Gorillas in the Mist

by Farley Mowat

  It may sound terribly conceited, but I don’t want my camp overrun with hippies, freeloaders, or other similar unqualified, adventure-seeking people who will “work for nothing.” This kind can always spend their time protesting in America-I don’t want them here.

  At last she found a candidate who seemed ideal. He was a onetime schoolteacher who had returned to Liverpool University to gain a bachelor’s degree in zoology, following which he had studied captive orangutans. He had written Dr. Hinde in Cambridge looking for doctorate-level research work, and Hinde had passed his letter on to Dian.

  “I’ve finally found the right man for the job,” she wrote Leakey. “His name is Alan Goodall—no relation to Jane! I know that you would like him, Louis, for he’s honest, forthright, intelligent, completely dedicated, has a good sense of humor, common sense, humility, and, above all, maturity. This young man is definitely the one to replace me when I’m away from camp, or for that matter to help me out in pursuit of special study topics when I’m there, for it has gotten to be too much to cover for one person.”

  Alan Goodall was married, and when Dian interviewed him at Cambridge, he and his wife were expecting their first child. After her disastrous experience with the dope-smoking census taker, Goodall seemed to represent the kind of stability and maturity for which Dian was looking.

  Since he was a family man with responsibilities, Dian agreed that he should be paid a small salary (fifty pounds a month) and provided with transportation to Rwanda for his wife and child.

  Leakey objected. “Don’t you think you’re being overly generous? After all, I’m the one who has to raise the money.”

  “Generous!” Dian flared back. “Not everyone can work for nothing! If I can’t get some decent help, I may be forced to abandon the whole project!”

  Leakey capitulated. It was agreed that Goodall would take charge of Karisoke while Dian returned to Cambridge for her next two semesters.

  Back in the Virungas for the summer, Dian spent every possible hour with her gorillas. She was often accompanied by Bob Campbell, who was shooting still pictures to illustrate a second National Geographic article scheduled for October 1971, as well as cine footage for the planned television special. Close contact with the gorillas was now routine, and though working under extremely difficult conditions, Campbell was able to record some remarkable moments of communion between the two species.

  Dian took considerable pleasure in his presence. Ever since sharing her grief with him over her father’s death, she had felt an affinity with this unassuming man who worked so unremittingly and uncomplainingly. She sometimes wondered what his life was like in Nairobi, but although she knew that he had a wife, she never probed into his personal affairs.

  During the progress of his assignment, the relationship between them was gradually transformed from that of two professionals to an intensely personal rapport. For his sake, Dian began dyeing her hair to hide the gray that, at thirty-eight, had begun to salt it. Campbell brought out the domestic impulse in her. She delighted in cooking for him and on his birthday and other festive occasions would prepare elaborate meals. For his part, Bob Campbell had a calming influence on her mercurial personality.

  From time to time he returned to his home in Nairobi, and Dian dreaded these departures. She missed him deeply and sometimes turned to drinking at night to dull the loneliness. During his absence, she would spend hours sewing curtains or making other wifely improvements to his quarters in preparation for his return.

  Her private life did not, however, interfere with her gorilla studies—or with her war against poachers and herders. She was indefatigable and implacable at breaking snares, destroying shelters, and chasing cattle to the park boundaries. A ghastly incident occurred in May, to which she reacted with such ferocity that she horrified herself.

  A poor buffalo had gotten wedged into a tree fork, and some Tutsi herders had come along and found it that way. They cut the meat off its hind legs and left it alive and horribly tortured when my men found it some time later. I loaded my little pistol and went to find the poor animal, which was still full of courageous bluff-snorting with every inch of life left within it and trying so hard to defend what remained of its life. I detested killing such a display of courage, and of course I was crying my eyes out when I pumped the bullets into its skull. I don’t think I will ever forget those eyes.

  Killing that poor animal has done something to me that I didn’t think possible, for now I am finding myself out to avenge the cruelty of the Tutsi by crippling their cattle with bullets. I used to shoot above or below or near the cattle of the Tutsi, but now I shoot them in their hind legs and have crippled several since the buffalo was found.

