by Thor Hanson
I put all thoughts of loss behind me the next morning as we neared Mubare group, climbing the steep, densely forested hill that bears their name. James Tibamanya, the lead tracker, gave me a cool smile and motioned the tourists to silence. Perpetually hungover, he usually lagged behind until the tracking became difficult, then took over the point position, cap askew, and led us straight to the group. Today we heard them feeding from several hundred yards away and approached slowly through the sun flecks and shade.
Ruhondeza lay like a heap of black earth in a bower of shrubs, predictably asleep while his family foraged around him. Three of the juveniles climbed into a low, spreading omwifa and played king of the mountain, grappling, hooting, and pushing one another from the tallest branches. I scanned the group but saw no sign of the infant. Tibamanya tapped my arm and pointed with his lips to a dark shape, deep in the undergrowth behind the sleeping silverback. Through binoculars I watched the young female, Mamakawere, facing away from me and preening something just out of sight. Then she stood, and for an instant I saw her baby clearly, a wide-eyed, pale-skinned newborn clinging to the dark bulge of her stomach, as if it were all the hope in the world.
15
Changes
Year after year
on the monkey’s face
a monkey’s face
—Basho, Japanese poet, 17th century
Translated by Robert Hass
Karema hammered the ground with a resonant, double-handed slap and stalked toward us stiff-legged, her calm brown eyes suddenly flinty with aggression.
“Slowly, slowly,” Levi whispered to the tourists, a wide-eyed German couple in matching yellow rain suits. We inched backward, regaining our fifteen-foot distance, and crouched down in a patch of dew-wet ferns.
Karema advanced to the small omwifa tree where we’d been standing. She reached up, snapped off a leafy branch, and settled back against the narrow trunk, shaking the whole tree with her weight. Food in hand, her mood relaxed immediately. The whole incident was simply her way to make us step aside, the same communication technique that gorillas use to establish dominance and feeding privileges within the group. Still, any sign of hostility seemed out of character for Karema, the most gentle, even-tempered Katendegyere ape.
Levi glanced in my direction with an I-told-you-so smile. He and the other guides had warned me of Karema’s newfound surliness—they thought she might be pregnant. I watched carefully through binoculars, but her bulging midsection looked the same as any normal gorilla stomach. Great apes have digestive systems just like ours, without the chambered stomachs or other adaptations that help grazers and browsers process plant food efficiently. They must take in huge quantities of vegetation to survive, and mountain gorillas spend more than a third of their waking hours foraging and feeding. Adult females can eat twenty pounds of fruit, leaves, and bark in a single day, and silverbacks average twice as much. Their constantly bloated stomachs make determining pregnancy a great challenge for researchers. Dian Fossey wrote of her shock and disbelief when Puck, the energetic young “male” in one of her primary study groups, suddenly gave birth.
Karema fed calmly on the omwifa’s fruit and leaves for close to thirty minutes. As I scrutinized her, I began to realize that Fossey’s Puck confusion might answer all of our questions. Whenever Karema stretched upward to grab a branch or cluster of small fruit, I noticed surprisingly burly muscles rippling under the smooth black skin of her chest. Facially, she had always resembled Mugurusi and Kacupira, with long, narrow features that gave all of them a haughty, almost aristocratic appearance. But now her whole head reminded me of the silverbacks, with a subtle pointiness that echoed their pronounced, and distinctively male, sagittal crests.
“I think we have made a mistake,” I told Levi on the walk home. “Karema is a man.”
He looked incredulous. A ranger-guide since the park was created, Levi Rwahamuhanda knew the gorillas as well as anyone. “No…is it?”
That night I pored over old photographs, picking out the slight but noticeable progression of Karema’s male features slowly taking over. The guides and trackers accepted this change grudgingly. We’d all come to think of Karema as a calm young female, helping balance the group’s unusual and aggressively masculine social dynamic. His sudden transformation skewed the sex ratio even further, bringing the number of mature males to six, all vying for the attention of a single female, Nyabutono. The sex of her child, Kasigazi, remained a mystery, but its rambunctious play behavior had led the trackers to choose a name meaning “little guy.”
