by Thor Hanson
Sixty miles to the north, my friend Rob Rothe faced similar troubles at his site in Maramagombo forest.
“She broke up with me again,” he told me once in Kampala. “Said I was stirring my coffee wrong.”
I took a thoughtful sip of beer. Rob’s situation involved a German expatriate – language problems I could understand, but beverages? “How can you stir coffee wrong?”
“Too fast,” he said, shaking his head in glum wonder. “I was stirring my coffee too fast, and it bothered her.”
News of our romantic blunders soon flooded the Peace Corps gossip circuit, and I began receiving advice and lecherous commentary from people across the country. “What did you expect?” one friend asked me unsympathetically. “This is the Peace Corps, not a dating service.”
In the village, people regarded the Thor-Stephanie relationship as some kind of strange muzungu ritual. Ugandan romance operates under a completely different set of rules, with far less social interaction between unmarried men and women. In traditional families, arranged marriages often precluded courting, friendship, or even a meeting between the betrothed pair prior to their wedding day. Phenny and Hope were the only local couple I knew who socialized regularly together, but even Phenny found my problems strange. In the end, he attributed everything to bride-price. “Yes, Stephanie,” he commiserated one day on the trail. “For her I think you would owe the father more than goats . . . one new Toyota pickup, maybe two.”
William and I continued into the forest and found the first waterfall bridge twenty yards downstream from the crossing, washed up against a high bank but still intact.
“You know Munyaga, Tour?” he asked as we forded the river, arms out for balance on the slippery round stones. “People call it ‘the thief.’ ”
“Because it steals bridges?”
“Yes,” he answered when we reached the other side. “And crops and goats and sometimes lives. You know people have died in such floods.”
We walked on in silence. William’s personality fluctuated between gregarious good humor and long moments of pensive thought. He might drift off in the middle of a conversation, only to return seconds later with a completely new topic. But he spoke perfect English and excelled in the guide training program, scoring top marks on every examination. I sometimes imagined how my Buhoma friends might have lived, growing up outside of the village setting. With better opportunities for education and advancement, William could easily have been teaching the training classes, or running the entire park.
The largest Munyaga waterfall tumbled in white confusion over an eighty-foot rock face, filling the air with plumes of fine mist. William and I paused there to rest, leaning back against the soft embankment under an overhang of thick branches. Only one of the bridges needed major repairs, and I finally began to relax about the prince’s visit. Baboons, groundbreaking, and interpersonal chaos seemed to mingle and wash away in the constant rush of water noise.
The following morning, I was tracking Katendegyere group when Prince Bernhard arrived, but he had plenty of company: a personal assistant, two bodyguards, the director of Uganda National Parks, a television news crew, and various government officials from Kampala. Liz took all of them up the waterfall trail, but the prince was jetlagged and cut the trip short before they even reached our newly repaired bridges.
When I returned from the gorillas, people were already gathering for the ground-breaking ceremony. The park staff turned out in full uniform, mingling with a contingent from the village: the parish chief, the women’s club, the community campground committee. Our warden, Ignatius Achoka, had even brought sodas and beer from Butagota.
“You have an opener?” he whispered to me as we crowded around the building site. I nodded, pulled out my Swiss Army knife, and became the party’s official bartender.
The ceremony itself was something of an anticlimax: twenty minutes of speeches in the hot sun, followed by the prince, an energetic octogenarian in shorts and hiking boots, dropping a few mud bricks into a shallow hole and planting a wilted mahogany. After the applause, everyone stood around chatting and shaking hands happily, while I dragged the beer crate from under a shady bush and began to serve.
“Nile Special,” I explained, handing the first bottle to the prince with a smile. “Good beer.”
