The Impenetrable Forest

by Thor Hanson

  Emigration plays a vital social and biological role in gorilla populations, helping maintain a steady flow of individuals and genes among the various families. Most males leave their natal group when they reach sexual maturity, traveling on their own or in sibling pairs like Makale and Mutesi. As they gain in strength and experience, they begin seeking out other groups and challenging the lead silverbacks. These interactions involve dramatic displays of charging and chest beats, occasionally resulting in violent physical conflict. In rare cases, the intruding male defeats the resident silverback and takes over his role of leadership. More commonly, females use the conflict as a chance to shop around for a new mate. A younger, low-ranking individual might choose to switch allegiance and follow the challenger, with whom she’ll have higher status and a better chance of successfully rearing her children. Most females make several intergroup transfers during their lifetime, helping form new families or carrying their genes to other well-established groups.

  With Mugurusi presiding over five growing bachelors and only one female, Katendegyere group had been long overdue for a change. In the months before their departure, Makale and Mutesi had spent more and more time together, moving on the periphery of the group and harassing the younger males. Mutesi was the larger and stronger of the two, but Makale seemed to dominate his older brother, leading the way whenever they charged. I once watched them displace Karema for no apparent reason, chasing him from a prime feeding area with repeated lunges and screams, only to settle down and sleep as soon as the young black-back abandoned his meal. Aggression within the group decreased noticeably after they left, the way unruliness might disappear from a high school gym class after suspending the chief troublemakers. But I found myself missing Makale’s surly antics, and I was glad when the chief warden asked me to keep tabs on him from time to time.

  As Mishana and I neared the top of Hakanyasi, we crossed a swath of flattened vegetation, scattered with newly peeled stems. Mishana picked up a broken twig and rubbed it between his fingers.

  “Erizooba,” he concluded: “today.” We had stumbled into a fresh trail.

  Their path was obvious, and I took the lead, following the bent leaves and trampled shrubs through a wide clearing near the border. Just as I began to think my tracking skills were improving, the trail led into a copse of trees where the understory opened up into a mossy swale. Three different trails crossed in from the left and I found a day nest, half-chewed omwifa fruits, broken tree limbs, and four piles of fresh dung. Several other trails led out of the trees—one uphill, two downhill, and one in the direction we’d just come from. I turned to Mishana and threw up my hands.

  “Mubare,” he said, smiling at my confusion. Apparently, Makale and Mutesi had crossed Mubare group’s trail from the previous afternoon. Mishana walked quickly over the mossy ground and poked at a lone bolus of dung with his boot. Then he turned toward the uphill trail and motioned for me to follow.

  Twenty minutes later, we heard branches snapping on the hillside above us, and we climbed more slowly, beginning to cough a greeting. Just then, the sound of a chest beat drifted up from somewhere south of us on the ridge.

  “Ruhondeza,” Mishana whispered, and we paused.

  There was no response from above. We continued on to the place where Makale and Mutesi had just been feeding, and there the trail took a sudden sharp turn, leading directly away from the sound of Ruhondeza’s chest beat. Apparently, our brave bachelors weren’t quite ready for a confrontation with Mubare group. Ruhondeza’s far-reaching note of warning had served its purpose, establishing his presence in the area and avoiding the chance of an unplanned encounter. It took us another forty minutes to catch up with the wary males.

  We found them near the remains of a fallen tree. Makale was feeding in a dense thicket below us, while Mutesi searched the rotten log for termites. He squatted with his head out of sight beneath the trunk and his gray rump raised up awkwardly in the air. A fine mist had begun falling, and I watched his huge, leathery fingers scrabbling for a hold on the slippery wood. He rocked the log violently back and forth; from my angle, he appeared to be methodically picking it up and dropping it on his face. I inched closer to get a better view.

  “Ssst.” Mishana caught my attention and shook his head, gesturing down the hill toward Makale.

  Oh please, Makale can’t count, I thought, and shifted closer.

