Wild Spirit

by Henderson, Annette

  I had occasion to witness Win’s comfort around snakes just weeks after Rodo had brought the dead cobra into the guesthouse. The two of us were out driving along Bakota South when we spotted the graceful curves of a snake moving across the track ahead. As the sky was overcast and the air cold it moved sluggishly, then stopped altogether when it saw the Kombi. We pulled up just metres away, close enough to have a clear view of its distinctive black and yellow markings. ‘It’s a cobra!’ Win said excitedly. ‘See if you can get a shot of it. I’ll get out and try to keep it still, but you’ll have to hurry.’

  The cobra was large – around two metres long – with a small neat head. We knew deadly hooded cobras were endemic to the Belinga area and assumed that this was one, although no hood was visible. Somewhat nervously, I climbed out with the camera slung around my neck. Win had positioned himself in front of the snake, blocking its path to the nearby vegetation. Confronted, it slowly rose up, extended the hood on either side of its head and settled into a ritualised motion of threat, swaying from side to side, its eyes fixed on Win.

  ‘Now don’t fiddle around,’ Win urged. ‘I’m not going to be able to keep it here for long.’

  ‘For God’s sake be careful,’ I hissed as I fumbled with the camera settings, trying to compensate for the low light. ‘They’re not aggressive, you know,’ Win assured me. ‘I wouldn’t be doing this if they were. Come on! Hurry up!’ Each time I focused afresh the cobra moved and I had to start again, my concentration blurred by fear. The short depth of field dictated by a fully open lens only made the task more difficult. With each passing moment Win’s impatience grew, and with it the snake’s discomfort at being cornered.

  ‘For pity’s sake, get on with it!’ Win shouted. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘Trying to get it right. What do you think?’ I snapped.

  In a languidly beautiful movement I wish I could have appreciated at the time, the cobra ceased swaying, sank to the ground, and began advancing towards Win’s feet. He leapt backwards, cursing my procrastination, grabbed a handful of dirt and threw it at the glossy black head. Momentarily distracted, the cobra paused just long enough for me to click twice and retreat to a safer distance. No longer cornered, it changed direction and moved off to disappear into the cover of vegetation.

  ‘Did you get it?’

  ‘I got something, but I don’t know whether it’ll be any good.’

  I had never photographed a snake before, much less a deadly one that was threatening to strike at my husband’s legs, and it was not an exercise I was keen to repeat. ‘Next time we won’t be doing that,’ I said tartly as we returned to the Kombi. I should have been used to Win’s risk-taking behaviours by then, but they still had the power to annoy me. In contrast, Win was glowing with the excitement of his first cobra encounter. ‘I wasn’t in any danger,’ he insisted. ‘It was just telling me to move on.’

  It was only months later when Win related the episode to Eamon Temple that we were brought up with a jolt. Eamon sat poker-faced listening to the whole story, then in his measured Midwestern tones offered one of his heart-stopping retorts: ‘You know there are spitting cobras round here, don’t you? They can spit venom into your eye from a couple of metres away, and if they get you you’re blinded for life. You’re just lucky it wasn’t one of those.’

  There was little we could say at this news, but I hoped it might instil some caution into Win for future occasions. Eamon must have grimaced privately at the audacity of this newcomer to the African forest whose supreme confidence could have cost him so dearly. The ultimate irony was that when I had the film developed, I discovered the shots were grainy and out of focus.

  I thought little about Étienne and Bernard’s comments about the dead cobra until one day I was chatting to Jacques’ plumber, Lougué-Lougué Marcel, about various types of game meat, and he told me he didn’t eat a certain animal.

  ‘And why is that?’ I asked.

  ‘Where I come from, we don’t eat that.’ I couldn’t persuade him to tell me why. These food taboos – for that is what I believe they were – reminded me of something Mary Kingsley had written. She described a Gabonese custom whereby each person was allocated a forbidden food at birth or in infancy that they were prohibited from eating for life. The food differed from person to person; abstinence from it was intended as a sacrifice to the spirit governing the person’s life. In Kingsley’s day, most people adhered strictly to this custom, as any lapse could result in misfortune. The belief was widespread, and the consequences of breaking the taboo greatly feared. I could only speculate whether this custom underlay the two conversations I’d had.

