by Wilbur Smith
‘We could always come back,’ said Xander, more to help Innocent out than because he believed it. Hearing the hollowness in his own words he dug deeper. ‘You know, later in the trip. We’ve got another three weeks.’
‘You might have,’ said Caleb. ‘But not all of us are on holiday.’ He drew himself tall. ‘I have work to do, starting next week.’
Amelia couldn’t help correcting them both. ‘Work experience,’ she said to Caleb. ‘Though it’s still work of course.’ Turning to Xander she added, ‘Logistics-and-costs-wise, travelling all the way to Kinshasa and back makes zero sense. It’s not as if there’ll be fewer poachers to run into a fortnight from now.’
It occurred to me that Amelia really did want to see the mountain gorillas. She’d researched everything about the trip in advance, chimpanzees included, but from what she’d already told me about the gorillas, I reckon she could write a book on them. And yet she hadn’t spent the night without shelter in the jungle. That burning, tumbled sensation I get in my stomach when I’m exhausted was still there: the idea of heading back into the jungle feeling the way I was made me feel sick. Sensing my misgivings, Caleb upped the ante. ‘Of course, I’m not suggesting we head out to look for them today. But first thing tomorrow, when everyone’s had a decent night’s sleep, you’ll all be up for it then, yes?’
What was it with him? Why did I have to rise to it. I’ve no idea. I just know that my shoulders shrugged of their own accord and my voice, though it sounded distant in my ears, was clear enough.
‘Why not?’ I said.
21.
A simple sleeping bag on a cot bed set beneath flapping canvas provided me with possibly the best sleep of my life that night. I didn’t dream, just shut down as if under a spell and awoke ten hours later in daylight. Everyone else was already up, drinking sweetened tea out of tin mugs on benches set around the cooking fire in the clearing beyond our tents. I joined them and Patience handed me a cup. Marcel and Xander were talking together in French, while Amelia listened in. Xander is fluent in about six languages, and Amelia’s general cleverness extends to French too, but I’m shamefully hopeless in anything other than English, so I had no idea what they were talking about. It seemed Xander was telling a joke or funny anecdote, because when he finished the big guide burst out laughing and cuffed him on the shoulder. A second later the penny dropped for Amelia, and she burst out laughing as well. Her laugh is loud and infections: Patience was grinning and I found myself smiling, too. It struck me that whereas the mission Caleb, Innocent and I had undertaken to locate the poachers, survive a night in the forest, escape snares and find our way home had served only to put more prickly distance between my cousin and me, Xander, Amelia, Patience and Marcel had obviously bonded on their return trip through the forest.
Though I’d slept well and felt rested, Innocent appeared tired that morning. His smile was still in place, but it was thinner, more brittle, and his face was tinged grey. After the pickup dropped us at the start point for the trek, he paused us, his singsong voice forced, for ‘gorilla briefing’.
‘What’s there to brief?’ said Caleb. ‘Surely it’s the same as for the chimpanzees.’
‘Yes and no,’ Innocent muttered. He’d had enough of Caleb now for sure. With a sigh he told us that according to the rangers, the troop of gorillas we’d be visiting had spent the night some four hours’ hike away, most of it uphill. The bulk of the walking would be easy enough, on existing paths, but the last stretch would be slow-going. When we found the gorillas we’d have one hour maximum in their presence. We weren’t to approach within thirty feet of them, though they might come closer to us once we’d stopped. It was important that we keep quiet and still and avoid direct eye contact.
‘Why’s that?’ asked Xander.
‘It’s confrontational,’ said Amelia.
‘They’re very peaceful creatures,’ Innocent said. ‘But like any of us they don’t like to be threatened.’
‘Pretty obvious,’ said Caleb. ‘Shall we get on with it?’
As Innocent had predicted, the walking was fine to begin with, but we were all subdued. Xander did his best to lighten the mood by teeing up questions for Amelia to answer (a silverback gorilla weighs about 200 kilograms, stands ***
1.8 metres tall, and has an arm-span of two metres; they construct a new nest of flattened branches and leaves each night as they move around their territory in search of plants to eat and are one of the only primates to sleep on the ground; there are fewer than one thousand mountain gorillas living in the wild, though that’s an improvement on twenty years ago, and so on) but impressive as her mental factsheet was, it couldn’t lift the heavy presence of Caleb. He wasn’t outwardly angry, in fact he barely spoke, but everything about him put the rest of us, except Amelia possibly, on edge.
