by Tim Cahill
But Conrad had stood his ground, and Brutus had stopped about five yards away. Later, we pieced it together. Brutus had been sitting in a field of nettles, waiting out the rain. Gorillas sometimes seem so depressed by the rain that they neglect to seek shelter; they sit, shivering and miserable, with the water drumming on their heads and a clear mucus running from their noses, When Conrad approached on a trail that led directly to Brutus’s field of sorrow, the gorilla took it all out on him. He charged directly downhill, screaming and roaring, lips pulled away from his black tartar-covered teeth, wet hair plastered to his head.
All I ever saw of Brutus was his black shape as he lumbered back up the hill, muttering and cursing as much as gorillas can be said to mutter and curse. He turned to roar once more and disappeared into the jungle. Off in the distance, the clouds parted over Karisimbi and the mountain shone with a red-orange spectral glow.
“He stopped this time,” I said.
“Yeah,” Conrad said. “Maybe he’s been reading Schaller.”
Maybe. Sitting in the gorilla graveyard, I found myself smiling at the memory of Brutus. So he’s not your average silverback. I like to think of him ranging close to the shambas, howling and screaming and roaring at the people below. I like to think that he knows; and I like to think that those echoing roars have a significance beyond anger and defiance.
No one knows if the gorillas will survive. Researchers believe that with proper management, poaching can be stopped and the Virungas can be spared. Given these conditions, the gorillas will survive, and they may even multiply.
I looked down at one of the graves. It had not been tended in some time. Thistles had grown up around the marker, and when I moved them, I read the name Digit. I thought of Group 13, of Mrithi and Ijicho feeding on thistles like gourmands, making love in a field of thistles on a special sunny day. It seemed to me that thistles were a fine and appropriate funerary flower for a gorilla like Digit. I hoped Ijicho was pregnant.
The Clown Owl’s Bitter Legacy
I was camped up by Elbow Lake making a bowl of Mountain House instant applesauce when it occurred to me how much I loathe and despise Woodsy Owl. Mountain House advises users to pack out the foil package—good for you, Mountain House—but they ruin the effect by including a drawing of Woodsy. The clown owl, in this peculiar depiction, was carrying a backpack and wearing a hat with—get this—a feather on it. An owl with a feather in his hat is obscene. It’s like a man walking around with a severed human finger stuck in his hatband.
Later, I conducted my own informal, unscientific survey and discovered that most people are basically neutral about this lackwit owl, this driveling goody-goody. But ask yourself; Would I rather have a drink with the Crime Dog and get some gravelly voiced advice on how to take a bite outta crime, or would I like to stroll around Central Park with some nincompoop fowl?
Woodsy Owl, to my way of thinking, has no dignity. He is supposed to be a symbol of our great parks and wild lands, and yet he looks like he ought to be leading cheers in some bush-league baseball park. Even then, in my mind’s eye, I see all 750 people attending the game howling in rage and flinging beer cans at this fat, shambling, grounded fake.
At this very moment, I have a phone number on my desk. Just one quick call and I can find out how the bird was born and who is responsible for the noxious muppet. But how much more satisfying to speculate. Woodsy clearly is the product of some committee. Take the matter of size. Why is the bird bigger than most kids and smaller than most adults? I see a bunch of people sitting around a table discussing this very matter.
“Yeah, well, he ought to be like a big brother to the kids, see, but not threatening to adults.”
“Right, perfect. And he ought to skip everywhere he goes so the kids will identify with him.”
“We’ll give him big floppy yellow clowns feet.”
Can you imagine someone trying to make Smokey the Bear wear clown feet? Smokey had size, dignity, and a legend to match the Lone Ranger. An actual bear cub, Smokey was found badly burned after a disastrous forest fire. Compassionate rangers nursed the lone survivor back to health, and one gets the impression that it was Smokey himself who decided to devote his life to the fight against fires set by careless campers.
