by Thor Hanson
Rob shone his flashlight downward, and their luminous eyes gleamed back, countless pinpoints of fiery light extending deep into the shadows. Unlike most North American and European species, which feed on insects and navigate by echolocation, fruit bats rely chiefly on their eyesight and sense of smell to chart a path through the night skies, searching constantly for nectar-bearing flowers and crops of ripening fruit.* They pollinate dozens of rain forest trees in the process, as well as important agricultural species like bananas and avocado. I watched the furry, thrush-size bats flutter and skitter across the roof of the cave, fighting endlessly with their neighbors for a better purchase on the rock face. In spite of the pandemonium, many of the bats appeared to be sleeping, wings folded carefully around them as if clutching delicate blankets.
I heard water noises and noticed the dark motion of an underground stream, winding through the bottom of the cavern. Something large moved quietly beside it, a four-foot monitor lizard plodding slowly across the rocky floor. Moments later, when a bat lost its footing and dropped from the ceiling, the monitor leaped forward with uncanny speed, gulping down its victim with the rapid, awkward nods of a silent-movie dinosaur. For a predator, this monitor lived in the lap of luxury. The cave provided water, shelter, and a steady supply of live food raining down from above. I saw two others lounging near the entrance and realized that all of them depended on the largess of the bat colony, as did the vulture we’d startled upon our arrival and the fish eagles Rob had seen on previous visits. He tapped my shoulder and pointed out something else, draped over the rocks like great coils of firehose.
“That can’t be a snake,” I whispered, but through binoculars the broad head and mottled pattern of a rock python came clearly into view. Somnolent and still, it kept to the rear of the cave like a silent extension of shadow. Days later, Rob saw it in the open, sliding through a patch of sunlight by the cave mouth. He estimated the snake’s length at more than twelve feet.
That night we camped on the far shore of Lake Nyamusingiri, deep within the park. As burgundy dusk faded to darkness, a raft of hippopotami surfaced nearby, snorting and bellowing like wounded bulls at the unfamiliar sight of our campfire. Always a favorite target of local poachers, these survivors had learned to be wary. People in the village relished their spongy flesh above all other types of meat, calling it “the best friend of millet bread.” As nocturnal grazers, the hippos followed timeworn feeding paths from the lakeshore up into the forest and nearby clearings—the same trails that surrounded our campsite. Unpredictable and surprisingly fast, hippos account for more human deaths than any other African animal, trampling and biting unwary pedestrians that come between them and their routes back to the water. We stoked up the fire and kept it burning late into the night while starlight spilled across the darkening sky, waves of brilliant pinpricks, like bats’ eyes, reflecting faintly in the black calm of the lake.
“You know, in the States you sit around a fire because it’s warm,” Rob observed wryly as the distant coughs of hunting lions rose up in the night. “You build a fire here because you have to. To survive.”
In the morning I headed for home by the quickest available route: a canoe across the lake; the climb to Ndekye; a taxi van to Ishaka; and then south two hours to Rukungiri, where I stopped for tea at one of my favorite Ugandan restaurants, the Hope for the Best Bakery. Throughout the countryside, strange translations made sign spotting the best sport for long days of travel. Lovers Nest Grocery and Convenient Store rose up beside the ubiquitous backcountry hair dressers, tiny clapboard shops with names like the Aggravated Hair Saloon, Jesus Cares Beauty Saloon, or Peg Saloon—Dressings for Hair. Even Kampala held its share of billboard riddles, the unfortunate Joke Investments, Ltd., or Missing Link Investigators—“We’ll Investigate Anything from a Needle to a Camel.” I used to tease John Dubois for exacerbating the trend. When Hope’s sister opened the first eating establishment in Buhoma, John had painted the sign himself: Mable’s Restaurant, Beer Garden, and Super Duper Craft Shop.
