Gorillas in the Mist

by Farley Mowat

  BOOKS BY FARLEY MOWAT

  People of the Deer (1952)

  The Regiment (1955)

  Lost in the Barrens (1956)

  The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be (1957)

  Coppermine Journey (editor) (1958)

  Grey Seas Under (1958)

  The Desperate People (1959)

  Ordeal by Ice (1960)

  Owls in the Family (1961)

  The Serpent’s Coil (1961)

  The Black Joke (1962)

  Never Cry Wolf (1963)

  Westviking (1965)

  The Curse of the Viking Grave (1967)

  Canada North (illustrated edition 1967)

  The Polar Passion (1967)

  Canada North Now (revised paperback edition 1967)

  This Rock Within the Sea (with John de Visser) (1968)

  The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float (1969)

  Sibir (1970)

  The Siberians (1971)

  A Whale for the Killing (1972)

  Tundra (1973)

  Wake of the Great Sealers (with David Blackwood) (1973)

  The Snow Walker (1975)

  And No Birds Sang (1979)

  The World of Farley Mowat (edited by Peter Davison) (1980)

  Sea of Slaughter (1984)

  My Discovery of America (1985)

  Virunga: The Passion of Dian Fossey (1987; renamed Gorillas in the Mist, 2009)

  The New Founde Land (1989)

  Rescue the Earth! (1990)

  My Father’s Son (1992)

  Born Naked (1993)

  Aftermath (1995)

  A Farley Mowat Reader (edited by Wendy Thomas) (1997)

  The Farfarers (1998)

  High Latitudes (2002)

  Walking on the Land (2002)

  No Man’s River (2004)

  Bay of Spirits (2006)

  Otherwise (2008)

  For Nyiramachabelli

  and for those she loved

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND CREDITS

  As will be seen, a great many people have contributed to this book in one way or another. I am grateful to them all, but the following deserve my special thanks.

  Wade Rowland, my associate in this project, who scoured three continents in pursuit of interviews and who was responsible for locating and gaining access to Dian Fossey’s personal archives. His contributions have been invaluable.

  Mary Elliott, my secretarial assistant, who deciphered Dian’s sometimes nearly illegible notes and journals and who typed the several versions of the manuscript with magical speed and precision.

  Lily Poritz Miller, my editor, who rescued the book, and me, after I became so embroiled in Dian’s life that I thought myself lost forever.

  Rosamond Carr, Dian’s closest friend in Rwanda.

  Stacey Coil and Ian Redmond of the Digit Fund, for their staunch service to the cause of the mountain gorillas.

  Contributions to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (formerly the Digit Fund) will be gratefully accepted and can be made through the organization’s website, www.gorillafund.org.

  Grateful acknowledgment is given to the following for their kind permission to use material:

  Kelly Stewart, Ph.D., for the poem on page 138.

  The New York Times for portions of articles which appear on pages 338-339 and on page 345. Copyright © 1981-1982 by The New York Times, reprinted by permission.

  The Associated Press for portions of an article which appears on page 421, reprinted by permission.

  Houghton Mifflin Company and Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd. for excerpts from Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey, which appear on pages 37-38, 127, 128-129, 144, 232-233, 236-237, and 248. Copyright © 1983, reprinted by permission.

  Ian Redmond for the original sketches for the maps.

  Richard and Kitty Price for access to the letters and papers of Dian Fossey.

  Photo Credits:

  Peter G. Veit/DRK Photo

  Bob Campbell/© 1971 National Geographic Society

  Bob Campbell

  Peter G. Veit/DRK Photo

  Fossey archive/© 1981 National Geographic Society

  Brenton Kelly/Life magazine

  Dian with her gorilla friends sharing the intimacy of touch, the closeness she spent long, lonely years developing.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Dian Fossey never spoke about writing her autobiography, but that she someday hoped to do so is evident from notations in her journals and from the fact that she went to great pains to amass and preserve an extraordinarily complete personal archive.