Everything about Smokey had meaning. He wore a hat and pants to show that he was an orphan, to underscore the fact that he was raised by rangers. Mom and Dad were mere spots of bear grease, long since absorbed into the mute forest loam. There was a certain sadness in Smokey’s gruff, gentle warning: “Remember, only you can prevent forest fires.” But for all his enforced domesticity, despite the pants and hat, Smokey never wore a shirt. He wanted you to know that he was a bear—a great big powerful bear with a score to settle, an orphan’s rage burning in his massive chest. You got the distinct impression that if you were careless with matches in the woods, Smokey might show up on your doorstep one day and rip your lungs out.
There is absolutely no threat factor in this new bird. Here’s Mom and Dad out at the campsite, having martinis in the Winnebago. Junior and Sis are playing tag outside among the redwoods, and they stop for a Twinkie. Junior tosses the wrapper on the ground. Here comes fat, floppy, feeble little Woodsy. “Hoo, hoo, give a hoot, don’t pollute.”
“Dad, come quick. There’s a little guy out here in a funny suit and he’s bothering us.”
The camper door slams open and there’s Dad. “Get away from my kids,” he bellows, “you perverted little creep.” Dad turns back to the door. “Milly, get the sheriff on the CB and tell him there’s a dwarf in a chicken suit molesting children out here.” Now Dad takes a few threatening steps toward Woodsy. The forest is silent. Sis tosses her Twinkie wrapper on the ground.
“Hoo, hoo, give a …”
“Get outta here!” Dad towers over the trembling bird, and Woodsy decides, what the hey, a couple more Twinkie wrappers aren’t really worth a beating. He turns and skips away in floppy-footed terror, skips because it is his only mode of locomotion, and the skipping so irritates Dad—convinces him finally that he’s dealing with a dangerous pervert—that he launches a furious kick to the bird’s backside, lifting him a foot or two off the ground.
“Yay, get him, Dad,” the kids cry as Woodsy skips stiffly off into the forest dragging one floppy yellow foot.
Now if you really need some flying thing to remind you not to pollute, I suggest Rodan, the winged reptile who used to battle Godzilla in those Japanese monster movies of a decade ago. That was one fearsome pterodactyl, Rodan. Almost as big as Godzilla himself, Rodan had fearsome talons and a great, ripping beak.
An effective series of TV commercials would have Rodan flying unseen above a group of careless backpackers camped too close to a mountain lake, tossing litter in all directions. Next shot: Sergio Leone-type close-up of Rodan’s burning red eyes, sound up on an awesome scream. Below, in subtitles, the words appear: “I’m extinct because of you, you bastards with your Kelty packs.”
Commercial two gets to the meat of the matter. Same site, same careless campers. A good-looking young woman tosses a cigarette butt into the lake. Sound up on the Rodan scream, a whooshing from the sky. Montage of the campers’ faces staring upward in horror. Cut to: the girl swept off the ground by giant talons, her screams fading in the distance. Cut to: a long shot of Rodan picking, like a vulture, at something moist and pink on the ground. Close-up of the great scaled head rising in murderous triumph. The sound of the Rodan scream. Subtitles read: “Don’t pollute or I’ll rip you to shreds.”
Unfortunately, instead of some perfectly acceptable and effective reptilian terror, we’re stuck with this bonehead. Woodsy—or some little guy dressed up like him, anyway—does come around to some of the grade schools here in Montana. He hands out seeds for spruce trees. The kids are supposed to plant them. Fine, except that this is a semiarid grassland where no spruce grows. What a way to help kids appreciate nature. Plant a seed, kill a tree. Every spring a child asks, “Mom, why does Woodsy lie to us?”
The rare spruce tree that makes it will grow slowly. By the time the child is ready to leave home, the spruce may be chest high, a twisted, stunted, grotesque caricature of a tree, something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, a haunted, crippled, gnarled thing: the clown owl’s bitter legacy.
The Shame of Escobilla
People often speak of holy places—areas that are awesome or harsh or tranquil—but you seldom hear of a place that is evil. I know of one. It is located on several acres of low tropical hills, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The hills are green and there is a view of ocean, and these acres represent evil in a very pure form.