In the field, young gorillas resemble one another too closely to recognize their sexes. Barring a physical examination, the most reliable method is simply to wait. When males reach adolescence in their ninth or tenth year, the differences gradually become obvious. Like Karema, they develop strong, hairless chests and a distinctive crest along the upper sagittal area of the skull. Continuing to grow, they eventually double their sisters in size and begin showing silvery gray hairs on the lower back at age thirteen or fourteen. Contrary to public opinion and local myth, the silver back is not an honor reserved for group leaders. All males gray as they age, their light saddle eventually spreading down onto the flanks and thighs. Females reach sexual maturity during this same period, settling the question by giving birth to their first child at age ten or eleven.
As if proving a point of machismo, Karema grew more belligerent in the months that followed. He started shadowing Katome on mock charges, and we found him one day with a fresh head wound, evidence of his first major intragroup scuffle. But through it all he seemed hesitant and uncomfortable in his new role, like a teenager reluctantly succumbing to peer pressure. Eventually, he settled back into old habits, leaving the charges and other histrionics to his more excitable older siblings.
On one rare sunny day at the height of the October rains, he walked quietly toward us and lay down to rest, kicking his feet in the air and yawning, with an arm flung over his eyes to block out the light. The tourists snapped dozens of pictures before turning to the guide.
“Which gorilla is this?” someone whispered.
“Karema,” he answered simply. “She is our newest male.”
Late afternoon sunlight angled golden over the forest as I sat on the porch, writing guide evaluations and sipping tea. I heard footsteps on the path, and my new Peace Corps neighbor, Karen Archabald, stomped into the house, threw her notebook on the table, and settled into a chair.
“I don’t understand why everyone here is so fascinated with my breasts!”
I smiled and offered her a cup of tea. “Did the women’s group cop a feel again?”
“Yes.” She laughed, exasperated. “I was talking, and someone tried to lift up my shirt.”
I’d heard the same complaint from other female volunteers: Ugandan women seemed to have an insatiable curiosity about muzungu breasts. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said helpfully. “The trackers don’t seem too interested in mine.”
“Shut up.”
Karen arrived in Uganda only four short weeks after graduating from an Ivy League college in New England. She made the transition with amazing ease, aided by her great sense of humor and a riotous laugh that could bridge any cultural gap. When Karen found something funny, no one around her could help but join in the laughter.
“This Kareni,” the campground chairman told me after their first meeting. “She is jolly, jolly indeed.”
Karen moved into a small hut up the slope from my own, becoming my nearest full-time neighbor now that Dominico had sold his shamba to the park and moved farther into the village. She would often wander down in the evening for a bowl of beans and potatoes, and we quickly developed a camaraderie steeped in the humor of life as village muzungus.
Beyond the laughter, however, Karen’s great asset as a volunteer was her innate empathy for the people she worked with. This compassion would draw her deep into the web of joy and tragedy that is life in rural Uganda. It equipped her well for the
daunting task of filling John Dubois’s shoes as Buhoma’s community-development volunteer. Three years in the village had earned him legendary status as an organizer, motivator, and counselor for community projects. Luckily, Karen met John for several days of training in Buhoma, time for him to pass on some of his experience and site-specific knowledge.
“ ‘Don’t loan Benon any money,’ ” she quoted later.
“What?”
“That’s all John told me,” she said, throwing up her hands. “That’s all I have to go on here.”
“Well, it’s good advice.” I laughed. “He’d never pay you back.”
“Yeah, but who the hell is Benon?”
To mark the end of his time in Uganda, John threw a three-goat party and invited the whole parish. Hundreds of people crowded into the old campground, eating, dancing, and drinking tonto in homage to the curly-haired man from Connecticut who had devoted a part of his life to their village.
