by John Fowler
I stared in astonishment as Nani continued her wailing, her fit stunning me into a state of sympathy, and making me realize that she was capable of a much deeper range of emotions than I understood. Despite my own exhaustion and frustration, I was reminded of the trauma she must have had in the course of her extraction from her family, in the certain witness of her mother’s death, and spending weeks of her young life confined in a box, the victim of violence and kidnapping. Then we frightful humans insisted that she accept us, and now my insistence that she stand alone, entirely unaware of what awaits her with a new group of wild gorillas. I rushed to calm her, gathering her in my arms from the wet grass. She had won the argument.
On our fourth and last morning of February 29, Nani started her usual stirring at dawn, shifting and adjusting positions, nuzzled against me as forest birds began their morning chorus. I waited for a light shower of rain to move over us before crawling from the warmth of my sleeping bag. Toni didn’t stir from his tent until I started pumping the kerosene stove to make coffee. It was the day of Nani’s release.
Just as Toni crawled through his tent flaps, the sound of loud gorilla screams rang from the base of Mount Visoke, just above us. The roaring voices, combined with the characteristic pokka-pok of leathery hands beating a bare chest, went on intermittently for several minutes. The screaming sounded like mayhem. By the time Dian had arrived with Taka and Kaji, lugging their camera and sound equipment, the rain was pouring. I told Dian about the gorilla screams, and she peered into the forest squinting and blinking from under her rain hood in silent contemplation for a few minutes. Then, with Nani on my back, I joined Dian and the film team, following Rwelekana up the slope of Mount Visoke.
In the three months she had been with us in camp, our little ape had gained good weight, and with the steep angle of the mountainside, I could well feel her forty pounds. In the same time, I had gained the physical strength and endurance to navigate this volcanic terrain, and surprised myself with the ability to keep pace with Rwelekana at the head of the pack. The rain didn’t let up as we continued onward on what appeared to be Group 4’s trail. I was surprised by Dian’s ability to keep up with the rest of us considering her feebleness and coughing bout just weeks earlier, when she first tried to show me a site for a bivouac. Now, she showed little of the infirmity I had seen before, and although she brought up the rear, she kept up in the arduous climb. Kaji too, impressed me as he lugged his massive movie camera over the tricky slanted footing of Visoke’s weedy slopes.
Just a short distance away from the bivouac camp, our tracker picked up a fresh gorilla trail leading out of a large area of crushed vegetation. The ground here was covered in loose gorilla feces that Dian called “fear dung.” She explained to us that when gorillas are stressed from fear they excrete this loose, formless stool. When one group of gorillas interacts with another, the silverbacks usually lead the onslaughts, emitting their strong body odor in the process. Here, this odor hung thick in the air, a pungent, near-human, sweaty smell. Rwelekana chattered to Dian in Swahili, pointing his panga across the broad expanse of cleared ground and toward what looked like the various points of entry and exit of gorillas in frantic action.
“Group 4 has had an interaction with one of the fringe groups,” Dian surmised, after Rwelekana finished his discourse.
Rwelekana chose one fresh trail that led in a long straight line toward Visoke’s western side, opposite of Karisoke and farther into Zaire. We trudged along, slipping and sliding on the wet undergrowth, and somehow, even with forty pounds of baby gorilla on my back, I ended up just behind Rwelekana, who was blazing the trail with his panga. I had developed much endurance since my first weeks at Karisoke. The film crew kept pace as best they could with all their heavy equipment, and miraculously, Dian brought up the rear. What a contrast, I thought, to the month before when we made the short hike to look for a bivouac site, never even making it beyond the fringes of camp before she was too pained and agonized to continue. It was as if she was now willing herself to keep up with us.
When we came to the first ravine, I didn’t think Dian would be able to follow. But taking her time, she carefully slid and sidestepped down one side before groping her way up the steep embankment on the other. While our group paused to rest afterward, Rwelekana forged ahead to scout out directions of gorilla trails. The apes had dispersed while crossing the ravine, and each had reached the other side at various points, leaving no one clear path as to where they headed next. Our able tracker would be checking for where they had regrouped into a single trail. As we waited, the rain picked up in a stronger downpour, and the cold damp set in under our rain gear as steamy sweat turned to cold dampness against skin. Nani used the downtime to eat some gallium and thistles that grew on the ravine’s upper edge. By the time Rwelekana again picked up the gorilla group’s collective trail, the heavy rain had made the soft ground worse, deep and slick with mud.
