The Last Great Ape

by Ofir Drori

  “We’ve all been through this, Ofir,” she said. “I know he’s your baby. But think about it: if you love him, he needs to be with chimps, not humans. And in a few years we may even be able to integrate him back into the forest.”

  Sheri had a black belt in karate and she’d married a Cameroonian man. Their daughter, who’d grown up at the shelter, had greeted her classmates on the first day of kindergarten with her wrist outstretched and her hand curled downward, a chimp gesture.

  It was the possibility that Future might live again in the rainforest that spurred me to travel to Belabo in mid-November. Four other chimps and their caretakers had come, four chimps who, with Future, were to form a new family. At the shelter, we learned that Sheri was away; she’d been caring for a sick adult chimp who’d fallen from a tree and been attacked by ants. Future jumped from my arms and tumbled into the grass with the baby apes but kept looking back. He climbed a banana tree and swung from a long leaf that tore and set him on the ground again. One chimp discovered papayas, bananas, pineapples, the stockpile for all the chimps of the shelter, and Future and his mates charged the food like the monkeys at the Yaoundé zoo.

  Under the direction of a French woman, the caretakers and I stepped into the quarantine cage. Fresh sawdust covered the ground. The smallest chimp, Moon, entered the enclosure holding his caretaker’s leg, then scampered up the bars. Future lay in my lap and I tickled his feet, his laughter like that of someone who couldn’t get the sound out of his mouth. I pushed his hand away when he tried to pick my ear, and he climbed up after Moon. Then hung upside down and looked at me. An hour later, when all five chimps were climbing on the cage, the French woman said, “Go!” The caretakers and I scrambled out. She slammed the door, said, “Please don’t look back. Move quickly.” The chimps shrieked. Adult chimps watching from other enclosures held the bars and jumped up and down like prisoners inciting a riot. The screams of the young chimps were commensurate with the sound of children being stripped from parents.

  “Keep moving!” the French woman called out.

  Future’s cries found me within the hysteria.

  Moon’s caretaker was sobbing. I wiped my own tears.

  “I’m never going to care for a chimp again,” the man said. “It’s too tough.”

  I stopped to catch my breath when I was beyond view of the cage. My body shook. Future screamed and I fought the instinct to turn back to hug him and let him bury his face against my neck.

  Ravit had cared for Jack in the first week of his quarantine; Jack was to be paired with a young CWAF gorilla once the veterinarian determined he was healthy. Ravit walked up the stairs to my Mendong apartment. I’d told the volunteers I was ending our relationship. But Ravit still wanted to work with me. She had the will to continue and was giving me another chance. The right choice was to honor her effort to reach Cameroon. But I said, “Ravit, I need a clean slate.” So she left, and after she was gone I realized I hadn’t even thanked her.

  A week later, Sheri Speede called. “Future has an infection. There’s another antibiotic that may be more helpful than what we’ve given him. You’ll have to pick some up. Ofir, his condition is critical. I can’t imagine anything but emotional shock made him deteriorate like this.”

  I raced to Belabo, traveling in the night along Cameroon’s lone train line and then hiring a motorcycle for the hundred minute ride to the shelter. I tried to imagine what Future remembered of the time when I’d taken him from the hunter’s house, whether he saw me as his rescuer, his father, or just the safest warm chest.

  Future lay motionless on a table in the office of the shelter. His eyelids were barely open, but I got him to drink. Three seconds after he swallowed, the liquid passed out his rear. He lacked the strength even to hook his finger over the collar of my shirt. Sheri administered the antibiotics through an IV, and I lay with a hand on Future to ensure he didn’t rip the IV from his leg; there was a chance we wouldn’t be able to get it back in. I spent two full days and four nights in his cage. Anxious listening to the jungle, swarmed by mosquitoes and unable to sleep, I tried to laugh at what David would have said: So much drama; even your chimp is the most dramatic.