  Immediately, the shrubs below erupted with a screaming roar, and Makale charged toward me, lunging up through the chest-high bracken with his teeth bared. I started a submissive crouch, but he stopped short several meters away, looking suddenly disinterested, and spun around to stomp back to his feeding ground. Mutesi hadn’t even glanced up from the termites, and the whole encounter seemed perfunctory, as if Makale were simply trying to keep up appearances.

  I sat down as the mist turned into rain, and pulled out my field notebook: “11:35—Mak. charges to within 4 meters. Retreats immediately. Embarrassed because we saw him run from Ruhondeza?” The pungent, nervous-sweat smell of Makale’s charge dissipated quickly in the wet air, and the only sound came from Mutesi, gnawing quietly at the deadwood. Finally, he moved off to find shelter, and the clouds settled lower, closing the gap between earth and sky, and shrouding our green hilltop in layers of impenetrable whiteness.

  16

  Lessons

  Four thousand feet above my inn, between two mountain peaks, I always felt as if I were on another planet….The automobiles, racing with arrogant importance over the roads of Africa, looked like flimsy toys through my binoculars. Their speed seemed futile, their eagerness absurd. “Why all this hurry?” I wondered.

  —Walter Baumgärtel

  from Up Among the Mountain Gorillas, 1976

  “OK, Barigye, take it easy,” I counseled, but the car continued to pick up speed, racing along the road edge in first gear. “Mpora, mpora, ssebo,” I tried calmly, remembering that his English wasn’t strong. But one glance at my pupil told me that Barigye wasn’t hearing anything. He clenched the wheel in a death grip, eyes wide and glazed, teeth bared in a paralyzed leer.

  Suddenly, we veered off the roadway, flattening a wide swath of shrubs before us. “Jesus! Philman, tell him to stop!” I yelled, but Philman and Ephraim were just trying to hold on in the backseat as we bounced and jarred across the field, tall elephant grass beating frantically against the windshield. Barigye swerved again and we recrossed the road at an angle, speeding toward the spring where a group of kids were lined up for water. I saw their mouths open to scream as they darted out of the way, seconds before we finally lurched to a halt.

  In the sudden calm, Ephraim and Philman started laughing hysterically, and I breathed a sigh of relief, but Barigye remained silent. He looked dazed, still gripping the steering wheel and slowly blinking the sweat from his eyes. I reached over and turned off the engine. “I think we’ve had enough driving lessons for today.”

  Barigye nodded mutely and hopped out of the car. On his first day with the park’s tourism staff, he’d already been charged by Makale, and now his driving lesson had turned into a ride of terror. The following week, he gratefully accepted a transfer back to ranger duty and the relative peace of armed antipoaching patrols.

  With Liz away for two months on home leave, I had use of IGCP’s Maruti, a cheap two-door Suzuki made in India. “I call it P.O.S.,” she told me, handing over the keys: “piece of shit.”

  The car rattled like a cookie tin filled with nails, but it had lasted through years of backcountry use—overloaded market runs, rough roads, watery gasoline, and now Buhoma’s first official driving school.

  “One lesson, Tour,” Ephraim pleaded as I drove back to the house, but I shook my head no. Everyone longed for a turn at the wheel, but I wasn’t sure the Maruti or the teacher would survive another trip like Barigye’s.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I told him.

  “Then at least we should wash it,” Philman put in. “You see the vehicle is very dirty from driving off the ro
ad.”

  I gave in, and we stopped by the creek, drawing our usual crowd of spectators. Although tourism had made vehicles a common sight in Buhoma, people still regarded them with wary fascination. Other foreign technologies, like a Walkman or short-wave radio, aroused the same response: a sense of wonder that Western observers would describe as childlike. I never got over the unease of watching my friends marvel at things that I took for granted. But at the same time I felt saddened that my own culture equated amazement with immaturity. Where Africans view wonder as a natural reaction to the unfamiliar, we seem to consider it shameful and without value—a response of inexperience.

  I helped Philman heave basins of water over the car, while Ephraim carefully scrubbed mud from the hubcaps. It was futile, of course. A fresh layer of dust and grime would splatter up the sides of the vehicle before we’d driven a hundred yards, but that was a part of their plan. After all, a perpetually dirty vehicle always needed a trip to the car wash, and maybe there would be time for a lesson along the way.