Exhausted, but with our mission still ahead of us, our group collected our things while Nani scrambled onto my back as I rose. Rwelekana led us onward to where the gorillas’ trails regrouped as one, and we headed yet again into another ravine. While the rain pelted us unrelentingly, so too, the terrain was unforgiving; as soon as the ground leveled off from one ravine, another crevasse fell away before us in a brutal trek on the 45° angle of Mikeno’s pitch. Despite my heavy living cargo, I kept up with Rwelekana and we drew well ahead of the others, who followed with their own burdens as best they could.
As we struggled along in the worst conditions imaginable, with mud, rain, ravines, and Visoke’s steep angle, it began to seem we would never catch up with these gorillas, who had obviously made a mad dash far and away after the morning’s clash with another group. The task of releasing the baby into Group 4 at the end of our trail seemed increasing dubious and daunting on this day.
Then we were upon them.
Before realizing we were even closing in on our quarry, the deafening roar hit my eardrums: AAARRRGH! The undergrowth just in front of Rwelekana exploded and slammed to the ground under the swing of a massive forearm, and the silverback screamed again in his charge at Rwelekana and me. But we were already flat on the ground, eyes averted. The deafening voice sent chills through my body as we braced for impact, we were so close. Intuitively, we two humans voiced our gorilla whimpers in pathetic unison, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmmm . . . while Nani clung tightly to me, her eyes wide in startled awe. It had been months since she had been among gorillas and she was as stunned as we were when only eerie silence followed. As quickly as he had appeared, the silverback vanished. His thick angry odor hung in the air.
Raising our heads, Rwelekana and I listened in the silence for several minutes, trying to hear above the steady rain, staring into the green maze beyond. Dian and the film crew had not yet caught up with us. Surely, they heard the charge and halted. After several minutes on the ground, waiting and listening, Rwelekana rose cautiously. I swung Nani around to my back and followed back down the trail we came in on, to where Dian waited with the Japanese. Rwelekana and Dian conversed briefly in Swahili about what just happened, before Dian surmised that we had been following the trail of the interloping rival group instead of Group 4. This fringe group of gorillas had not been habituated by camp researchers, and in this area rife with poachers, had every reason to fear being pursued by a band of humans.
“Shit merde . . . we’re not going to be able to do this today,” Dian muttered, “In this motherfucking rain! And Group 4 is going be too goddamned agitated after interacting with this fringe group.” She was flustered, for sure, but her discontent wasn’t directed at anyone then, least of all me. I admired her diligence and fortitude in the moment, but was soon to see much more of what she was capable of.
Knowing that this was also a heavy poacher area, Dian called off the plans to release Nani that day. Seemingly resigned to getting Nani’s release over with, she changed plans entirely.
“John, you need to spend one more night in the bivou
ac,” Dian informed me. “Tomorrow, we’ll release her into Group 5 instead.” Discouraged and exhausted, we made the long trek back in a frigid downpour.
SEVENTEEN
A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE
On the morning of March 1, the birds began their usual chorus as the predawn sky lightened. My baby gorilla remained fast asleep, huddled in our nest next to me, out of character at this hour. I took advantage of her stillness and languished in the accumulated warmth of my sleeping bag. We were in the clouds again, and the dew lay thick and cold on the crumpled weeds around our campsite. It wasn’t until 7:30 and full daylight that the little ball of fur roused her head. After looking around briefly, she crawled to the base of a hypericum and climbed four meters up to begin her breakfast of gallium that she pulled toward her strand after strand.
I watched the little gorilla feeding, lingering in my sleeping bag for a precious fifteen minutes longer before crawling out into the damp cold mountain air. I struggled to keep my socks off the wet ground while maneuvering my feet into cold boots. Toni soon crawled from his tent to help me pack up camp and fold the plastic tarp that had been my feckless shelter.
