by only twenty-five miles, Bwindi’s gorillas were virtually unknown, and their taxonomic status had never been established. When a genetic study showed them to be mountain gorillas, rarest of all the great apes, conservationists had at last found their rallying cry.

  By focusing on the gorillas, an endangered and famous species, Ugandan and international groups helped urge the government to protect all of the Impenetrable Forest and its unusually varied collection of flora and fauna. As one of the few protected rain forests in Africa to encompass both lowland and montane habitats, Bwindi gives home to an exceptional array of wildlife. Preliminary surveys indicate more than 350 bird species, between 300 and 400 types of butterfly, more than 220 trees, and 100 different mammals, including 10 primates. For the sake of comparison, Bwindi’s biodiversity surpasses that of all six New England states combined, yet is found in a single forest less than a tenth the size of greater Boston.

  When the Musevini government gazetted Bwindi, the Rwenzori Mountains, and nearby Mgahinga Gorilla Reserve as national parks in 1991, it demonstrated an encouraging commitment to protect Uganda’s natural resources. The move earned praise from the international community and saved vital habitat for gorillas and myriad other species, but not without certain expectations. Musevini had pledged to revitalize Uganda’s tourism industry, and certainly recognized the economic potential of gorilla tracking, which in times of peace had been the third highest generator of foreign exchange in neighboring Rwanda.

  Many in the scientific community had hoped to preserve Bwindi’s mountain gorillas in a completely undisturbed setting, an exclusive preserve for a fragile, endangered species. The same arguments surfaced in the early 1980s, when legendary researcher Dian Fossey expressed reservations about the first gorilla tourism efforts in Rwanda and Zaire. But while the concept of a “gorilla ark” is appealing to nearly all conservationists, the idea rates as impractical, even untenable, in modern Central Africa. Both Bwindi Forest and the Virunga Volcanoes are tiny islands of habitat, surrounded by one of the densest rural populations on the continent. The area supports from 150 to more than 500 people per square kilometer, with growth rates that could double the population in less than 20 years.

  Faced with this increasing demand for land and forest products, local people and governments need very tangible reasons to set aside parks and reserves. Natural resource managers must embrace every possible conservation tool, and Uganda National Parks decided to center its efforts in Bwindi around the economic benefits of a carefully managed tourism program. In 1992, they appealed to the International Gorilla Conservation Program (IGCP) for advice. Sponsored jointly by the World Wildlife Fund, the African Wildlife Foundation, and Britain’s Fauna and Flora International IGCP brought financial support, as well as mountain gorilla expertise, in the form of my Buhoma colleague, Dr.
Liz Macfie.

  Drawing on her experiences as a gorilla veterinarian in Rwanda, Liz helped design a project in Bwindi that would emulate that country’s financial successes, while avoiding the pitfalls of overhabituation, excessive behavioral disturbance, and the risk of human disease transmission.

  “In Rwanda, we had generations of gorillas growing up in close contact with people,” she told me, referring to the apes habituated by Dian Fossey in the 1970s. “People didn’t know about disease transmission then, and they regularly came into physical contact with the gorillas. Now those animals are set in their habits, and their health is at serious risk, not to mention the danger to people. When a forty-pound juvenile crawls onto your lap, it’s not a problem. But when that gorilla grows up to weigh 350 pounds, his play behavior can break your arm.”

  The challenge lies in finding a balance, getting close enough to observe the gorillas without exposing them to human diseases or having too strong an impact on their natural behavior. Habituated animals should ignore people as much as possible and treat them as an innocuous part of the landscape. When they begin interacting with their human observers, the process has gone too far and puts both parties at risk. With Katendegyere group we were still in the early “patience” stages, trying to find a distance at which the gorillas were comfortable, then gradually closing that gap until we could view them regularly through Bwindi’s dense undergrowth.

  While I was habituating Katendegyere, Liz and the park advisory committee were hard at work editing Bwindi’s first management plan. But strict safeguards for the gorillas had already been put in place. We maintained a minimum distance of five meters from the animals at all times, and refrained from eating, drinking, or talking above a whisper within a quarter mile. All trash and food scraps were packed out, and any human waste buried at least ten inches underground. Tourists visiting Mubare group were limited to six people in a tight, quiet group, accompanied by a park guide and trackers. They stayed with the gorillas for a maximum of one hour, and anyone exhibiting signs of illness would be turned back, including park staff.

  If there was any statistical risk of gorillas catching a human hangover, the trackers would certainly have stayed behind this morning. But as the hike stretched into its second hour, they began to recover, bantering back and forth and slowly picking up the pace. We entered Bwindi’s dim shade near the hilltop and moved quickly now, grabbing at branches and tree roots for support as we descended a steep, slippery trail to the valley floor. A shallow gulch trickling with water marked the source of Muzabajiro Creek, and we crossed it in easy leaps. Soon we were climbing again through a large clearing in the forest, where isolated canopy trees lunged skyward like spreading hands, surrounded by thick waves of dense green shrubbery. We found Katendegyere group’s day-old trail near the top of the second rise and turned to follow, cutting back the vegetation with ringing panga blows. Our passing sent a troop of blue monkeys leaping through the treetops and startled up clouds of tiny indigo butterflies that winked through the leafy green around us like specks of misplaced midnight.

  When the trail began to look fresh, Prunari and Mishana took the lead. They were both talented trackers, able to follow the apes through any terrain but cursed by one of the cruelest career-choice ironies I’ve ever encountered: they were terrified of gorillas. To be fair, Katendegyere group’s five males often struggled against one another for dominance and were notoriously nervous around people. I hadn’t seen more than a few lunges and barks, but I knew their aggression could easily lead to a charge on their human observers.

