Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

by Tim Cahill

  There were yellow flowers blooming on the senecios and on the vine-entangled hypericum trees. Below, the surface of Lake Ngezi was as still and blue as the sky above. The chain of volcanoes stretched out, noble and massive in the distance, ranging all the way to Uganda in one direction and to Zaire in another. The infant crawled over the silverback’s chest and pulled at the hair under the juvenile’s chin. The two dissolved into play chuckles and rolled over Ndume’s belly, wrestling indolently as the patriarch yawned, showing his massive canines.

  I felt, in that bright, aureate moment, that I was watching one of the loveliest scenes on the face of the earth. It seemed like a tableau out of time: the lazy frolic, the drowsy family at peace in the provident forest, the special beauty of the lake and the mountains. I found myself thinking of the dawn of man, of the Garden of Eden.

  The sensation was almost physically seductive, and I wanted the moment to last forever—especially since I carried with me a fund of ominous knowledge. What I knew tinged the idyllic setting with a sense of doom. For all the serenity of the place, I could not help dreading the specter that haunted it—a specter that one writer has called “the black suction of extinction.” The signs of it were glaringly apparent. Ndume, for example, has no right hand. Chances are that he lost it in a poacher’s trap. And chances are that his predecessor, a patriarch named Stilgar, was also a victim of poachers. If so, it is likely that the poachers cut off his head and hands, boiled them to remove the flesh and then sold the skull and skeletal hands to tourists.

  Poaching is an emotional and well-publicized issue, but the gorillas face an even greater danger. They are caught up in a grave and perhaps insoluble crisis that has grown out of the history of Rwanda and involves painful decisions about the very survival of the gorillas and the people of the area. Unlike most cases involving the extermination of animals, the situation in the Virungas is not one in which the needs of the animals and those of the people are mutually exclusive. In the long run, there is an identity of interest for all the inhabitants of the region. Most lives, however, are conducted in the very short run.

  Long, long ago, the inhabitants of the area were the Twa, aboriginal Pygmies who survived primarily by hunting. They were conquered by an agricultural people called the Hutu. These farmers viewed the forest as an enemy and set about clearing it to raise crops. Around 1000 A.D. the Tutsi (sometimes called the Watutsi) arrived from the north. The Tutsi were herdsmen who by and large left the forest alone and frustrated the agricultural ambitions of the Hutu, whom they quickly enslaved. In 1959 the Hutu, bearing centuries of anger, finally rose up against the Tutsi. One of the revolutionary slogans translated roughly as “Let’s cut these people down to size”—a reference to the fact that the Tutsi are the tallest people on earth. The Hutu meant their slogan literally, and legless Tutsi bodies choked the forest streams. Thousands of survivors fled to neighboring countries.

  Since then, the Hutu have restored the subsistence farming ethic and have changed the face of Rwanda. Vast stretches of primal forest have been cleared to make way for self-contained family farms that average a mere 2.5 acres and that barely keep people alive. Now, with land growing scarce, local farmers are looking to Volcano National Park for more cropland. Just twelve years ago, forty square miles—or almost half of the park—were turned over to cultivation. That single act was the most important factor in the reduction of the mountain gorilla population from an estimated 450 in 1960 to about 200 in 1981. The advantages to the people were illusory and short-lived for the simple reason that the countryside that nurtures the gorillas also nurtures the people. The vegetation of the Garden acts as a spongy reservoir, releasing water to the rivers in the dry seasons and storing moisture during rainy periods. It is hardly a coincidence that the smaller rivers below the areas cultivated twelve years ago are now dry and that local people report that the water stopped flowing at just about the time the cultivation began. Further cultivation will cause more sedimentation and erosion, then drought and famine. If the Virunga watershed is destroyed by cultivation, the gorillas will surely perish. But so too, eventually, will the people.

  The government of President Juvénal Habyarimana understands this equation, and it is firmly committed to protecting the park. But the pressures for more farmland are going to be very great in the next few years. You can feel it at the edge of the park: the need and the press of hungry humanity. The farms, called shambas, roll bare and treeless right up to the forest, and as many as 780 people work and live on each square mile.

