A violent electrical storm hit the camp on the morning of 1 July. Solid black cloud hung low over the forest, blotting out the sky. Mario quickly unplugged the radio aerial to avoid the possibility of a lightning strike. Next morning, he had urgent matters to attend to down in the workers’ village and asked me if I would handle the radio link. Win and I had barely been in camp a week but I was the only one able to do it, so I had no choice. At nine-thirty, I switched on the set to find Kruger already trying to raise us.
‘BE-ling-a! BE-ling-a!’ The static was bad, but I could just hear him shouting over it. ‘Il y a un avion tombé dans la région de Belinga! Avez-vous compris?’ What I thought I heard chilled me: ‘There is an aircraft down in the Belinga area. Do you read me?’
‘Répétez s’il vous plaît,’ I shouted into the receiver. ‘Please repeat.’ Again, it came through, chopped up by the crackle: ‘Avion … tombé … région de Belinga.’ Moments later, Mario walked through the door. I whirled around in my seat to face him and blurted out, ‘Kruger says there’s a plane down somewhere in this area. He wants to know if we’ve heard anything.’
The colour drained from Mario’s face. He stared at me, mute for some moments until the implications sank in. Étienne had heard Kruger’s urgent call, and stood at the kitchen door, his face creased with concern. Mario started pacing up and down and fumbled for his packet of cigarettes, his eyes darting here and there as he tried to decide what to do. Meanwhile, Kruger was holding on at the other end of the line, waiting for some kind of response. Minutes later, I watched as Mario’s demeanour switched in an instant to commanding decisiveness: ‘Tell him to come on air at five o’clock this afternoon and we’ll let him know.’ As an afterthought, he added, ‘Tell Bernard I won’t be in for lunch, will you?’ Grabbing a fresh packet of cigarettes, he strode out the door. I had no time to ask him what he planned to do. As I relayed his message to Kruger, I heard the tyres of the Toyota ute churning up the loose gravel as Mario gunned the accelerator and swung around the loop of road heading for the débarcadère.
He was gone for the whole day. Confined to camp, Win and I felt helpless. We had food, bedding and drugs in abundance if only we knew where the plane was and how to reach it. Was it a commercial passenger plane, a cargo carrier, a light plane? In this wilderness of mountains and forest, what chance would any survivors have of being found and rescued? I tried to picture the scene, but my mind recoiled from the horror.
Mario arrived back in the late afternoon, and Win and I ran out to meet him. ‘Did you find out anything?’ I pressed. His sombre expression could have meant he had, but he shook his head, ‘Rien!’ He’d driven straight to Mayebut and despatched a reconnaissance pirogue downriver to ask at all the villages. Then he’d travelled upstream as far as M’Vadhi in another small pirogue to enquire there, but no-one anywhere along the river had seen or heard anything. At the radio, he conveyed this to Kruger, who signed off quickly to go and relay the news to the authorities. Mario poured drinks for the three of us and we sat in silence out on the porch in the gathering dusk, weighed down by our impotence and this brutal reminder of human vulnerability in this unforgiving terrain.
We were unaware as we sat there that a sequence of events was unfolding in Makokou with Eamon Temple at its centre. It had begun when one of his earthworks machines at the Djadié River had broken down. Work had halted while parts were sourced in Makokou. Late in the day of the electrical storm, Eamon had driven in to Makokou to collect the parts. On arrival, he’d been informed that a Cessna on private charter to Van Splunder, the Dutch company building the bridge at Makokou, had gone missing in the region earlier that day with six people on board. The French pilot had overshot the airfield at Makokou during the storm. His last radio message had indicated he was coming below the clouds to have a look. After that, all radio contact had ceased.
It was to be a week before we heard the details of what followed. Kruger had not been forthcoming about it over the radio; Eamon himself recounted the aftermath to us when he made a brief visit to camp after it was all over. I was shocked at the change in him. His eyes seemed hollow in their sockets, and his gaze appeared fixed on some far distant horrific reality. He revealed little detail, and as he spoke I thought he looked like a man newly returned from a theatre of war.