Here the senses are assaulted. An odor of death and putrescent meat rises up from these hills. Animal bodies are piled four and five feet deep, left to rot and dry under a blazing sun. As many as fifty vultures pick at the purple and black meat. They work with a joyless efficiency, steadying the carcasses with their talons as they yank at the soft flesh with their powerful beaks. The weight of all those bodies rotting generates an intense heat, so that when a breeze springs up, the air becomes artificially warm, heavy with death and decay. Standing in the path of such a breeze, one is left feeling fouled, hopeless, unholy.
Everywhere there is the constant droning of flies. The air is black with them. Working among the vultures and the flies in the awful stench are the most unfortunate people of the local villages: there is one man with a horribly contorted spine, another whose right eye is a mass of scar tissue. These men stumble over the rotting reptilian bodies like sinners confined to some virulent lower level of hell.
The final evil is there also. Not only are mature animals slaughtered and left to rot in the sun, there is also an immense pile of eggs—the next generation—and these, mixed with the entrails of their mothers, are rotting too. The entire pile is covered with maggots, a heaving mass of hissing malevolence.
That pile and those rotting bodies may signal the last time sea turtles will mass on the beach at Escobilla to lay their eggs. The carnage is being carried on despite the good intentions of the Mexican government. The motive is simple and timeless. It is sheer greed.
Two hundred million years ago reptiles owned the earth. There were turtles then as there are turtles now. It is thought that they developed from a marsh-dwelling lizard that hunched its shoulders forward, protecting its head with hard scales, in case of attack. Over millions of years these animals developed a shell, called a carapace, and a horny undershell, called a plastron. The body itself twisted into a strange configuration to conform to the confines of the shell.
About 90 million years ago, several species of turtle took to the sea. The stumpy, cylindrical legs became thin, flattened flippers. It was the last radical move these living dinosaurs ever made. As the stem reptiles gave rise to birds and to mammals, as the last brontosaurus thundered to earth, the turtles plodded on, survivors.
Today there are seven generally recognized species of sea turtle. One, the Pacific or Olive Ridley, an eighty-pound animal with a shell the size of a manhole cover, is found in the warmer waters of the Pacific from southern Japan to Baja California. Like nearly all reptiles, the Ridley lays eggs, and these the females deposit in the sand on certain small stretches of isolated beach. In many places, nesting females are slaughtered out of hand, even before they can lay their eggs, and in other spots locals may collect nearly 100 percent of the eggs laid. For this reason, the 1975 reptile Red Data Book lists the Pacific Ridley as endangered: “In danger of extinction and whose survival is unlikely if the causal factors keep operating.”
In Mexico, the government has established an enlightened program of turtle conservation. Beaches are patrolled, egg poaching is illegal, and reasonable quotas have been set for harvesting the animals. On the beach at Escobilla, about two hundred miles south of Acapulco, nesting female Ridleys come up out of the surf between the months of July and November. The massings occur about once a month, on certain star-swept nights when the moon is entering its last quarter and when the winds blow inland from the sea. Local people call this an arribazón, and some say that as many as two hundred thousand turtles have laid their eggs on one four-mile stretch of beach in previous years. If this estimate is even close, Escobilla is the site of the largest arribazón in the Americas.
On Saturday, October 1, 1977, I stood on the beach at Escobilla in company with an ABC-Sports TV crew filming an American Sportsman segment. The show concerns itself with celebrities and their adventures with and reactions to animals. The arribazón was fine meat for Sportsman. One of the celebrities was Outside’s Jack Ford, who had informed me of the expected October arribazón. The ABC crew was gracious enough to make room for me on their charter flight from Acapulco to Puerto Ángel, an hour’s drive from the beach.
No one lived on the sand itself—no fresh water—but nearby there was a compound composed of a palapa and several red tents housing eleven Mexican marines who patrolled the beach to prevent egg poaching.
We arrived in time to see the morriña, the hatching of eggs laid during a previous arribazón. The beach was pocked with small depressions. As I watched, the sand would suddenly collapse into itself and, miraculously, a small black flipper would appear, the black dot of a head would emerge, and finally the hatchling—not quite the size of a quarter and all black like some child’s toy stamped out of hard rubber—would move off resolutely toward the sea. Ten, twenty, thirty, and more would dig their way out from the same spot.
