A Forest in the Clouds

by John Fowler

  One night I awoke to the clang of my bean pot’s lid being jostled aside on the shelf beside my bed. By this time, I had learned to keep my flashlight close at hand, and upon switching it on, I revealed the beady eyes of the giant rat staring into the light. Still chewing a mouthful of my beans, he poked his nose into the air in my direction, twitching his great whiskers as if trying to smell me beyond his own breath. He was the size of a cat! As I rose to grab for my panga, the thing flopped to the floor, dragging his thick naked tail like a snake behind him. There he held his ground, as if wanting to get past me to grab the pot of beans to take with him.

  Blinded by the beam of light, the creature reared up into the air, sniffing and twitching his long whiskers, tail slung heavily across the flooring. Despite my fascination with animals of all types I found this creature disturbing in his scale and boldness. Giant rats, I soon learned, are not indigenous to the forest at this altitude, and had invaded only because of the food human presence brought. I reached for my panga by the wall, and swung. One broadside smack only sent him spinning around my feet, before he quickly regained his wits and slipped right back through the flap in the wall from which he’d entered.

  As we were forced to withdraw into our own spaces, pet rat included, Dian became more withdrawn into her own. Except for sending us orders via camp staff, written on scraps of paper, our headmistress sequestered herself in her cabin for days. Even in her isolation, however, she ensured that no conviviality go on in camp beyond her walls. After dark, it seemed she could be lurking just outside, to intercept any attempt we might make at a social gathering. Like lockdown in a prison, each of us inmates were confined to our own cell; Dian, the warden, remained prepared to intervene at a moment’s notice. One by one, I noticed Kanyaragana stockpiling a growing number of empty Johnnie Walker bottles he salvaged from her trash bin to store for use as valuable water vessels at his home off the mountain. These he asked to store in my cabin. Except for needing to use the kitchen, I imagined Carolyn must’ve withdrawn into her private end of Dian’s cabin. At least she had a door to close and a wall between them.

  Her hopes crushed by Dian’s cruelty, Carolyn finally announced to Stuart, Peter, and me that she had made the decision to leave. After breaking this news to Dian, life under the same roof with the camp director went from awkward to unbearable, and though she was too reserved to provide details, Carolyn asked to move into Stuart’s and my cabin the last couple of nights before her departure. She held on as long as she could. There, she insisted on sleeping on my floor, despite the giant rat’s inevitable nocturnal visit, knowing that she would soon be whisked away forever by the camp’s porters.

  On February 1, less than two weeks after arriving hopeful and optimistic, Carolyn packed her few belongings for the last time and headed down the camp trail with the porters. That morning, as had become my full-time duty, I had picked up the baby gorilla then referred to as N’gee from Dian. As I watched N’gee forage on gallium cascading from a large fallen hagenia tree behind the Empty Cabin, I saw Carolyn approach with the group of porters who had finished delivering our supplies and were heading back down to the foot of Mount Visoke. Carolyn was dressed in the few clean clothes she had, but she wore a tranquil smile I hadn’t seen since she sat on Judy Chidester’s veranda overlooking a panoramic view of Kigali as we optimistically pondered what lay ahead. It was obvious that she felt good about her decision to leave Karisoke. I hugged her and she surprised me with a kiss on my cheek.

  “You’re right, Dian is a miserable wretch,” Carolyn said, “and I agree with you that she’s trying to break your spirit.”

  “Well, I don’t know what else to think.” I added.

  “And she isn’t worth my spit!” Carolyn added, alluding to Dian’s displays of spitting on the ground in contempt of someone she hated mentioning.

  Whoa! This was out of character for our own soft-spoken Carolyn, and I realized then that she had been internalizing all that she could and no longer needed to. I had never heard Carolyn utter anything disparaging, and still hadn’t even heard her curse. Her experiences at Karisoke had somehow changed her. Obviously, she no longer clung to the hope of things working out, nor of giving Dian the benefit of a doubt. Her hope and optimism had buoyed me above the unrelenting ill-treatment Dian bestowed on me. At that moment I saw Carolyn as both defeated and stronger. She had become steeled in her decision to not keep trying to make this work and with that gained liberation in seeing Dian differently. Still, the hopes and dreams that she had arrived with had been shattered without mercy, and that had to hurt.

