With the nets rolled up once more and looped over the net carriers, we continue walking and walking until we come to another place that someone—Who knows how these decisions are made?—determines is right, and the nets are again laid down rapidly by the men, raised and fixed in place by the women, with the four of us again left standing near the bottom of the crescent. Again we hear the highpitched whoops and barks in the distance and coming closer, and again at last the Pygmies silently materialize from inside the forest—but again, this second time, no animals: no nervous, leaping monkeys, no ragged, zigzagging duikers, nothing. Nada.
A third time as well the hunters spread out their great nets, fix them in place, whoop and bark, singing thus to push and drive the game into the pocket of the crescent—but the calls die out, and the Pygmies appear while the animals do not. This hunt has become a tedious vegetarian’s exercise, and so the question one is provoked to ask is this: Where have all the animals gone?
Dawn.
I’m lying beneath the mosquito netting in my bed in my bedroom in our cottage beside the Epulu River at the Okapi Station. I open my eyes to look up through a cloud of netting overhead to consider the bullet holes in the ceiling. Still half asleep. Being awakened by an alarm clock, which is the temperature bird, a repetitive little fellow who hangs around outside the window and every morning wakes me up at the same time with the same monotonous query: Temperature. What’s the temperature? Temperature. Temperature. Temperature. What’s the temperature?
It’s warm now and going to be hot soon.
I open my eyes again and once more size up the bullet holes in the ceiling, which seem now like a dangerous form of punctuation, like a stream of ellipses screwing the syntax of the synapse in the middle of a dream, like … and … and … that make one pause to wonder: Where have all the animals gone? They’ve gone, I think, into a black hole made by the soldiers and thugs who shot the bullets that made the bullet holes. Or maybe they’ve gone into a deep hole dug in the ground by the meat merchants and the ivory traders and timber thieves, the butchers, bankers, bosses, and bumblers. Or maybe they’ve just dropped into the giant hole being screwed into the earth by the mighty march of modern progress.
Temperature. Temperature. What’s the temperature?
It’s our last day at Epulu, and now, as I scribble these words into my little notebook, I hear a series of clinks, clanks, and clunks in the kitchen, a discordant concert conducted carelessly by Samuel, our cook, as he rummages about. He’s early this morning, maybe because he’s eagerly anticipating final payment for services rendered.
The Epulu River rushes past the Okapi Station and our little cottage in the station, creating a surfy roar day and night, nature’s white-noise machine that I find mostly comforting, since it masks much of the rumbling of the trucks moving past the Okapi Breeding Station and the headquarters of the ICCN on Route Nacional 4 (RN4). That’s the main clay track connecting east with west, in the process slashing open an orange gash right through the Ituri Forest and the Okapi Wildlife Reserve. A brief pause in the rumbling, as a truck stops momentarily at the security barrier in front of the ICCN barracks. Then the driver revs the engine, shifting gears, getting under way—although still carefully, one hopes, across the wood planks bolted onto the steel girders of the new bridge over the rushing Epulu River—headed, as he would be, west, on the way to places like Nia Nia and beyond, as far perhaps as the big city of Kisangani …
Or maybe the driver is pointed in the other direction, in which case he has already crossed the bridge before stopping at the barrier. It’s still a momentary pause at the barrier (no inspections here) before he revs the engine, shifts the gears, and heads east to places like Mambasa and Irumu and on, perhaps, to Bunia and out to Uganda and beyond.
I sometimes think of Africa as the middle of the world. It is, in any case, a nucleus of evolution and a center of life, and the Congo—the great warm, wet, all-embracing Congo—is the forested center of the center. In 1989, the Democratic Republic of the Congo held more elephants than any other nation in the world, with an estimated population of 112,000 individuals. Surveys published in 2007, less than two decades later, concluded that only between 10,000 and 20,000 elephants were left. If those figures are reliable, one can conclude that somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of the elephants alive in the heart of Africa were, during the last couple of decades, wiped out, erased, extinguished, killed, or just shot full of holes and cut up into a hundred thousand pieces.
Such is the elephant holocaust: the sad, sad circus of Pleistocene refugees all lined up and marching trunk to tail in the grim program of extermination. What drives this bloody parade is the Great I-Want, the mysterious matrix of human desire, the unaccountable human passion for the peculiar luster and texture of the elongated front teeth of elephants.
Elephants have those teeth.
People want the teeth.
Too bad for the elephants.
Until recent times, ivory was sold openly and legally in the Congo, carved in dozens of workshops located in the urban centers of Kinshasa, Kisangani, and elsewhere. A ban in 1989 pushed Congo’s ivory trade underground, while the war, beginning in 1996, brought it back into the open with a vengeance. Thugs temporarily employed as soldiers looted the forests for meat and ivory, and they looted all the settlements along the road, including the village of Epulu and the offices and barracks of the ICCN and the various buildings and guest cottages of the Okapi Breeding Station.