  The next morning, I woke to a quiet knock at the door.

  “Tour…” someone called softly. “Kodi, kodi.”

  Dim predawn light crept in around the shutters as I stumbled out of bed and looked for a pair of pants. My house ran on an open-door policy, and visitors stopped by periodically throughout the day, but they usually waited for the damn sun to rise.

  “Agandi, Gongo,” I said to the trim, gray-haired man on the lawn as I stepped out into the half-light. It was Phenny’s father, Tibesigwa, a respected elder in the village and the newly appointed manager of the community campground. He returned my greeting, shifting his weight from foot to foot and digging one toe into the ground, as if reluctant to disturb me so early. Etiquette required a pause before coming to the point, and I watched his intelligent, bearded face as we chatted, trying to discern some hint of the morning’s problem. Tibesigwa shared Phenny’s impish sense of humor, but there was nothing funny behind today’s visit.

  “I hope you can help my granddaughter with transport,” he said finally. He told me her name, but it wasn’t someone I knew. As an elder, however, Tibesigwa might refer to any young woman in the village as “granddaughter.”

  “What’s wrong, Gongo?”

  “She is producing too soon,” he explained with an earnest look, and I saw the worry in his dark eyes. His granddaughter was pregnant and near term but had entered labor prematurely. “There is a problem with the pregnancy.”

  “What about Proscovia?” I asked, referring to the nurse from Buhoma’s tiny health clinic. “Is she there?”

  “Yes, yes. She says the girl needs Kisizi.”

  Kisizi Hospital, the nearest medical facility of any size, lay over three hours away on bad roads. There were no telephones or ambulances, of course, and P.O.S. was the only vehicle in Buhoma. “I’m coming, Gongo,” I told him. “Let me get ready and stop by the office first.”

  “Webale, ssebo.” He shook my hand and turned to hurry home, calling over his shoulder: “You can pick her from the path by Buhoma church. Phenny will show you.”

  Early sunlight brushed against the hilltops as I drove toward the office, brightening the stark line where forest greens gave way to the cultivated shades of millet and young cassava. I found Phenny waiting by the roadside. He gave me a mock salute as I pulled up, and jumped into the passenger seat.

  “Tugyende hamwe, ssebo,” he offered: “We will go together.” I noticed that his uniform shirt looked neat and freshly pressed. With cheap laundry soap and a charcoal iron provided by the park, the guides always managed to dress sharply, while my own clothes—stained khakis and a T-shirt—looked like, well, like I lived in a jungle.

  “All the way to Kisizi?” I asked him. The sick girl was probably his niece or cousin, but I hadn’t expected to have a guide.

  “Sure. I need to pick up more medicines for Hope,” he said, sudden concern sweeping the smile from his face. Phenny knew the route to Kisizi well. Ever since giving birth to Amanda, Hope had suffered from stomach problems and chronic fatigue. Two trips to the hospital had failed to provide a cure, and her one-month maternity break had turned into an indefinite leave of absence. She remained cheerful, staying home and managing the growing restaurant business at the H & P Canteen. But any lingering illness was cause for concern, and Phenny’s usual good humor had given way lately to frequent periods of brooding depression.

  “How is Hope?” I asked.

  It was a question that had become as familiar as his inevitable answer: “She is improving somehow, but still weak.”

  We drove in silence to the church, where a large crowd had gathered, surrounding the pregnant young woman and her family. They lifted her gently into the back of the vehicle, tilting up one of the bench seats so she could lie flat, with her head resting forward. Her mother and three brothers crowded in beside her, burdened with bundles of food for a long hospital stay. I waved to Tibesigwa, who came to the window, frowning, every inch the solemn patriarch. He exchanged words with the people in back, then turned to me.

  “They have money for petrol,” he said with approval. “One jerrican at least. You can pick it from Butagota.”