He offered a toast but excused himself from the party several minutes later to rest. I wondered if all the turmoil had been worth it, particularly when the visitor center wouldn’t see another minute’s work during the rest of my time in Buhoma. Even now, Prince Bernhard’s symbolic bricks are the only physical evidence of the structure. But everyone seemed pleased with the event, and the story on Uganda TV gave Bwindi a lot of good publicity. With a wave and a few words of good-bye, the prince handed me his half-empty bottle and disappeared down the road.
I watched him go and took a sip of the leftover beer. Over the course of two years abroad, every Peace Corps volunteer learns to scavenge like a desert vulture, following a steady devolution of manners and good taste. I had long since passed the point of turning down a slightly used Nile Special and happily rejoined the celebration with the prince’s backwash firmly in hand.
John and several members of the campground committee stood around the pile of bricks, looking down at the prince’s small tree. People sipped their beer amiably, appreciating the chance to socialize even if no one knew exactly what it was all about. “Where is Netherlands?” I heard someone ask. And the answer: “North, somehow north.”
13
Friends
I think I could turn and live with animals…. They do not sweat and whine about their condition . . . Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
—Walt Whitman
from Song of Myself, 1855
On my birthday, John treated me to dinner at Hope and Phenny’s place, the H & P Canteen. They lived and cooked in a narrow metal-roofed building directly across from the campground, serving up made-to-order meals of cabbage, beans, fried potatoes, and groundnut stew to the growing stream of tourists now visiting the park. John and I were regular customers too. The food was good, but we came just as much to socialize with the couple we’d grown to like so well: Phenny, the prankster with a serious heart, and Hope, a tireless source of kindness and capability in any situation.
In many ways, they represented the best possibilities for a place like Buhoma, two people from traditional families who instinctively grasped the potential of every new development in their community. They held good jobs, built a thriving restaurant business, and moved comfortably between village life and the emerging tourist culture of the park. Hope and Phenny seemed completely at ease with muzungus, yet still held respected positions in the village. She helped found the women’s group and kept books for the community campground, while Phenny’s leadership and work ethic made him a natural successor to his father, a leading village elder, or even his uncle, the local chief.
John had ordered chips ahead of time to go with the bottle of ketchup he’d found in Kampala. We sat inside and Hope came to join us, frowning thoughtfully as she sampled the exotic condiment. “It’s a bit sweet for potatoes, John,” she concluded. “Maybe as dessert?”
A young cousin came in from the kitchen, and Hope directed her on preparing the rest of the meal. She may have been taking a break from cooking, but there was no question about who was in charge. In spite of her full-time job at the park, Hope still managed the busy canteen every night and seemed involved in just about everything that happened in the village.
“I think that Buhoma will just stop when you have your maternity leave,” John joked with her, and she laughed until she coughed. “I’m serious,” he insisted. “You’re running this whole village!”
She protested and excused herself to the kitchen in embarrassment, but John was right. It was hard to imagine a functioning Buhoma without Hope.
After dinner, Phenny, John, and I walked deep into the forest without flashlights, stepping carefully along f
amiliar trails made strange by the darkness. We stopped at the first Munyaga bridge, three friends sitting over a black rush of water, talking about the ways our lives had crossed. I thought of a simple goal I’d had in joining the Peace Corps, to make friendships unbounded by the gaps of cultural difference. With Tom Ntale I’d gotten off to a strong start in Kajansi, and realized now that my real birthday present lay in finding the same thing happening in Buhoma.
A sudden downpour drenched us on the way home, and I woke up coughing the next morning. Two sneezing fits on the way to the office confirmed it: I’d caught my first rainy season cold. As if sensing my condition and knowing it would prevent me from tracking, Katendegyere group immediately did something dramatic.
“It is Makale,” Phenny told me worriedly. “He fought terribly with the big silverback and is now very sick. The trackers think he is dying.”
No one witnessed the fight itself, but traces of nervous, diarrhetic dung along the trail told them that something was wrong long before they reached the group. Soon they came to a wide, trampled area spotted with blood and bits of hair. They found the gorillas soon after, but the group was moving quickly away from the scene of the battle, and the trackers caught only glimpses of the two combatants: Mugurusi bleeding from scratches on his neck and arms, and another male trailing behind with deep head wounds and a mangled wrist.