  This massive collection included the correspondence received by her since the days of her youth together with copies of most of her own letters. In addition, she preserved her own writings and musings, both published and unpublished; a comprehensive file of what was written about her; a set of daily journals; an enormous mass of observations of both animals and people, together with a miscellaneous collection of documents covering every aspect of her years in Africa.

  When my associate in this project, Wade Rowland, uncovered Dian’s archives, I was jubilant. It appeared to be the sort of treasure trove every biographer dreams of acquiring. However, as I immersed myself in this detailed record of a human life and began to listen to Dian’s own voice telling her own story, I felt much less comfortable with my role as her biographer. In truth, I began to feel like an intruder. Consequently, I made the decision to abandon the usual biographer’s role as recorder and commentator and to settle for something in the nature of an editorial collaborator.

  Insofar as I have been able to make it so, what follows is Dian Fossey’s own account of her life. Her voice is paramount throughout, and I have muted mine—a claim which may inspire some initial incredulity in those who know me.

  To make this work, I have arranged that Dian’s own words be set in a distinct typeface. I have occasionally reshaped awkwardly phrased source material into descriptive scenes and dialogue. But in all such cases, the reworked version remains faithful to the record.

  I never met Dian Fossey in the flesh, but I have lived with her on terms of intense intimacy for more than a year. Having read thousands of her letters, her diaries and journals, her printed words, and having listened to scores of people who knew her in life, she has become as achingly familiar to me as if we were of one blood.

  I would be happy if we were.

  Port Hope, Ontario, Canada

  June 1st, 1987.

  — 1 —

  Neither destiny nor fate took me to Africa. Nor was it romance. I had a deep wish to see and live with wild animals in a world that hadn’t yet been completely changed by humans. I guess I really wanted to go backward in time. From my childhood I believed that was what going to Africa would be, but by 1963, when I was first able to make a trip there, it was not that way anymore. There were only a few places other than the deserts and the swamps that hadn’t been overrun by people. Almost at the end of my trip I found the place I had been looking for.

  Right in the heart of central Africa, so high up that you shiver more than you sweat, are great, old volcanoes towering up almost fifteen thousand feet, and nearly covered with rich, green rain forest—the Virungas.

  Going to Africa was one of many dreams that filled Dian Fossey’s lonely childhood. Her father, George Fossey, son of an English immigrant, was a big, affable, outdoorsy type who loved his little daughter but hated his impoverished life as an insurance agent in San Francisco. In consequence he drank too much, which got him into trouble with the law and finally brought on a divorce that took him out of Dian’s life in 1938 when she was six. A year later her mother, Kitty, married Richard Price, an ambitious, hard-driving building contractor. In the beginning, George Fossey tried to keep in touch with Dian, sending her pictures of hims
elf in his navy uniform during the war; but even his name was taboo in the Price household and eventually he drifted out of sight.

  Although she dutifully called him Daddy, Dian’s stepfather never adopted her. Richard Price was a stern traditionalist who believed that children should be properly disciplined. Until she was ten, Dian was not even permitted to take her evening meal with Richard and Kitty, but ate in the kitchen with the housekeeper. “I had always been brought up to think that children dined with adults when they were becoming adults,” Price offered in justification.

  Like many lonely children Dian loved animals and took comfort from their undemanding acceptance of her; yet she was not permitted any pets of her own except for a goldfish, upon which she lavished the affection that had few other outlets. The death of the fish left her desolate.

  I cried for a week when I found him floating belly up in the bowl in my room. My parents thought it was good riddance, so I never got another. A friend at school offered me a hamster, but they considered it dirty, so that was out.

  Although the Prices seemed wealthy, Dian did not receive much financial assistance from them when she entered the adult world. In the main, she supported herself after she completed high school. In 1949, while at Marin Junior College taking a business course, which she despised, she worked as a clerk at the White House Department Store. As a university undergraduate she spent holidays and weekends doing clerical and laboratory jobs, and she once had a job as a machine operator in a factory.