  Still, the group’s habituation might have progressed faster without the trackers’ habit of avoidance. Without supervision, they were known to hike into the forest, have lunch and a quick nap, and then return to the office with a glowing report that “the gorillas are very fine.” My major role on the team was simply to ensure that we reached the group and actually stayed with them for the full habituation period.

  I wanted the process to be successful, but at times I felt terrible putting the trackers through it. Their anxiety increased visibly the closer we came, and I tried to imagine their thoughts as they deciphered the complex bent-leaf trail: “Ah, see the broken twigs there, the gorillas have passed this way. Here is the dung of a male. The trail is becoming very fresh now. SHIT!!!”

  We descended slowly into a narrow, knife-thin ravine and soon enough heard the twig-snapping racket of feeding apes. Just then, a celestial valve opened somewhere high in the clouds, and rain began tumbling down over us in an unbroken lead-glass curtain. We glimpsed flashes of black as the gorillas moved deeper into the undergrowth to wait out the storm, and we cast about to find our own shelter from the rain.

  As we pulled up our hoods and hunkered down, Phenny touched my arm and gestured across the ravine. A gorilla, one of the females, had settled in full view less than thirty yards away. Through binoculars I could see the water running down her face as she stared resolutely into the storm. Her eyes held a look of calm wisdom, like a patient old fisherman or a veteran schoolteacher—someone in control, with little room for surprise.

  I pulled out my notebook and tried sketching her “nose print,” the distinctive pattern of wrinkles and scars that researchers use to distinguish individuals in a group. Recognizing specific animals is essential to understanding social dynamics and predicting an individual’s behavior. With the trackers’ help, I hoped to identify and name all the Katendegyere and Mubare gorillas, and Liz had asked me to establish a set of photographs for the IGCP files. But with rainwater sluicing over the lens of my binoculars, I gave up on art and photography and settled in to wait, unconsciously mimicking the sullen posture of my primate cousin across the valley.

  The cloudburst came down in heavy, tropical drops that seemed not so much to fall as to bounce, setting every individual leaf into spastic motion, as if the whole forest was orchestrated in a grand, botanical dance. After an hour, the shower finally began tapering off. We stood up to shake the water from our raincoats and watched Katendegyere group slowly rouse themselves to action. But in the ravine’s thick tangle, we didn’t see gorillas so much as the movement of gorillas, a shaking branch, shuddering leaves, or the tall shrubs parting from below as individuals spread out around us to feed.

  The female had moved closer and squatted now on a wide log, stripping thin creepers from an overhanging branch. As she reached up to pull down a fistful of vines, something drew my attention to her right hand. The last two fingers stood out at a sharp angle, broken some time ago and improperly healed. The injury may have resulted from a fall or a fight, but more probably arose from one of the many wire snares set in the forest by poachers hunting bushpigs, duiker,* and other small game. Wound tight around a gorilla’s foot or wrist, snares often lead to serious infections, gangrene, and even death. With only two fingers maimed, this gorilla had gotten off lightly. They actually made her appear almost quaint, handling each leaf daintily, like an English matron serving tea in delicate porcelain cups.

  I turned to ask the trackers if she had a name, but before I could speak, the foliage behind them erupted, and a large male gorilla charged full speed down the slope. He moved in a hunched, loping gallop that should have seemed awkward but managed to cover the ground between us with lightning fluidity. Screaming in rage and trampling everything in his path, he was on us in something less than a heartbeat.

  Renowned zoologist George Schaller once wrote that gorillas “are eminently gentle and amiable creatures, and the dictum of peaceful coexistence is their way of life.” What an idiot, I thought. Somewhere in my mind, I knew that charging was only a bluff tactic, an elaborate display that actually helped minimize direct physical conflict between males. All the textbooks agreed that so long as I didn’t fight back or try to run, the actual danger was negligible. But with a roaring, furious gorilla thundering toward me, this knowledge fled from my brain faster than goats from a sleeping herd boy.

  The ape careened past in a flash of bared teeth and wi
ld eyes, less than an arm’s reach from my face, and in that instant I gained complete understanding for the trackers’ fear. My rational mind cowered behind one overpowering impulse: let’s get the hell out of here.

  The gorilla spun away, still screaming, and continued down the slope. The noise alone was heart-stopping: an indescribable roar, ragged and impossibly loud, the way a wounded pit bull might howl if it outweighed a bison and happened to be wired into the speaker system at a Led Zeppelin concert.

  Below us, he paused to hammer a staccato thunderclap against the ground with open palms, before circling up through the undergrowth for another pass. We held our position and braced ourselves as he came into view above us. Glowering with dark, inscrutable eyes, he screamed again and lunged forward but didn’t charge.

  The staredown continued for several tense minutes, and I regained enough composure to raise my binoculars for a closer look. Though the glasses I could make out every wrinkle in his leathery face, the shadow of his brow, the dark brown eyes narrowed in anger. He had a distinctive notch running sideways from his left nostril, but I would come to know this gorilla more by his haughty, belligerent glare than any scar or nose print.

  I glanced at the trackers and they looked shaken. Suddenly I realized they had it far worse than me; I couldn’t imagine how those screams must have sounded with a hangover.

  The gorilla lunged again, an aggressive, stiff-legged lurch, accompanied by loud barks. We backed off, regaining our five-meter distance and coughing quietly to mimic the sound of gorillas at rest. This seemed to mollify him, and he sat down, tearing at the leaves around him as if feeding.

  “Makale,” Phenny whispered, a Rukiga word meaning “fierce one.” Prunari, Mishana, and Charles all nodded their assent with wary grins, and I shakily penciled the word into my notebook. We had named our first gorilla.