“Are they sure it was Makale?”
“It should be,” Phenny affirmed, but identifying individual apes was still a new concept to the trackers, and the name Makale, “fierce one,” could easily apply to any gorilla involved in a fight.
Every afternoon the trackers came to my house with more bad news. His dung was bloody and he wasn’t eating. He couldn’t use his injured hand. He made his night nest farther and farther away from the rest of the group. I told them to keep watching carefully to try to confirm the gorilla’s identity, while I stayed at home, cursing the virus and waiting for my symptoms to fade.
Even in perfect health, however, I knew there was little I could have done for the injured ape. Liz had treated numerous gorillas in Rwanda for snare wounds and other human-induced problems, but although we kept tranquilizers and darting equipment on hand, we avoided interfering in the natural hazards of gorilla life. To do so could upset the group’s social hierarchy, not to mention the normal process of death and renewal. If Mugurusi had successfully defended his dominant role, sending a rejuvenated challenger back into the ring invited an unnatural conflict and behavioral disturbance.
Finally, days later, I woke with a clear head and no trace of coughing. The gorillas were nearby, lingering in a narrow canyon high above the Muzabajiro valley. Prunari told me they hadn’t moved far since the day of the fight, a typical behavior for groups with wounded or sick members. They adjusted their daily routine, traveling short distances and allowing their wounded companions extra time to feed.
“Makale is eating again,” Charles said, stopping on the trail to make the sign of a full belly with his hands. But the ape was still very shy, Phenny added, staying in the thick brush a good distance away from the rest of the group.
When we reached them, the gorillas had spread out, feeding in the dense undergrowth, visible only as a group of indistinct shadows and leaf tremors. We climbed to a small ledge at the head of the valley, hoping they would pass through an open place below us. The trackers prided themselves on choosing good vantage points and predicting the gorillas’ movements. When the first ape appeared in the clearing, Prunari looked back at me with a self-satisfied smile.
Suddenly, the gorilla lunged up the slope toward us with an angry scream, pulling at clumps of vegetation and baring his teeth. Gorillas usually prefer to charge from above, but this was Katome, “the small fist,” Makale’s little brother and the youngest of the black-back males. He often bluff-charged to cover for Mugurusi, and sure enough, the “old man” darted quickly across the clearing behind him as we backed away. I caught a glimpse of the red gashes on Mugurusi’s forearms before he disappeared up the hill. When gorillas fight, their long canine incisors can inflict terrible damage, and while Mugurusi may have emerged the victor, he obviously hadn’t escaped unscathed.
Katome fixed us with a beady-eyed stare as he withdrew, turning to follow Mugurusi up the slope. We rarely saw him venture far from the aging silverback, and before they settled on a name, the trackers had referred to him simply as “the assistant.” All the male gorillas in Katendegyere group were probably related, either the sons or younger brothers of Mugurusi. Lead silverbacks often tolerate several other males in their group, but they will aggressively defend exclusive mating privileges. Conflicts arise when the younger males attempt to breed, so most choose to emigrate when they reach sexual maturity. Traveling on their own, they gain strength and experience, hoping to attract females and start a new family. Some apes, however, remain in their natal groups for life, aging gracefully as secondary, nonbreeding silverbacks. Judging from his close relationship with Mugurusi, Katome seemed bent on following the latter path.
Several minutes later, Nyabutono crossed the clearing, followed by her three-year-old child, Kasigazi, “the little guy.” The rest of the group stayed out of sight behind the forest’s curtain of leaves, but we heard them slowly making their way uphill, until only one ape remained below us, feeding quietly in a dense thicket.
Phenny motioned toward the rustling bush with his lips, a distinctly Ugandan gesture developed to avoid pointing with a finger, which is considered rude. “This should be the one,” he whispered.
