by Farley Mowat
At dawn each day the woodman appeared from his village far below to spend long hours collecting dry fuel for the camp stoves. Dian had strictly forbidden the cutting of live trees of whatever size and would not even permit the felling of dead ones in the vicinity of camp for fear this might disturb the birds and other animals. A woodman’s lot at Karisoke was not an easy one.
One or more of the three principal trackers—Vatiri, Nemeye, and Rwelekana—would set out at seven-thirty every morning to visit the gorilla groups, sometimes accompanied by Dian or Ian but often on their own. They were charged with reporting the daily movements of the great apes and with keeping a sharp eye peeled for signs of poachers or their snares. They also had to bring back plastic bags full of gorilla dung that they had collected from the previous night’s nests.
This odoriferous material went to Ian Redmond, who, at Dian’s request, had undertaken a study of the internal parasites that plague gorillas. It was his unsavory task to examine minutely each day’s dung collection, with the aid of an ancient microscope he had scrounged at the Ruhengeri hospital, and make meticulous drawings of the peculiar creatures that inhabit the guts of gorillas. Ian’s dedication to this arcane project baffled the Africans, but in recognition of the peculiarities of bazungas, they gave him a new name. He became known far and wide as The Worm Boy.
Each evening Ian was expected to send Dian a written report of the day’s observations, delivered by Basili or some other member of the staff, to which she would respond with instructions, suggestions, and sometimes peremptory demands for more data. Although separated by no more than a couple hundred yards, the two whites sometimes did not see each other for days on end. About once a week Dian would invite him for dinner and occasionally would visit him to register some particularly vehement complaint about his slowness in writing up reports. She deliberately left little room for intimacy between them.
Nevertheless, his presence put an enormous strain upon her determination to remain aloof. If ever there had been a man after her own mold, this was the one. Although trained as a biologist, Ian did not accept science as an all-consuming vocation. As his time at Karisoke lengthened, he became increasingly preoccupied with the vital question of how to help the gorillas to survive and far less interested in them as subject matter to advance a professional career. He saw them as Dian did—living entities to be understood and cherished on the emotional level as well as with the intellect.
Even-tempered, witty in the understated English manner, tolerant of the foibles and frailties of others, and irrepressibly enthusiastic, he had little difficulty dealing with Dian’s prickly side. “Her outbursts,” he told a new student, “are like the charge of an old silverback guarding his group—ninety-nine percent bluff. If you stand your ground the same way you do to a charging gorilla, she is no problem at all.”
As her affection for Ian grew, Dian experienced increasing difficulty maintaining her distance. Although she suppressed any sexual manifestations of it, she could not deny the growing warmth she felt for him. Making the most of the twenty-year age difference, she sublimated her feelings into a kind of maternal relationship in which he was cast in the role of a charming but feckless adolescent who needed to be treated with a firm but kindly hand.
The relatively even tenor of life at Karisoke was briefly interrupted on May 1 when Dian went off to Kigali to collect a new student arriving by air from the United States. Daniel was yet another pleasant but callow youth, quite unprepared for the African realities. Nevertheless, Dian was astounded when, just four days later, he told her he wished to leave.
I couldn’t believe it! But he is, according to Ian, a conscientious objector and dislikes my antipoaching activities…. I talked to him for an hour but he didn’t give any conclusive reason why he wanted to leave … he just said I had a colonialistic attitude, but we settled on a week’s stay as a trial.
When Dian awakened late next morning it was to find that—trial or no trial—Daniel had departed. She was philosophical about it.
He came and went so fast we weren’t sure he’d even been here. I guess he’ll go into the history of Karisoke as the Four-Day Wonder.
A few days later one of the park guards reported that a party of gorillas at the foot of the mountain near the cultivated fields had the farmers in an uproar. Dian hastened to intervene. The animals turned out to be members of Group 5 meandering about on the park boundary at a rocky outcrop called Jambo Bluff.
The group seems to like this ledge since it allows them, from a position of relative safety, to look down over the open fields at their toiling primate relations as if to say, “Still at it, eh?” Simultaneously the natives gather to shriek “Ngagi! Ngagi!” Gorilla! Gorilla! Neither these Hutu people nor the gorillas are really afraid of one another in this particular area, which is far from the Twa poachers’ village. A respectful distance is maintained between the two species since there is nothing to interest the gorillas in the denuded pyrethrum fields. It isn’t possible to decide who is the onlooker and who the viewer.
The gorillas, their curiosity satisfied, finally leave the ledge to go on with their feeding and the Africans go back to their never-ending toil of hoeing the fields.
On this occasion I simply couldn’t resist the impulse to mingle with the gorillas as they climbed out onto the ledge as though to acknowledge the greetings of their subjects. When my head suddenly sprang into view between those of Puck and Tuck while we all crawled slowly to the lip of the ledge, the outburst of human screams and shouts seemed to triple. “Nyiramacheballi! Nyiramachabelli!”-that not-so-adorable nickname they have given me-The Lone Woman of the Forest!