  When Future was walking and strong enough to hang from my arm, I left the sanctuary, both of us too exhausted for dramatic goodbyes. In Yaoundé, my house and the giant headquarters were empty, the apes in shelters, David back in the U.S., the volunteers gone and their anger with them. The world that had formed around me so quickly had crumbled away.

  * David learned the next year that the man had a crowbar hidden up the sleeve of his coat.

  2003

  HUNTING THE HUNTERS

  Girls swept the ground outside Ignatius’s office, the door open as always because of the heat. Temgoua, a MINEF official in his forties, shook out his green beret and snapped it down. Julius, the policeman with rope-like veins in his arms, was focused, leaning forward. I said, “We’re going to collect Officer Eric on the way. He’s ready and he is on uniform.”

  “Mmm,” Julius and Temgoua hummed in accord.

  “Now. What we have: we have two ladies in Mvog Mbi. Okay. Both of them are selling elephant meat. One is selling elephant and gorilla in large quantities.”

  “Mmm,” said Julius.

  Temgoua adjusted his beret and smiled. He was a quiet man, passionate about the protection of wildlife, and in the years of his assignment by MINEF in the North he’d chased elephants away from crops so conflict wouldn’t lead to their killing. Temgoua spent much of his salary on cable television so he could watch nature films. He’d told me he felt trapped in the Yaoundé office with his MINEF coworkers who didn’t care about wildlife.

  “The sellers are there in Mvog Mbi, in the junction,” I said. “There is a small roundabout fence with an MTN sign. Okay.” I drew a diagram. “There are three ladies. One two three. On two ladies, we already have the evidence. We have the film. These are the two ladies on the left.”

  John, an investigator, had just bought elephant meat from both women and filmed it with a hidden camera hooked up to a motorcycle battery and fitted into a shoulder bag. John’s high-pitched voice and stutter made a lousy first impression and made it easy for him to win the trust of dealers.

  “Now, you’ll see the footage and you’ll recognize the faces of the women. Twenty minutes ago, my man called from the field to tell me exactly what they’re wearing. Both of them are now there. The one on the right is wearing a black headscarf. The other one is not wearing any headscarf and she’s wearing a blue dress.”

  A sewing machine whirred beyond the office door.

  “We are going to take two special taxis. Okay. One after the other. We arrive. We stop near to that roundabout. We drop. You approach those ladies, you ask to see what they are selling and you find the elephant. It’s inside a bucket. I’m filming the whole thing. We arrest them and we go. No delays.”

  The air over Yaoundé was silvery with smoke, stinking from plastic bags tangled in fields that farmers were burning in preparation for planting. Old Julius, the village man who cooked at the Abong-Mbang bus stand, had warned me against carrying out operations at Mvog Mbi; the market was full of bushmeat vendors who had never been challenged. Though illegal, the trade in protected species was not considered criminal behavior. With the police routinely abusive and MINEF officials involved in the bushmeat trade, market vendors might become enraged at the sight of uniformed men acting in a way most would assume was just bullying for a bribe.

  The taxis stopped at the roundabout, and I opened the cab door. Six months in Cameroon had been building to this moment, and I had no idea how the operation would unfold. Julius led three armed policemen toward the vendors. People swirled in the commotion of green uniforms. Temgoua and I hurried out of our cab. The women, shaded by umbrellas, sat with piles of greasy black meat. But between us and them was a stomach-high iron fence, far more of an obstacle than the hidden footage had revealed. Julius and Temgoua squeezed through the crowd to find their
way to the vendors. People flocked to the circular fence to watch. The gathering mob wedged between me and the officers, and by the time Julius reached the fat woman in the black headscarf we’d lost the element of surprise. Temgoua bent down to inspect her bushmeat and stood silently, as though pondering something.

  “Fast, fast, put it all together!” Julius said.

  People murmured, began to shout.

  “Move out!” Julius said to the crowd. “You have nothing to see here. Just go.”

  Julius ordered his timid officers to climb over the fence toward him and he pulled the fat seller up by the arm.

  “Don’t go with them!” a man said to her.

  Julius whipped around and said, “This is not concerning you!”

