A Forest in the Clouds

by John Fowler

  Dr. Pierre Vimont, the French physician in Ruhengeri who had rescued our orphaned gorilla from poachers, had asked Dian if a couple of his French countrymen could come to Karisoke for a visit with gorillas. In light of Dr. Vimont’s heroics, and perhaps in thanks, Dian couldn’t decline this request that she would otherwise be most unlikely to honor. Hosting these two men at her cabin and sending them off to Group 5 with Peter and me was a rare privilege reserved for only the most important people, or at least people who had something to offer.

  On the morning of February 6, Dian had Peter and me wait for the two Frenchmen who had referred to themselves as naturalistes. While these gray-bearded gentlemen had a leisurely breakfast at her cabin, Mademoiselli came down to the campfire after sending Stuart to search for Group 4.

  “John, would you come out and look at this . . . um . . . please?” Dian asked.

  I followed Dian to the picnic table near the campfire. A dead black-fronted duiker, the species of small antelope that browsed each day in the meadows and forest edges around camp, lay dead and stiff on the ground by the table.

  “What happened?” I blurted at the disturbing sight.

  “The poacher patrol found it alive in a fucking snare two days ago.” Dian lamented. “I was keeping it at my cabin, but it couldn’t use its front legs and died.”

  I bent down and stroked the delicate creature’s sleek russet fur. At such close range, I could see the beautiful details of the delicate animal, a female, her smooth fur, nearly orange, accented by a jet-black forehead. The tiny ebony horns were corrugated and tapered to a fierce point, and its nose was broad and black, resembling a dog’s, I thought. Rwelekana stood nearby honing a large knife on a whetstone.

  “I tried to feed her, but she never ate.” Dian lifted one of the front legs. “Look at these legs and tell me what you think.”

  Feeling very self-conscious with Dian now soliciting my opinion, I took the dainty leg from her hand and articulated it back and forth. I could hear and feel the crunching of a multitude of bone fragments and shards; the leg had been destroyed beyond repair. Despite the stiff rigor mortis in the rest of the body, both front legs flopped in their mangled sockets, limp like a rag doll’s arms.

  “You can feel the broken bones grinding in the legs when you move it,” I said, wondering if Dian understood that I wasn’t actually in vet school yet. At the time, I didn’t know of Dian’s aspirations to become a veterinarian herself.

  Dian summoned Rwelekana from the fire pit, speaking briefly to him in Swahili. Placing his whetstone on the picnic table, the able staffer rolled the dead duiker onto its back. One of Dian’s most prized longtime gorilla trackers, Rwelekana worked his knife with great proficiency, slicing nimbly up the belly of the antelope in one stroke. After cutting with the same dexterity up the center of each foreleg, he deftly peeled back the hide.

  “Wow, he knows what he’s doing!” I said.

  “That’s because he used to be a poacher.” Dian responded, dryly.

  “NOOO . . .” Rwelekana blurted, surprising Dian and me with both his apparent understanding of what she said, and his attempt at English.

  “Ehht mwah . . .” Dian muttered, looking at Rwelekana, who smiled impishly before turning away furtively to sharpen his knife again on the whetstone. Rwelekana gave me a side-glance and a furtive smile me before resuming his task.

  In no time, Dian’s “ex-poacher” had the duiker’s sinews cut away revealing the tissues of its foreleg joints. The animal’s muscles were torn and near-black, clotted with blood from the hemorrhage that had resulted during the animal’s struggle, one foot having been suspended in the air by a wire snare. The bones on the upper half of each front leg were shattered into splinters. Dian and I stared down at the dismembered carcass.

  “You can see all the damage that was done,” I said, bending down to move the leg again. “When she was stuck in the snare and fractured the trapped leg, she must’ve just struggled until he broke the other leg. These animals don’t know when to stop in a situation like that and I’m sure this one thrashed around some more, grinding the leg bones to pieces.”

  “Do you think there was anything we could have done to save it?” Dian asked. This was the first time Dian had really asked my opinion on anything and I was taken aback by becoming more than just an outlet for her contempt. I really thought she wanted me to explain to her precisely what we could’ve done to save the animal, but actually I was surprised she had kept it in this condition for so long. I thought it should’ve been put out of its misery immediately, and hoped she would understand my response.

