Wild Spirit

by Henderson, Annette

  ‘Bienvenue à Belinga!’ I said, and watched as Annie’s gaze swept over the familiar sight of the guesthouse, looking much as it would have done a decade before.

  André Brosset exactly fitted my image of a naturalist. He wore a long-sleeved shirt, a khaki camera jacket with rows of bulging pockets, jungle-green pants and sturdy boots. He could have been fifty, but his head of luxuriant black hair and carefully trimmed beard made him look younger. Louise Emmons, a slightly built American in her twenties, spoke quietly and looked scholarly. Her sandy hair, tied back in a ponytail, framed an elfin face.

  ‘Eamon will be back soon,’ Rodo said, ‘but in the meantime, let me show you to your rooms.’

  Next morning, I had my first chance to watch biologists at work. Eamon had spread the word that the scientists were interested in any small animals people could bring in, especially brush-tailed porcupines. Annie, Jean-Pierre and Louise had set themselves up at a long table beside the road, surrounded by equipment. By the time I arrived, they’d already recorded the calls of a band of cercocèbe monkeys moving through the trees several hundred metres away on the edge of camp. The monkeys were distinctive because of their huge voice boxes, which made the calls audible over long distances.

  The carcasses of several small animals lay spread out on the table. They measured each one, weighed it on a set of portable scales, examined it closely, then recorded the information on field data sheets. I hovered in the background, fascinated, but anxious not to disturb them.

  Annie looked over and smiled. ‘Come and have a look.’ As I watched and listened, I envied them a little – their passion was also their work. Their lives had direction and purpose, they were respected for their knowledge, and they were doing what they loved. Twelve years of officework had never once ignited my passion. If only I could do something similar to what they did, I thought.

  Rodo, Win and I joined them for drinks before lunch, and I heard for the first time about the work being done at the research station in Makokou. CNRS was running a rehabilitation program for orphaned gorillas and chimpanzees, reintroducing them to the wild on an island in the river. Scientists from many disciplines also used the station as a base for their research. There were zoologists, botanists, entomologists and others who came for varying periods. André specialised in birds and bats. Louise’s project involved radio-tracking the nocturnal movements of brush-tailed porcupines. She spent most nights alone on foot in the forest with a radio receiver, a grid map, a pen and a torch. I looked at her slight frame and wondered what she would do out there if something went wrong.

  ‘Aren’t you frightened in the forest?’ I asked. Her reply gave me my first insight into her extraordinary courage and resilience.

  ‘Not really,’ she said nonchalantly. ‘The only real risk would come from elephants. Sometimes it’s so boring, I take a book.’

  André had come to Belinga to revisit his old research site, a cave called La Grotte du Faucon, which lay two hours’ climb from the camp.

  ‘It’s the largest bat cave in Africa,’ he explained. ‘We calculated that up to a million bats of three different species live in it.’ And he had another reason for revisiting the site. Some rare birds – bareheaded rockfowls, Picathartes orea – dwelt at the cave entrance. The birds had been officially classified as endangered and few people had ever seen them. He had studied them extensively in the 1960s and wanted to see how they were faring a decade later. As I listened, I was unaware of André’s global standing in the scientific community. I saw a humble man, passionate about his work and fired with the energy of someone half his age.

  Over dinner, he told us he’d engaged his former assistant, Mateba Louis, who was now on our workforce, as a guide for the next day. They would leave at nine in the morning for the two-hour climb to the cave. Annie, Jean-Pierre and Louise would remain behind doing their own work.

  André cast his eyes quizzically around the table. ‘I’d appreciate some company on the walk. Are there any takers?’

  Rodo and I leapt at the chance. I looked across the table at Win. ‘Would you like to visit the bat cave? André has just invited us.’

  His eyes lit up and he beamed across at André. ‘That would be wonderful! We’d love to.’