The fact of him, buzz-cut hair, stupid lime-green boots, brand-new machete and all, up front with his head down, pulsing with discontent, was maddening. Look at where we were and what we were doing: hiking through one of the most stunning landscapes on earth in search of one of the rarest and most impressive animals alive. How could he sour that experience? I forced myself to ignore him and take in the detail of the day.
It was cooler, but no less humid, as we climbed, and the clouds boiled up above us, unleashing lush curtains of rain that turned the path to mud. As we made our way higher into the mountains the glossy greenery of ferns and bamboo and gallium vines pressed in. Among them was something that managed to sting me through my trousers. Not knowing what it was made my heart race. Amelia put me at ease by saying, ‘Ow!’ almost immediately after I’d been stung. When I told her something had also bitten me, she laughed and said, ‘The chances of two spider bites or snake strikes in ten seconds is infinitesimal. So it was a plant. I’ve not read about any deadly stinging vegetation in the jungle. Therefore we’ve probably just brushed against a pumped-up sort of nettle. We can relax.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. It came out more sarcastic than I meant. The truth was that the sting hurt, which made it hard for me not to think of what worse dangers might be lurking just out of sight.
22.
The canopy above us thinned out a little from time to time, but the undergrowth, one or two welcome clearings aside, was pretty unrelenting. Innocent and Marcel – and Caleb of course – increasingly had to use their machetes to cut us a pathway through it. The noise of the rainforest was unending, a constant drone-hum of insects punctured by rain-hiss and leaf-patter and the whooping and chattering of birds, monkeys, god-knows-what, overlain with our own hard breathing and the squelch of our boots and the snick of the machetes: it was music, of sorts, a soundtrack encouraging us to keep on walking. And that’s what we did. We were all puffing harder than Patience, but managing to maintain a pace that I think impressed our guides all the same. Innocent paused less often than he had en route to the chimpanzees. We took on water (I’d made sure to bring three times as much with me that day) without slowing down. It was tough going, but either the troop had moved closer or we made better progress than Innocent had predicted. After just two and half hours Marcel, who had been making the occasional soft grunting noise as we walked, heard something in response that made him kink left, push through some dripping ferns and kneel down next to a hefty pile of greeny-yellow droppings. ‘Juste là-bas,’ he whispered.
Innocent handed out masks before allowing us to get closer, and not long after we’d begun moving forward again I glimpsed a tantalising hillock of black fur through the foliage. Moving stealthily, we emerged at the edge of a trampled clearing of sorts. I crouched low and quickly counted six, no, seven gorillas. The nearest one was stripping leaves from a long bent stalk. I was close enough to see the fibres in the stalk as she broke it, the shifting black of her fur and the tiny flies that rose in a cloud as she turned. Her eyes were a reddish brown. The creases around them looked like the laughter or worry lines you see in a human face. Immediately I realised I was doing the one thing we’d been told not to do
, stare straight at her, but I couldn’t help it. Her gaze was magnetic. It was all I could do to break from it and look to one side. Even then the imprint of what I’d seen didn’t fade. To me the gorilla had the look of an elder, a judge, a prophet even; she seemed not only to know what I was thinking, but to be deciding it.
The rest of the group, as I looked around, camera clicking, reminded me of an extended family at Christmas, or on a picnic maybe. I felt as if I’d stumbled into somebody’s front room or garden. A couple of the gorillas were grooming one another, one was dozing and others were absently stripping leaves to eat. The two young ones off to one side were rough-and-tumbling through the foliage. It appeared a scene of lounging contentment to me. So I was baffled when Innocent said, ‘Something’s strange.’
‘Strange? They’re magnificent!’ insisted Amelia.
‘But Spenser’s not here,’ said Patience.
‘What? Who’s Spenser?’
