“Knuckle marks,” Bill said. “Enormous.”
The professor said, “Maybe we’ll see one tomorrow.”
“If you’re not too tired,” Bill said, poking at the mole.
“I’m fine. It was just a long walk up here for an old man.”
“It’s a long walk for anybody,” Jay said.
Bill found the mole could be lifted safely. He touched the beautiful soft fur with the palm of his hand. “I didn’t know tenrecs got this far north,” he said.
The professor sat up in bed. “It isn’t a tenrec.”
They began to argue. They were so scientific Jay couldn’t follow them. They discussed the nasal cavities of the tenrec and of the golden mole. Madagascar was mentioned heatedly. “How do you account for the variation in the anatomy of Jacobson’s organ?” the professor demanded. Bill said he didn’t account for it. He simply ignored it. The professor began a lecture on convergent evolution. They were having a marvelous time. Jay went out of the tent and found Mr. Palmer talking to Lew Cable.
A native had told Cable there were gorillas in both the upper and lower bamboo forests. The lower forest was easier hunting, the native had reported, but there were not so many gorillas. In the upper forest woodcutters had built huts and planted gardens and had then abandoned them, and now gorillas lived there. They ate the plantain the natives had planted. The drawback of the upper forest was the uneven country that made it difficult to follow a trail. Cable could not decide where to go.
“Do we all hunt together?” Mr. Palmer asked.
“I think so.”
“It will be rather noisy.”
“Of course, Jay isn’t to go,” Cable said.
“Can’t we have two parties?” Mr. Palmer asked. “One up and one down?”
“No. The professor and I both must be in on the death.”
Mr. Palmer smiled at Jay. “Too bad.”
“I didn’t expect to go.”
“You may be glad you didn’t,” Cable said.
“Why?”
“If a gorilla should charge us.”
“Are they likely to?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“I suppose they’re much like other animals,” Mr. Palmer said.
He went off to watch the dining tent being put up. His Somali boys were doing that. The porters were bringing in wood and stacking supplies and scientific equipment in another tent. About fifty of them were to stay in camp. The rest would go back to their villages in the lowlands until they were needed again.
“You’re to use the storage tent for a darkroom,” Lew Cable told Jay.
“All right.”
Cable’s voice was usually contemptuous. Now it was friendlier. “Is Bill very sore?”
“I don’t know,” Jay said.
“I’m sorry to be so jumpy,” Cable said. “But I want everything to go smoothly. I’m really responsible, you know.”
“You are?”
“Yes. Before we left the trustees put me in charge. There was a hell of an argument about it. The professor doesn’t know. But since I’m putting up the money why shouldn’t I have charge? Only I can’t have anything go wrong now. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want Bill to be sore. He’s a good man. Tell him I’m sorry.”
“You’d better tell him.”
Cable looked at him. “All right, Boy Scout.”
Jay went to the supply tent. He could feel Cable watching him. He had passed the point where he wanted to be friendly with Cable. He had been superior too long. It was typical that he was sorry for being nasty to Bill only because it might endanger the success of the expedition. He did not know if Cable was making an overture to him or not. He didn’t care. All he wanted from him was the consideration ordinarily given to an upper-grade servant.
CHAPTER 4
BEFORE DINNER Jay sat in a camp chair in the shelter of one of the sleeping tents and read the Modern Library edition of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The sun was warm where the wind did not blow, but it would be cold later. The dining tent was up and the porters had put a bamboo table under its brown sunflap. The cook was using two fires to make dinner. The camp now consisted of two sleeping tents, a dining tent, a laboratory tent, a supply and darkroom tent and porters’ huts. Jay was to sleep in the supply tent to watch the equipment.
He liked The Magic Mountain, but he was glad when Bill came out of the tent he now shared with Mr. Palmer. The Magic Mountain, like much great literature, required concentration. He was always getting the characters confused through lack of concentration.
“This is a place,” Bill said.
“It’s swell.”
“Isn’t it exciting to think there are gorillas around?”