  “We would’ve had to be able to put those bones back together . . . and then splint it. There’s just too many fragments. All the bones and muscles would have to knit back together. She would’ve died in the process. These animals are so flighty in captivity, I don’t see how we could’ve kept her alive even if we could put her back together. It would just be a longer, slower death.”

  “I know,” Dian lamented with a sigh. “I just get so goddamned tired of not being able to do anything when these animals are brought in like this.”

  Dian spoke again to Rwelekana, and he resumed cutting up the duiker. I watched, surprised to see this man meticulously gutting and cleaning the animal, excavating its entrails before deftly removing the entire hide, like a deer being cleaned after the hunt.

  “Do you just have them bury it?” I asked Dian, knowing that something else was going on.

  “I let the men eat them.” Dian responded.

  I was surprised by Dian’s willingness to allow poacher contraband to become a feast, but accepted her ability to see the dead duiker as a food resource that her staff could utilize in the resource-poor environment of our camp—and the poor country itself.

  After Rwelekana carried the duiker away, Peter arrived, and Dian reminded us to wait for her two French guests who would join us on our visit to Group 5. Dian explained to us that they were acquaintances of Dr. Vimont, who had helped in the confiscation of our baby gorilla. Dian went on to explain that the older gentleman was interested in acquiring our little gorilla for his own animal collection.

  “He’s got money!” Dian exclaimed, in a hushed tone, leaning in close, “because he says he has a zoo in France. ‘My zoo! MY zoo!’” Dian pointed emphatically at her own chest in her best mimic of the old guy. “He offered to take the baby . . .”

  Knowing about Coco and Pucker, the two young confiscated gorillas she had nursed back to health years earlier before they were sent to Germany’s Cologne Zoo, I was perplexed that Dian had not expressed complete contempt about this scenario of an individual wanting to acquire the baby for a private collection. Up until now, Dian had shown nothing but contempt for any outside parties interested in the affairs of her mountain gorillas. But these were special friends of Dr. Vimont and Dian was on her best behavior for her public persona and the stories told down below. And for what it might be worth, “He’s got money!”

  FOURTEEN

  NYAMURAGIRA

  That evening, Stuart returned to our cabin from Group 4, telling me that Dian was still frantic about Nunkie and this silverback’s group of females. Because the photos that Bob McIlvaine had brought from National Geographic had confirmed our baby gorilla was not N’gee from Nunkie’s Group, as she had been thinking, Dian gained a little optimism that Nunkie’s Group was still out there, intact, somewhere beyond the research range.

  “She wants you to come with me and Rwelekana tomorrow,” he said, “to find Nunkie.”

  “Okay,” I said, “sounds like an adventure.”

  “Yeah . . . you know, we’re going to have to go way into Zaire,” he added.

  “Yeah . . . ?” We had already been out to visit Peanuts’s group numerous times across the border.

  “This time we’ll be going all the way to the other side of Mount Visoke . . .

  “And . . . ?”

  “And we don’t have visas for Zaire.”

  “I know, bu
t, sounds like plenty of others have done it before us.”

  Stuart and I chatted about the risks of getting caught so far into Zaire without visas, shrugging off the danger as being negligible, considering that we’d be deep in the forest and high on Mount Visoke’s slopes. I began to think that my willingness, or a possible lack thereof, was more a concern of Dian’s than of Stuart’s. I surmised that previous students had made a case of Dian putting them at risk, and she assumed I would be unwilling. Students unwilling to take the risks she required, or put themselves in danger, were of little use to her.

  Nunkie had been a lone male who appeared on the scene within the Karisoke research range. Dian had learned a lot about how gorilla groups formed watching Nunkie draw females away from other groups. These were generally those who had been low ranking than others more senior, or otherwise dominant, within their groups. Low-ranking Papoose and Petula of Group 4 left their silverback, Uncle Bert, to move on with the bold new guy in town. These two females produced Nunkie’s first known offspring, and from there on his new group continued to grow, with females lured away from other groups, and his subsequent breedings with them.

  Nunkie’s story would be a feature of Dian’s next National Geographic article, and our finding him and bringing back the most recent field notes was essential to the story’s outcome.