Aside from the dozen or so okapis cared for at the Okapi Station, Rosmarie and Karl Ruf (the Swiss couple who ran the place) also took in chimpanzee babies who had been orphaned by hunters, keeping the growing apes on two islands in the middle of the river. The thugs employed as soldiers killed and ate all those chimps but somehow were persuaded—who knows how? a promise, a deal, an appeal?—to leave the okapis alone.
Meanwhile, thousands of amateur miners had been moving into the Ituri Forest, scratching holes into the earth in search of gold, diamonds, coltan (critical for the manufacture of electronic gadgets), and cassiterite (for tin), while other extraction entrepreneurs moved in to mine the trees, the meat, and again the ivory. Mining ivory was easy enough. No shovels required. Mining ivory required little more than pointing an AK-47 in a certain direction and pulling the trigger, then hacking away an elephant’s front teeth and getting those teeth out to market. But what market, where, how?
The dirt highway, the RN4, could help. On the RN4, elephants’ teeth could be taken either west to Kisangani and from there on to the north or west. Or one could take the ivory on the RN4 east to Bunia and from there out of the country and on, ultimately, to China, where a rising middle-class has become the big market for big teeth these days.
The end of the war came after all the deals were finalized in Kinshasa, whereupon the various rebel chiefs signed papers, were given rewards, and the national army and police drove out the last of the thugs employed as soldiers. With the end of the war, a number of outside organizations—the World Bank, for example—moved in to make things better. The RN4, that link between east and west, the red-clay cut through the Ituri Forest and the Okapi Reserve inside the Ituri, had gotten bad. It was rutted, washed out in places, muddy, seriously unreliable. The World Bank financed the improvement work, hiring Chinese crews to do it right and even to build a beautiful new steel bridge across the Epulu River right in front of the Okapi Station and the ICCN headquarters.
That’s the World Bank. That’s development. That’s progress. After the World Bank refurbishment, traffic on the RN4 went from a small trickle to a major rush: hundreds of trucks a month rumbling along the road. But the question the World Bank officers, teetering in their ergonomically engineered chairs inside their high-rise offices at the very tippy tops of cities in the First World, may not have addressed fully enough is this: What might be inside those trucks?
A good X-ray machine would help, since official barriers on the road are run by soldiers and police among whom many are no
t altogether averse to closing their eyes. As a result, the RN4 has become a major conduit for illegal timber, bushmeat, and ivory. A few weeks after the bridge at Epulu was finished, a giant double truck carrying twice the legal load, all of it illegally harvested timber bound for markets in Kenya, tested the tensile strength of the bridge girders and found it wanting. A two hundred–meter span of the bridge buckled and dropped into the river, along with the truck and its driver and the wood. Of course, the World Bank was quick to refinance the building of that bridge by a Chinese crew. The trucks soon returned.
Along with the illegal timber goes illegal bushmeat. There is legal bushmeat too, but in truth all animals of all kinds, including elephants and okapis, are chopped up and sent piece by piece on this road in both directions and sold as meat at the various village and town and city markets outside the Okapi Reserve.
Ivory moves in both directions on the RN4, and occasionally a truck is popped open to show us more particularly what it looks like. By “popped open,” I’m referring to cases like the truck bound for Kisangani recently that crashed into another vehicle, whereupon 116 tusks stored in jerricans flew off the back. The ICCN rangers who monitor the barrier at Epulu are unusual in that they do not take bribes, so I have been told, but they have an additional motivation not to look closely into the trucks. A lot of the criminal traffic in ivory moving past their checkpoint is run at the direction of the general commanding the Thirteenth Brigade of the Congolese army, based not very far away in the town of Mambasa.
The general is a Big Man, as are most of the people at the free enterprise heart of the ivory mafia. These are the commanditaires: men of money and power who will organize the hunting expeditions at the start and take care of the ivory sales at the end. The commanditaires are military officers, government officials, well-established businessmen, and they hire the hunters and provide them with all the necessities: food and marijuana, guns and ammo. Guns are usually military AK-47s, owned by the Congolese military, but sometimes twelve-gauge shotguns with the lead shot melted down and reconfigured to make elephant-stopper slugs. An expedition might include a couple of hunters going out for a couple of days or perhaps a dozen or more hunters headed into the woods for a few weeks. The principal goal is ivory, which is the shiny prize that motivates the commanditaire, but the hunters may be rewarded with meat for themselves and their families or to sell or give away. Meat will come from antelopes, apes, buffalo, bushpigs, monkeys, okapis … any unlucky animal will do, including, of course, elephants.
Sold in the city markets at Kisangani, elephant meat goes for around $5 to $6 per kilogram. By comparison, antelope fetches between $3.60 and $4.80 per kilo, while monkey goes for $3.22 to $3.50 per kilo. Yes, elephant meat is more expensive than other meats, and apparently more desired, especially the succulent steak from trunk or feet. The skin of an ear makes a good drum head, while the hairs of the tail can be sold to make bracelets that are said to protect a person from lightning. The dung is used as a medicine to treat malarial convulsions among small children. But all that—dung, ears, feet, trunk, basketfuls of other body parts—is for the hunters and the traders and transporters to think about. The meat and by-products: That’s their take. The commanditaire is just hoping to sell his cleaner and more portable ivory for his own nice profit. Right now, as I listen to the temperature bird outside my window and to the clinking, clanking, and clunking of Samuel in the kitchen working on breakfast, raw ivory sells for around $160 for a pair of five-kilogram tusks, $580 for two ten-kilogram tusks, and $1,680 for a pair of fifteen-kilogram tusks.