At Makokou on the night of the crash, a representative of Van Splunder had approached Eamon, convinced he knew where the plane had gone down and could lead Eamon to it if he agreed to take part in a search. There was no search and rescue service to call upon, and Eamon knew that part of the country better than anyone. It was characteristic of the man we later came to know that Eamon didn’t hesitate. He was, after all, the man who had surveyed a route for the Trans-Gabonese Railway twice, on foot, years earlier, an epic feat covering more than 600 kilometres from the coast to Belinga through thick jungle, swamps and rugged mountains. Eamon was at home in the Gabonese forest, and accustomed to putting his own wellbeing last.
That night, he and the Van Splunder executive drove to the Djadié camp, and at first light next morning set out on foot to cover as much ground as they could. They walked all day in ever-widening circles, some thirty-five kilometres, but found nothing and only returned to camp at dusk. By then, almost forty-eight hours had elapsed since the plane had come down. They drove back to Makokou immediately to report in to the authorities, by which time the Gabonese army had been placed on standby to assist.
The provincial government put Eamon in charge of the search operation. Next day, he set his men at the Djadié camp to work cutting a heliport in the forest. Meanwhile, although it was the dry season, heavy rain had fallen all day, making flying conditions too dangerous, and costing a precious day. Three days had now gone by, holding out little hope of finding any survivors alive. On the fourth day, Eamon conducted an aerial reconnaissance in a military helicopter flown by an army pilot. Within an hour, he had located the wreckage, all too obvious from the air. In its fatal descent, the Cessna had cut a swathe through the trees, shearing off its wings before ploughing into a mountainside and bursting into flames.
In a combined operation involving Eamon’s men and a party of Gabonese military personnel, a track was cleared from the Makokou road to the crash site. A scene of unspeakable tragedy awaited them when they reached it. Two of the six people had survived the crash and managed to crawl away some little distance to escape the fire, but had perished along with the others in the days that followed. Four Van Splunder executives were among the dead, together with a seventeen-year-old girl, the daughter of one of the men, who had been visiting Gabon on holidays.
Eamon’s head sunk to his chest as he told us, ‘I knew that pilot well. He was one of the best in the country.’
The bodies were brought out on stretchers through the squelching mud, to be transported back to Makokou in an army truck. The only question I felt able to ask Eamon was why that experienced pilot had overshot the airfield at Makokou. Why couldn’t he have been guided in by the navigation beacon? Eamon looked me in the eye, his face ashen, and said, ‘The beacon wasn’t working that day because they’d run out of fuel for the generator.’
For days afterward, I tried to get my mind around the senselessness of it, this brutal extermination of life in the most stupid of circumstances. And I wondered, pointlessly, what we might have been able to do in time had we known the crash was only twenty kilometres from Belinga. For me, the tragedy proved a stark introduction to life in this frontier region where safety nets seldom existed.
Our supplies of fresh food, mail and other items arrived on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The iceboxes – glacières – usually contained an assortment of vegetables, meat, cheeses, yoghurt and fruit, originally from Paris or Johannesburg, but purchased at Mbolo supermarket in Libreville. The vegetables often arrived perished from being in transit too long. Small articles of hardware came up in padlocked tin trunks called cantines, which shuttled constantly back and forth on the aircraft, trucks and pirogues.
&nbs
p; The consignment of builder’s tools we had ordered in Libreville took a fortnight to arrive. When the shipment came in, it was time for Win to begin work. I accompanied him in the Kombi up to the carpenters’ workshop – the atelier du bois – for his first encounter with the men. Bruno and Joseph, the chief carpenters, were there, along with another carpenter, several labourers and some trainee masons.
Win bounded out of the driver’s seat and greeted them with a beaming smile. ‘Bonjour!’
‘Bonjour, patron! Bonjour, madame,’ they chorused.
‘Bonjour!’ I smiled around at the group, then stood back and waited to see how Win would handle the next five minutes. I had made no progress in teaching him French, and I knew I was unlikely to succeed, however long I tried.