  Obviously this makes me no better than the Tutsi who hacked off the hind legs of the buffalo, but suddenly the entire area is devoid of cattle and once again the buffalo, elephant, and gorilla are able to return to their ranges.

  By September Dian had settled Alan Goodall at Karisoke and was off for Los Angeles en route to Cambridge again. Los Angeles was to be the scene of an event that more than any other marked her emergence as a naturalist of world stature. Once again she owed the opportunity to Louis Leakey, who had arranged for her to be the featured speaker at a thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raising dinner for the Leakey Foundation. Dian was somewhat intimidated at the prospect of keeping an audience of such wealth and breadth of knowledge entertained for an hour; but from the moment she walked, stunningly dressed, to the podium in the darkened ballroom and, in the soft Southern inflections she had acquired in Louisville, introduced the first of her remarkable gorilla slides, her audience was enthralled.

  The thunderous applause at the end of her talk was a moment of pure triumph that, ironically, marked the decline of her dependence on Leakey. Soon she would have the academic credentials to run Karisoke on her own; and she was now confident she had the personal influence to sustain it financially. When she walked into the conference room at National Geographic headquarters in Washington a week later to argue for a renewal and enlargement of her research grant, she succeeded without any support from Leakey.

  Under Dian’s tutelage, Alan Goodall had learned the routine of life at Karisoke, observing the gorillas and engaging in antipoaching and antiherding activities. But he found it difficult to adjust to the isolation of the camp and to the physical hardships involved in tracking gorillas through dense forest and across rugged terrain at high altitude and in weather that was all too often abysmally bad.

  After being bluff-charged once or twice by silverbacks reacting to his unaccustomed presence, he began to wonder whether he had the stamina to live with much more of that. In fact, on the very day of Dian’s departure for Los Angeles, he had tried to resign. While busily completing her packing, Dian talked him out of it. In his own book, The Wandering Gorillas, Goodall recalled the moment:

  “She listened sympathetically to my tale of woe before telling me that she, too, had been very depressed when she first started her study three years earlier. She recalled that when her friend Alyette de Munck left her alone on the mountain for the first time, she had run and locked herself in her cabin when one of the African staff came to speak to her. Later, upon translating his words with the aid of her Upcountry Swahili book, she had discovered that he had merely asked her if she required hot water! Such is the fear of the unknown.”

  Although by Dian’s rigorous standards Goodall’s research observations left something to be desired, there was no denying that he was a determined and energetic conservationist.

  On one occasion he actually shot a fleeing poacher with the .32-caliber pistol Dian had left with him. Exactly where he hit the man is unclear—Goodall admits to hitting him in the leg, but Dian believed he was wounded in the back. The poacher turned up at Ruhengeri hospital for treatment and was placed in a bed next to one being occupied by Alyette de Munck’s gardener. When Mrs. de Munck learned of the shooting from her gardener, she stormed up the mountain to Karisoke where she confronte
d Goodall. He tearfully confessed, and she read him the riot act. Fortunately for him, the Rwandan authorities chose to turn a blind eye to the incident.

  Early in November Alan heard a rumor that villagers at the foot of Mt. Karisimbi had killed several gorillas. He spent half a day getting to the scene, accompanied by his wife and Guamhogazi, one of the camp workers. They found five mutilated bodies—two silverbacks, one blackback male, and two mature females. The animals, which happily did not belong to any of the study groups, had been killed just outside the existing park boundary. They were, however, inside the earlier boundary that was still visible in the form of a thin line of stumps. The bodies had been too badly mutilated by dogs, hyenas, and other scavengers for the cause of death to be properly determined, but Goodall deduced from the many small stones lying near the corpses that they had been stoned to death by frightened villagers. The fact that only the bodies of adult gorillas had been found led him to believe that an infant had been captured during the massacre.