Beyond Rukungiri, traffic thinned to a trickle, and I settled for a ride in the back of a tiny pickup truck, stuffed in with bags of charcoal, a goat, cabbages, yams, two bicycles, a bed frame, and more than twenty passengers. I clung to the side rail with one hand and leaned into every gut-wrenching turn as we struggled up the winding dirt track and plummeted into the next valley. There was an old man seated on my lap, and an even older man sitting on him. They both wore tattered knit hats, and the eldest clenched a wooden pipe between his teeth, squinting fiercely into the wind. Thick road dust billowed over us in waves, covering everyone with ocher, as if anointed for some bizarre ritual.
I felt my patience and sense of humor slipping away as gasoline from a leaky jerrican soaked slowly into my pants. My legs were packed tight between the old men and a pile of cabbages, and I couldn’t reach below me to tighten the fuel can’s rattling lid.
“Ssebo, ngaha!” I yelled to the man next to me, gesticulating with my free hand and trying to convince him to please, please stop smoking. He took another drag and shrugged, looking baffled as I pointed at my pants and shouted the words for “fire!” and “danger!” After several minutes of heated explanation, I saw him finally nod in understanding. He smiled warmly and, reaching into his coat pocket, offered me a cigarette.
I felt distinctly relieved when I heard the distinctive pop and hiss of a blowout. We rolled to a stop where the road passed through Kihihi, a small market town halfway to Buhoma. Disentangling myself from old men and luggage, I jumped out of the truck and took my petrol-stained legs away from the friendly smoker. Two men wrestled with the blown tire, hammering at mismatched lug nuts while the driver wandered into a nearby duka for beer. Patching the tube or finding a new one might take the rest of the afternoon, and I glanced up the empty street, looking for a place to pass time.
Just then I heard the rumble of an approaching vehicle, and a safari van appeared, leading its own dust cloud like a cavalry charge up the narrow red track. The driver was a regular visitor to Buhoma, and he stopped when he recognized me, honking the horn and waving.
“You are the gorilla man!” he shouted. “Come, come. I will take you home!”
My fellow passengers helped disentangle my luggage from the back of the pickup and watched me go—some with smiles, some with undisguised envy. I waved to them from the van window as it sped quickly away.
“My God, how can you stand that?” asked one of the tourists, a well-dressed British woman of middle years. She looked at me with genuine curiosity, as if witnessing a strange piece of performance art.
“Transportation is very difficult here,” I answered slowly, brushing clouds of road dust from my clothes. “We are suffering,” I couldn’t help adding. “You tell your Japanese . . .”
18
Some Grains Will Perish
Some men have no children, and some grains perish without fruit; then all are ended.
—Commoro, Sudanese chief
As quoted by Samuel Baker, 1862
When the rangers found it, the hunting dog staggered away through the undergrowth, blind with pain. Its right rear leg was broken, and its jaw hung useless, half-torn from the bottom of its ruined face. They tied the dog firmly with a bark-rope tether and led it back to headquarters. Later, people in the village identified its owner, giving the park its first lead in the investigation. They found another dog dead at the scene, killed in the fray and abandoned near the rotting corpses of its quarry: a black-back, an adult female, and two juveniles from Bwindi’s Kyaguliro mountain gorilla family.
The rangers made careful note of their location, returning the next day with Liz and a team of investigators to identify the remains and conduct autopsies. Everyone brought cigarettes for the work, smoking furiously in a vain attempt to cover the stench of putrefaction. But coping with the smell was almost welcome, a visceral distraction from the more disturbing defeat and sadness of losing precious gorilla lives.
The poachers had a
ttacked en masse, harrying the apes with dogs while they edged close enough to slash and jab with their long spears. No trophies were taken, but census reports of the Kyaguliro survivors showed an infant missing from the group. Its mother, the slain female, lay slightly apart from the other bodies, and she probably died last, still struggling to protect the baby her assailants had come to steal. Gorillas defend their young to the death, and poachers always kill several other group members when they target an infant for capture. Although most zoos now refrain from purchasing wild-caught apes, gorillas still bring a high premium in the illegal pet trade. Collectors smuggle lowland gorillas out of West Africa every year, but this attack marked the first time in more than a decade that poachers had struck at a habituated family from the Bwindi or Virunga gorilla populations. If it survived, the baby abducted from Kyaguliro group would become the only captive mountain gorilla in the world, a tragic centerpiece for someone’s private menagerie.