He picked up an offcut of plywood from the floor, drew a felt pen from his pocket, and wrote his name on it in capital letters. He held it up to the men. ‘My name is Win, Win Henderson.’
The men who could read looked disconcerted and shifted their weight from one foot to the other. Those who could not looked on with blank stares. Bruno and Joseph spoke up, telling Win it was fitting that they should address him as ‘patron’. He was their boss, and that was how things were done. It was a term of respect.
‘You’d better listen to them,’ I said. ‘We’re the outsiders here.’ He thought for a moment, then grinned his acquiescence to the circle of faces. ‘Okay, okay!’ He motioned everyone to follow him over to the Kombi, where the boxes of new tools lay open – electric drills and circular saws, German hammers, leather carpenters’ aprons, measuring tapes, spirit levels and dozens of other items, many of which the men had never used before. Their eyes lit up, and a hubbub of approval broke out. ‘C’est bien, patron!’ They looked from one to the other, smiled and nodded as if they had never expected such a windfall. Through me, Win explained that each man would have a full set of tools, and everyone would be responsible for his own kit, to be kept in a lockable wooden box. I left them shortly afterwards, crowded around Win while he made the first toolbox as a demonstration. The introduction had gone better than I expected. I could see that the men already respected him, and his sense of humour and energy more than compensated for his lack of French. I told Win that in the early stages, I would spend half an hour in the atelier du bois each morning interpreting where necessary.
In the weeks that followed, Win instituted a program to teach the men modern building methods and safe work practices. He led by example, demonstrating techniques first, then supervising as each man tried them. I sometimes watched from the sidelines. They communicated so well it was almost as if no language barrier existed. The men taught him words for tools and types of timber, which he picked up quickly, laughing readily at his own mistakes. He slotted into the role seamlessly, so I gradually withdrew as interpreter and left them to it.
The initial building priorities were to finish off the toilets and showers in the surveyors’ quarters, double the floor area of the atelier du bois to take the combinée, and convert the far end of the old sample shed into an office for the surveyors. Once the combinée had arrived, house frames and roofing beams would be pre-cut in the workshop before being transported down to each site, halving the time taken to complete each dwelling. As there was no spare vehicle, the Kombi quickly became vital to the building program. By day it transported materials, men and equipment around camp. By night we slept in it.
On Sundays, Mario sometimes drove down to the river to fish, using a line with a piece of soap on the end. We had been in camp just two weeks when he made the catch of his life. He pulled up in a cloud of dust in front of the guesthouse, hit the horn and shouted to Étienne and Bernard to come quickly. We ran out to join them, peering into the back of the Toyota utility. A colossal fish, over a metre and a half long, lay motionless on its belly. Its smooth skin was dark grey and white with no scales. Whiskers protruded from either side of its broad, flat head. It had no dorsal or ventral fins, and its tail tapered off like an eel’s. To me, it resembled an exhibit from a natural history museum. I had never seen anything like it.
‘A catfish!’ Win cried.
Mario nodded vigorously. ‘Oui, oui – c’est ça.’
Win turned to me, knowing I’d never seen one before. ‘They’re bottom feeders. They spend their time on the riverbed, cleaning up everything that builds up on the silt.’
I ran to fetch the camera and insisted Mario let me take his picture with it. He beamed in triumph and struck a pose that reduced me to helpless giggles. Then Étienne and Bernard grabbed one end of the fish each and staggered into the guesthouse, where they dropped it onto the kitchen table. I heard their voices through the window: ‘C’est bien, ça! Bien à manger!’
‘They’re good eating, those catfish,’ Win said to Mario.
‘Oui, oui – ils sont délicieux.’ Étienne and Bernard had already begun skinning and gutting it and cutting slabs of the flesh for freezing.
‘Leave some out,’ Mario called through the window to them. ‘We’ll have it for dinner tonight.’