  On the last day I visited the creatures of the Garden, Ndume had chosen to feed and doze no more than a hundred yards from the place where the shambas began. I sat somewhat above him, watching him watch the people hoeing potatoes or harvesting pyrethrum. Children shouted in play, men drove goats with whistles, and women called to one another across the fields. Ndume, with his long, handsome, sensitive face and troubled soft brown eyes, sat still and silent and stared into the teeming shambas below.

  Early one May morning, I was standing by the night nests of a six-member family known as Group 13. A trail led away from the nesting site, and Mark Condiotti, who works for the conservation organization known as the Mountain Gorilla Project, was showing me how to track the animals. It wasn’t all that difficult. A group of twenty men crawling on their hands and knees might have made such a path through the thick undergrowth. Occasionally we passed through what amounted to a leafy tunnel: the vegetation was trampled below but undisturbed at a height of about four feet.

  We found ourselves in a thick stand of bamboo. There was a strange, unsettling, subaqueous quality to the light, a sense of shimmering twilight, and through the ten- and fifteen-foot-high stalks we could just make out several bear-size black shapes, moving slowly. I cleared my throat several times quite loudly.

  The sound is called a double belch vocalization, DBV for short. Gorillas make, the sound by a rasping inhalation and exhalation of breath. Humans make it by clearing their throats. The first time the sound is short and emphatic; the second sound follows immediately and is softer, more drawn out.

  DBVs are sounds of reassurance. Gorillas move slowly, and any abrupt action might be interpreted as a threat, so they make the sounds before changing position or when moving into the proximity of another individual. It is a convenient way to signal lack of aggressive intent, and it’s a handy thing for human visitors to know.

  We were looking for Mrithi, Group 13’s silverback, but we ran into Mtoto, a charming three-year-old. She spotted us and batted her chest—pockety-pock-pock-pock—then gave us a slow sideways glance. We smiled, without showing our teeth.

  Mtoto stood and walked across some broken bamboo stalks. She pounded her protruding belly and occasionally glanced in our direction to see how intimidated we were by this terrifying display. Mtoto weighed about thirty pounds. One of the bamboo stalks broke under her, and she fell onto her back. She passed wind in several prolonged toots, then lolled her head over a piece of bamboo and stared, her soft brown eyes sinking absurdly into the top of her head.

  The clouds broke and sunlight pierced the bamboo grove in several oblique shafts like light streaming into a cathedral. Mtoto strutted off to join the others, who were moving even more slowly now. They seemed sated and ready for their afternoon siesta. We found Mrithi in an open, grassy glade. He stared at us, pounded the flats of his hands on the ground four times, then walked away, leading his group deeper into the shimmering world of the bamboo grove.

  Gorilla faces read like human faces: the animals smile when they are content, frown when they are not, and display an infinite number of nuances. Some have long hair, some short, and a few of the males sport little goatees. I spent about thirty hours no more than ten feet from the gorillas and met almost forty individuals.

  Personalities varied as much as appearances. The juveniles tended to be bold, curious, mischievous; the adults were more restrained. Beethoven, Group 5’s silverback, is immense, a dignified aging patriarch, a Willi
am Howard Taft of a gorilla. Brutus has the slicked-back hair of a 1950s juvenile delinquent and a mean, pinched face. He is the one gorilla in the Garden who attacks humans—and I was determined to meet him.

  I liked Mrithi as much as any silverback I’ve met, and I visited him several times. But he is a gorilla who lives in the bamboo, and some researchers think this dark and visually limited world makes the animals who live there more aggressive toward strangers. Mrithi charged me twice, but one of those charges veered off so quickly that I could see he was not coming for me at all. One of his favorite tricks is a forward charge of about eight feet, followed by an abrupt attempt to push a stalk of bamboo down on his victim. Unfortunately, the bamboo was often tangled above, and Mrithi was unable to dislodge it. Worse, small pieces of vegetation ended up falling onto his own back. He is not, I’m afraid, the most intimidating silverback alive—that would be Brutus—and Mrithi’s ineffectual rages always reminded me of the cartoon character Elmer Fudd.

