by John Fowler
Although male gorilla genitalia are remarkably small, Peter and I could visibly confirm that Maggie was a girl within days of her birth, and so I found it surprising that so many of the research gorillas had erroneously been given male names like Puck, Tuck and Augustus, and even Bonne Année, who had first been called “Charlie” in camp.
In three days, Maggie’s eyes were open, and she began clinging to her mother’s body hair. Over the next twenty days, Maggie clung only ventrally on her mother’s chest and abdomen, with frequent support from Effie’s hand. Over the days, her pink skin became splotched with black, and almost overnight on day twenty she was black, and moved dorsally, riding on Effie’s back with her fuzzy bobbling head held high, eyes wide in observance and wonderment.
The timing worked out because after the film crew’s return up to camp from final filming below, André had become ill with a bad cold, and was laid up at the Big Cabin for a couple days with his teammates, Jan and Dick, who relaxed during the downtime, and tended to their boss. They took advantage of this down time to interview Jean-Pierre, visiting the camp. Stuart, Peter, and I could only laugh at the jovial old parc conservateur who was completely uncomfortable in front of a camera and fumbled his words comically in response. Jean-Pierre laughed with us, from where he sat casually on the trunk of a large fallen hagenia, until André made the three of us go inside the Big Cabin to stop being a distraction. Jean-Pierre had a habit of crossing his legs when he sat, and in his awkwardness with the film crew he crossed his arms nervously over his lap. Stuart, Peter, and I could only laugh all the more from a distance, watching André repeatedly pulling Jean-Pierre’s arms apart, and untying the jumbled knot of his body language. Finally, Jean-Pierre came through, and was glad it was over.
Peter and I observed Maggie’s successful first few days and Effie’s good health, before the film crew came with us to Group 5. They were happy with the up-close-and-personal footage they were able to get in the midst of the world’s most habituated mountain gorillas, being themselves as they filmed.
In the days following the film crew’s departure, Stuart confided in me and Peter that recent letters and telegrams from Dian had begun to take on a more defensive, threatening tone. Stuart then let us in on the news that Dian was planning a return trip before June was over. Our leader, I could only surmise, must’ve been having some trouble coping with her new role at Cornell, and life back among the civilized. We were all concerned that she might be going go so far as to give up her new job in order to reclaim her throne at Karisoke, holding down the fort in the face of what she saw as a hostile takeover.
Her former student Sandy Harcourt, now well-regarded as a field scientist in his own right, had gained growing support from funding sources and decision-makers including the Rwandan park service’s director, Monsieur Benda Lema, no fan of Fossey. Indeed, Sandy had even colluded with Benda Lema to block Dian’s reentry into Rwanda. Perhaps Dian’s biggest flaw was her idea that everyone needed her approval and support to do their own gorilla research and conservation. To her indignation, Bill and Amy had already proven that wrong. In light of these growing pressures, and what looked like a maelstrom, Stuart announced that he planned to leave Karisoke by the end of June.
NINETEEN
KIMA KUFA
The routine of my evenings alone in my cabin rarely varied, and I fell into a gratifyingly monotonous rhythm upon returning home from my routine visits with gorillas: eat, type, read, sleep. I savored this routine, becoming inventive with my simple kerosene stove as I concocted camp cuisine ranging from crude pizzas to oddly satisfying “Karisoke soufflés” made from sautéed onions, peppers, tomatoes, flour, and eggs.
One night, within a week of Dian’s departure, someone knocked on my door.
“Ndio?” I said, now automatic with my knowledge of the Swahili word for yes.
No response. I rose from my chair, unlatched and opened the door.
“Jambo,” Dian’s houseboy Kanyaragana said, standing in the failing light, smiling pleasantly from beneath the bill of his navy-and-white New York Yankees cap.
“Uh . . . jambo,” I replied, baffled by this unexpected visitor. After an awkward standoff in the doorway during which Kanyaragana uttered a few phrases of Swahili well beyond my dozen words, I spoke and gestured to him that I needed to fetch my Swahili book on the desk.
Next, he was inside. He spoke again, more Swahili. Exasperated, I dropped into my desk chair, feeling a little annoyed. He didn’t need anything, and there was obviously no urgent Karisoke business afoot. I shuffled my notes, placed paper into my typewriter—anything to look busy. Too busy for idleness. Installing himself on the only other seat, the edge of my bed, Kanyaragana sat silently. For lack of any other explanation in the moment, I could only surmise, Kanyaragana was paying me a visit. I decided I had to respond somehow, but first I had to understand what he was saying.