  I often chatted with Mendoum Dominique about subjects unrelated to work, as he was articulate and precise in expressing himself. If anybody could explain to me the intricacies of traditional beliefs, I thought, perhaps he could. So one day I decided to try. I began with some general questions about local belief systems. I had barely started when his eyes widened and he became tense and guarded. He took a step back, put up his hands and declared, ‘Anyway, I’m a Christian, so it’s no use asking me!’ He repeated this several times, declaring that the Good Lord was his God and that he left all that traditional nonsense to others. I felt myself blush and changed the subject immediately. From then on I never asked people directly about their beliefs, and resigned myself to learning what I could piecemeal.

  Not long after that conversation, Dominique received a large advance on his salary to cover the cost of his daughter’s treatment by a traditional healer near Makokou. The girl was gravely ill. As she had not responded to western medical treatments, he had taken her to the healer, where she spent three weeks being treated. Dominique related all this to me on his return. I listened carefully but asked no questions. I guessed that the girl was considered to be suffering spirit possession, a paralysing condition that some of our workers had experienced. It made them lethargic, fearful for their lives and unable to carry out their normal daily activities. Under Gabonese law, spirit possession was an illness for which workers were entitled to time off to be treated. In these cases, western medicine had nothing to offer.

  As time passed, we found that traditional beliefs often emerged unexpectedly in the midst of everyday situations. One day, one of the men asked to be driven out into the forest to bring in a leopard he had caught in a trap. We took the Toyota utility, and the man and several other hunters rode in the back. When we arrived at the spot, there was a large antelope with its leg snared in a piège – a wire trap – but no sign of a leopard.

  ‘Where’s the leopard?’ I asked. The man looked sheepish, mumbled something and turned his head away – the leopard story had evidently been a ruse to persuade us to use the Toyota to save them carrying the carcass back on foot.

  We stood at a discreet distance and waited for the hunter to kill the antelope. It bellowed in pain and fear as he twisted its head around to expose the throat for slitting, but then he froze, his face covered in sweat and his eyes wide. He remained bent over the animal for some minutes, paralysed, before calling to one of the other hunters to kill the beast for him. I turned away, unable to watch. When it was all over and the carcass loaded into the Toyota, I asked him why he had not killed the antelope himself.

  ‘Ma femme est enceinte,’ he explained – my wife is pregnant – as if that clarified everything. On the way back to camp, I mulled over what it could mean. Was it similar to the taboo the people observed on eating eggs? Eggs were never eaten but always fed back to the chickens. Was this about the sanctity of unborn life? Each time we witnessed these traditional beliefs in action, I realised afresh how little I knew about the world view of the people, and how little seemed to have changed since Mary Kingsley’s time.

  By the end of September, Win had finished work on our flat at the eastern end of the old sample shed. It was one large room with a shower and toilet to one side and a bare concrete floor. Along the northern wall, louvre windows revealed a view out over the old pla
ntations to the forest and mountains. The flat was insect-screened and equipped with a stove, a fridge, a double bed and a wardrobe with a light bulb inside to prevent mildew growing on our clothes. We set up our camping table and chairs at the kitchen end and our radio cassette player on the bench, then unpacked all the crockery, appliances and linen we had bought in Libreville three months before. Our long-awaited privacy had come at last. I could escape from the daily chaos if I needed to. It was cause for celebration.

  It was a destiny day for another reason, too – I had turned thirty. Rodo, in his characteristically thoughtful way, had made me a birthday card and secretly organised Étienne to bake me a cake. We’d invited him in for a celebratory drink in the flat that afternoon; when he arrived at the door, he held the cake high over his head and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in his gravelly bass voice.

