by John Fowler
“Ndio?” I paused, recalling the Swahili word for “yes.”
“Yesss . . . yore welkum,” Kanyaragana added with a smile.
Chuckling at his blithe hospitality, I sat down and nibbled away at the delicacies on the table. Occasionally I could hear Dian’s low, labored voice over the din of the Africans outside the kitchen door, who chattered and laughed loudly in unison. Dian’s voice sounded strained and breathy, but not angry or annoyed. I grew uneasy that she might come back into the house. I didn’t want her to see me eating, so confused was I by everything. When the voices stopped, I quickly finished my breakfast, thanked Kanyaragana again and headed back out to the opposite side of the cabin where Carolyn waited with the baby.
“Who’s here with Dian?” I asked, taking Josephine from Carolyn’s arms.
“Dian was waiting for the poacher patrol. It must be them.” Carolyn said, and after watching me and the gorilla for a few moments, she went back into the cabin. It was a few minutes past ten and the temperature had dropped to what felt like the low fifties. Mist wafted down the slopes of Visoke and enshrouded the camp again in a damp, gray pall.
Josephine was still clingy, but I walked over to a fallen hagenia, and placed her on the ground before climbing onto its leaning trunk. Josephine followed and I squeezed around a branch that pointed into the air and blocked the baby’s path. Puzzled, she stopped and stared forlornly at me before noticing a twig with leaves sprouting from the branch. She examined it closely with her eyes, smelled and tasted it, and finally ate a few of the leaves.
Suddenly a din of voices rose up from one end of Dian’s cabin and six Africans in green plastic rain pants and matching jackets trod in our direction. The man in front held a small black handgun. Terrified, Josephine scrambled around the branch that separated us, and seeing her alarm, I bent down to pick her up. As the baby clung tightly with her eyes transfixed on the poacher patrolmen, I jumped down from the tree. Feeling her desperate grip, I walked away from the group as they passed, turning to block her view, but Josephine craned her neck to see around my shoulder. Dian’s poacher patrol marched onward, under the spreading hagenias toward the large open meadow and the border of Zaire. Even after they faded out of sight, Josephine continued to hold tightly to me and stare wide-eyed in their direction.
I sat down next to a patch of gallium and thistle, hoping the gorilla food plants would entice the baby. Still shaken, Josephine kept her long furry arms wrapped tightly around my torso, and after a few minutes fell into a deep sleep. As I tried to remain motionless the baby’s breathing changed to a faint gratifying snore. It was still cold and cloudy and I sat holding Karisoke’s three-year-old gorilla as she slept.
I later learned that Dian’s poacher patrol was another bone of contention between her and Benda Lema of the national parks office in Kigali. She had no official permission to send her own armed guards into the park, let alone across the border into Zaire, but she did it anyway. Feeling that there was insufficient protection from the park offices for gorillas and other wildlife in the Parc des Volcans, Dian put together her own band of men and paid them to go out and destroy traps set by poachers. Because she was planning on leaving Karisoke soon for an extended period, she was sending this group of men out twice a week on a blitz of the heavily poached areas just over the border in Zaire toward the Kabara meadow, where she once had her very first gorilla research startup camp. And from where she was captured and detained by the Zairois.
Our arrangement for the day was that I would babysit in the morning, and Carolyn would take the afternoon shift. It was a nearly an hour later when Josephine awoke and Carolyn returned to take over. I knew Dian wanted notes, so I headed off to begin typing. Back at my cabin, I stared at the wine bottles filled with the tea-colored creek water. A cup of hot tea would have been nice in my cold room, but I still didn’t have a cookstove or any eating utensils. Not even a cup. After the day’s comments from Dian, I certainly wasn’t going to ask her about supplies.
A small portable Olivetti field-style typewriter and some typing paper had been placed in my cabin. Dian must have sent it via Kanyaragana, I thought. Peter, not Dian, had explained the rules to me: Dian supplied us with typing paper and carbons. We would use three sheets of paper with two carbons and type all notes in triplicate. One copy was for Dian, one was for camp records, and we could keep the originals. They had to be typed daily, and placed on our beds in the morning to be picked up by Kanyaragana when he came to pick up dirty dishes and make beds. Such service!