Nani continued to feed for nearly half an hour before climbing down from her tree and trying to cling to me. When Toni finally emerged, we began disassembling his tent, struggling to fold the bulky canvas into any sensible form, while Nani grabbed at my legs whenever I passed near her. I dodged her clingy fingers at every turn.
At 8:30, Kanyaragana arrived with Mukera the woodman, and the two joined Toni in gathering the bundles and utensils that had been our camp. I still wanted Nani to do some walking on her own, but finally just relented to her grasping and let her climb onto my backpack as we began the hike back into Rwanda. We passed by the site of Stuart’s midway camp, now cleared and vacant. The long, boggy meadow leading to Karisoke was draped in curtains of mist when we reached it, the far end invisible in the cloud cover. The volcanoes above us were obscured by the very clouds through which we hiked. To avoid getting the smell of smoke on the baby, Dian had requested I walk around camp instead of through it, so I stayed to the right of the meadow until it narrowed into a thin clearing to the south of camp and just behind my cabin that on this day seemed like my cozy home.
When we passed the research center, we crossed the camp creek on the lichen-covered stones that Nani had perched on many times before to stare at her reflection in the water, and touch that enigmatic mirror of its surface that had intrigued her so. I wanted to let her linger there with me one last time, but Dian was waiting for me down the Porter Trail.
As I carried Nani along the path, I thought about the amount of time we had been together, and what we had become. My mom had once taken in two foster girls who had been removed from an abusive, neglectful home by the local social services in a town near where we lived. The girls, aged seven and eleven, were very withdrawn their first day in our home. Like Nani, they were wild too, with bangs growing over their eyes, their growing feet busting through their worn-out shoes. To coax them from their shyness, I joked with them and teased them as much for my amusement as theirs. Within a few days, they were following me everywhere in and around the house, amusing me one minute, annoying me the next.
One day, while I was reading a children’s book to the youngest girl, she asked me, “Can I call you ‘Dad’?” In my mid-teens, I didn’t feel like a dad. I told her just to think of me as a brother instead. Social services doesn’t let foster children stay in one home too long because the interpersonal bonds grow so strong over time, it becomes increasingly difficult emotionally to separate the child from the fosterers.
Nani was becoming this to me. We had spent most of our waking hours of the last five weeks together and I had become a family member to her. At twenty-three, I saw myself as somewhere between a foster parent and a sibling to her, and now I was taking her to a new permanent adopted family of gorillas. Instead of allowing myself to think too much about her being in any danger, I focused on the idea that I would still get to see her regularly, and looked forward to monitoring her progress as she grew up—a normal nonhuman in her new ape family.
Dian was standing alone by the first little stream that crossed the Porter Trail when I arrived with Nani on my back. I expected annoyance from Dian in some form, about my being either late or early, or thought she would otherwise just be in a foul mood about having to do this all over again, but she was even tempered and focused on our task at hand. I appreciated her calm demeanor and again felt honored to play such a key role in our orphaned gorilla’s rehabilitation and release.
“The rest have gone on ahead to find Group 5,” she said. “They’ll be waiting for us up the Tourist Trail.”
Nani clung tightly to my shoulders as I followed Dian down the Porter Trail. Downhill was easier, but I again marveled at Dian’s ability to hike after her failed attempt at walking a short distance from her cabin just weeks earlier. We continued at a steady pace, and I realized how my physical stamina had changed since the day Peter and I carried Judy’s and Liza’s luggage down the mountain soon after I arrived in camp. Like the day before, I was now carrying a forty-pound gorilla. It was hard, but the strain of the effort became a sort of monotonous mantra for me as I placed one heavy boot–clad foot before the other.
In ten minutes, Dian, Nani, and I met Nameye and Baraqueza waiting for us at the grassy clearing called the Tourist Spot. Nameye spoke in Swahili to Dian and pointed to the Tourist Trail, which led from this meadow at a 45° angle up Mount Visoke. After a brief rest, I hoisted Nani onto my back again and followed Nameye and Baraqueza up the Tourist Trail. Dian followed at her own pace.