Temperature. Temperature. What’s the temperature? Temperature.
Those price figures are based on the report Dan is just now working on, so they must be up to date. Before the trip, Dan had hired a couple of professional ivory spies—make that professional researchers—named Richard and André, two vigorous-looking young Africans, cool and self-confident, dressed well and wearing shades, who day before yesterday rode their motorcycle all the way up from Kisangani for 460 kilometers, in order to conduct their own interviews.
Dan gave them some money as a down payment, lent them a video camera, and sent them on their investigative journey up and down the RN4, west to Mambasa and east back to Kisangani, to meet and interview elephant hunters, transporters, marketers, and, if possible, a few middlemen or commanditaires. Richard and André have good connections in the area. They will do their job, while today—this morning, just as soon as we finish our breakfast and pay Samuel, the cook, for his services—Karl, Dan, and I will hit the RN4 on our own little mission that will include stopping in markets and making ourselves as inconspicuous as three daft blancs in the middle of the DR Congo can be, while checking various kinds of meats and their prices …
But first, as I say, we must pay the cook, Samuel, who, as a worker contracted through the ICCN, has his own official prices that are carefully summarized on an official bill that he now—now that the breakfast dishes are cleared and left to soak in the sink—hands us.
We do the math and assemble the money: a small fistful of clean, crisp American fives, tens, and a couple of twenties. Samuel looks tentatively grateful, but he wants to make sure the money is good. He counts the bills once, twice, thrice, turning them all in the same direction, and then carefully, one by one, he goes through them once more to examine the dates. One five-dollar bill has a bad date. Luckily, though, Dan has a five that’s better. Having satisfied himself about the dates, Samuel presses them up, one by one, against the glass at the window, using sunlight to check for any imperfections.
Ah! One of the tens has a crease that looks like it could be the beginning of a slow tear. He hands that back. Karl fishes around in his wallet to find a replacement.
But now, as Samuel examines the bills even more closely, he finds three of the bills—two fives and a ten—have actual holes in them. Pinpricks. He shows us, shaking his head with sincere concern. They won’t do.
Dan, dripping with sly sarcasm, comments quietly: “This is unbelievable. I can’t fucking believe it. Somebody has put pinpricks into our money!”
But patiently we go back to our wallets, and with a good deal of back and forthing, leafing through bills, considering the dates and holding them up to the window for new examinations, we finally come up with sufficient replacement money, making Samuel at last satisfied. Then we jam our bags into the car and hit the road.
Good-bye, Samuel.
Good-bye, Michel.
Good-bye, Jean-Prince.
Good-bye, Bernard, Abeli, and Myanamenge.*
*Two years later, an armed gang of poachers and illegal miners stormed the ranger station and the Okapi Breeding Center, looted and burned the physical structures, and killed six people. I can only hope these generous individuals were not among the victims. The criminal raiders also killed all the okapis.
Unnatural Habitats
Susan Daitch
GIRAFFA CAMELOPARDALIS
A STUFFED GIRAFFE, mottled and less than a tenth the height of the full-grown actual animal, began life in a factory in Jiangsu Province, China, traveled in a container ship across the Pacific to the port of Oakland, California, was shipped in boxes with other animals to the Bronx Zoo gift shop, bought for a child, discarded when outgrown, picked out of the trash, and then tied to the grille of a truck like a ship’s figurehead, and in this position it crisscrossed the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
In 1826, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt arranged to have a giraffe from the Sudan and her handlers follow the slave route, along with traders of so-called black gold up the Blue Nile, to travel all the way from Sennar to Khartoum to Alexandria. She had two keepers: Atir, Sudanese, and Hassan, an Egyptian. They knew nothing of cities of snow and ice, but the ultimate goal of the adventure, as they understood it, was to present King Charles X of France with Zarafa, named from the Arabic zerafa. The gift was intended as part of a grander, more secret scheme to keep the French from siding with the Greeks in their war against the
Turks, to drive a wedge, to keep European from siding with European, a heavy burden to place on the sloping shoulders of an animal.
So unusual was the concept of capture and display that even the nature of what a cage might be for wildcats and large creatures had yet to be completely and reliably figured out. While Zarafa was waiting in the port of Alexandria, there were reports of hyenas and lions in disintegrating pens, and parrots from Yemen clustering in palm trees, none indigenous to the city and all occupying space somewhere between containment and the streets. Zarafa remained docile in her enclosure; the streets were full of recognizable hazards, the sea was deadly, there was no place to go. Fed milk from Egyptian cows who also had to be transported, she was loaded onto a Sardinian brigantine, I Due Fratelli, set to sail from Alexandria to Marseille.
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