  We woke early next morning to assemble our gear – bottles of drinking water, sweaters, spray jackets, cameras, torches and binoculars – and just before nine the five of us gathered in front of the guesthouse. Mateba Louis led the way up the dirt road towards the forest, where a track branched off behind the reservoir. André cautioned us to speak only when necessary and always in whispers, so as not to frighten any wildlife away.

  The morning air was still cool, and moisture dripped from the leaves. The mountainside rose steeply, and we scrambled and slipped up the slope in single file, grabbing at exposed roots and struggling with the gear slung around our necks. At the top, the track levelled out. We padded through the dimly lit understorey, past spiders’ webs heavy with droplets of water, around fallen forest giants and past thorny vines, the only sound the soft fall of our feet on the leaf litter. When we came to particular fungi or ferns, André paused to explain their special attributes and the uses the local people had for them. Several times we came upon elephant tracks in the mud.

  ‘They often move over this ridge,’ André explained. ‘They follow well-worn paths.’ The track wound around the mountainside like a snake, skirting giant tree trunks and massive boulders. We walked at a steady pace for almost two hours before André signalled that we were almost there.

  A steep thirty-metre drop led down from the crest of a ridge to the cave. We clutched at tree trunks and roots on the way down, slipping on loose stones and sliding on our backsides to the bottom, where a pebbly creek bed wound through understorey vegetation. Banks of giant boulders stood between us and the creek, providing perfect cover.

  André motioned us into absolute silence. The cave mouth lay only fifteen metres away, and if we were to see Picathartes at all, we had to remain hidden. At the first hint of our presence, they would fly off. We crept up one by one behind the line of boulders, then crawled on our hands and knees behind a thick clump of vegetation. Holding our breath, we slowly raised our heads just high enough to look through the gaps between the topmost leaves.

  Less than ten metres away, on the bare expanse of smooth rock at the cave mouth, two Picathartes were performing a ritualised dance, a complicated hopping sequence, twisting and turning their bodies to right and left and cocking their heads from side to side. The two bald ovals on their heads stood out like the eyes of some creature from science fiction. They were the size of large pigeons, with sleek bodies and long thin legs.

  As if on cue, a shaft of weak sunlight broke through the canopy and struck the rock platform, and for a few moments their brilliant colours were visible – rich wine red and mossy green on their heads, and dove grey on their wings and backs. Then something must have alerted them to our presence: in an instant, they had disappeared through the trees, leaving us gaping at the bare rock ledge.

  André’s joy at seeing them again shone from his face; Rodo, Win and I looked at one another, open-mouthed, stunned at the privilege of seeing them. Even when André signalled that we could stand up, we lingered, as if movement would break the spell.

  We followed him down a dirt path towards the cave entrance. At the bottom, he crossed the creek bed and climbed up the left side of the cave mouth, pointing excitedly at something attached to the rock wall two metres from the ground.

  ‘It’s the nest!’ he cried. The Picathartes’ mud nest, threaded through with straggly bits of plant and twigs, was perfectly camouflaged. The structure exactly matched the colour of the rock and was partially concealed by overhanging grasses. We could easily have passed it by without noticing. Picathartes were poor breeders, and their numbers had dwindled steeply in the wild as a result of excessive collection. To see evidence that they were breeding must have been a dream fulfilled for André.

  We sto
od poised at the cave entrance while he explained where we could safely walk once we were inside. For the uninitiated it could be treacherous, because the bats deposited several tonnes of guano on to the cave floor every day, and over millennia the droppings had built up to a depth of over a metre. During his research there, André had marked out a safe path to the back of the cave with vertical sticks. If we deviated from it, he warned, we would sink into the stinking sludge up to our chests.

  With our torches on, we entered the gloom and moved slowly along the left side, where the guano was shallowest and we could balance against the rock wall. The surface was slimy and soft underfoot. The smell of the guano, a choking ammonia-like stench, filled our lungs and made breathing difficult.