“He is my son!” Dominico crowed, a sentiment echoed by the entire community. The park staff and scout troops hated to see John go, posing for endless rounds of pictures in the fading gold light of his last Buhoma evening. The women’s group composed a special song; the parish chief made a speech; and Phenny and Hope brought their newborn daughter, Amanda, giving the infant a final glimpse of her famous “Uncle John.” Hope was still weak from the birth, but she and Phenny looked radiant, their pride as new parents overcoming the sadness of bidding John farewell.
John’s good-bye party marked a turning point for me in Buhoma. During my second year, tourism in the forest increased dramatically, and the tempo of village life accelerated to keep pace. From a fledgling park with two wardens and a borrowed motorcycle, Bwindi had grown into the major source of revenue for the entire national park system. Six full-time wardens and an equal number of expatriate advisers struggled to coordinate construction projects, antipoaching, revenue sharing, conservation education, and multiple use. IGCP extended its activities into Mgahinga, and Liz found herself tied up with meetings and workshops, sometimes visiting Buhoma less than once a month. I took over much of the project’s on-site administration and spent every morning in the office, helping manage a chaotic visitor check-in process we came to know as “the tourist shuffle.”
With Rwanda’s civil war spilling over into Zaire, more and more tourists chose Bwindi for their gorilla tracking experience. Our permits sold out months in advance, and we often had people waiting on standby, camped out in Buhoma for days at a time. Most visitors arrived well informed and ready for a day in the forest, but with language barriers from Rukiga and English to Japanese or Dutch, the possibilities for miscommunication were endless. Common complaints ranged from “It’s raining, I want a refund” to “The gorillas are nice, but what you really need is a gift shop.” The guides laughed for weeks after one woman showed up in high heels and makeup, wondering where she could catch the mountain gorilla minibus. When we explained the rigors of tracking, she pretended to faint, swooning into the arms of a nearby ranger, and then demanded her money back for reasons of health. But in terms of sheer drama, we spent our most exciting morning with a visiting Israeli general. He didn’t have a permit but demanded access to the gorillas on grounds of diplomatic immunity. His Ugandan escort, an army colonel with dark sunglasses and a beret, called park headquarters on the radio, threatening to hold our warden at gunpoint until we agreed to “cooperate.”
The gorillas adjusted to their celebrity status with aplomb, calmly indifferent to the whir of cameras and video. Both Mubare and Katendegyere groups were fully habituated now, receiving their daily visitors with only an occasional charge, chest beat, or other sign of stress. I accompanied the tourist groups at least twice a week, monitoring the gorillas, evaluating the staff, and finding new topics for my biweekly guide-training sessions. While we covered everything from ornithology to first aid, it was my lectures on gorilla behavior that prompted the liveliest reaction from the guides.
“For gorillas, the forest is a restaurant,” I told them one day, gathered under a shady tree near the office. “Their diet includes well over sixty different plants and trees, as well as fruit, grubs, ants, and even their own dung.”
Everyone looked horrified and stopped taking notes.
“It can’t be!” Medad exclaimed in disgust and disbelief. “Not the dung. We have never seen it. The trackers have never seen it.”
I assured him that Fossey and other researchers had observed the practice many times, suspecting that certain nutrients could be absorbed only on their second journey through the gorillas’ inefficient stomach. But the guides were adamant: no self-respecting Bwindi ape would ever feed on its own excrement.
“Maybe for those Virunga gorillas,” Phenny concluded. “You know they are dirty.”
Combined with the in-forest work, shuffling tourists and training guides kept me busier than a tonto bar on market day. I sometimes found myself pining for the old days when Buhoma was still a sleepy one-goat town. John and I laughed and reminisced about the past whenever I saw him in Kampala. He had stayed in the country for more than a month after his Buhoma departure, working on the one task he had yet to complete in Uganda. Through a generous donation of surplus equipment, he secured himself a temporary teaching post at Makerere University. The subject of his class? An Introduction to American Baseball.
Prunari knelt down and rummaged through the matted leaves and twigs of a large night nest. “Mutesi,” he concluded, plucking out a short black hair and holding it up in the sunlight. He stood, brushed his knees, and handed the evidence to me: a wiry bristle, like horsetail, with the distinctive gray tip of a silverback.