I pulled the remaining wedge of cheese out of my metal footlocker and used my pocket knife to carve away some green mold that was forming along its edges. When I got down to a clean portion, I peeled a slice and popped it in my mouth. Crumbly with a pungent moldy taste, it was a welcome treat. I ate another sliver and a couple bananas to take the edge off my hunger. I still had some vitamins from home and washed one down with the brown creek water in one of my old wine bottles, Virunga tea.
Mukera, the woodman, knocked on my door and came in to make a fire in my woodstove. Dian employed him to find and cut firewood daily and build a fire in each occupied cabin at night. Deftly, he stacked an armload of wood in the stove’s tiny cylindrical chamber, and with a match and a scrap of torn cardboard, he brought a small fire to life. The damp wood mostly just smoldered, but made the cold cabin a little more comfortable.
I had taken a typing course in high school, but did not have much experience with a typewriter beyond that. I spent the rest of the afternoon pecking out my recollections of Josephine’s behavior. I managed to fill a whole page, beginning with picking Josephine up at Dian’s cabin at 8:20 A.M. and ending with our encounter with the poacher patrol:
. . . she watches until they are out of sight, but looks their way when patrol makes loud noise. 10:18 Cold and cloudy. I sit w J. next to gallium and thistle. Won’t eat. Clings tight, shifts, sleeps. 10 min. heavy breathing. This continues til 11:15. 11:20 I turn J. over to Carolyn.”
Not very scientific, but I didn’t know how else to do it.
As I was finishing my typing late in the afternoon, Stuart returned from a visit to Group 5 with Peter. Still maintaining a positive relationship with Dian, he had visited her at her cabin. Stuart had become the only one that Dian talked to about her goals and objectives, and I came to rely on him for such information.
“Do you know what Dian wants in these notes?” I asked him.
“Not exactly, but she says Peter’s notes are some of the best notes she’s ever seen.”
Hmm, she didn’t show any liking for Peter, but she liked his notes. She must have really meant it if she made a point to tell that to Stuart. I would be going out to Group 5 with Peter in the morning and I made a mental note to talk to him about his note-taking techniques.
“Do you know when Dian is going to be leaving?” I asked.
“Well, she was supposed to have been gone by now, but first she was waiting for us to arrive and get settled in. When I got here, she told me she was going to leave on February 15, but now she’s talking about leaving on February 26.”
“Why the delay?”
“We’ve got to come up with a plan for the baby gorilla. Dian’s not comfortable leaving until we know what we’re going to do with her. She doesn’t want to see her go to a zoo like Coco and Pucker did. They didn’t live very long after that.”
Stuart’s positive relationship with Dian put him in a position of responsibility to her and he continued to describe Dian’s concerns. Mountain gorillas were essentially absent in captivity and one would provide a significant attraction at any zoo. Although global concern for wildlife conservation had slowed the unchecked extraction of exotic animals from their native habitat, here was one that already had been taken from the wild and needed a new home. Most zoos would have an interest in her.
Although Dian felt that a zoo home for the baby was one possible option, she thought that one mountain gorilla would trigger interest in another for breeding. At the time many zoo collect
ion managers poorly understood the methods by which poachers acquired wild animals, and simply seeing animals listed on an animal dealers price list, bought a specimen with little knowledge of the details of its acquisition.
Dian, however, was well acquainted with the blatant disregard poachers had for wildlife. She had seen firsthand how their wire snares fractured the legs of bushbucks and duikers and mercilessly held them until they died from shock, exhaustion, or starvation.
Animals couldn’t speak for themselves and were helpless in the face of persecution by humans. As contemptuous as Dian seemed to be of humans, she could empathize with the suffering of a hyrax or duiker, and she could really relate to the persecution of gorillas, so much like humans without being human. For whatever reason from Dian’s wounded past, or whatever, guarding the animals appealed to her psyche and made her worthy to go on living. Perhaps her suffering and sacrifice in the struggle was her punishment for being human and being the wretched Dian, from which she could not escape.