  I hugged him hard, thrilled that he had gone to the trouble. Win put on one of our classical music tapes, and the three of us sat at the table eating the cake and looking out over the forest.

  During the three months since we had arrived, I felt I had been in a crucible, tested at every turn. It was as if all the outer layers of myself that I had carried around for so many years had been stripped away, and I had come face to face with my inner self for the first time. I’d discovered I possessed a kernel of toughness. The more I had engaged with the challenges of helping to run the camp, the more my confidence had grown.

  Although I didn’t yet know it, on that landmark birthday, I was poised for the greatest change of my life, and the three of us – Rodo, Win and I – would be bonded forever by events that would unfold in the weeks to come.

  chapter eleven

  JOSIE

  It was a Sunday evening early in October. Win and I had spent the day relaxing in the flat, relishing our new-found privacy and the space to spread out after living in the Kombi for six months. Win had listened to a Rachmaninov piano concerto while I wrote letters home to my family, trying to paint a picture for them of what our life in camp was like. I regularly wrote to all our friends back in Australia and England, determined to maintain the relationships despite our isolation. Letters from the outside world had assumed a great importance for us since we had arrived in camp: apart from the radio, they were all we had to connect us to everything we had known before. Back in Australia, Win had new grandchildren he had never seen. Each time the mail pouch arrived on the pirogues, we waited impatiently to see if there were any letters for us.

  Rodo had driven down to Mayebut that afternoon for a few hours’ respite from the demands of the camp. From our flat, we could see the final bend of the road that led up from the débarcadère. We had been watching for his return, and when he hadn’t arrived by six o’clock, we became concerned. Then we heard the crunch of the Toyota hitting second gear halfway up the hill. Instead of driving straight down to the cas de passage, he skirted the guesthouse and braked to a halt outside our front door. We heard the car door open and the sound of his boots running on the laterite outside. Something was wrong. We both felt it.

  We threw open the door just as he reached it. His face was white with shock. He said nothing, but motioned us to follow him to the car. When he opened the door on the passenger side and stood back, we saw in the half-light what had brought him to this state. A tiny black figure sat hunched up on the seat, cowering. I took in the leathery texture of its face, the roundness of the head, and the way its legs and arms were drawn tightly up to its body as if to protect itself. Although we had never seen one before, the features were unmistakable. It was a baby gorilla – and it was in crisis. Its body was wracked with tremors, and its filthy, matted coat gave off the stench of infection.

  For some moments, all we could do was stare. Thoughts tumbled through my mind. How did it come to be here? What do we do? Then Rodo leaned forward to pick it up. As he did, the infant looked up listlessly, then stretched out its arms to him in a gesture of inexpressible pathos. He gathered the baby to his chest, where it clung with a desperation that moved us close to tears.

  ‘What happened?’ I managed to ask.

  ‘One of the Bakwélé men at Mayebut tried to sell it to me. They shot the mother three days ago for raiding their banana plantation, and they’ve kept the baby in a hut ever since, tied up around the groin with a rough liana.’

  ‘How could anybody bear to do this?’ I thought. ‘Have they no compassion?’

  Win stroked the infant’s head gently and tried to comfort it with soft crooning sounds.

  ‘I didn’t pay them,’ Rodo said. ‘I told them we’d talk about that later. I just wanted to get it out of there.’

  We stood in silence. The three of us had talked about gorillas so often, about how much we wanted to see one, but we had never imagined it would happen this way. In the face of the infant’s trauma, I felt helpless. We had no equipment, facilities or expertise to deal with the situation.

  ‘We’d better check with Eamon to make sure he’s happy for us to keep it,’ Rodo said. ‘It’s a big commitment, and it won’t be easy.’

  Eamon lay stretched out on his bed reading. We walked in and stood silently at his door. Normally he would have smiled and greeted us with some quirky comment, but when he looked up and saw what Rodo was nursing, he jerked bolt upright. We waited for him to speak. He looked hard at the infant and shook his head. ‘Oh my lord, where did it come from?’ I saw the same sadness in his eyes I’d seen when he’d spoken about the gorilla deaths in the 1960s. He met Rodo’s eyes and must have realised at once that he’d set his heart on caring for the infant. Eamon seemed on the point of saying something – I sensed he wanted to warn us to beware of caring too much. Instead, he nodded and simply said, ‘Make sure you keep it warm.’