Soon I was thumbing through my little green Swahili book as my guest uttered simple phrases one at a time: Where are you from? Do you have a family at home? My frustration soon turned to a sort of appreciation as I began to communicate in a simple conversational Swahili.
After that, Kanyaragana became a regular visitor, showing up after we had both eaten dinner. Jarred out of my hermitic routine of gorillas, dinner, and typing notes, I remained a little inconvenienced at first, but I welcomed him inside, nonetheless, taking advantage of the opportunity to learn Swahili. He was always polite, never staying longer than fifteen or twenty minutes. Slowly, with my little green book in hand, I built my Swahili vocabulary into fluency word by word.
Soon I was speaking with the others, joining them at the fire pit. With this newfound communication they became different people. They had stories and backgrounds and histories. Young Toni was just learning Swahili too. He was a newlywed; though happy to be working, he missed his bride while up with us at Karisoke. “Bernadetta iko mzuri sana,” he told me wistfully. I learned that Toni’s father lived in Uganda, and couldn’t return to Rwanda, something to do with the ethnic violence that took place between 1959 and 1962. On this topic, they became quiet. Like the horrid genocide that was yet to come, there had already been ethnic violence between Hutu and Tutsi while the country transitioned from a Belgian colony to an independent nation. This earlier genocide, in the dearth of telecommunication, was little-known to the world relative to what would follow in 1994.
In our camp pidgin Swahili, I pointed out stars and planets to Nameye and explained that these are suns like our own, and the planets are other worlds. I was surprised that he wasn’t so surprised, and instead shared my belief that there could be other life out there in other worlds. I was impressed too, that gorilla tracking wasn’t just a job for him, he expressed a true devotion to the mountain gorillas he had come to know so well, and a real dedication to preserving them. He nodded with understanding as I explained that our studies of mountain gorillas could give us insight into our own human behaviors and the common ancestry we share with great apes. Mukera the woodman was a funny guy, and told me the Kinyarwanda words for male and female genitalia. They all laughed when I pronounce these, and then made up funny sentences with them. Boys behaving badly.
I asked what napati meant, the pet name Dian used for Kima, or when she was trying to speak to a forest buffalo, as if to tame it. “Iko bure,” they all agreed, a phrase they use to say it’s nothing, something she made up, or a mispronunciation of something else. None could say how Dian came up with that. I ask about Nyiramachabelli, the name Dian said the locals gave her. “Iko bure,” they all agreed. None knew of its meaning. They shared the opinion it was only something Dian had contrived or misconstrued. Perhaps it was her misunderstanding of some other word or words she had heard, but none of the men could come up with any actual local word it resembled. As with our tracker, Baraqueza, whose name in camp was Dian’s best guess at his actual name, Werebguereza. And Dian’s head porter, whom we knew as Gwehandegoza, was actually Gwahamogozi. I also asked about family name
s. Rwelekana spelled his out for me on a piece of cardboard as Banyangandora, but they didn’t use these. Instead, each had a western name too, usually French. Rwelekana was also Emmanuel. Dian had documented and described gorilla language, but after thirteen years in the Virungas, had little knowledge of, or interest in, the region’s native tongue.
Kitchwa mgonjwa, the men would say about Dian’s irrational behaviors, meaning sick in the head. In reference to Dian, the men would also use their own Kinyarwanda word, umusazi, meaning crazy.
Treks to gorillas, too, became filled with chatter. Learning about these men—their lives, backgrounds, the culture of Rwanda—I was, for the first time, discovering who they were. They all wanted to come to America.
I enjoyed a little renaissance of sorts during this time, finally unpacking the charcoal, watercolor paints, brushes, and paper I had brought from home. I sketched a charcoal of Bonne Année to give to the Vimonts, who rescued the little orphan, who held special interest for them. I painted a similar watercolor and pinned it to my grass-mat wall. With pen and ink, I practiced a technique I learned in high school art class of drawing a picture with a single line, without looking at my sketch paper. As a subject, I choose a photo of a beautiful girl in the pages of a National Geographic about Dutch colonials in Indonesia. At the end of my line, when I finally lifted the pen and looked down at the paper, I was stunned to see that it was not the beautiful Dutch-Indonesian girl at all, but an umusazi image of Dian Fossey staring back at me. As if the paper was the Ouija board and my pen the gliding planchette, Mademoiselli emerged telepathically, as if to scold me for talking about her with the men. Recovering from my shock, I resigned myself to continue the piece, applying watercolors, thereby only enhancing it as an eerie abstraction of Dr. Fossey.