The poachers, from Rwanda or Zaire, came from a world that included a daily labor for the basic needs of food, shelter, and a feeling of safety for an entire family in a single-room hut made of dung and thatch. Education was scant and the world beyond the horizon was a great marvelous mystery. Animals were simply viewed as a local natural resource to the hunters that foraged with spears, arrows, and snare traps for bushmeat in the forests of the Virunga Volcanoes. Gorillas sometimes got caught in the snare too, and unable to remove the wire from their own arms or hands, they lost a limb or died from infection. With only about 250 mountain gorillas estimated remaining in the Virungas, population numbers couldn’t afford losses.
Two worlds were colliding in the saddle area between Visoke and Karisimbi along the border of Zaire. Dian’s contempt for poachers came to a head on New Year’s Eve in 1977, when Digit, a young silverback in Group 4 was slaughtered by a group of men and their dogs. Dian had watched Digit grow up in his family group, and he was one of her favorites. Earlier, he had become immortalized in a National Geographic documentary, but poachers had hacked off his head and hands as items for sale in the souvenir trade.
Seven months later, poachers shot and killed three more members of Group 4: Uncle Bert, a female named Macho, and her offspring, Kweli—these were among the names I had seen in the gorilla graveyard by Dian’s cabin. Dian had garnered fame through her study of these endangered apes; now, what was this heroine to do in the face of full-blown onslaught? I eventually learned that past students had suggested that these overt killings of gorillas were a revenge the poachers enacted on Dian. What better way to get at Dian than to kill her beloved mountain gorillas? What better way to reverse her efforts at protecting them than to cause their demise? The thought that she was somehow responsible for these overt gorilla deaths was too much for Dian, and I knew she would be hostile to anyone suggesting it. But I couldn’t help but think that, deep down, she knew this could be true, and the shame of it only fueled her war and fed her wrath against poachers, with gorillas caught in the crossfire.
As Stuart and I discussed the dilemma of Josephine’s future, he said that although Dian had not ruled out placing the baby gorilla with a zoo, she thought it might be worth the risk of trying to place her with Group 4, which had been decimated by poachers. If she was going to follow through with such an idea, she would have to do it before she left for her teaching assignment at Cornell. Dr. Glenn Hausfater, who had arranged her visiting professorship, was growing concerned about her continuing delays. Her teaching assignment was to begin in mid-March and her delays were allowing her less and less time to get settled in Ithaca and prepare for her series of public lectures.
It was clear Stuart was enjoying his stature as Dian’s right-hand man. Dian had chosen him among the three of us as her confidant, a position I didn’t envy at all. If he had any interest in becoming the acting director in Dian’s absence, as I suspected he did, then he had reason to be happy about the way Dian had taken to him. He did a lot for her, agreeing with her when she ranted about poachers and reassuring her when she expressed her worst fears about the fate of Nunkie’s Group. Dian communicated very little directly to me, instead letting Stuart relay information.
“Tomorrow’s porter day,” Stuart said, handing me a piece of paper. “Here’s the list Dian gave me.”
The three-by-five-inch note listed all the food we could order. On the right side of the paper, names of things were printed in English: onions, potatoes, rice . . . On the left side, their Swahili translations: vitunguu, viazi, maziwa . . . I tried to sound out the odd blendings of vowels and consonants: “vitunguuu, mmmchele, maziiiwaaa . . .”
The prices per kilogram, apiece, or other appropriate unit were also listed by each item. The porters, led by Gwehandegoza, whom we met upon our arrival in the Volkswagen three days earlier, delivered food and other items to camp twice a week. Dian and the students wrote their own orders from the list of available products and included the exact amount of Rwandan francs needed for Gwehandegoza to purchase everything at the marketplace in Ruhengeri. He picked up the next order each time he and a group of his handpicked porters delivered the previous requests. Gwehandegoza would also bring and deliver our mail to the post office in Ruhengeri.
In the fading light, I made my porter list and dreamed of food: potatoes, rice, pineapple, eggs, and yes, cabbage. I continued down the reference list. Cigarettes? They too were on the list. At one hundred francs, or a dollar per pack I decided to indulge myself in a pack of Impalas and added to my order. What the heck.