  At first, I saw nothing in the blackness. As we inched our way forward, a strange sound filled my ears, like a powerful wind rushing through a long tunnel but never reaching the end. Perhaps it was a trick of acoustics, I thought. But as my eyes adjusted, I realised the source of the sound – a frantic blur of moving bodies whirling above us. Hundreds of thousands of bats had simultaneously taken flight – countless fine-membraned wings all vibrating the air at once. Their furry black and brown shapes streaked in all directions, too fast for the eye to follow, the mass of moving bodies so dense it completely obscured the roof of the cave. Tiny high-pitched squeaks cut through the sound of rushing wings, like the piping of piccolos – the bats were all calling at once.

  Until then, I’d had no experience of bats. I had grown up with all the myths and horror stories that surrounded them in western culture, yet now I felt no fear or repugnance. I was curious and excited.

  The deeper we moved into the cave, the staler and more humid the air became. Our skin dripped sweat, trapping swarms of tiny black insects. Then I realised fine moisture was falling on us. Condensation from the cave roof I thought at first. But it was bat urine, falling like mist, wetting our hair and clothes.

  We turned off our torches and stood still in the blackness, listening, smelling and feeling – immersed like deep-sea divers in total sensory bombardment. Then André switched on his torch and directed it to the cave wall. No rock was visible, because thousands more bats clung to it, crowded together, squealing, squirming and fighting, a seething mass of contorted upside-down faces protesting the disturbance.

  The cave opened out into a vast high-ceilinged cavern. As we moved yet further in, the moving shapes of other life forms became visible. Pale insects that looked part-spider, part-scorpion crawled around the ceiling. A moving carpet of cockroaches and beetles swarmed endlessly over the guano, and the coiled form of a hooded cobra glinted on a rock ledge, waiting to strike at an unsuspecting bat. I felt we had entered another world, immensely far back in time, an entire ecosystem that had existed unchanged for numberless centuries.

  At the far end, the combination of the heat and the acrid stench of the guano became overpowering and breathing grew even more difficult. It was time to turn back. I paused before we began our awkward progress back to daylight, and reflected on the miracle of this place – that it supported so much life, that it was so ancient, and that it also provided a home for one of the world’s rarest birds.

  Outside, we gulped in the clean, fresh air and squinted against the sudden brightness. Sunlight filtered through chinks in the canopy. The forest lay cool and quiet in the lull of midday. We sat down on some rocks beside the stream and washed the sweat, urine and insects from our skin, then swallowed mouthfuls of water from our bottles.

  ‘The Pygmies come here sometimes to hunt the bats for food,’ André said. I tried to picture the little people with their crossbows and poisoned arrows, or perhaps with their nets. André’s mind had skipped back ten years, and he was reliving it. ‘Each evening at dusk we would watch the bats exit the cave to feed, and at dawn watch them return to roost. I never tired of the spectacle; it took three hours for the stream of animals to pass over. By observing the speed and density of these movements, we calculated the size of the population.’ He explained that the three species of bats were mainly insect-eaters; they exploited the food niche that birds occupied during daylight.

  ‘Bats carry many parasites and diseases,’ he said, ‘including filariasis. Even the guano harbours a fungus which can be harmful to humans.’

  I wished we could linger to witness the nightly exodus and the dawn return. I knew we would never come here again. My understanding of the cave had just begun, but our time had run out. We stood and stretched, drank some more water, then slowly began the steep climb out of the stream bed and the long trek home.

  We reached camp mid-afternoon, just in time for farewell drinks before the scientists needed to leave. We gathered to sit in the old armchairs on the porch, overlooking the forest. Louise, Annie and Jean-Pierre wanted to hear all about the cave excursion, so, still on a wave of euphoria, I related in French everything we had seen. As I did, a group of giant casqued hornbills swished across the clearing, calling raucously. To me, they were the sound of Belinga. I never tired of seeing and hearing them.

  While I had the chance, I asked Annie about the rehabilitation program that was underway for the orphaned great apes. I really wanted to see the gorillas and chimps, but hesitated to suggest we visit.

  ‘How many apes do you have there, and how does the program work?’