  I knew that Carolyn’s decision to leave was justified, considering the abuse she had endured from Dian. Still the reality of her departure was a blow to me because of its finality. Coming to Karisoke had been like a dream for both of us and Carolyn would never have this opportunity again. Still, as I watched her leave, part of me envied Carolyn’s departure from Karisoke. I longed for home.

  As the sound of the chattering porters disappeared with Carolyn among them, I was struck by the faint drone of an airplane. High above me in the equatorial jet stream, a distant passenger plane glinted silver as it flew westward. I watched wistfully, realizing how unusual it was to see any sign of the outside world from camp. My baby gorilla didn’t take notice of the airplane, but stared toward the direction that Carolyn had departed.

  Within moments my attention was brought back to the moment and my own reality. The baby and I could see through the trees that someone was entering camp from the trail on which Carolyn had disappeared. With a few porters ahead of him, a white man moved with the group quietly up the trail toward Dian’s cabin.

  Rob McIlvaine’s timing could not have be worse for Dian. Her own appointee to head her foundation, the Digit Fund, arrived on the very day Carolyn left. A former US ambassador to Kenya, executive vice president of the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, and longtime supporter and confidant of Dian, Rob was by then part of the cadre of professionals trying to finesse Dian’s overdue departure out of Rwanda in the wake of her outrageous dealings with poachers, locals, tourists, and government park officials. The teaching position at Cornell University was a fine and dignified place for her to land on her feet while others took Karisoke in a positive new direction.

  That night I dreamed that I was back in my home in Mount Jackson, Virginia. I was sitting on my dad’s chair in front of the TV in the sunroom. Carolyn sat on my mom’s old rattan couch. Refreshed and relaxed, we discussed having been at Karisoke. As we talked I became aware of a feeling of regret for having left Rwanda to return home. The feeling overwhelmed me as I realized that a lifetime opportunity had come and gone in a few short weeks, and I would never have such an opportunity again. I was missing the adventure that Africa offered me.

  The sun was already coming up when I woke from this dream and maneuvered myself groggily into a sitting position against my pillows. My fire had gone out during the night as usual, and the clammy cold that had never fully been at bay had reestablished itself. Looking around my dingy, sparsely-equipped cabin I was relieved to be in camp.

  Only in retrospect do I realize the effect this dream had on galvanizing my spirit subconsciously into sticking it out at Karisoke. It gave me the ability to fast-forward to my feelings if I had chosen to leave. I did not like what I saw in the choice to return home to the life I had outgrown in Virginia. Instead, with little motivation left in me I recommitted to spend a year in Fossey’s camp, doing what I could do for mountain gorillas, and my little orphaned one. Dian might make me miserable, but she would not run me off.

  I was only just beginning to understand the depth and complexity of the politics of gorilla field research and Dian’s thorny stance at the center of it all. The morning after Carolyn’s departure, in an uncharacteristic move, Dian graciously invited me into her cabin when I arrived to pick up the baby gorilla for that day’s duty. Something I once would have treasured as a gesture of friendship, however, by then only made me wary and u
neasy, and I soon realized that I was merely a prop, staged for Rob McIlvaine to witness some positive relationship Dian might have with her students. Naturally paranoid, Dian undoubtedly feared that Rob would have crossed paths with Carolyn, or at the very least would have heard controversial rumors of the sudden departure of yet another student. And who knows what the Americans in Kigali were saying about Carolyn’s unexpected exit?

  As the baby scampered to my feet, I was surprised to see Dian fully dressed so early, her hair nicely brushed. I was nearly speechless as she introduced me to Rob as if I was her treasured right-hand man.

  “John’s reeeally and truuuly been doing a wonderful job with the baby,” Dian gushed to her authoritative visitor.