  Dian was desolated by Alan’s hastily written report of the macabre incident, when it reached her at Cambridge. She discarded the hypothesis that the animals had been stoned to death, although she knew how frightening gorillas could be when threatened and how terrified most farmers were of them. Noting that the gorillas had been killed in the same general area in which Coco and Pucker had been captured, she concluded that they had been slaughtered by poachers during the capture of one or more infants destined for the zoo trade.

  Furious, she pounded out a letter to the park conservateur accusing him of being behind the killings and threatening him with the wrath of international public opinion. She wrote equally angrily to his boss, the director of Tourism and National Parks. And she wrote to a friend employed by Sabena Airlines in Kigali, asking him to watch cargo manifests for the shipment of a baby gorilla. She also wrote to every conservation organization she could think of to alert them to the slaughter. She asked Alyette de Munck to use her African staff to ferret out information on the slaughter from local villagers. When despite all of this she was unable to get to the bottom of the killings, she vowed never again to be at such a loss for information. Therafter she developed a network of informants in Ruhengeri and Kigali to keep her abreast of the activities of any person engaging in the illegal traffic in endangered animals.

  Dian returned to Karisoke on March 12, 1971, and more than ever it felt like coming home. But on the very first evening she had a run-in with Alan Goodall, who had been somewhat cavalier in his treatment of her cabin.

  “My God,” she scolded, “look at the mess. What do you think this is—some transient shelter?”

  “Now wait a bit, Dian! I’ve tried to keep the place as neat as possible.”

  “Neat? Hell, this is my home! It looks like a pigsty. You don’t realize what this place means to me. You come in here, use my stuff, don’t even bother to put it back. This isn’t a commune!”

  After Dian’s return—and Goodall’s departure—a new cabin was built to replace the tent in which Bob Campbell had spent the better part of the previous year. Soon thereafter, a fourth cabin was constructed to house a succession of students engaged for the long-delayed census of the park’s gorilla population.

  The first census students had already begun work by the time Dian returned to Karisoke. They were two American girls, Jacqueline Raine and Marshall Smith. Cambridge student Nick Humphrey would arrive soon after, to be followed by Sandy Harcourt, Graeme Groom, and many others. Initially the students were based in bush camps in remote areas of the park where the gorilla populations had not yet been surveyed. Later, as the census work was completed and the emphasis switched to research into gorilla behavior, students who were gathering material for their own doctoral theses lived at and worked from Karisoke proper.

  Well before her second departure for Cambridge there had been talk between Dian and Bob Campbell of his ending his ten-year marriage. However, when he and Dian were reunited at Karisoke in March of 1971, he confessed that he had not told his wife of what was happening, much less broached the subject of divorce.

  Although Dian was deeply distressed by what she viewed as cowardice on his part, she nevertheless forgave him and the affair continued.

  Dian was convinced that for the first time in her life she was genuinely in love. Although her experience with her own family had made her leery of permanent arrangements between man and woman, Bob inspired a great desire within her for a traditional and enduring relationship. Each time he went off to his home in Nairobi, she hoped and willed that he would cut the knot; but always he returned to Karisoke to admit that nothing had been done.

  So the summer passed with no resolution of their relationship. Then, in late November, Dian discovered she was pregnant.

  It was not easy for a white woman to procure an abortion in Catholic Rwanda. The abortion was eventually done by a Belgian woman doctor working across the border in the Congo, who agreed to drive to Gisenyi to perform the operation.

  December 1: Appointment at 11:00. I’ve never been through anything like it and seem to have forgotten a great deal since then. I swallowed my tongue during surgery and was turning purple before it came up. Drove to Rosamond’s in back of Bob’s car. Mt. Nyiragongo erupting all night-had injection to make me sleep.

  After spending four days recuperating at Rosamond Carr’s home near Gisenyi, Dian insisted on going back to camp. Despite Rosamond’s protestations, she drove herself to the foot of the mountain and then made the climb. That afternoon she began hemorrhaging.

  Was terrified so plopped straight into bed and was there when Bob came in from the gorillas and found me. Did not tell him what was wrong and don’t think he guessed how bad it was.