  I went to bed early that night, and in the morning Rwelekana accompanied Stuart and me down the camp trail toward the border of Zaire. As the three of us passed the south end of Dian’s cabin, we heard laughter and stumbled upon Dian with her two French guests. Dian stood just outside her door with the oldest gentleman, while the other man stood with his back toward us, aiming a camera at his ami, posing with the famous Dr. Fossey standing by his side. At the sound of our approaching footsteps, the cameraman turned his head to us exclaiming “bonjour!”

  Dian was dressed in her typical work shirt and jeans, but they were clean and fresh looking; even her hair was brushed. This was the first and only time I saw her wearing makeup. She wore bright red lipstick that made her small mouth look large. The same color was rubbed onto her cheeks, exaggerating the whole effect of being made up. Dian’s giggles became a taciturn smile at the sight of Stuart and me. As Stuart slowed, echoing their “bonjours,” I almost ran into the back of him while staring at Dian. I caught myself ogling the sight despite fearing that she, out of embarrassment, wanted to curse at us. Instead, under the scrutiny of her visitors from the outside world, Dian forced another smile and an awkward, reticent, girlish wave to Stuart.

  That day’s trek to the other side of Mount Visoke seemed endless, and despite the distance we traveled into and across many ravines, we didn’t find Nunkie’s Group. Rwelekana spotted gorilla footprints in a trampled clearing, but eleven nearby night nests that the gorillas had made three days earlier did not fit the profile of Nunkie’s clan. While Stuart and I measured and sketched the layout of the nesting area in our notepads, our skilled tracker lifted a single lobe of dung from each ring of bent and folded plant stalks. Each of these pieces, he wrapped meticulously in a broad lobelia leaf, before carefully placing them in his backpack.

  It was 2:20 P.M. when Rwelekana, pointing his panga eastward, indicated that we should return. Dian’s curfew was at 5:30 P.M., and Rwelekana began leading Stuart and me straight up the side of Mount Visoke from deep in Zaire. From the clearings, we could easily see the town of Rumangabo, Zaire to the northwest. Beyond, that in the far distance, green forest gave way to the golden plains of Zaire’s Rwindi National Park glowing on the horizon, stretching to the southern shoreline of Lake Edward.

  “Tutarudi juaa,” our intrepid guide said, pointing toward the peak of the volcano. Stuart and I understood him to be saying that we would return upward—the shortest way home would be over the mountain’s top.

  Stuart and I huffed and puffed, but Rwelekana led the way effortlessly, hacking through thick undergrowth to cut a trail. The higher we climbed, the shorter and more open the vegetation became just beneath the alpine zone, until we hit stands of giant senecio, Dendrosenecio adnivalis, with twisting trunks. Their thick and large glossy, green leaves reminded me of the magnolias back home. Beneath these, Rwelekana paused, using his panga to break open a woody stem revealing a brittle white core.

  “Ngagi kula,” he said, breaking a piece of the crispy pith and holding it near his mouth, informing Stuart and me that this was another gorilla food. We each sampled a piece; the taste and texture reminding me of water chestnuts.

  The three of us maneuvered through these tangled groves, upward, until the terrain changed to sloping meadows of grassy sedge, Carex runsoroensis, punctuated by expansive slabs of bare black volcanic rock. From an unobstructed vantage point on one of these exposed patches of ancient volcanic cone, we could see a great portion of Zaire that tumbled away from our feet. By contrast to tiny Rwanda, Zaire—later to be called Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC for short—is one of Africa’s largest and least populated countries. From where I stood, unbroken forest, in stark contrast to Rwanda’s plowed farmlands, spilled downward to the lowlands westward. While rains on the Rwandan slopes fed the Nile, rains on this side fed the great Congo River basin all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Although Rwanda was now obscured, we were so far around Mount Visoke that to the northeast, we could also just see into Uganda. I had to squint to see what I thought must be the dry grasslands where the dark green forest ended and golden yellow began. I later learned that this was Zaire’s Rwindi Park that merges into Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park along the borders of great Lake Edward. As my sweat turned cold in the thin alpine air, I reminisced about the warm, dry savannas I traveled through in Kenya the previous summer.