  Temgoua bent down before a random seller, picked up a hunk of meat and showed it to one of the policemen as if giving a workshop. “This is elephant. Do you see, it’s gray? The skin on this side is wrinkled. These spots are where the hairs used to be. That’s how it is.”

  One bushmeat seller stood and walked off. The crowd was thickening, growing louder. I leaned over the roundabout fence and said to Temgoua, “Just take it. It’s fine. We can identify it at the station.”

  The second seller, the skinny woman in a blue dress, sat unbothered.

  “Julius! Deal with her.”

  He walked past the cairns of black flesh and picked up a piece of meat.

  “Elle est partí,” said the skinny woman, as if the owner of the meat had left.

  The shouting mob blocked my view of the policemen. The crowd was finding its voice. There was one face in front of me, then three. Temgoua stood in a sea of market-goers as the flashpoint neared.

  “Just take it! It’s fine,” I said to Julius. “Take it in a plastic bag. Julius, c’est fini.”

  A man bowed his chest and said, “You can’t chase us away!”

  Julius seized both women by the arms and led them through the crowd to the cabs. One policeman loaded meat into the trunk, and we departed, lucky—no coordination, no communication, no leadership.

  At the MINEF station, both women admitted to trading elephant meat, one of them chimpanzee, and they signed their complaint reports. If the minister channeled the cases to court, the state council would decide whether the women would stand trial. Julius and Temgoua received 10,000-franc bonuses, the junior officers 5,000, all of it financed by me and my father. The bushmeat was fed to hyenas, crocodiles, and lions at the zoo. And the operation and follow-up were filmed for accountability.

  Vincent said, “The radio news is singing and singing the operation.”

  Old Julius advised me to return to Mvog Mbi in the morning on the assumption that the women, released after signing their statements, would sell off their stockpiles. And the next day they were back at the market. Christopher fitted his disguise onto his head—the top hat. He repeated my instructions back to me and left with the hidden camera. But when he returned with the footage, I saw that in buying elephant meat from the woman in the blue dress, he’d passed the money to her through a small girl—a mistake rookie investigators would make when too focused on completing a sale.

  The team returned to the market in two cabs. Julius slammed his door and stormed toward the sellers with three policemen in tow. Temgoua and I followed. The fat woman in the black headscarf was there, the skinny woman gone. The shouting began as people swarmed to the railing to watch the fight.

  “Faster, Temgoua,” Julius said. “Not like yesterday.” Julius stood over the fat woman and said to her, “Do you have it now? Where is it?”

  She stuttered.

  “Where is your sister? You are doing it again without shame? Just to cry later?”

  “That’s elephant there,” I said.

  “There’s nothing,” Temgoua said. “There’s just a pangolin. Alive.”

  Then he found and held up a piece of elephant meat.

  “No, I don’t have,” the fat woman pleaded. “No, I didn’t know.”

  While Temgoua lectured her, Julius disappeared into the crowd. He returned with the skinny woman. A market vendor stepped forward, said, “Leave it to the biggest man.” The skinny woman raised her arms, slapped her hands, shouted in her tribal language—to rally support.

  “She is resisting,” I said.

  The market was with her. The policemen were scattered, people swarming. One policeman stood like a bystander, smiling, as clueless as Jens. Temgoua was nowhere in sight. A seller shoved one of our men. We were easy prey.

  The skinny woman was furious.

  “It’s okay, mama,” I said to her. “Stay here.”

  “Stay here,” Julius repeated. “When we’ll engage more people—”

  “What will you engage?” a man yelled.

  “We’ll engage whoever we want.”

  Men pushed between Julius and me. Two policemen raised their guns. Horns blared. Julius gripped the fat woman’s arm. A man yelled, “Was she hunting the animals? Bring any man you want.” In rough French, so everyone would hear, I said, “Selling elephant meat. That’s one. That’s two. It’s fine like that. The pangolin also. And all the elephant. Wrap it and let’s go.” People seemed to be forming a wall around us.

  “No. She doesn’t go!”