  Although she succeeded in concealing the scale of the bleeding from Bob, he stayed close to camp for the next three days. On the third day Dian sent a note down to the Ruhengeri hospital asking for medication. The porter returned with pills and a message from the disapproving Dr. Weiss ordering her to come to the hospital at once for proper treatment. Dian ignored this message and stilled Bob’s apprehensions by assuring him that the medicines she had received would stop the hemorrhaging.

  She was wrong. On the fourth day she was too weak to get out of bed. Bob had arranged to fly to Nairobi that day to visit his wife, and he left camp at about ten in the morning. However, in Ruhengeri he paused to question Dr. Weiss about Dian’s condition. He was so disturbed by what he heard that instead of continuing on to the airport in Kigali, he hastily hired ten porters and a native litter and by 2:30 that afternoon was back at Dian’s bedside.

  “You must come down to the Ruhengeri hospital,” he insisted. “You simply can’t stay here alone. You might well die!”

  Too weak to resist any longer, Dian was carried down the mountain. After Campbell delivered her to the hospital, he extracted from her the promise that she would not leave until the problem was cleared up. Content with that, he continued on his way to Nairobi.

  Two days later Dian was still bleeding so profusely that, to save her life, Dr. Weiss performed an emergency operation.

  They give me a shot that nearly puts me out as I am very weak now. Heard myself yelling after surgery was over—was embarrassed. They gave me plasma…. Feel rather sluggish when I wake up. Try to talk with Dr. Weiss but don’t get message across. Stay on cigarette diet until 5:00 P.M. Work on National Geographic manuscript most of the day and night. Dr. Weiss told me something had been left in, and that caused the trouble. Now, no more bleeding.

  Just two days after the second operation she insisted on returning to camp despite the angry remonstrances of Dr. Weiss.

  “You are being foolish, mademoiselle. There may be more complications. If you do not stay here I take no responsibilities. It is stupid what you have done, and stupider still to leave here now.”

  He was not very nice to me, but I respect him for his integrity, although I don’t know if he has told the truth. One of the nurses came in all dripping with false s
ympathy because, she said, I couldn’t have a baby now. Dr. Weiss says nonsense, but I can’t stand the way they all look at me, as if I were a criminal. I have to get out of here.

  Although she was in a black mood for the next two weeks—or perhaps because of her dark depression—Dian worked herself to the limit of her endurance. Both Rosamond and Alyette had invited her to spend Christmas down below, but for Dian there could be no question of leaving Karisoke at this season of the year, which was the time when poaching became most intense, and there was no one but her at Karisoke to protect the gorillas.

  On Christmas Eve she distributed the many gifts she had bought for the camp staff during her last trip to the United States and England and shared a few bottles of beer with her men. Back at her own cabin she continued to drink in solitude until she fell asleep.

  She observed Christmas Day by staying in her cabin writing letters and working on the monthly research report for the National Geographic Society. Bob Campbell would be away for some time, and in his absence she made plans to build him a new privy, food storage box, and cold box for his cabin. But her mood was, to put it mildly, rather grim.

  Went out this morning and furious to see cows all over camp. Got pistol and killed one poor old cow with a single shot in the spine at the neck. It fell to its knees, dropped its head, and was immediately dead. Two Tutsi herders were hanging around. They were afraid but I screamed at them to come and get their cow. Some fourteen men came to cow’s body next morning to move it across the meadow and cut it up. They were afraid I’d shoot them too-all very obsequious.

  On January 5, 1972, after hearing the barking of Twa hunting dogs for several days, she went on a single-handed antipoaching patrol.

  D day. I go to Group 5. They awake slowly and feed off into Camp Gully and beyond, and then I go to the poacher trail and, finding no footprints, track down to the lower meadow, where, lo and behold, after half an hour’s wait, two of them appear. I let them get closer before firing three shots at intervals. Talk about run! I waited a bit but they didn’t return so I came back to camp. My men were very impressed.