  “Ehhh . . .” Rwelekana said, pointing his panga directly south, “iko Nyamuragira!” Following his line of sight southward, Stuart and I looked to see a distant streak of brilliant crimson, a fountain of red light shooting into the air. It was Mount Nyamuragira, the active volcano that our newfound friends at the American Embassy had told us newcomers about when we first arrived in Kigali. Standing between the eruption and us, the jagged cone of Mount Mikeno obscured the eastern half of the more southerly low-lying volcano. I took my binoculars out of my backpack and viewed the sight. Glowing red-orange magma spewed from the western side of the volcano in a powerful arc, like the fire from a giant signal flare. Massive dollops broke away from the main jet and splattered on the slopes below. At the downhill edge of the resulting flow, smoke billowed from where the snaking mantle of molten rock set forest trees aflame with billowing smoke. We paused to behold the spectacle, passing binoculars around, uttering our oohs and ahhs of amazement. As Rwelekana viewed the scene through the lenses, he let out a descending staccato of whistles in the local’s characteristic expression of surprise.

  With our curiosity satisfied, our intrepid guide led us farther up Visoke. When we reached the summit at over twelve thousand feet, the cold bracing air offset the overheating of our bodies from the climb. Cool shards of sweeping mist, clouds actually, swept around and between us. The abating slope and leveling off of terrain made us feel lighter, and we picked up the pace, the hard climb becoming a brisk trot—that, with the bracing wind and a views of Africa in all directions, made me want to run. Whooping and hollering, I jogged past Stuart and Rwelekana, who laughed at my goofy enthusiasm. Just as I entered a swiftly moving cloud I had to bring myself to a sudden halt at the volcano’s rim. Here, the ground sloped suddenly downward. Nestled one hundred feet below us at the bottom of the round crater lay a perfectly circular body of water, like the silent belly of a carnivorous pitcher plant waiting for me to drop in.

  Protected all around from the high-altitude wind by the steeply sloping sides of the crater, scarcely a ripple disturbed the surface of the dark water. Plants that would have found the windy exposed top of the volcano inhospitable had refuge on the sloping walls inside this undisturbed basin. Dotted around the banks of the lake were more giant senecios and lobelias whose
seeds had found refuge there beneath the volcano’s wind-swept edge, in a sheltered microclimate. Stuart and Rwelekana joined me to view the lake in silent contemplation. As exhaustive as our trek had been that day, this rare place brought us rejuvenation. When a blanket of mist drifted in and obscured our scenery, we resumed travel.

  The rim of Mount Visoke’s crater is dotted with the tall rigid sedges. Over the eons, protected from regular overgrazing by buffaloes or other animals at such a high and out-of-the-way altitude, these spiny clumps have formed massive bases of thatch that buoy their crowns over five feet above the ground. Where these plants aggregate into thick patches, they create a catacomb of corridors. When the clouds settled in upon us, Stuart, Rwelekana, and I stayed close together to avoid getting separated and lost in this maze-like sedge forest.

  The air cleared again as we walked out of the tussocks, and within minutes the three of us had traversed Visoke’s volcanic rim from its western to eastern side; the reverse feat having taken us most of the day around the mountain’s much wider base. Heading downslope, Rwelekana soon found a trail he knew. There he paused, aiming his panga downward, pointing out the view of Karisoke’s meadow that the three of us had walked through from camp that morning. Through gaps in the swirling mists below, we could see the bright green clearing far beneath us, flanked by the darker green hagenias and other trees of our surrounding forest. Karisoke lay obscured among these beyond the meadow’s northern edge.

  Here, our tracker knew exactly where to begin our descent, and which pathways to take as we traveled back through the various plant zones of alpine grasses, giant senecios, and lobelias. With gravity in our favor, our descent was easy relative to our hike that morning. In no time, Rwelekana was leading Stuart and me down the Elephant Trail into the familiar hagenia and hypericum forest zone that surrounds camp. Viewing the Virunga mountains from a distance, it might seem incredible that one should use the summit of Mount Visoke as a shortcut at the end of a full day’s hike, but we would climb over it and back again in a single day, time and again in pursuit of Nunkie’s whereabouts. Dian’s seasoned gorilla trackers had done this many times, and continued to do so in their hard task of monitoring far-ranging mountain gorillas.