The eggs were about the size of Ping-Pong balls. When I found one hatchling struggling to break the shell, I peeled it away. The turtle was curled over a bright, yellow-orange yolk to which it had been connected by a kind of umbilical cord. The hatchling pulled away from the yolk—the little mark on the bottom of the plastron is called a yolk scar—and crawled off toward the water.
All up and down the beach, tiny turtles were making their way out to sea. There were half a dozen men walking the beach with white styrofoam boxes, collecting the hatchlings. I saw dozens of boxes containing about two hundred animals apiece, and was told that the men were doing something scientific that had to do with the preservation of the Ridley. No one seemed willing to tell me any more than that.
Later, I sat under the palapa watching the sunset with Juan José de la Vega and Bob Nixon. De la Vega, twenty-nine, is director of the Cosmographic Society, a Mexican conservationist group. He wears his hair to his shoulders, sports a wide gold bracelet, and speaks good English in a relaxed, offhand fashion. Nixon, the writer for the Sportsman segment, is blond, crisply efficient, and, at the moment, he was clearly unhappy with Juan José for what appeared to be good reason.
De la Vega had proposed the segment to Nixon, indicating that the turtles of Escobilla were in danger, that a man named Antonio Suárez, owner of a company called PIOSA, was slaughtering the animals out of hand, “Soon,” Juan José said, “there will be no more arribazónes at Escobilla.”
The problem was that Nixon and I had just learned that the men with the styrofoam boxes worked for Antonio Suárez, that this same Suárez had footed most of the bill for a new laboratory for the study and preservation of the turtles, and that this lab was supposed to put hundreds of thousands of hatchlings into the sea each year. The next day, Sunday, officials from the Mexican Department of Fisheries and the governor of Oaxaca would be on hand at a ceremony to dedicate the lab and, incidentally, honor Antonio Suárez and his contribution to the conservation of the Pacific Ridley turtle.
I’m pretty sure Nixon felt as I did: Juan José had attacked Suárez out of sheer lust for publicity. I told de la Vega as much, to his face.
Oaxaca was in the midst of a terrible drought, but dedication day, Sunday, dawned pale and cold, and a wet wind howled in from the sea bringing torrential rains. The important visitors would first inspect the PIOSA slaughterhouse, then move on to the nearby lab. Official cars bogged down on the muddy road from Puerto Ángel to the slaughterhouse, and a large banner welcoming the governor wrenched loose from a tree and whipp
ed itself into tatters.
People dashed from the cars to the shelter of the slaughterhouse. Workers, dressed in green T-shirts and shorts, stood nervously about, surreptitiously ogling the important visitors. There was a pile of live turtles, helpless on their backs, in one corner of the room. They barely moved. Occasionally a flipper would jerk in a sad, spasmodic gesture.
In the center of the room was the killing table. It was a long, wooden affair accommodating ten turtles, and the front was canted down at a slight angle. The turtle was lifted onto the sloping surface, and the neck was placed in a semicircular scoop on the ledge at the downside of the table, so that the head was held stationary, in midair. The weight of its body against the ledge prevented the animal from moving. The turtles had lost their green sea color and looked as gray as the sky outside. The eyes were solid black and without expression.
One of the workmen drew a curious, silver gun with a wide red-skirted barrel. The Mexican camera crew moved in for a close-up. The gun was placed on top of the turtle’s head. We heard a muffled thump. The animal’s head jerked up, the black eyes bulged, a great lump formed at the throat, formed again, the mouth opened wide, snapped shut, and the eyes turned fluid and pale. Great gouts of dark blood burst from the turtle’s head. Another man carried the dying animal to a spot near a short conveyor belt. A grooved tube caught the blood and carried it out of the slaughterhouse and about twenty yards down the beach into a cove.
“On killing days,” Juan José whispered, “the cove is red with the blood of these turtles.”
“Sure, Juan,” I said.
The conveyor belt carried the turtle to another room where it was placed on a slaughtering table. Every turtle I saw gutted that day was a female, and all of them had eggs in their oviducts. The eggs and entrails were placed in a large plastic bucket. Later, I was told, the eggs would be taken to the new lab and buried in the sand and new turtles would grow from these eggs.