  Head to toe in khaki, Rob was shorter than Dian; square, fit, and trim with close-cropped graying hair, he looked the part of a military sergeant. The photos he’d brought from National Geographic confirmed that our little gorilla was not N’gee, as Dian had been so convinced.

  Kanyaragana brought Dian another steaming cup from the kitchen and she offered it to me instead, as if I was her dearest friend. Dumbfounded by this gesture, I awkwardly took the cup as Rob resumed his grilling of Dian.

  “So, now tell me what the holdup is . . . ?” he pressed.

  “I have a lot of things to get done before I go,” Dian whined, “and the baby gorilla . . . !” The baby, I had realized by then of course, was Dian’s ace in the hole for explaining her delay; it couldn’t stay in camp indefinitely, and Dian needed to have a solution in place before leaving, “I’m still not sure what I’m going to do about her!”

  Rob kept cool pressure on Dian until she mentioned wanting to take her head porter, Gwehandegoza, back to the States with her, at which point, grimacing in disbelief, he finally lost his patience.

  “C’mon, Dian! You know you can’t do that!” he blurted. “You’d never be able to get the paperwork done, for one thing!”

  With the little gorilla under my left arm, I sipped my coffee, unable not to enjoy the scene before me—Dian made uncomfortable by someone more powerful than she, someone bigger than Karisoke in the broader world of wildlife conservation and foreign service. I allowed myself to envision a tolerable camp life with our leader gone.

  The National Geographic photos Rob brought of N’gee, however, revealed that our gorilla orphan was not the missing baby from Nunkie’s Group. Our baby, once again became nameless.

  “Now that Carolyn is gone,” Dian said tersely, as I followed with the baby on my back, “I need you to take full charge of the baby.”

  “That’s fine. I’d like to do that.”

  “Really and truuuly, that cunt was not to be believed.” I felt myself flush with anger at her choice of such a harsh derogatory word, but kept following silently like the dumb and diffident zombie I’d become. I couldn’t even imagine where Dian drew her vitriol from.

  “I’m sorry,” Dian said dryly, in response to my silence, “I know how you feel about her, but I just don’t need someone like THAT in camp.” Someone like WHAT I wondered . . . someone who admired you and came here with every intention of serving a woman who was to her a hero?

  THIRTEEN

  THE POACHER PATROL

  As an attempt to regroup after Rob McIlvaine’s visit on the heels of Carolyn’s departure, and in defense of what talk there may be in Kigali about yet another Karisoke exile, Dian invited the three of us remaining males to her cabin for dinner, telling us each to bring something. Apparently we could eat together as long as it was under her roof, and her watchful eye. Suddenly, we were one big happy bunch, or else . . . Dinner at Dian’s came to be a familiar tactic of her damage control.

  Thankful to have regular supplies of food deliveries from the porters, it was with great zeal that I prepared food of my own. I’d learned a little Swahili and Kinyarwanda, reading a copy of the camp’s standard porter list—vitunguru for beans, mchele for rice, viazi for potatoes—basic fare, but I got creative. A simple cabbage, or amashoe, became nirvana to me. Recalling my mother’s skill at making paper-thin shredded coleslaw from Dad’s homegrown cabbage, I did my best to re-create hers, making do with the juice of a lemon, vegetable oil, salt and pepper.

  “Tafhadahali,” Stuart said, as Dian’s houseboy, Basili, offered him a cold primus.

  “Ahem, what did you say?” Dian said, dryly, seated across from him. Peter and I poised in bemused anticipation.

  “Isn’t that the word for please?” Stuart asked.

  “Ahem . . . We don’t say that here,” Dian replied brusquely, eyes red from another afternoon with Johnnie Walker.

  We passed around our plates and bowls of rice, beans, and my Karisoke coleslaw as our conversation moved from the topic of Swahili to Dian’s ideas about releasing the baby gorilla back into a wild group. As usual, Dian picked at her food as she talked, occasionally using her knife to slice and press thick chunks of margarine into her bread, before topping it off with a heavy shake of salt. This she ate heartily, sampling my slaw between bites.

  “Who made this?” Dian asked, chewing on a mouthful of my shredded cabbage, like a gorilla finishing a bolus of gallium.