For the Africans, Kima the monkey had always been the terror of camp, chasing and lunging at them from above like some angry arboreal watchdog. Neither is it all bluff. Once when Dian invited her employees’ families to a staff Christmas party in camp, Karisoke staffers recalled that Kima bit the Achilles tendon of one of the tracker’s wives so severely that the woman had to be taken to the hospital in Ruhengeri.
With Dian long gone, however, Kima had no one to align herself with.
“Kima’s getting a lot nicer to me since Dian’s been gone.” Stuart told me one day, “She even lets me pet her sometimes.”
The next morning, I emerged from my cabin to see Kima sitting by the fire pit with the Africans, nearly on Nameye’s lap. Nameye looked every bit as baffled as I did. I approached with cautious disbelief as the monkey merely looked up at me, uttering a few soft chirping sounds. Soon we were all taking turns stroking her soft fur as she warmed herself in the glow of the fire like one of the gang.
Stuart had been away again visiting Jean-Pierre at Plantation de Gasiza, but the morning of June 4, after his return, he banged loudly on my door.
“John! John! Open up!” Stuart’s voice was frantic. “Something’s wrong with Kima, she won’t move.”
I followed Stuart quickly up the path to Dian’s cabin. Inside, Stuart had Kima in a cardboard Johnnie Walker box in front of the fireplace with its usual smoldering, soggy fire. Kanyaragana stoked the wood, blowing on the sparse embers in a futile attempt to rouse the flames. Dian’s pet monkey lay huddled in the box on a crumpled towel.
“I’ve got to do something,” Stuart said, “I’ve gotta get her to a vet!” I agree to drive into Ruhengeri with him, but neither of us had any idea where to find a veterinarian.
In desperation, Stuart and I raced down the mountain on foot with a blanket draped over Kima’s box. Later, on the long bumpy van ride into Ruhengeri, I peered into the box repeatedly checking on the sickly monkey. Her eyes remained listless and half-closed.
In a desperate dash through town, we sought directions to the nearest vet just outside the south end, on the road to Gisenyi. I cringed as the livestock vet injected a cow-sized hypodermic filled with a thick white liquid I could only surmise was an antibiotic of some sort under the skin between Kima’s shoulders. At this, Kima rose up weakly, and, grabbing the edge of her box in a silent pantomime, rolled her head back, mouthing the air as if there was a bad taste on her tongue. Then with a long, slow shudder, Kima’s body tensed and fell limp. Dian’s pet monkey of eleven years was dead—kufa, as they said in camp.
Stuart was beside himself.
“We’ve got to have an autopsy done,” he said, “Dian’s gotta know that Kima died of natural causes.”
Back into town in a cloud of dust, we raced around the Ruhengeri hospital grounds on foot, lifeless blue monkey in tow, looking for any physician we could find. In a worst-case scenario, the first physician we encountered was Dr. Peter Weiss, a fit, trim and distinguished white-haired gentleman, and one of the hospital’s top administrators. Unbeknownst to us, he was also Dian’s infamously scorned ex-paramour-cum-fiancé. The two, we later learned, once enjoyed a famously passionate romance before a bitter, volatile breakup during which, as word had it, Dian stormed down the mountain and smashed the French doctor’s windshield. In the moment, he well knew Kima, but we didn’t know him.
“I am very zorry,” Dr. Weiss said, without a trace of emotion in his distinct French accent, “I have very important things to do here with PEOPLE and can NOT take zee time to perform an autopsy on a MONKEY.”
Back in camp, I carved a plaque for Kima, and we buried her by the gorilla graveyard. In a sympathetic letter, Stuart informed Dian of the tragic news.
TWENTY
A BREAK IN THE CLOUDS
The best weather in the Virunga Volcanoes comes during the long dry season between June and September. Our anticipation of the rains ending was compromised by word from Dian that she would indeed visit camp in June, but after receiving the news of Kima’s death, she informed Stuart in another letter that she would not actually be coming due to her conflicting trip to Japan, where she would be attending the premiere of the Nippon AV film of Bonne Année’s attempted release.