As the darkness settled in on camp, Stuart pumped up his lantern and began typing the notes he had taken with Group 4. We closed the door between our halves of the cabin and I lit a candle on the shelf by my bed before placing my large washpot filled with creek water on my tiny stove. The woodman, Mukera, had made a fire earlier, but the damp wood only smoldered and fizzled, despite my efforts to reignite it. Still the stove eventually produced enough heat to take the chill out of the water, and I bathed with an old washcloth that looked like it had been in camp for years. The smoldering fire didn’t really warm the room much, and afterward I dressed in a sweatshirt and sweatpants for pajamas, with a fresh pair of wool socks to keep my feet warm. I crawled into my bed under damp blankets and a sleeping bag. In the dim candlelight, I began reading A High Wind in Jamaica that I had borrowed from the American Embassy in Kigali, until I was too tired to focus on a page.
In the darkness, with the acrid smell of a blown candlewick, I pondered conditions at Karisoke. I marveled at the positive relationship Stuart maintained with Dian. She was congenial to him, and he sought interactions with her while I met only with contempt and disapproval. After three nights in Karisoke, I could not imagine choosing to be around her. Dian talked to Stuart openly, using him as a sounding board for her ideas and confiding in him about her fears.
Peter also seemed to be an outcast, but had somehow managed to live in camp for a year already. Unlike me, he was not intimidated by her, because he had at one time had a positive relationship with her. I wondered if the arrival of Stuart in camp had allowed Dian to cast Peter aside for someone fresh and new and as yet oblivious to where that would lead.
Peter had been in camp long enough to know her better. He had also known other students who had come and gone, like the shunned V-W couple, and was privy to their tales of confrontation with Dian. I thought of Carolyn living under the same roof as Dian. She seemed to be handling it okay, and as I drifted off to sleep I was thankful to be in a separate cabin at the opposite end of camp.
Sometime in the cold predawn hours, I was awakened by the sound of a dull thud inside my cabin. This was followed by a dull but quick loping scuttle across the grass mat floor, thump, thump, thump . . . It continued from the base of my desk on the opposite side of the room to the foot of my bed. I sat upright and groped for the matches to light my candle, wishing I had set my flashlight at arm’s length. A moonless night at Karisoke is pitch black. I couldn�
�t find the matches. Where was my flashlight? Reaching farther for matches, I knocked the candle and its bottle-holder on the floor with a crash. At that, the creature on the floor scampered heavily but quickly away from my bed to the area under the cabinets against the wall. The sound of its footsteps ended with a brushing sound of something sliding through the grass mat that covered the wall.
I grasped my flashlight farther down the shelf by my bed and clicked it on. Slowly, cautiously, I stepped out of bed and shined the flashlight toward the corner where the noise had stopped. In the beam of light, I could see that the point where the grass mats met each other on the walls, and where the walls met the floors, were loosely secured. The cabin’s simple construction of metal and wood allowed for gaps and holes throughout.
I shined my light where I first heard the noise and saw my remaining half-dozen bananas scattered and partially eaten on the floor. I gathered them up. Outside my cabin door was a small fruit cage made of hardware cloth stretched over a wooden frame about the size of a hatbox. Mounted atop four-foot stilts, I had thought it seemed a bit eccentric upon my arrival, but now it made sense. I went outside, triggering the bark of a bushbuck whose successive barks faded into the dark surrounding forest. I opened the door of the fruit cage and tossed my remaining bananas inside. Back in my cabin, I crawled under my mantle of damp covers, listening intently in the darkness for any other noises until sleep again overcame me.
SEVEN
GORILLA COMMUNION
As the cold morning light filled the room, I was still tired from my wakeful encounter with the creature that had invaded my cabin during the night. Hearing Stuart moving around on his side, I opened our adjoining door and told him about the nighttime escapades. He had already had a similar experience before I arrived, and told me that he had learned from Dian and Peter that the creature was a giant rat. Not just a big rat, the common name was “giant rat.” Incredulous, I had remembered reading about these, and searched through my luggage to find my Larger Mammals of East Africa field guide. Flipping through the pages I found the color plate of the large rodent with a long naked tail. Its face was also longish with large naked ears. On the same page was a picture of a “brush-tailed porcupine,” and the two appeared to be about the same size. A rat the size of a porcupine—I mulled the idea over in my mind.