  Sheepishly, I raised my hand.

  “You made this?” She squinted her eyes at me warily, blinking several times. “I like it.”

  I had never known what it is like to have to bestow kindness upon someone who had been hostile to me, yet I discovered that I could muster up this kind of action. The next day when I broke for lunch from my baby gorilla care, I threw together a fresh batch of slaw, with a heavy shake of salt. As Basili passed by my cabin, I handed him a covered bowl of it to deliver to Dian, a sacrifice to the goddess.

  That evening, after baby gorilla duty, I found something wrapped in paper on my desk. The paper was a note in response to the coleslaw: I was just thinking of that this morning. Thank you. Dian. Wrapped inside the note was a chunk of milk chocolate. Cabbage well invested! This simple gesture gave me the smallest glimmer of hope. Dian preferred those who had something to offer her.

  From this point, Dian began to treat me with something akin to appreciation as she formulated her plan for the baby gorilla’s release into gorilla Group 4.

  With Carolyn gone, I became the full-time caregiver of our little orphan whose name had been changed from Charlie to Sophie to Josephine to N’gee. I thought Peter and Stuart felt bad for me being stuck in camp, unable to get out to see the wild groups, but I found a certain sense of comfort and satisfaction in this responsibility. It was certainly an important task, and it gave me my very own project, versus wondering where Dian would send me next, to tag along with whom, as if she didn’t really know what to do with me anyway. Besides, I was good at it, able to get into the baby’s gorilla mindset, meet her needs of feeling secure and give her the active play she needed without being spoiled. And because this caregiver task was so important to Dian, I knew it would curb my boss’s antagonism toward me.

  Dian’s level demeanor may have been at least partly attributable to encouraging letters from Glen Hausfater, the man who arranged her teaching position at Cornell. Although I certainly didn’t know the details, the arrangement also held the promise of male companionship stateside.

  In preparation for her departure, she sent her poacher patrol out in a series of sweeps into Zaire to cut snares and confiscate dead animals. This makeshift army of Rwandans and Zairois was her pride and joy, in direct alignment with her own confrontational tendencies. She took particular delight in covering the bare feet of the towering and gangly Tutsi, Mutarutkwa, with new size-fourteen boots. These, she had special-ordered for him, and she laughed unabashedly as he ran in a comic and ungainly canter, in footwear for the first time.

  The baby gorilla, nameless again, clung tightly to me, watching wide-eyed as this emboldened group of Africans marched past into the forest, and making me wonder about the day she was taken from her family. Was it a band of men that looked and sounded like these? How many of her family of gorillas died in the cour
se of her capture?

  Upon their return at the end of the day, the men of the poacher patrol proudly presented Dian with a bounty of poacher’s traps in the form of rope and wire snares. Their booty also included purloined animals that had been caught in the traps. These they carried slung over shoulders, or carefully hog-tied in multiples onto wood poles carried between two men. Their victory put Dian in a victorious and maniacally upbeat mood. When her men returned with such loot, she made a party of it, replete with beer, and she swaggered at the center of it with great bravado. Vengeance against poachers clearly made her far happier than yet more gorilla data, and in light of the overt killings of Digit and other of her gorillas, it was obvious there was a very personal element to this war.

  For the most part, these forays were conducted well across the border toward the direction of her original campsite, in the then-Congo, where she had once been captured and removed by Congolese soldiers; some accounts of this event include tales of rape and torture before Dian could outwit and escape her captors. How much of the pride she had for her own little band of soldiers heading back from whence she came to make their mark—her mark, actually—could be retaliation? Our research gorilla groups were not even frequenting the area where she sent her patrolmen; neither did she hold visa nor research permit for access there.

  Dian played a dangerous game, but the game she played was more complicated than she appeared to imagine. I later learned, that unbeknownst to his trusting boss, her beloved Mutarutkwa, in his new Karisoke-sponsored supersized boots, was in fact, a poacher himself, spending his off days setting traps in the very region she paid him to patrol. So blindly gullible was Dian in her vengeance.