Sandy Harcourt continued to make strides in his efforts to return to Karisoke and take charge, garnering major grant monies from the Guggenheim Foundation and even National Geographic, Dian’s own funding source. He continued to win favor with the Rwandan park service, ORTPN, whose director, Benda Lema, wrote to the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation’s office saying that Dian was “psychologically sick.”
Stuart, Peter, and I, along with our intrepid tracker Rwelekana, took advantage of the good weather to make an overnight trek up Mount Visoke, hoping to spot signs of Nunkie’s Group along the way. It gave us a nice break from the routine and mounting drama of Karisoke. We used the lightweight tent left by the Japanese and camped in the thin could air above Visoke’s placid lake, marveling at the starry skies from our twelve-thousand-foot vantage point.
The next morning we woke in frost before hiking down its northern slope to the tranquil Lake Ngezi just on the border with Zaire. There, we were on the direct opposite side of the mountain from Karisoke. Along the way, we found no sign of Nunkie. The lake lay beside a trail that snaked up from low in Zaire, reputed to be long used for smuggling coffee into Rwanda, where the market was better. Rumor was that Rwanda exported more coffee than it actually grew because of this trail and its secret traffic when coffee was harvested.
A pair of plump red-knobbed coots, Fulica cristata, made their home on the small scenic lake. I watched as these dark, buoyant waterbirds diligently built a floating nest from the stems of soggy plants they plucked from the marshy edges. Their red knobs shone like bright berries atop their heads as they floated and bobbed along on their busy task. A lone little grebe, Tachybaptus ruficollis, or “dabchick” was the only other bird who joined them on the water. With its ruddy cheeks and stark white patches at the base of its beak, it disappeared intermittently as it dove for what small aquatic prey it might find beneath the mirror-like surface, only to pop up unexpectedly in another spot on the small quiet lake.
We camped in the vacan
t green cabin, originally built to accommodate the occasional tourist, but by then mostly forgotten. In the thick forest behind the small structure, Rwelekana showed us a deep narrow pit once used by Twa hunters to capture forest elephants. The hole was about eight feet long, and only a couple feet wide. Its depth, at nearly seven or eight feet, would have been over my head. When covered by leaves and branches, an elephant might unwittingly step in it, Rwelekana explained. As the big animal struggled to free itself, its other legs would slip in, thereby wedging the animal tightly into the gap. The weight and bulky structure of an elephant prevented its escape before hunters would be upon it with sharp spears.
Back in camp, in addition to dispatching Dian’s poacher patrols, Stuart continued his daily treks to Peanuts’s Group while continuously sending out trackers in search of Nunkie. The groups that Dian had habituated were of most importance to her. Fringe groups were fringe groups, gorillas she hadn’t met, and therefore had no emotional connection to. While a conservationist might be as concerned about the total population of mountain gorillas, even those yet unidentified, Dian was most protective of her own gorillas, like one’s indifference to a neighbor’s pet dog versus one’s own beloved pet. The gorilla graveyard stood as testimony to her emotional connection to her named gorillas and surrogate family: Uncle Bert, Flossie, Old Goat, Digit . . .
We went out every day, seven days a week, averaging a one- or two-hour hike to gorillas; uphill, downhill, or at a 45° angle across ravines, four hours with them, then one or two hours back, followed by an hour or two of typing notes. I soon learned that mountain gorillas do have a sort of average day, like humans in the home and workplace.
In the Virungas, near the equator, the sun comes up around six o’clock every morning, year round. The gorillas rise with the sun and begin foraging for breakfast, an easy task where they live, within the salad bowl upon which they feed. As they feed, they move into fresh stands of thistles, nettles, wild celery, and creeping gallium, so abundant on the volcanic slopes. By midmorning, they slow their movement and become sedentary for a short while, picking their teeth, burping, and farting while they digest their breakfast. Some may groom one another, especially mothers to their infants. Some may sprawl out to rest, especially in sunshine, while others may make day nests to lay in by snapping and pulling in nearby plants to tuck around themselves in a loose, low circular support mat. The leafy fronds of low-altitude lobelia are a favorite for these nests. A mother’s inactivity during rest makes a perfect opportunity for an infant to nurse, and they suckle contentedly during these rest periods. Like human children though, gorilla kids may not sleep much at nap time, instead wrestling or playing a game of chase and tackle in and among the sleeping grownups.