“I suppose,” Jay said.
He looked away from Bill. He saw some porters were starting to build a hut near the bamboo. They were bringing up armloads of green shoots.
“I’m sorry as hell you’re not going,” Bill said.
“It’s all right.”
It wasn’t, though, Jay realized. He was excited about gorillas and the strange country. He really wanted to go, not so much to kill as to see a gorilla. He wondered what it was like in the mountain forest.
“Maybe a gorilla will blunder into camp,” Bill said.
“I’ll ask him to tea.”
“You could shoot him.”
“I’d be too damn scared,” Jay said.
The shoots the porters brought to the hut were all about five feet high. The porters stripped the leaves from them and thrust the thicker ends of the now bare shoots in the soft ground. They were making a circle of the upright shoots.
“I don’t feel scared of gorillas,” Bill said. “At least not the way I do of lions.”
“Are you still thinking about lions?”
“I wish I’d gone with you that day.”
“You did.”
“All I did was find out that I was a coward.”
“The hell!” Jay said. “You were just scared. Everybody gets scared.”
“You weren’t.”
“Not then. But I’ve been. I remember once being in the Everglades with a girl. Linda. We’d parked the car and were walking along a canal when a moccasin struck at me from some grass. It hit my trousers. I ran like hell, leaving Linda and the moccasin. That was my time to be scared.”
“What did Linda do?”
“She killed it.”
Bill thought about this. Jay watched the porters. They had finished the circle of upright shoots and had bent them towards the center of the circle and tied them, arched over, with vines. Now they were weaving pliant shoots in horizontal circles through the tied vertical shoots. When Linda killed the snake, Jay remembered, they had been coming back from Useppa Island. They had been fishing.
Suddenly he remembered the full moon, bigger than any moon, and trolling at night in the keys and the big tarpon that had looked, squirming in air, like a white shadow on the water. He remembered the squeal of the von Hofe reel and moisture flying from the wet outrunning line and the belly slap of the tarpon on the water and the silver rise of spray and the jerking line and the rod gradually straightening until there was only the pull of the tarpon’s dead weight. He reeled in slowly and they could hear the gurgle of water under the hull and then the fish ran from the boat’s shadow and he had to reel in again, but at last it was alongside, dead, the iridescent white underbody touching the stern. Linda was pregnant then and he wouldn’t let her fish and she’d been angry.
“The snake was different,” Bill said. “You didn’t have time to think.”
“Neither did you.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Well, what if you are a coward? What’s the difference? It’s like finding out you’ve brown eyes instead of blue. Some people have brown eyes and some have blue. Some people are brave and some are not.”
“I suppose so,” Bill said.
“It’s a difference, but
it isn’t important. You just accept it.”
“Do you really think it’s as simple as that?”
“No,” Jay said.
The hut now looked like an inverted wicker basket. The porters were bringing big leaves. They pasted the leaves in layers over the basketwork. Some of the leaves were as big as the men. They covered the entire hut except for a small hole by the ground. They would crawl in through this.
“Very cozy,” Jay said.
“I’d never build a house without a garage,” Bill said.
Jay was sorry about Bill. A lion made a problem you did not come up against in civilized places unless there was a war. And even then it was not quite the same. In war you were hypnotized by the belief you were fighting for your country, or for a just cause, and, anyway, you didn’t act as an individual. You were a cog in a machine. A lion you had to face of your own free will. It was a highly individual thing. And it was very unsettling if you felt a necessity to face a lion and didn’t have the courage. This was complicated, Jay thought. It would be very hard to explain to anyone who had never heard a lion roar.
Bill got a bottle of beer and two cups from the supply tent. The beer foamed when it came from the bottle. It was foamy from being carried up the trail. “I found out about the mystery woman,” he said.
“Found out what?”
“Mr. Palmer was right. Her husband is lost in the Ituri Forest.”
“That’s a good place to lose one.”
“He’s been gone for a month,” Bill said. “The lady wants us to look for him when we get there.”
