by John Fowler
A FOREST IN THE CLOUDS
My Year Among the Mountain Gorillas in the Remote Enclave of Dian Fossey
JOHN FOWLER
For Janet, Isabel and Ben
And for Mom and Dad
When I was about seven years old I knew I had to go to Africa, and, I also knew that I would write a book someday.
—Dian Fossey
We live as we dream—alone.
While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
CONTENTS
Preface
PROLOGUE
A View from a Tree
ONE
My Own Vision of the Wild
TWO
Into Rwanda
THREE
Through the Mille Collines
FOUR
Karisoke Welcome
FIVE
A Cruel Climb
SIX
Un-Settling In
SEVEN
Gorilla Communion
EIGHT
Gorilla Without a Name
NINE
The Empty Cabin
TEN
It’s N’gee!
ELEVEN
Lockdown
TWELVE
A Sad Goodbye
THIRTEEN
The Poacher Patrol
FOURTEEN
Nyamuragira
FIFTEEN
A Man a Plan a Gorilla Dian
SIXTEEN
The Bivouac
SEVENTEEN
A Near-Death Experience
EIGHTEEN
Siku ya Uhuru!
NINETEEN
Kima Kufa
TWENTY
A Break in the Clouds
TWENTY-ONE
Dian Returns
TWENTY-TWO
Dian’s Friend
TWENTY-THREE
Gorilla Murder
TWENTY-FOUR
Nairobi
TWENTY-FIVE
Dian’s Foe
TWENTY-SIX
Going Bush
TWENTY-SEVEN
Gray Winter Home
EPILOGUE
The Ruins
Acknowledgments
Index
PREFACE
Dian Fossey was found murdered at Karisoke Research Center, in Rwanda, Africa, on December 27, 1985. At forty-eight years old, the once statuesque and commanding mountain gorilla behaviorist had become battle-weary, all but defeated in her long reign while struggling to hold on to her research camp, her mountain village, and the home she had created for herself through the years.
Along with chimpanzee research pioneer, Jane Goodall, in Tanzania’s Gombe Reserve, and Biruté Galdikas, who launched an orangutan research project in Borneo, Fossey was one of the legendary trio of primatologists sent into the wilds under the mentorship of anthropologist Louis Leakey. At the time, being women made their bold pioneering efforts alone in the wilds even more newsworthy. But Dian Fossey had embraced the isolation a little too much, perhaps, and the autocracy that came with life in the remote enclave of her own making had not shaped her in a positive way, nor refined her best qualities and her social skills. She still had to contend with humans, if only because she needed them.
Ultimately, what had originally been seen as her courage and determination would be viewed by many as too much counterproductive behavior and an exhaustion of resourcefulness—in essence, a sort-of overstaying of her welcome. Relationships with former allies in research and conservation had soured, but the region’s precious mountain gorillas were far too important, and endangered, for others to watch idly from a distance. Relocating Dian out of the Virungas and into a most worthy academic position at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, had been a tenuous, and delicately executed maneuver. But for none that followed in taking her position at Karisoke Research Center did the cold and lonely camp become their home. They came and went. Meanwhile, the call of the wild—or the need to withdraw—never abated for Dian, and ultimately she made her way back.
On that morning, Dian’s longtime house-servant, Kanyaragana, made his usual trek up the narrow path through the research camp as dawn began to light the sky. Hours would pass before the sun could burn even a peek through the pervasive mists. As on any other morning in the mountain forest at ten thousand feet, it was damp and chilly, and as usual, Kanyaragana was there to make Dian’s coffee and reignite the fire in her woodstove that always burned out during the night.
Going to unlock Dian’s cabin door, Kanyaragana found it already unsecured, and ajar, entirely out of character for the Research Center director who always made sure, with good reason, her doors were secure at night and who often slept late. Once inside, Kanyaragana walked across fragments of broken glass from camp lanterns littering the floor, past living room furniture that had been upended and knocked about.
Venturing toward Dian’s bedroom, the faithful servant saw that this room, too, had been ransacked, with drawers and cupboards pulled open, books scattered across the floor. Dian’s lifeless form lay face up on the dingy grass matting, a large gash gaping across her wan face. She had been hacked to death, disfigured by the sharp blade of a panga, Africa’s two-foot long machete. It was kept saber-sharp for harvesting crops like sugar cane and bananas, or in these parts, by Rwandan camp staff, gorilla researchers, and animal poachers for cutting through the heavy green growth of the forests. Pangas also made handy weapons, and this savagery stood as a punctuation mark of hate and rage at the end of the famous primatologist’s tumultuous life.
I hadn’t seen Dian in over five years at the time of her death, which caused quite a stir internationally. My coworkers at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans knew that I had spent a year as her research assistant, but it was not a subject I discussed much. There were no short answers, after all, to their questions: What was it like? What was Dian like? I had found it difficult to relate to others expecting a happy, inspirational story. There were so many who admired the noble National Geographic image of Fossey as intrepid scientist nestled among a peaceful family of mountain gorillas, Gorilla beringei beringei, against the lush green backdrop of equatorial Africa. To not know Dian, was to love her. Up close, however, her flaws cast a long terrible shadow, over even her most impressive accomplishments.