  Annie was quick to respond. ‘Rather than tell you, why don’t we show you? Come down for a weekend. There’s so much to see – we’d love to have you.’

  I looked across at Win and Rodo, who were nodding vigorously. ‘Oh, we’d love to!’ I breathed. ‘Thank you!’

  ‘You can have the two spare bedrooms in my house,’ Louise offered. ‘There’s plenty of room. Just let me know over the radio when you can come, and I’ll pick you up at the SOMIFER compound.’

  Suddenly a new world had opened up to us. I hadn’t dared to hope that we might see the apes. Now it was certain, I could hardly wait. The prospect of visiting the research station would keep me going for weeks as I battled the workaday frustrations of life in the camp. And it meant we would see these generous and dedicated scientists again. As we waved them off, I felt we had been uniquely privileged. André had shown us a natural wonder that only a handful of Europeans had ever seen. The sounds and smells of the cave, the prehistoric feel of the stinking darkness and the rush of those beating wings would stay with me forever. I hoped that Picathartes would continue to flourish, and that La Grotte du Faucon would always remain as we had seen it – timeless, hidden and filled with wonders. That night, I went to bed with my mind full of visions of an Africa before white people had ever come.

  chapter fourteen

  GORILLAS IN MY SOUL

  We had been at Belinga nine months. In all of that time, there had been no other white woman resident in camp, and my attempts to get to know some of the Gabonese women in the village had not succeeded. Many seemed shy and reticent, and I felt I would need to spend long periods around them before we could truly communicate with one another. I’d had to adapt to a masculine environment, where toughness and resilience were the personal qualities that counted most. My job had handed me more authority and autonomy than I had ever had in my working life, and my self-confidence had soared as I met the constant challenges and filled a crucial role in the management of the camp. My colleagues respected me, and I drew satisfaction from the knowledge that I had so far been equal to whatever life in the camp had demanded of me. The sense of empowerment was heady – for the first time in my life, I believed I could follow any career I chose.

  Despite this strength and optimism, the daily frustrations of camp life continued to press in on me, and Win and Rodo felt them too. For the three of us, the antidote was always the forest. The noisier and more crowded the camp became, the more we felt the need to escape into the peace it offered. Six days a week, trucks and bulldozers rumbled past the guesthouse up to the maintenance bay. The constant stream of complaints from workers about rations or other grievances wore us down, and
we found the only way to avoid being harassed was not to be there.

  One Saturday morning, my tolerance ran out. Nothing had gone to plan, and I was fit to scream. When Rodo and Win came in for lunch, I saw that they were at boiling point too.

  ‘Why don’t we camp overnight at the Djadié tonight?’ I suggested. ‘The weather’s fine. We could spend tomorrow swimming and exploring, and nobody could get to us. Come on! What do you think?’ We had never done it before, but since Eamon had widened and graded the Djadié route, the drive to the river was an easy forty-minute run, and there was a wide sandy clearing at the riverbank where we could camp. ‘We might even get to see an elephant,’ I urged. Eamon had said that our best chance of seeing one would be to drive down to the Djadié at night.

  The two of them needed little persuasion, so we spent the afternoon packing food, bedding and gear. Rodo would take the Toyota Land Cruiser; we’d go in the Kombi. At nine o’clock, we drove out into a clear, starry night. The forest lay bathed in silver from a bright moon: every leaf shone, and the soaring grey tree trunks stood out like columns in a cathedral. We led off in the Kombi, equipped with a game-spotting floodlight, and Rodo followed closely behind.

  About twenty minutes out, we reached a fork in the track where the bulldozers had cut a bypass around a boggy area. The new section wound through dense forest, and piles of fallen trees littered the verges.

  As we rounded a bend, the lumbering grey shape of an elephant appeared. It was side-on to us, slowly rocking from left to right and back again, blocking the road. My first wild elephant! I’d waited nine months for this moment. All I could think was how beautiful it was, how calm, how majestic.