  “Get out of our market!”

  Where the hell was Temgoua? “Julius, we wrap it up,” I said and turned to the skinny woman. “You can stay here. You’re only making things worse for yourself.”

  Temgoua appeared holding a monitor lizard the size of a small crocodile. Steps from the taxi, a man smacked Temgoua’s arm and swiped the lizard. Julius guided the fat woman into the cab along with an old female seller. Someone swiped a bag of bushmeat from the hatchback before the policemen could get it closed. Peopled were blocking our way, slapping and banging the sides of the taxis. Julius climbed out and swelled in his uniform as he roared, “Move!”

  And they did; Julius was not a man to ignore.

  We rode away from the market. I rewound in my mind the events of the reckless, amateurish operation that would prove I was a risk to myself and to everyone. The video footage I vowed to erase. At the station, the fat woman confessed again and signed a second complaint report. To the old woman I said, “You are my grandmother. Out of respect to you, you’ll go free. But please don’t sell these endangered species again.”

  The pangolin, a long scaly mammal, unrolled from her protective ball and moved off with the ancient dignity of a dinosaur when I released her by the river behind Mendong. On Monday, Christopher confirmed that the skinny woman was back at the market, and Julius took five armed men and arrested her without a struggle. She’d worn the colors of the flag and an arm band streaked with the flames of Cameroon’s ruling party.

  Two weeks earlier, I’d gone to Belabo. Future, Moon, and the other young chimps were out of quarantine, acting like a family, making daily trips into the forest with older chimps and a caretaker. Future climbed in the trees. He came to me but not at first, and I sensed that one day he wouldn’t remember me at all. I tried not to see his growing indifference as rejection, tried to see it as a closing of the circle that meant he was returning to the life he was supposed to live.

  On the ride back to Yaoundé, two live crocodiles—threatened animals in Cameroon—were lifted onto my bus roof in a crate, and a woman and a young man boarded. With the bus in motion and the woman eyeing me, I called Koulagna, director of wildlife, on my very first cell phone. When the Alliance Voyages bus stopped in Ayos for a food break, I got the license plate number, phoned Takam at the Nkoabang checkpoint and insisted he stop the van. After midnight, just before we reached Nkoabang, I beeped Takam with my cell phone, and he stepped into the road waving a flashlight. I ducked behind my seat to avoid any eye contact that might reveal Takam and I knew each other. He confiscated the crate and led the young man but not the woman into the MINEF cabin. I continued into Yaoundé and approached her at the end of the line.

  “I saw you’re traveling with crocodiles,�
� I said. “Did they take them away?”

  “This is nothing. I’m going to recover them. My husband is a government official. I’ll give them a small gift and that’s all.”

  “Well, I need pets. I was hoping to get your crocodiles to have for my garden and my swimming pool.”

  She looked me up and down and shook her head. “These two animals were ordered.”

  I gave her my number. “Call me if you get more.”

  When I asked for her number, she said, “I have to move.”

  I returned to the checkpoint not long after dawn. Takam was sleeping, his uniform unbuttoned. He said, “You came too late. Someone came just now with a letter from the sub-director of human resources of MINEF. This letter says, ‘These crocodiles belong to me. Release them.’ The official arrived in his car and took them. That boy who we got down from the bus—he just went and ran away.”

  I rode to the ministry and took the elevator up to Koulagna’s office. Waving the sub-director’s hand-written letter in the air, I said to Kou-lagna, “We need to open an investigation into this right now.”

  A staff member of the wildlife department, Nango, stood beside me.

  “This is really outrageous,” Koulagna said. “We’ll write a letter to the minister.”

  “No. The sub-director of human resources is here in the building,” I said. “We’re going to his office now to do an investigation.”

  Koulagna shrugged. “Okay.”

  The staff member followed me to the sub-director’s office. Outside it, he approached the secretary and said, “Please, do you think the sub-director can receive us now?” I was already knocking on the door. Staff member Nango tried to step around me as the door opened. Over my shoulder, he said, “Mr. Director—”