  “It’s no problem, Gongo,” I told him, and eased the car into gear. The crowd stood back to watch us go, a jumbled knot of bright clothes and dark skin receding in my rearview mirror, with a hundred eyes staring after. We rattled toward Butagota, and I looked down at our young passenger. She was dressed as if going to market, her head wrapped in a blue kerchief and dress arranged neatly over the bulge of her stomach. But she rode in obvious pain, wincing at every bump, with a fine sheen of sweat glistening on her smooth forehead. I stopped the car frequently, and her family raised her up, rearranging the cushions of bundled clothes and making her drink from a calabash of sweet porridge.

  “Webale, ssebo,” she whispered once, “thank you,” her round eyes gazing up at me, glazed with pain and resignation. It was an image that would stay with me always. I lay my hand on her head in an attempt at comfort, braking and swerving to avoid the worst of the potholes, as if there were anyplace else to drive.

  The sun rose hot in a dry season haze as we sped through Kigezi’s hill country, raising clouds of dust behind us like a cavalry charge. I turned on some music to ease the waves of tension and worry that rose up from the back of the car. Phenny grinned and sorted through the cassettes, but spent most of the ride staring out the window, lost in his own thoughts.

  At the village of Kanungu we turned east on a narrow dirt track, climbing again, and then descending toward the broad valley where Kisizi lay tucked in a river bend, just downstream from the waterfall that bears its name. The town stretched along a quarter-mile of dusty roadway, a small collection of shops and stalls that served as a trading center for local farmers supplying the busy hospital and its constant stream of customers.

  I drove slowly through the market to the hospital itself, several large brick buildings and a neatly tended lawn that dominated the village center. People milled everywhere—nurses, uniformed orderlies, and throngs of visitors, walking together in small groups, or waiting beneath the huge eucalyptus and jacaranda trees that shaded the compound. I dropped my passengers at the office and went to park, while Phenny bought Hope’s medicine and helped his ailing young relative and her family navigate the check-in process. When I returned, they had already carried her off to the maternity ward.

  “Let us go see the waterfall,” Phenny said, glancing at his wristwatch. “Afterward they should know if she needs to stay on.”

  “Did they say what is wrong?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” he said dismissively. “People in the village don’t know anything, so they get excited.”

  He turned away and I followed him toward the sound of the waterfall, but I wasn’t so quick to disregard the girl’s problem. People in Buhoma couldn’t always put a recognizable name to their illness, but they knew when they were sick.

  After I had learned to bandage the
trackers’ occasional panga wounds, they began sending me their friends and neighbors with more complicated ailments. Any sickness accompanied by a fever was called malaria, while head colds and congestion were known collectively as flu. “I am weak,” my patients would complain, pointing to the afflicted region. Sometimes, their foreheads or aching joints would be crosshatched with tiny scars, where they’d cut the skin repeatedly with a sharp knife or razor blade. A nurse in Kabale explained this method to me as “letting the millet out,” an attempt to bleed away painful symptoms. She told me that it helped some people but was dangerous in infants, whose parents often inflicted deep chest wounds to rid them of croup cough, or cut out unformed baby teeth as a cure for diarrhea. But many local remedies worked far better than their pharmaceutical counterparts: tree bark teas for stomach worms, an herbal poultice for snake bites, or certain crushed leaves that instantly stanched the flow of blood. In my small “practice,” I relied heavily on the placebo effect, doling out aspirin, Band-Aids, and vitamin C, and referring everyone to the nearest clinic.

  Sometimes, a malady came along that baffled local and Western traditions alike. Ephraim Akampurira had recently missed over a month of work, sick in bed with a terrible case of “malaria.” Philman told me he’d never seen an affliction quite like it, but this really came as no surprise. If anyone would catch a strange illness, it would be Ephraim, who proved himself time and again as the most hapless, accident-prone person in the village. He injured himself constantly—sprained ankles and a snapped collarbone from playing soccer, skinned knees and gravel-road abrasions from bicycle wrecks, tumbling out of moving vehicles, or simply tripping and falling over. “I have broken my face,” he announced after one such mishap, arriving at work with swollen cheeks and a wildly bloodshot eye.