  One of the few bright episodes in her early life was learning to ride. The rapport she had with horses won her a place at a dude ranch in Montana during the summer of her twenty-first year; but she lost this— “the best job I’d ever had” —when she contracted chicken pox. A young man who knew her at the ranch remembered her as being “completely wrapped up in animals—the horses, dogs, a pet coyote, anything that walked or flew. She liked people well enough, but didn’t seem to rely on them as much as the rest of us do.”

  Rejecting Richard Price’s decision that she seek a career in business, Dian began setting her own course and in 1950 enrolled as a preveterinary medical student at the University of California campus in Davis. She was determined to share her life with animals; but although she did extremely well in such studies as writing and art, botany and zoology, she had no affinity for the “hard” sciences. To her enormous disappointment she failed her second year, brought down by chemistry and physics, which she simply could not master.

  Undaunted, she decided to work with damaged children. She transferred to San Jose State College, graduating in 1954 with a degree in occupational therapy. During the succeeding nine months she interned in several hospitals. She dealt with tuberculosis patients in one of these, an experience that left an indelible impression on her.

  The job she chose after graduation was about as far removed from California as she could get and still remain in the United States. Except for brief, ritual visits with the Prices, she never returned to the scene of her birth and early years.

  The new focus of her life, Korsair Children’s Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, was a rambling half-timbered old building, exactly to her liking.

  It’s a Shriners’ hospital and I’m surprised they hired me without Shriner pull. I’m to be the director of the occupational therapy department, which makes me feel quite inadequate. My assist ant is a fifty-year-old woman, and that makes me feel a little like a louse, but everyone is relaxed and friendly. The children come direct from the backwoods. They are brought out of the hills by truck, jeep, even on horseback. I’m excited because within the next month I am going in with the doctors on one of their “collecting” trips. We may even go to the area where four sheriffs have been shot in the last three years. These children have a variety of physical and emotional disabilities and are lost in this world of ours. All are much younger than their years and are like wild animals penned up with no hope of escape. They need a tremendous amount of care and kindness to make them feel life is worth living.

  Although she had lived in a big city most of her life, Dian hated urban constraint, so her first concern after settling in at Korsair was to find a place to live, well beyond Louisville’s city limits. Eventually she rented a dilapidated cottage on a sprawling, century-old farm called Glenmary.

  The owners encouraged her to pitch in with the seasonal farm chores, and she was able to put her knowledge of veterinary medicine to constructive use. She was in her element.

  Never have I seen any place as beautiful as this is now in autumn. At Glenmary the creeks are full of the golden, red, green, and brown leaves from the forests. The pastures are still vivid green and are framed by trees that you would swear were on fire. When I wake up in the morning, I just run to the windows all over the house and am blinded by the beauty. Quite often I’ll see a raccoon or possum scurrying by, or else the ninety head of Angus cattle will be taking their morning meal off my backyard. When I come home from work, I have to take about twenty minutes to feed the multitude of barn cats and the big white shepherd dog from over the hill who stops by for a handout, along with our own farm dogs, Mitzi, Shep, and Brownie, who have adopted me as one of their own.

  A warm friendship developed between Dian and Mary White Henry, secretary to the chief administrator at the Korsair Children’s Hospital. Mary White was the daughter of a well-known Louisville heart specialist and she introduced Dian to Louisville society.

  Now in her twenties, she was not conventionally beautiful, but a number of the men she met found her attractive. She was exceptionally tall and slender with gleaming dark hair, intense and searching eyes, strong features, and a coltish grace. Some of the city’s most prominent men courted her, yet none of them appealed to her. More to her liking was Franz Forrester, a shock-headed young Rhodesian whom she also met through her friendship with the Henry family.