Up until then, this hike, like the one the day before, had been on gently sloping or level ground. On the steep angle of this trail, Nani now felt like herself, plus all the gorillas she had been: Charlie, Sophie, Josephine, and N’gee. With every step, I found myself hoping Group 5 was low on the mountain and just a few steps off the Tourist Trail.
I rested and caught my breath while Dian and Baraqueza caught up. With my heart pounding from the climb and my live cargo, I let the two move ahead of me to follow our tracker’s lead. Nameye guided us through the thick nettles and thistles of Visoke’s northeast slopes for another fifteen minutes, and I struggled to balance myself with Nani over the dense tangle of thick and slippery weed stems, wet from cloud mist. Finally, Nameye stopped and pointed downslope. About thirty-five meters below, Dian and I could see Peter pointing across to our lower left, indicating the location of Group 5. The dark tops of Taka’s and Kaji’s heads were visible above the thistles across from where Peter stood. For Dian and me, the gorillas were still out of view, but we could see the vegetation moving where they fed. Dian scanned the scene below us, her eyes twitching and squinting in silent concentration. She was well winded, but had an energized vitality I had never seen before.
“There’s a tree we could get up into.” Dian whispered, pointing to a large hagenia, downhill on our lower right about twenty meters from Group 5. This tree, leaning downslope at a 45° angle, looked easy to climb and would provide a good vantage point from which Nani could be seen by the gorillas below.
Nani clung tightly to my shoulders while I followed Dian downhill, and Nameye and Baraqueza promptly vanished into nearby thickets. With Nani still clinging securely, I climbed up the sloping tree, three meters up until I had a foothold onto a side branch. At that point I could turn around, and half-sit, leaning against the hypericum’s main trunk with Nani holding onto my torso under my left arm. Dian climbed up and positioned herself two meters below me. From our vantage point we could see the heads and shoulders of a few of the gorillas of Group 5, but they did not yet notice us.
Peter, now in plain view, scrawled notes on his waterproof pad of paper, as cold air drifted down from the mountaintop, ushering in a light drizzle. While I held the baby tightly under my left arm, I used my free hand to pull on the hood of my raincoat in a careful balancing act.
Below us to th
e right, Kaji and Taka had settled into place in the thick wet undergrowth, readying their bulky film equipment. They looked weary and disheveled from the haul, but energized nonetheless by responsibility and anticipation, their vivid blue raingear glowing absurdly in the descending gloom of mist. As Dian clung to the base of our tree, halfway between me and the ground, Kaji focused the giant lens of his camera like the eyeball of a cyclops on her. She too was poised, her eyes trained on the unwitting gorillas, just visible off to our right, from where we faced uphill. We could just see the tops of their heads and shoulders, as they quietly foraged just forty feet away, snapping crisp wild celery and emitting their tranquil rumbling vocalizations.
With the camera rolling, Dian adopted the same dramatic expression I had seen days earlier. She slowly turned to look up at the baby in my arms. Her baby. Dian’s brow furrowed above her puffy eyes, her lips pursed in a dramatic look of worried concern. She knew the camera was trained on her, and she was poised and energized in the moment. She knew important film footage was being made—ten thousand dollars’ worth—and that every motion, every nuance, was being recorded for the world beyond the forest, those she reached only through her deeds on film and in print. As withdrawn as she had become in these mountains, the camera connected her to the world and gave meaning to her life.
Within five minutes, Nani, having not yet noticed the family of wild gorillas nearby, crawled free of me and climbed slowly, purposefully down the tree trunk, arm over leg, over foot, over hand. Dian let her pass. Remembering that my boss wanted notes, I fumbled to get my pencil and begin writing on my now damp paper. Just past Dian’s feet, Nani reached for a handful of gallium near the ground. As she chewed and grabbed for more, Dian leaned over and stripped several handfuls of the stringy gorilla food from the base of our tree and passed them up to me. Understanding Dian’s intent to keep Nani visible to Group 5 from the tree, I draped the sticky vines on the trunk and branches around me. We didn’t want Group 5 to move on without having noticed our orphan.