Innocent explained: ‘The silverback. He’s the head of this family. But I can’t see him, or Annabel and her baby.’
Marcel, who had skirted the group, now came back with a worried look on his face and spoke hurriedly to Innocent in French. I caught one phrase I understood, gravement malade, and though I didn’t know who he was referring to, I got the gist: somebody was badly sick. ‘Agité, très agité!’ he went on.
Xander was about to explain what that meant when the situation became obvious. A female gorilla moved in among the troop carrying an infant. It was obviously sick, limp across her forearm, its head canted back. I wondered if it was in fact dead, until I saw its lolling head roll to one side. One of the baby’s arms flopped forward. It was missing a hand, the stump still raw. Seeing the wound, I winced.
‘Can we help it?’ asked Amelia.
Innocent shook his head.
‘Why not?’ said Caleb.
A crashing sound cut off his answer. The foliage behind the troop shook and exploded. A huge gorilla, almost twice the size of the next biggest, shot headlong into the clearing. His back was a slab of muscle dusted in silver fur. It shimmered as he jockeyed sideways with the momentum of a small car. He thumped the ground in front of him, then rocked back on his haunches and beat his chest, making an astonishing percussive sound like two coconut halves being whacked together. It echoed over the noise of the forest. This was Spenser. I couldn’t believe the size of him. The other gorillas had seemed so solid and powerful, but this silverback dwarfed them. Without realising I’d done it, I’d copied Patience and shrunk low to the ground in the face of his display. Her head was bowed. I looked at my hands in my lap. They were quivering.
Yet Caleb was still standing beside me, arms folded across his chest. ‘It’s just for show,’ he explained to Amelia, suddenly an expert, though his voice sounded a bit thin. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
In a low murmur Innocent said, ‘He’s upset. We must be respectful.’
‘Everyone knows they’re nature’s gentle giants,’ Caleb said.
‘Even so, he’s defensive of little Redmond, with the injury.’
The silverback, heavy on his knuckles, now crabbed sideways into a thicker patch of vegetation, which partly obscured him for a moment. I lifted my camera to my eye. Beside me Caleb took a step forward. ‘We’ve got to do something about that injured baby, you’re right,’ he said to Amelia.
‘No, no, no,’ insisted Innocent. ‘Stay still.’
The bushes into which the silverback had retreated rattled and staccato guttural alarm calls came from within them.
‘It’ll die if we don’t intervene,’ Caleb went on. ‘Look at it. Poor thing.’
The injured baby gorilla, still limp over its mother’s arm, wasn’t moving. Of course I felt sorry for it. And for its parents too. But if we could have helped, Innocent would have said so. He was saying the opposite. Squatting next to Patience, I saw that the tendons in her father’s neck were rigid with tension. If he’d had a leash on Caleb he’d be drawing it in now. But there was no leash, and Caleb, shirtsleeves rolled and swinging that stupid machete of his, Caleb who I sincerely doubted would lose a moment’s sleep over the baby gorilla, however things turned out, Caleb was taking yet another step towards the troop.
‘Really?’ muttered Xander. ‘I mean, what’s he trying to prove?’
It wasn’t just what he was trying to prove that struck me in that moment, but who he was trying to prove it to.
Within the undergrowth concealing the silverback, the top of a large sapling bent sharply. A splitting, ripping sound accompanied the movement. The gorilla had torn down a tree three times his height. He rushed forward again, dragging it, and flung it aside without apparent effort, scattering some of the troop, most of whom were now noisy, restless, agitated. The silverback beat his chest again, veered off in a different direction, spun and faced us.
I could feel my pulse in my throat, hear my heart despite the din.
‘Just showing off,’ said Caleb.
‘Perhaps we should give him some space,’ said Xander.
‘Oui. Lentement, lentement …’ urged Marcel, smoothly stepping backwards.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ said Caleb. ‘The worst thing you can do in a situation like this is run away.’
Nobody was running. Quite the opposite. But having accused us of doing so, Caleb, looking straight at the silverback across the clearing, for some reason felt compelled to take two big strides towards him. He drew himself tall, pointed at the gorilla with his machete, and said, ‘See? Harmless.’