News of the attack reached Buhoma on a sunny morning at the end of the dry season, the same day we expected an official visit from Uganda’s new minister of tourism and wildlife. Our chief warden, Ignatius Achoka, was beside himself.
“You have heard of the poaching?” he asked me. “They have killed gorillas at Ruhija. Now, how am I supposed to tell the minister?”
To make matters worse, circumstantial evidence suggested that the poachers had help from the inside. Kyaguliro group was being habituated for a behavioral study by employees of the Institute for Tropical Forest Conservation (ITFC), a research station at the park’s Ruhija ranger post. They visited the gorillas every day, just as we tracked Mubare and Katendegyere groups. Their presence should have made Kyaguliro one of the best-protected groups in the park. More than twenty unhabituated gorilla families ranged through the forest in relative obscurity, so why would poachers risk immediate detection by attacking such a well-known group?
Speculation and rumors implicated everyone from local rangers to the chairman of the Uganda National Parks board of trustees, but the most damning evidence pointed to ITFC and its controversial director. Strangely, he had dismissed the Kyaguliro group’s regular habituators only a week before the killings, replacing them with a team of strangers that he handpicked himself. And when rangers examined the dead gorillas, they found them partially decomposed, as if ITFC had waited for several days before reporting their deaths to the park.
“He is very powerful, and he has sworn to take us all with him when he goes,” another Bwindi warden told me. Under charges of corruption, the ITFC leader was in the midst of an intense performance evaluation by the World Wildlife Fund, the institute’s major sponsor. “Maybe he decided to take some few gorillas too. I don’t know.”
Although respected as a scientist, the director had mismanaged ITFC to the point of bankruptcy, bringing its research activities to a virtual standstill. Students accused him of stealing their stipends and spending the institute’s money as his own. From workshops and conferences, I remembered him as a knowledgeable, friendly participant, but those who knew better warned me of another side to his character.
“You must watch yourself with that man,” an official at national parks headquarters told me once. “On the outside he appears so clean—a born-again Christian. He doesn’t drink, takes no meat. But you only scratch the surface, and he is black, black as coal.”
Starting from the injured hunting dog, police and wardens identified five local suspects in the case. They raided their village homes and found large parties in progress, evidence of a suspicious influx of money into the families. But the poachers themselves had already fled into Zaire, leaving a host of unanswered questions in their wake. Who had hired them? Where was the missing infant? Who warned them of the investigation? Special agents arrived from Kampala, and the inquiries dragged on for weeks, but no one at the park or ITFC was ever charged.
Whoever organized the incident had the connections to pinpoint a known gorilla group deep in the forest, locate and hire five local hunters, and smuggle an infant gorilla out of the country. Unfortunately, people with that kind of influence probably also had contacts in the higher levels of government. The ITFC director, for example, knew the chairman of the national parks board, who was a personal friend of President Musevini. Through the transitive property of power, an important political force in Uganda, he was virtually untouchable.
Some people believed that politics played an even larger role, that the gorillas were killed in a ploy to embarrass and discredit the new minister of tourism and wildlife. As an ex-general and the former leader of a rebel group that once rivaled Musevini’s National Resistance Army, the minister had plenty of well-connected enemies in government. To lose five valuable mountain gorillas insulted him in his new role, a suspicious coincidence on the day of his first trip to the park.
Theories grew more speculative as it became apparent that the case would never be solved. Philippine authorities confiscated an infant gorilla at the airport in Manila, but it turned out to be from the western lowland species. Rangers apprehended a poacher from the right village, but he had a credible alibi and knew nothing about the Kyaguliro incident. After several months, only a junior warden remained on the case.