  Still, when a silverback pounds the ground, you want to respect him, and so we waited several minutes before tracking him again. The second time we found him, Mrithi treated us to a halfhearted series of cough-grunts, an eh-eh-eh vocalization sometimes called a pig grunt because of its slightly swinish resonance. The sound is a warning.

  “He’s still excited about the interaction with the other group a few days ago,” Mark said. “We’ll try one more time, and if he retreats, I think we ought to leave him alone.”

  The “interaction” was a brief fight between Mrithi and the silverback of another group. Rosalind Aveling, who, along with her husband, Conrad, handles tourism and education for the Mountain Gorilla Project, had been tracking Group 13 that day. She noticed that Mrithi led the group through the bamboo without allowing them to feed, which was unusual, and that he was guiding them directly into an area occupied by a second family of gorillas.

  Suddenly Ros heard an outbreak of screaming and hooting. She hurried toward the sound, but the gorillas had gone. In the flattened greenery on the sloping forest floor, Ros found silverback dung. Next to the dung was a patch of fresh blood.

  About thirty yards farther on, Ros found Group 13. They were bunched closely together on top of a ridge. The second group was huddled below, in the depths of a ravine. Mrithi was strutting along the top of the ridge, beating his chest and hooting. The silverback below responded with chest beats and hoots.

  No one knows for sure why Mrithi chose to lead his group directly into the teeth of the second group that day, but a factor to be considered is Ijicho, Mrithi’s flighty and attractive constant companion (almost) and the female lead of this little soap opera. At about eight years of age, Ijicho is just starting her regular four-day-a-month estrous cycle, and she was in heat on the day of the altercation. Female gorillas often pass over to other groups, and Mark thinks that Ijicho tried to join the second group and that Mrithi had been obliged to follow her.

  A. H. “Sandy” Harcourt, the director of the research center at Karisoke, doubts that Ijicho would have traveled such a distance to change groups, for records indicate that most transfers take place while two groups are in sight of each other. Personally, I hate it when science gets in the way of a good story, and I like to think that Mrithi rose one morning to find Ijicho gone. I choose to believe that he followed her out of a sense of burning loss and implacable rage, that he fought for her and won.

  Ijicho was in estrous the next day, but no copulation was observed, and the day after that, Ijicho approached Mrithi boldly as he lay in his day nest. She stared into his eyes and made a light, moaning vocalization. Mrithi sprawled grandly on his back and emitted a dismissive neighing sound. I like to think he was punishing her for her attempt to abandon him.

  On the last day of Ijicho’s cycle, I was pleased to find that she and the others had settled down into a pleasant open field full of succulent thistles. Gorillas are particularly fond of these prickly plants and seem to consider them a great delicacy. Mrithi sat cross-legged in his nest. He folded his arms over his chest, and his black fur glistened like metal in the warm afternoon sun. His head and upper body were immense. He looked like some pagan idol, a god of immense strength and insatiable appetite.

  We were fifteen yards away. The silverback uncrossed his arms, scratched his head, and sighed. The thistles were delicious, the glade was open to the sun, and he was ready for his nap.

  About half an hour later, Ijicho rose from her own nest nearby. She approached Mrithi, moaning in a low, guttural fashion. He woke up, and they stared into each other’s eyes for several seconds.

  “They’re courting,” Mark whispered.

  Ijicho stood on all fours, her face on a level with Mrithi’s. They continued to stare.

  “I think we’re going to have a copulation,” Mark said.

  Ijicho reached out with her right hand, a slow, tentative movement. Mrithi rose up onto his knees. Simultaneously, Ijicho turned away from him, presenting her backside. He entered her and began stroking. His great bulk—Mark estimated his weight at 350 pounds—covered the female, who seemed far less than half his size.

  Mtoto, the mischievous juvenile, moved closer to the silver-back’s nest. Mrithi began stroking faster. His lips were pursed, and he began hooting—a relatively high-pitched hoo, hoo, hoo—in time with his strokes. Mtoto studied the action. I thought I read both bewilderment and fascination in her eyes.

  It was over in less than two minutes. Ijicho simply wandered away and began browsing on thistles. Mrithi sat up in his nest and stared at the humans with a blank and unfathomable expression. He looked entirely regal.