The silverback charged. One second the whole scene was stock still, the next everything seemed to be in motion. The gorillas, the bushes, the grass and leaves, us; the whole tableau was a frenzy, with Spenser the prime mover, a whirlwind spinning forward. He came at us unstoppably fast. A vision overtook me in that moment; I saw light bouncing off car windscreens as the mini swerved behind me in the street, heard the squeal of tyres, felt the rush of something heavy moving wrongly through space. The crash was happening again and this time I was in it, welded to the spot. As the gorilla closed in, Innocent jumped past me to pull Caleb clear, and Caleb swung both hands up to protect himself, and the gorilla thumped straight through them and kept going, running over Xander and bouncing me into the bushes as he swept beyond us and veered away.
The attack, if that’s what you’d call it, was over in a flash. I jumped back to my feet before I knew it, desperate to see where Spenser had gone and if he was readying to charge again. He wasn’t. He’d immediately retreated into the middle of his troop and was studiously ignoring us. Having witnessed the energy unleashed in that one charge, heard the heaviness of his feet as he’d pounded towards us, felt the massive blur of him knocking us aside, I knew that he’d barely tried to hurt us at all. If he’d wanted to do that, he’d have torn us limb from limb. I was still intact. And he’d not touched Amelia, Patience or Marcel. Caleb was also dusting himself down, apparently OK, if white in the face. But Xander was rolling from side to side, both hands gripping his left knee, clearly in pain. And Innocent was bent double, half groaning, half gasping, hugging himself hard. I leaned down and put an arm around him, thinking he was probably winded, since that’s the same sort of noise I make if I hit the ground hard falling off my bike, and it was only then that I noticed his fingers, pressed against his neck, were vivid with blood.
23.
Marcel immediately went to Xander’s aid. I heard them speaking in French – Xander through gritted teeth – about him being OK apart from his leg, as I knelt next to Innocent and pulled myself together to help him. In the aftermath of Mark’s death Mum had made us all do a first-aid course. It wouldn’t have saved him, of course, but I think in her paranoia – what if I got hurt too? – she wanted to take every possible step to equip us all to help each other any time the situation demanded it. In the shock of the moment I struggled to remember the detail of what to do, but I knew deep down that I knew, if that makes sense, and a sort of autopilot quickly kicked in.
&
nbsp; ‘OK, Innocent,’ I said, my voice as matter-of-fact as I could manage, ‘let’s have a look at this cut then.’
He was still on his haunches, fingers pressed against his neck, the blood flowing through them a shockingly bright red. He’d begun to shiver.
Patience was whimpering next to her father. I put a hand on her shoulder, but couldn’t ease her away.
‘Here.’ Amelia was at my side, rooting through her pack. She pulled out a spare shirt she’d brought and handed it to me.
‘It wasn’t Spenser’s fault,’ Innocent mumbled. ‘Just defending his family. He got me though. Bad scratch.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady, since the quantity of blood seeping between his fingers was truly alarming. ‘We just need to get some proper pressure on this cut, to stop it bleeding, eh. Let’s use this.’ I’d folded Amelia’s shirt into a pad and showed it to Innocent before easing his fingers away. The wound, a vicious, crimson cut at the base of his throat, ten centimetres long at least, was only briefly visible before it flooded with blood. I covered it instantly with the pad, grabbed Innocent’s hand and pressed on the cut with him, very hard indeed.
‘My God!’ Amelia said.
‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ I muttered, fighting the panic flooding my own stomach.
Innocent’s shivering had become shuddering. He was going into shock. I didn’t know whether to keep him upright, with the wound above his heart, or roll him onto his side into the recovery position. My first-aid course felt laughable now. I looked up for help and saw Marcel scrabbling frantically at the medical kit he’d brought. I was startled to see that his eyes were awash with tears. He found a roll of crepe bandage and held it out to me, Behind him Caleb was walking in small circles, head down, as if looking for something. ‘I can’t believe that thing actually charged us,’ he said, more to himself than anyone else. ‘They’re supposed to stop. It’s a display. They’re meant to be damned peaceful.’