  Our little orphan was a female, about the size of a three-month-old human child. Rodo set her down on the long wooden table on the porch, where a single light bulb gave off a dingy glow. She sat hunched up, her arms locked around her body, grinding her teeth. She had a tiny wizened face and a grip of iron. Her eyelids slowly opened and closed as though she was utterly exhausted. Win stroked her head and back, trying to reassure her.

  ‘I want to get a good look at her and see where the septic smell is coming from,’ Win said. ‘I’ll try rolling her over on her back, and if you two can keep her there, that’ll help.’ Our first attempt was not encouraging. When we laid her on her back she screamed, flailed her legs and arms, rolled herself back on to her belly and sat up.

  ‘I don’t want to stress her more than she already is,’ Win said, ‘but we’ve got to keep trying.’ On the third attempt, Rodo held her arms against the table and I steadied her legs. She squirmed and struggled, registering her protests with a series of lusty screams. In spite of all she had been through, her spirit and strength seemed to be intact.

  She was in a pitiful state. Her backside was smeared with dried excrement, and a deep wound, 8 centimetres long and 2.5 centimetres wide, ran the length of her left groin where she had chafed against her tether. The wound oozed pus and was matted with filth and twigs. Her skin and flesh had been sliced through to the hip joint.

  ‘I’d say she’s been tied up for much longer than three days,’ Win said. ‘It looks more like a week to me. And we don’t know whether she has internal injuries either.’ I had never been faced with an injured animal before. As we bent over her, the importance of our role in her life hit me. She wasn’t just any animal, she was a great ape – so like us – and a member of a threatened species. Her survival probably depended on what we could do that night.

  ‘We’ve got to do something,’ Win said. ‘If we wait to take her down to the vet in Makokou in the morning, it might be too late.’ He looked across at me. ‘Can you get our first-aid kit?’

  It was almost seven o’clock, dinner time, but we had no thought of food. I arrived back with the first-aid kit to find Win peering at the wound. ‘That’s not going to heal by itself. It’s just too big. It should be stitched.’ Our comprehensive kit included
sutures and a curved surgical needle. Win stared fixedly out into the darkness for perhaps a minute, then murmured, ‘If you two can hold her still, I’ll stitch her myself.’

  The table on the porch became our operating theatre. We covered it with an old woollen blanket and put a pillow under her hips.

  ‘How’re we going to keep her calm and still?’ I said. ‘She’s so strong, she’s going to fight like hell.’

  ‘Good question. We need a sedative of some kind.’ Around us the insects droned. Flying termites hit the light bulb and dropped onto our heads. The isolation of our situation pressed in even more than usual.

  ‘There is one possibility.’ Win perked up. ‘We’ve got plenty of red wine. A cupful just might do it.’

  Rodo fetched a bottle of Bordeaux and a plastic cup from the kitchen while Win rummaged around in the first-aid kit to find the eye-dropper. As she lay on her back with the two of us bracing her arms and legs against the table, Win squirted the wine into her mouth, a few drops at a time. She shook her head from side to side and struggled to break free. Several times, she almost succeeded in biting on the eye-dropper with her sharp teeth, but each time Win withdrew it just in time. An hour passed before she swallowed the last of the wine and grew drowsy.

  I filled a bowl with warm water and set out disinfectant and cotton wool, then Win set to work swabbing out the pus and debris. The wound was the size of a fat cigar, and so deep that the bone of her hip joint lay exposed.

  Win stared at it in dismay. ‘I’m not even sure it’s possible to stitch a wound this size without a clamp to hold the sides together.’ The first step was to prepare the margins of the wound for stitching. I disinfected a pair of surgical scissors and Win trimmed away the thick black hair from the edges.