  “They copulate nearly every month,” Mark said. “She’s been going through some adolescent sterility. God, I hope she’s pregnant this time.”

  It was too moody a day to sit in a graveyard, any graveyard, but this—the final resting place of nine mountain gorillas, with nine rustic wooden markers—set the mind diving into some dark and chilling waters. Yellow-green moss clung to the trunks of the surrounding trees. A lighter green variety drippped like beaded drapery from the top, outermost branches. A fine mist hung in the air and drifted, silver-gray, through the green world above. Somewhere below, thunder rumbled.

  The graveyard is located at Karisoke, behind the big house where Dr. Dian Fossey lived for thirteen years until she left in 1980. It was Fossey who discovered that gorillas could be habituated to the presence of humans. And it was she who changed the public’s perception of gorillas: the “savage apes” became “gentle giants.” Fossey was often pictured with Digit, a magnificent silverback, and the two were often seen touching. Those photos struck an emotional chord. There was a mystical echo of God and Adam reaching out to touch and understand each other, as in the Sistine Chapel. Part of Group 4, one of Fossey’s study groups, was slaughtered by poachers in 1978 after Digit himself had been killed trying to protect his family. His mutilated body was found later.

  It began to rain lightly in the graveyard at Karisoke. Not far away, on a day like this one, I had gone with photographer Nick Nichols and Conrad Aveling to see the notorious Brutus. We all knew that if Brutus continued to charge and bite people, someday he might kill someone.

  Ever since George Schaller’s pioneering work with the mountain gorilla in 1960, it had been known that no gorilla will attack a man who holds his ground. No gorilla except Brutus. The records at Karisoke indicate that he has injured three people in twelve years; local people put the number at six or seven, and they tell lurid tales of entire calf muscles being stripped away from the leg by those great teeth.

  We started at about noon. Our information was that Brutus had last been seen at the ten-thousand-foot level of Visoke, on the Mount Karisimbi side. Down below, in the mud-hut village of Bisate, someone was pounding a drum. It was, from this distance, less rhythmic than mechanical: thump … thump … thump … thump … and so on until, it seemed, the end of time.

  After hours of painful climbing through chest-high nettles, it was a relief to ent
er a sloping hagenia meadow. To our right, great dripping branches hung cantilevered over a gaping canyon, which looked as if it were carpeted in green velvet at its greatest depth. Thunder rolled, and the drums thudded out their mechanical counterpoint.

  Finally, we found a nest that was bigger than any I had seen before. The dung it contained was, by careful scientific measurement, ten centimeters in width. Enormous. “Brutus,” I said and stared down at the dung feeling foolish and afraid.

  Just then the sky ripped apart and rain hammered down endlessly, relentlessly, while thunder rolled and the drums of Bisate continued to thump away. Gorillas hate rain. It makes them evil tempered, and Brutus was grouchy on the sunniest of days.

  No one knows why Brutus has become a savage and atypical gorilla. He has ranged close to the shambas for years, and the locals used to make money by taking curious visitors up to see him. These inexperienced guides knew nothing of Fossey’s habituation methods: they were noisy, apt to run, clumsy, and aggressively impolite. Perhaps Brutus has been pushed beyond the limits of gorilla endurance. Perhaps he is angry at the whole damned human race. He too sits at the edge of the park, but he is not silent. He roars down into the shambas, and the people below tremble at the sound.

  The trails kept turning back on themselves, and after four hours we decided to give up on the search. Conrad wanted to try one more path, but Nick and I sat, exhausted, on the rim of Brutus’s nest. The sound we heard started off at a high pitch, like a cock crowing—provided the cock in question weighs over four hundred pounds. It rose in pitch and volume so that it sounded for a moment like something ancient and reptilian. In the forest, above the spot where Conrad must have been, we could see the foliage parting rapidly on a downhill vector, and the scream dropped into a lower register, as will a donkey’s bray. It seemed then as if there was more than one voice raised, and Nick shouted, “Christ, Conrad’s being mauled!” We sprinted up the hill, and the scream now sounded like leopards or lions, like dragons in combat. It broke off into a piercing, defiant yowl, and its echo reverberated out of the green velvet depths of the ravine.