Details of the murder scene were released: A hole had been cut in the sheet metal exterior wall of her bedroom. The entry was just like one that had been cut soon after my departure from there five years earlier—to steal expensive sound recording equipment . . . by someone who knew it was there. I imagined the sound this must have made, the ripping and bending of sheet metal. It was preposterous that anyone could’ve done this with a pistol-packing Dian just inside, only a few feet away. Impossible, drunk or sober. And she was at her meanest when she was drunk. It had to have been done after the murder, a diversionary tactic to look like a break-in. And that could only mean that the killer was allowed inside. It was chilling to think beyond this.
The ensuing news reports of Dian’s murder, combined with persistent questions of friends and acquaintances made me speculate. Who did do the actual killing? I soon learned that all staff that was present in camp at the time of the murder were arrested and thrown in jail. Over ensuing weeks, news trickled out that they were all released . . . all except Rwelekana. Why was he detained? I thought back to working side by side with this seasoned gorilla tracker . . . our conversations together, with the other staffers by the camp’s fire. Did Rwelekana differ from the others? Was he a little more independent than they? More aloof? Detached? Dian had once referred to this valued gorilla tracker as an “ex-poacher.” He denied it with a smile, but . . . Was there something I didn’t know? I considered him one
of the most intelligent of camp staff—clever too perhaps. But still he had been devoted to Dian for years. . . . Why him? Why now?
The only non-African in camp with Dian when she was murdered was an American named Wayne McGuire. His photo in a news story showed an odd and scruffy character behind the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. His overgrown beard and unkempt hair looked the picture of a man gone “bush”—like Dian, too long in the forest. I found myself thinking, saying even, “if anyone had even the smallest tendency to murder, Dian could sure bring it out of them.” I didn’t know McGuire, had never even met him, but it was natural to speculate any weird scenario, under the circumstances, upon seeing his solemn odd photo. He also looked exhausted.
Then, there was news that a poacher had killed Dian. Her own patrolmen had, in fact, captured and detained one not long before. She had taken away the man’s amulet—the precious little sack of mostly dried herbs that these forest-dwellers hold so dear. It was a supreme insult, and Dian had long antagonized the poachers around her realm, waging war with them really.
Speculation didn’t end there. I soon found myself whisked back to Rwanda by a TV film crew, and at one safari lodge, the wife of a Belgian park ranger told me, “Oh, everyone knows it was someone in the government.” Rumor had formulated inside Rwanda’s national park system that Dian had been boasting of having inside information about animal trafficking in the country. News had it that she was implicating government people, from local all the way up to Rwanda’s president. Apparently, she had taken great delight in making it known that she would soon be blowing the whistle.
Earning a dollar a day from their boss for work shifts on the mountain, Karisoke staffers were paid less than two hundred dollars a year. A murder contract from someone who could pay any amount wouldn’t cost much in Rwanda’s economy, and if the murder was precipitated by corrupt politicians, they would certainly have arm-twisting power.
In retrospect, it seems fitting that things should have come to this end, Dian dying in battle. Knowing what I knew of her, it seemed preordained. She would have wanted it this way.
A young man of average achievements and yet-undefined goals, I was by all rights an unlikely candidate for one of only a handful of research positions at Karisoke. But for Dian, I was near perfect—what surer way for her to remain unchallenged in her position on the mountain. Unbeknownst to me, by that time she’d had enough of matching wits with the bright young postgraduates who came with clear agendas of their own. Such challenging interactions had taken a toll on her. Whereas I—enthusiastic and naïve—was ripe for the plucking.
A Forest in the Clouds is the story of my year living and working at Karisoke Research Center, Dian Fossey’s mountain gorilla research camp. It is my careful, if belated, response to that inevitable question: What was Dian Fossey like? Who was this woman who could leave behind so many murder suspects? It is a question I’ve spent many years avoiding, ever since I left that place. For me, it is Dian’s ghost.
PROLOGUE
A VIEW FROM A TREE
We have arrived. The odor fills my nostrils, my mouth—heady, herbal, and animal, just a few chromosomes away from human body odor. I can taste it, pungent and salty, mingling with the smell of thistle and nettle, crushed and bruised under their bulk.
My heart pounds in my ears from the climb up Mount Visoke’s steep muddy trail, just the end of the morning’s hike from camp in Zaire, on the other side of the mountain, back into Rwanda. I have forty pounds of baby gorilla on my back. Three months ago this would have killed me. But I have lasted. Now my heart just pounds away in my ears as sweat steams inside my rain jacket, dampening the layers of clothes underneath. There is no comfort zone here, just overheat and sweat while moving, and cold wetness when we stop.
Nameye, our gorilla tracker, pops up from a stand of tall thistles, his skin lava-black against the bright green surroundings. His eyes, excited, gleam wide and white, in stark contrast to his careful silence. The stage has been set, and tension hangs in the air. Behind him, shreds of clouds drift down the volcano’s steep sides, washing green to gray, swallowing us in a pervasive damp chill.