“They were just out hunting bushpigs,” Phenny concluded one day, throwing up his hands in disgust. “We shouldn’t let anyone into the forest. No tourism, no multiple use, no beekeepers, nothing. This is what happens.”
Regardless of who was to blame, losing the Kyaguliro apes shocked everyone involved in the world of mountain gorillas. For years, poaching in Bwindi and the Virungas had focused on small game—antelope and bushpigs that hunters hoped to add to their cook pots. Direct hunting of mountain gorillas had all but disappeared since the mid-1980s,* allowing park managers to focus on more far-reaching conservation strategies, combining protection with tourism, conservation education, revenue sharing, and other progressive ideas. In Bwindi, we planned for sustainability, thinking in terms of economics and genetic viability over the long term. The threat of gorillas dying at spearpoint had seemed remote, a problem left securely in the past.
The Kyaguliro killings brought that menace back to the foreground, a brutal and unsettling reminder that despite our best efforts, mountain gorillas still faced the risk of immediate extinction. I no longer took it for granted that Mubare and Katendegyere groups would be waiting safely in the forest each morning, and found myself questioning some fundamental aspects of the park’s management plan. Our program emphasized the benefits of conservation over time. Through education, tourism, and local involvement, we hoped to show people that saving Bwindi forest and the gorillas would improve their quality of life. But how well had these concepts taken hold if villagers and those behind them were still willing to hunt and kill the apes?
By definition, sustainable strategies depend on communicating the idea of future rewards. Local communities and governments give up the short-term gains of logging and hunting in return for a continued yield of tourism revenues and environmental benefits. A potential problem, I realized, lay deeply rooted in the African sense of time, a framework that emphasizes the current moment over what is to come. Rural cultures had evolved in a kind of stasis, with few dramatic variations in weather, agriculture, or the pattern of daily life. Without any anticipation of change, the future became almost irrelevant, a simple extension of present conditions. Its low priority is revealed in language, where several different verb tenses describe the past, but only one exists for future times, a vague “tomorrow” indicating nothing beyond the next several days.
People live continuously in the present, a state of mind I came to understand while working with the trail crew. During the wet season, moss-heavy branches and whole trees fell constantly across our hiking trails. I struggled for months to teach the idea of maintenance, but still the men would step over the logs rather than removing them from the path. To me, taking a moment to clear windfalls saved the effort of climbing over them countless times in the future. To the t
rail crew, however, the idea was a ludicrous waste of energy. If you consider walking the path as an event isolated in the present, then it’s far more logical to step over the log, rather then spend twenty minutes chopping through it and pushing it out of the way. In the absence of future, my drive to keep the trails clear must have seemed slightly insane.
Using the same model, abstract rewards like revenue sharing or watershed protection may never outweigh the immediate benefits of hunting, cutting timber, or selling an infant gorilla. In fact, they might not even make sense. The trail crew eventually became highly skilled in maintenance, but I was never sure whether or not they agreed with the concept or if they did it just to humor me. Similarly, the strategies of sustainable management may someday produce great results, regardless of the motive, and that potential makes any amount of effort worthwhile. But seeing the rebirth of active poaching increased my capacity for doubt.
Five months after the Kyaguliro incident, poachers shot and killed three more gorillas in Zaire’s Virunga National Park, including the lead silverback of their most popular tourist group. The killings were probably unrelated to those in Uganda but brought our losses for the year to eight individuals, nearly 1.5 percent of the entire mountain gorilla population. Where we had once shunned firearms on tracking duty, we now posted armed ranger patrols to follow Mubare, Katendegyere, and the remaining Kyaguliro gorillas throughout the daylight hours.
I knew the route to the herbalist well, bumping along the narrow path and braking automatically to swerve past the goats, cows, and potholes. Phenny and Hope rode with me, our conversation interrupted by long stretches of concerned silence. Amanda lay still in Hope’s lap, hazy-eyed and despondent, her tiny face pinched with sickness. In the wake of the gorilla poaching, it seemed the season for sadness had returned.