We settled in to wait, hoping the gorilla would choose a visible route when he decided to follow his family up the slope. Twenty minutes later, the other gorillas were completely out of earshot when he finally began to move. We watched the brush part around him as he emerged into the clearing, walking gingerly, with his left hand twisted backward at a sickening angle. A deep cut ran from behind his ear to the top of his head, laying the flesh open to the bone. At this distance I couldn’t make out his nose print, but when he turned sideways, a band of silver hair showed clearly across his lower back.
“Rugabo,” I whispered to Phenny, and handed him my binoculars.
“Yes,” he agreed, “a silverback.”
Not Makale, I thought, and was surprised by the strength of my relief. Since hearing of the injury I’d grown increasingly tense with worry, as over a sick friend one can do nothing to help. I was surprised too that the trackers hadn’t recognized this gorilla as the third silverback, the only unnamed member of the group. But he had always been reclusive, and we didn’t know him nearly as well as the others. I watched now as he made his way slowly across the far edge of the clearing, stopping twice to rest and feed. By pulling down branches with his good arm and bracing them with the broken hand, he could still strip off the edible bark and leaves. If he managed to avoid infection, a full recovery seemed likely. The skeletons of wild gorillas often show signs of healed fractures and other serious injuries. Fossey found old head wounds in nearly three-quarters of the silverbacks she studied; two of the skulls actually contained the cusps of their adversaries’ canines, broken off and fused into the mended bone.
After the gorilla had moved out of sight, I turned to the trackers. “This one we will always know,” I said, holding my left hand bent back at the wrist.
“Kacupira,” Prunari supplied immediately: “the one who limps.”
The name completed our lexicon of Katendegyere group, eight individuals as distinctive as any of my other friends and coworkers. Realizing this, I thought back to one of my first real discussions of gorilla behavior, with an expert named David Watts who had once worked with Dian Fossey. He’d been passing through Uganda and agreed to meet with me at the Peace Corps training center to give me some pointers. This is a little odd, I remembered thinking, as he continually referred to the apes with human pronouns: “someone grunted” or “everyone came over, and I know they remembered me.” Now I was doing the same thing, not to mention my degenerating f
eeding habits and a growing tendency to clear my throat with a cough-bark. When I started making night nests and raiding Behuari’s banana shamba, I would know it was time to go home.
“You’re from Washington?” the woman cried, and turned to find her husband. “Honey, come meet…Todd. He’s from D.C.! Get the camera!”
Her husband waved back without answering. He was cheerfully sharing cigarettes with the trackers and chatting about the lions he’d seen in Kenya. Charles and Prunari looked hungover but smiled their thanks, stowing the cigarettes carefully in a dry pocket of the tattered backpack they shared.
“What are your names? What can I call you guys?” I heard the man ask.
Charles stared back in vague comprehension, then gave him the baffling answer, “God made me.”
“Great!” The man nodded enthusiastically, and I tried not to laugh. Good-natured noncommunication always set a jovial tone for the day, and I just hoped we could avoid more serious complications. A week before, the tourists had all gone hungry after their porters mistakenly devoured the lunches they’d been hired to carry.
With three new safari camps in Buhoma, more high-end American tourists were visiting Bwindi Park. People reacted with surprise on finding a Peace Corps volunteer in the jungle. Younger travelers often envied my position, but anyone with children echoed the response of today’s group: “Your parents must be worried sick.”
Half an hour later, all conversation came to a halt on the steep slopes of Rushura. The couple and their friends were in their mid-sixties, on an extended East African trip sponsored by a midwestern zoo. After two weeks of touring the savanna in minivans, hiking up a mountainside came as something of a shock. The guide and trackers stopped frequently and kept the pace slow, but it’s still a difficult climb, and the eldest of the men started falling behind. I watched him stumble and lean into the hillside with every step, sweat pouring from his forehead.