  Franz was the youngest son in a displaced Austrian family who owned extensive agricultural and business interests in Africa. Called Pookie by his intimates, he came as close to evoking a serious response from Dian as any man she had so far met—though that was not very close.

  He’s from Southern Rhodesia and he’s a dream, but younger than I am, the son of an Austrian count claiming imperial blood. He has all these great plans for us, but I really don’t think I can afford the time.

  Dian might have slipped away from Franz Forrester as she had done from previous admirers, but he was persistent beyond all others.

  Letters, letters, letters from New York, London, Ireland, Paris, Rome, and South Africa. The ladies in the local post office are beside themselves. Now Pookie is back in town from New York and sets the sky as the limit for fun and frolic in Louisville. Not long ago he sent me a “pouf”-phew! It’s a footstool, I guess. The top is certainly right off a zebra’s back. It’s not bad except that it looks like a tumor rising out of my vicuna floor rug. The dogs attacked it on sight, but now the smell has so permeated the house, I guess they think it belongs.

  Dian met an even more impressive man through Mary White. As a favor to Mary, one day she drove to a monastery called Gethsemane, two hours from Louisville, to pick up a writer who had been on retreat. While there, Dian encountered a vibrant Irish priest with sparkling blue eyes, contagious enthusiasm, and a considerable interest in the mundane.

  I can’t believe it. This Trappist monk, Father Raymond, who wrote the best-selling book The Man Who Got Even with God, obviously has a liking for me. Last Sunday Mary White called to say he was coming to Louisville and wanted to see me. Well, that was about the most rewarding experience in my life. Talking to him is like sitting on top of a live volcano. You’re constantly exploding one idea on top of another. You leave his presence, and thoughts, like lava, continue pouring over you for days. I’m not going holy holy, but this was an experience of a lifetime. He is quite a man!

  He must have been. Less than a month later, in a letter to her mother, Dian noted as a casual aside that she had converted to Catholicism. Although it pro
ved to be a transient conversion, it horrified the family.

  Kitty Price was inconsolable. “I can’t stop crying long enough to reason it out,” she sobbed into the telephone the night she heard the awful news. “I can’t believe you would take such a serious step without considering us.”

  Kitty and Richard Price had not even begun to suspect what Dian was capable of doing with her own life.

  While Dian developed an intimate relationship with Father Raymond, Franz Forrester remained in hot pursuit and even offered to pay her way to Africa, on a one-way trip.

  Dian was already intrigued by Africa. In 1957 she had met a traveler just back from that far country, a dashing reporter on the Louisville Courier Journal, whose excitement about his trip had been contagious. She was in love with the world he described and perhaps a little in love with him.

  The thought of being where the animals haven’t all been driven into little corners attracts me so much. If he goes back to Africa, as he hopes, I’ll be right behind him!

  Then the journalist moved to Florida and dropped out of Dian’s life. But the dream of Africa remained.

  In 1960 Mary White made an African safari, and Dian’s dormant desire was rekindled. In one of the most painful decisions of her life she turned down Mary’s invitation to go along. The truth was she could not pay her way. However, she made up her mind she would find the funds to make a safari on her own in the not-too-distant future. “I am saving every penny for Africa,” she wrote her mother soon after Mary’s departure, perhaps in the faint hope that the Prices would offer some assistance.

  Despite its attraction, she would not accept Franz Forrester’s offer. Marriage to him as the price of getting to Africa was not acceptable. She would go under her own steam or not at all. She began accumulating literature on safaris, but was appalled by the costs. Still, she was determined to reach Africa before 1963 ended.

  By June of that year she had made tentative arrangements to hire the services of a Nairobi safari guide and was desperately trying to raise the requisite five thousand dollars. She pleaded with the Prices to back a bank loan; and although they initially agreed, they withdrew the offer on the grounds that the venture was both rash and dangerous. Eventually she mortgaged her income from the hospital for the next three years to a loan company at the usurious interest rate of twenty-four percent.