That evening afforded Win and me our first taste of Gabonese wild food. Mario had told Bernard to prepare the fish in an Italian sauce of herbs and tomato, served on a bed of boiled rice. The flesh was moist and sweet, with a delicate flavour that belied the fish’s life as a bottom scavenger. Mario kept a good cellar: we drank one of his light white wines with it. The meal created a festive atmosphere, and I could see that a day away from camp had lifted Mario’s spirits.
The following week, Doug made one of his regular visits, and sounded me out about a job. His original idea that I might teach expatriate children had been overtaken by subsequent events, as the family in question would now be based in Makokou. Instead, Doug wanted me to take over some of Mario’s more routine administrative duties in running the camp. We sat out on the porch over morning coffee and he outlined it to me.
‘How would you feel about a part-time job supervising the hunters and the distribution of rations, monitoring the movement of supplies, doing the ordering and accounting for the économat, and gradually taking over the radio operation? We could pay you US$300 a month.’
‘What do you mean, supervising the hunters?’ I said. I was sure they didn’t need me to tell them how to shoot monkeys.
‘It would just be a case of issuing them with their ammunition and weighing and recording the meat each afternoon – that’s all.’
‘And what’s involved in monitoring the movement of supplies?’
‘Well, we need someone to keep track of what’s been ordered, where it’s coming from, whether it’s been delivered, and making sure it’s locked safely into the warehouse – all that sort of thing.’
‘Mmm,’ I mused. ‘Sounds like a lot of work for US$75 a week.’
‘Oh, it sounds more than it really is. Once you get into a routine with it, you won’t find it takes much time.’ I gulped down some coffee and chewed on a biscuit while I thought about the practicalities. My technical vocabulary was still weak, but I liked the prospect of having something definite to do. From the company’s point of view, it made sense. Mario was overloaded, and my French was under-utilised. From my standpoint, there was another thing in its favour too. It could give me an opportunity to influence what animals the hunters shot.
‘I’ll make a deal with you,’ I said, because I knew I was in a strong position. ‘I’ll take on the job if you instruct the hunters that they are not to kill any more gorillas, and if they do, they won’t be paid for the meat.’
Doug screwed up his eyes, sat back and regarded me with mock seriousness. ‘You’re a hard woman, but I think we can do that.’
‘Good! So you’ll tell the hunters tonight, will you?’
‘I will, and I want you to be there when I do.’ He was as good as his word. The hunters listened gravely while he spelt it out – no more gorillas to be killed. They took it on the chin. I had the impression it didn’t matter to them what they shot.
Doug was delighted th
at I had agreed to the job.
‘I’ll have the office draw up a contract for you as soon as I get back. We’ll probably have to designate you as a bilingual secretary. Then, as soon as that’s approved by the government, your salary will start going into the bank.’
‘You realise it’ll take me a while to master the radio,’ I warned him. ‘I’ve listened to Mario handling Kruger sometimes and it’s not beer and skittles.’
‘I’ve got no doubt you’ll be equal to it,’ he replied. ‘In a few weeks you’ll be giving them heaps.’ I wished I could be as confident as he was, but I welcomed the challenge and would give it my best shot.
My new duties commenced immediately. At six-thirty next morning I heard the hunters calling to me from outside the annexe: ‘Madame! Madame!’ I stumbled out of bed, pulled on some jeans and stuck my head out the door.
‘Bonjour, madame. Les cartouches s’il vous plaît, madame.’
‘D’accord. Attendez.’ They waited in the chill air – woollen hats pulled down over their ears and ragged pullovers covering their flimsy shirts – while I went to the locked cupboard in the guesthouse and counted out the day’s quota of shells.
‘Voilà!’ I placed the shells in their calloused hands and wished them good hunting.
At nine-thirty, I sat beside Mario at the radio and tried to follow the rapid bursts of French coming from Kruger in Makokou and the staff in the Libreville office, through the dry-season crackle. I realised how much colloquial French I had yet to learn. Kruger’s laconic way of speaking didn’t help either, and I guessed, knowing his style, that he wouldn’t be making too many allowances for my inexperience. I’d put myself on a steep learning curve accepting the job. Time would tell whether, as Doug had predicted, I was equal to it.
Wild Spirit Page 9