“And here is Makale,” said Charles, pulling all-black hairs from another nest several yards away. “From yesterday,” he added. “The dung is old.”
I sighed and checked my watch. Late afternoon sun angled through a broken sky, throwing cloud shadows across the forest like vast, drifting ink stains. From Hakanyasi Hill, the landscape spread around us like features on a relief map: Bwindi’s green ridges gave way to coffee trees and burned fields in Zaire, falling off sharply to the Ivi River valley and the great, flat-bottomed emptiness of the rift. It was a beautiful place but a long walk from Buhoma, and I’d already made the trackers work a double shift: visiting Katendegyere group with the tourists and now searching for the two renegade males.
As if to prove the gorilla world could change as fast as Buhoma, Makale and Mutesi had disappeared from Katendegyere group sometime the previous week. They went quietly, leaving no signs of a fight or confrontation with Mugurusi. The trackers simply noticed two missing night nests and reported no sightings of either male. When several Zairian farmers complained at the park office about a pair of crop-raiding gorillas, we had little doubt that we’d found our runaways. The night nests on Hakanyasi confirmed it, but the trail was still a day old, and I’d hoped for a visual sighting. I decided to return in the morning to continue the search.
“Ka tugaruka,” I said to the trackers –“Let’s go back” – and we started bushwhacking downhill through the clearing’s thick vegetation. Charles led the way, swinging his panga and leaning forward to push a path through the vines. We followed behind him, walking across a tangled mat of leaves and thick shrubs, suspended several inches above the ground. Suddenly, Charles shouted and leaped backward into me, knocking both of us down in a heap. I thought we’d stumbled into Makale until I heard Mishana and Prunari start laughing out loud.
“Enjoka,” Charles admitted sheepishly, pointing with his panga. I peered into the greenery and glimpsed a flash of the reptile before it slipped away, something large and black like a forest cobra. With fourteen different varieties, including bush vipers, rhinoceros adders, spitting cobras, and other deadly poisonous species, Bwindi’s snakes aroused more abject fear than any other rain forest inhabitants. And with good reason. Traditional remedies took time to prepare, and village healers held the proper mixture of herbs as a closely guarded trade secre
t. The nearest Western serums were at Kisizi, over three hours away, if a vehicle were even available. Charles helped me up and laughed with relief while the others teased him, reenacting the encounter with exaggerated leaps and terrified shouts. But the levity died out as we set off again, and I noticed that no one offered to take Charles’s place in the lead.
I arrived at the office early the next morning and found the trackers gathered around the cook pot out back, drinking hot mugs of corn meal porridge.
“Erizooba ninronda Makale na Mutesi,” I told them, explaining that I wanted to return to Hakanyasi and spend the whole day tracking. Immediately, their eyes fell from mine, and they started shifting uncomfortably. “Two of you have to go with the tourists,” I went on. “But I need someone to help me find Makale.”
They hated this. None of the staff wanted to get anywhere near the gorillas with fewer than four people.
“Makale will count,” Medad used to say, squinting and nodding his head like a gorilla doing arithmetic, “and if you are too few, then he knows he can charge!”
Finally, Mishana volunteered to join me, stepping forward reluctantly, as if accepting latrine duty in a Siberian gulag. We climbed together through the overgrown tea fields behind my house, past the level plot of land where Dominico’s family compound had stood. Overgrown yam plants grew up through the thatch of the fallen cook hut, broad leaves shining in the porcelain light of a cloudy Bwindi morning.
Crossing into the forest, we startled two palm nut vultures from their roost in a leafless canopy snag. They flapped briefly and drifted out over the valley, their wings a geometric study in black and white against the deep greens of the opposite ridge. We took the Muzabajiro trail and hiked toward distant Hakanyasi, hoping to find Makale and Mutesi before they shifted to another area. Lone males or sibling pairs often shadowed the movements of their old group mates, but their ranges expanded quickly as they gained more confidence on their own.