The professor had told Bill all about her. She was a Canadian, from Montreal, and her husband was French and very rich. He was one of the Salles family with the big textile mills at Lyons. He’d got permission from the Belgians to study the Ituri pygmies. Why he wanted to study the pygmies, Bill said, the professor didn’t know. Probably an amateur anthropologist, the professor thought. Many wealthy young Frenchmen had scientific hobbies. Anyway, he’d gone into the Ituri with porters and some pygmy guides. That was six weeks ago. His wife had stayed at Stanleyville. And then, two weeks later, some of the porters had turned up at their villages. The Belgian authorities talked to them. They said the white man had made a camp near the Ituri River by one of the tabu forests in the district. One morning he had gone into the tabu zone with the pygmies, intending to be back that night. The porters had waited three days. Then, badly frightened, they had gone home.
“Didn’t the Belgians make a search?” Jay asked.
The woman told the professor they had made a very perfunctory one, Bill said. No guides would take them into the tabu zone. And the Belgians did not like the forest any too well themselves. So they concluded Salles was dead. That was the easy thing to do.
“And she doesn’t think he’s dead?” Jay asked.
“Prof didn’t say,” Bill said. “I suppose she wants to find out. Anyway, she wants to go with us.”
“Will Prof take her?”
“If she can get permission from the Belgians.”
“That will be swell,” Jay said. “Nothing like having a woman along. I suppose we’ll have to dress for dinner.”
“Full dress every night,” Bill said. “We’ll put pants on the natives, too.”
“To hell with women,” Jay said.
“You didn’t say that once.”
“No. And look what happened.”
Bill was embarrassed. He had not meant to remind Jay of Linda. “This one might be nice,” he said. “She sounded nice.”
“Have you read The Magic Mountain?” Jay asked. “It’s a fine book. It’s about people with tuberculosis.”
After a while Jay went to his tent. Juma brought him a pail of hot water. He washed carefully, taking off his shirt and soaping his arms and chest. When he dressed again, he put a sweater under his coat. It was turning cold. He wondered if he should drink another bottle of beer. He left the tent and found Mr. Palmer talking to a dozen Batwa pygmies and two blacks who had come to the camp to beg for salt. The pygmies stood close together, leaning on their spears and examining the camp out of the corners of their eyes. Some were as small as dwarfs, but many were middle sized Jay had read they were larger than the Ituri pygmies. They wore loincloths and brass bracelets and necklaces. They did not speak Swahili, but the two large blacks did. Mr. Palmer was talking to the pygmies through them. One, with a squint eye, did most of the translating.
“They say there are gorillas quite near,” Mr. Palmer told Jay.
He asked the pygmies where. Squint-eye translated. The pygmies smiled and several spoke. One pointed his spear at the green peak to the south.
“All around,” Mr. Palmer told Jay.
He asked something else. Squint-eye talked with the pygmy who had pointed his spear. The others listened respectfully. The pygmy was young, with curly black hair and a sleek-muscled body, and he wore a necklace of crimson beads. He was obviously some sort of a chief.
“Name’s Nygano,” Mr. Palmer said after a time. “He’s willing to guide us.”
“He looks smart,” Jay said.
Nygano spoke to Squint-eye, who spoke to Mr. Palmer. “Three hours’ walk up the mountain,” Mr. Palmer translated. “Nygano says that’s the best place.”
Lew Cable came over to them. He knew enough Swahili to join in the conversation. He and Mr. Palmer talked to Squint-eye. Finally Squint-eye clapped the other large black on the shoulder and pushed him, giggling in embarrassment, towards the white men. The second black stood, still giggling, while everyone looked at his leg. Jay had not noticed the wound before. It was on his thigh and it had festered, discoloring the flesh around it.
“What is it?” Jay asked.
“He says a gorilla bit him,” Mr. Palmer said.
Squint-eye told the story. He dramatized it, fighting a foe, roaring, being bitten, biting, beating his chest, squirming with pain. He concluded by falling on the ground. The wounded native looked at his feet, deprecating such fame.