We balance on a thick mat of undergrowth slanting 45° uphill and down, that tiresome angle on which we must maneuver. Nameye gestures with the panga he clutches, it’s long rusty blade pointed in the direction of gorilla Group 5, just downhill and to the left of where we stand. The others, too, are waiting, in position, for us to take our posts.
My place is high in a great hagenia tree. Maneuvering the baby to my front, I climb up the thick trunk, anchoring the arches of my boots onto a couple of branches, before squaring my back against the bark as I grab for another limb above me. My little gorilla obliges, adjusting her hairy grasp of hands and feet to my clothing. I am cold, but the baby is warm under my left arm, fuzzy black forearms clinging to my torso with leathery fingers. Her eyes, shining brown gems, stare into mine for reassurance. Then she belches into my face, and the weedy smell of digesting vines fills my nostrils.
The rain begins, light and misting, a cruel teaser of more serious rain to come, and with it drifts more cold. I maneuver the hood of my raincoat onto my head with my free hand, and pull the baby in closer to my side. My heart is still thumping away, though by now it has dropped back into place in my chest.
On the ground to the left, in a thicket just uphill, fellow student Peter is at the ready with a waterproof notepad to document what unfolds. Across-slope, to the right, the duo comprising the Japanese film crew, position themselves on a tangle of thick wet undergrowth, their vivid blue matching raingear glowing like neon against the shiny green landscape. Laden down with equipment, black hair sweat-plastered to their foreheads, they have lost their dapper neatness; clearly the climb has taken a toll on them as well. Kaji sits cross-legged in front, nested in a tangle of undergrowth, wielding his bulky camera to his right eye while Taka stands upslope behind him, teetering, using both arms to steady the long tubular microphone out over his partner’s head. Kaji trains the massive lens across the slope below him . . . toward our tree . . . up the base of the trunk . . . and there, he pauses.
The lens, a giant eyeball to the world, spins; the aperture tightens, twisting inward, focusing now on the woman directly below me. It is our leader, the famous Dian Fossey, who clings to the base of the hagenia tree, halfway between me and the ground. She, too, is focused, fixated on the other gorillas. From our vantage point, we can see the black hairy heads and shoulders of the gorillas of Group 5, shifting in the thickets across the mountainside on our left. Some forty feet away, barely visible through the green, they have not so much as glanced our way. But they know perfectly well that we’re here.
The great apes continue feeding, despite the drizzle, pulling down stalks of thistles and nettles with crisp snaps of stems, their massive jaws producing muffled crunching, punctuated by an occasional low-rumbling belch vocalization, ummwaah . . . These are the sounds of contented gorillas minding their own business.
But we have made their business ours.
From underneath the hood of her drab green rain jacket, Dian’s own dark hair pokes like disheveled ape fur, and I can’t see her face until she turns to look up at the baby in my arms. Her baby. My leader’s brow furrows above her puffy eyes, lips pursed in a look of worried concern. Dian knows the camera is trained on her. She is different today, poised and energized, and I am baffled by the transformation. Only days before she could hardly walk with me a hundred yards without doubling over in pain and retching, and yet today, somehow, she has climbed a mountain, and is perched halfway up a tree with me.
She knows important film footage is being made, that every gesture, every expression, is being recorded for the world outside of hers, the people she reaches only through film and the printed page. Only the camera, it seems, trained on her, brings real life to her, and meaning.
Sensing movement from the corner of my right eye, I glance over toward Group 5. Still forty feet away, one gorilla’s upp
er torso is now in plain view. It’s Beethoven, the family’s four-hundred pound patriarch. He is seated, facing downhill—high, broad silver back and shoulders supporting an equally impressive head mounted on a thick neck, his cranium soaring to a high sagittal crest: his crown. Along with his silver back, this peaked cranium is the adult male gorilla’s emblem of maturity, stature and might. Beethoven’s powerful jaws crush the last morsel of nettle in his mouth, unfazed by stinging spines, the muscles in his head flexing underneath the gray hair at his temples. Defender of his group, now in repose, he sizes up where to lead his family next.
Suddenly, I am struck with the thought of how out of place I am. How far from home . . . in a tree . . . a baby gorilla in my arms! In a moment, Beethoven will see me, and then what? I find myself thinking, for the first time . . . I don’t belong here.
Sure enough, the massive old gorilla shifts his head toward me now, suddenly taking in something that shouldn’t be. He knows me, of course, by now, but not this peculiar scene—and worse yet, a baby gorilla in my arms! Whose baby gorilla? Instantly, his repose turns to alarm. I see it flicker across the eyes of this massive hominid as he fixes his glassy dark gaze on me, with my odd cargo. Baring his black teeth now, Beethoven releases a scream to end all screams—a primal sound, at once human and animal, screeching and voluminous, it rips across the mountain at me. This horrific noise that only a silverback gorilla can make. It peals through my body, rattling my inner core with a terror I have never known.