“I think I have it,” said Mr. Palmer. “Our wounded black was cutting wood with friends when they disturbed a big gorilla asleep in a bush. He rushed them. They ran, but he caught this one. The black tried to beat him off with his hand ax, but the gorilla took it away and broke it. Then he bit the black’s leg and went off.”
They examined the wound again. It was about a month old. Jay thought he could see the marks of teeth. Mr. Palmer got a carbolic solution from the medicine kit and treated the leg and then he gave the pygmies and the big blacks salt and grain. It was agreed that Nygano, the young pygmy, and two or three others would come back in the morning to guide the gorilla party.
They had dinner under the outstretched flap of the dining tent, with safari lamps for light and a big fire for warmth. It was clear and cold and still. By the bamboo they could see the porters’ fires and their huts, black and round in the uneven light. The two Totos served goat’s meat, carrots and rice, and, when that was finished, stewed apricots, cake and coffee. The professor did not eat much dinner. He did not look well.
“I hope you’re not going to be sick,” Bill said.
The professor smiled. “I’m tougher than you think.”
“Sure,” Bill said. “Sure you are. But you’ve got to take care of yourself.”
“I shall.”
“You’ve got to eat,” Bill said.
“Yes, William.” The professor grinned at the others and ate his apricots.
Jay saw that Bill was genuinely worried about him. He thought probably the change in altitude had affected the professor. He hoped it wasn’t anything serious.
They talked mostly about gorillas during dinner. Everyone was very excited about them. Mr. Palmer wanted to know how many porters Cable planned to keep to carry the gorillas into camp.
“Fifty,” Lew Cable said.
“That should be enough to carry an army,” Bill said.
“Very thick forest,” Mr. Palmer said. “Frightfully difficult to carry things through it
.”
Bill asked, “Could we drive the gorillas towards camp before we shot them?”
“I shouldn’t like to try it.”
“Let the porters drive them,” Lew Cable suggested.
“Not quite sporting, do you think?” Mr. Palmer said.
“I don’t believe gorillas drive,” said the professor.
The Totos carried off the plates. The porters huddled around their fires, wrapped in blankets, the steady drone of their voices carrying to the tent. Smoke from the fires hung in a cloud over the clearing. The cloud was pink from the light of the fires.
“Where do you shoot a gorilla?” Jay asked.
“In the head, I should imagine,” said Mr. Palmer.
“Yes,” the professor said. “We must try for the head. If we break one of the big arteries in the body we won’t be able to embalm him.”
“That means getting very close,” Bill said.
“Quite,” Mr. Palmer said.
“Is there any danger of one biting us? If we have to come so close?”
Mr. Palmer looked at him curiously through his blue sharpshooter’s eyes. “Don’t know,” he said. “Something certainly bit our black friend.”
“But a well-placed shot would stop a gorilla, wouldn’t it?”
“Stop anything. Stop an elephant.” Mr. Palmer’s eyes were reflective. He was studying Bill. “Difficult, though, to obtain a shot in heavy brush.”
“I hope it doesn’t develop into a hand-to-hand combat,” Bill said.
Jay said, “It’s just as well I’m staying in camp.”
Bill noticed they were looking at him. “I’m not scared,” he said, “I just don’t want Prof to get in a melee.”
“It won’t come to that,” Mr. Palmer said.
Bill had turned red. “I’m only scared of lions.”
“I’m sure the lions feel the same way, William,” the professor said.
“Yes,” Mr. Palmer said.
The hunter was smiling at the professor. Jay could see he liked him. If Mr. Palmer judged people by their guts, Jay thought, the professor was one he could be sure about. He was really brave, with the absolute bravery of some peaceful people. He lived in a world where personal considerations such as pride and lust and hatred and cowardice were absent. He loved the truth with a fine impersonal love. He was the way, Jay thought, Audubon and Thoreau and Galileo and Thomas More and Archimedes must have been. While the professor was being killed by a gorilla, he would be wondering if the animal’s molars were marked with the same cusps as man’s.
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