People came running by the dozens from the lower fields. Huts emptied; children hid behind their mothers’ skirts shrieking; men and women were pointing and making such a clamor one would have thought it was the Second Coming. The gorillas seemed only mildly discombobulated by the uproar and filed off the ledge in a far more dignified manner than I; but it took the people a long time to settle down.
At the end of May filmmakers Genny and Warren Garst climbed to Karisoke to make a documentary about Dian and the gorillas for the television series Wild Kingdom.
An easygoing pair of professionals, the Garsts and an accompanying couple who did the sound recordings got on well both with the Karisoke people and with the gorillas, showing respect for both.
The newcomers had a spectacularly invigorating effect on Dian.
Warren Garst and I had a fantastic day with Group 5-he shot twelve hundred feet of cine of the silverbacks and of the females, Effie, Marchesa, Tuck, and Puck. Icarus, the number two silverback, was great and made three charges! Then we went on to Group 6, where Garst ran out of film. It was a marvelous contact, with every one of the gorillas doing something. The day was sunny and perfect. I was in a joyous mood when we came home and went down to their cabin for dinner. First time I’ve been happy in ages-really happy!
Even the loss of her precious asthma inhalator while out tracking a gorilla group with Garst did not upset her.
I’m in such a good mood for a change nothing seems to bother me, but I don’t know how long it will last.
In the company of these new people, her sense of the ridiculous flowered once again.
During the Garsts’ stay, camp acquired a new inhabitant never seen before over a ten-year period, a member of the Giant Rat species. He took up residence near my cabin, and I named him Rufus and set about making friends.
I wondered where Rufus could have come from. Although the Africans said they were common in the villages below, I thought this was an awfully long hike to make just on the off chance of a few grains of corn being left over by my chickens. As soon as Rufus became tame, I experimented with various foods and found he would eat anything except meat. He obviously belonged to the new vegie wave!
He became completely accustomed to flashlights and pressure lamps, and I would force my reluctant guests to go out at night and marvel over Rufus-all forty inches of him! T
hen sometime later he was joined by a lady rat I called Rebecca; and a few days later by Rhoda; then in rapid succession out of nowhere came Batrat, Robin, Russ, Rufus, Rascal-and on and on it went.
Individuals could be identified by variations in tail coloring, and there was a definite pecking order amongst them when the food was set out. Rather than risk being trampled by the mob, I took to simply tossing the food and then running back into the house while they poured out of the forest and from under the cabin itself.
About then I chanced to read a National Geographic article that explained in vivid detail why rats are the most successful mammalian species in the world. It gave nightmarish figures on their reproductive rates. This, plus the fact that it was getting a bit squishy underfoot outside the cabin at night, convinced me that I had to either learn to play a flute or cut off their food supply.
First, though, I wanted to get some pictures of them. One night I surrounded the feeding area with pressure lamps and took a precarious position myself on the wood basket inside my cabin below an open window, with flash in one hand and camera in the other.
Before you could say “rat fink” the area filled up with slithering bodies and writhing tails reminiscent of a snake pit. In my eagerness to get as many rats as possible into the picture, I leaned out a little bit too far and fell crashing to the ground. Unable to break my fall while trying to save the camera, I felt a pain in my ribs that was not to be believed. I’d gone and done it again, I thought, broken a rib for a totally ignoble cause.
Although the rats brought some light relief, dark times were returning to Karisoke. One day while in Ruhengeri for supplies, Dian encountered Lolly Prescada, a Spanish surgeon and old friend who worked in a leper hospital.
She told me about Peter-the banns have now been posted for his marriage. He’s been given only ten more months’ extension on his visa, but if he marries Fina he can get permission to stay in Rwanda permanently.
This news was closely followed by the event itself. On July 1, Dian penciled one brief, furious entry in her journal to mark the end of the affair.
Today Peter married to black bitch.
The spell of bright and sunny weather that had made June remarkable now ended. Heavy clouds overflowed the skies and the rains again beat down. The energy Dian was investing in the film left her in a chronic state of fatigue. Sciatica in her right hip had become so severe she could barely endure accompanying Warren Garst out to the gorillas. More worrisome still, a fierce pain in her chest, which she did not associate with her fall from the window, was keeping her awake at night unless she was drugged by sleeping pills.
Her mood became darker with the delivery of a letter from Debi Hamburger, a young friend and ardent admirer in California. It had been arranged that Debi would come to Karisoke in 1976 as a student, but just before her departure it was discovered that she had cancer of the breast. An operation followed. Now Debi wrote to say that the prognosis was bad. “But I am going to get well, Dian, you can rely on that! What I want most in all my life is to stay with you and the wonderful gorillas at Karisoke. I’ll make it, don’t you worry!”
Although Dian liked the Garsts, it was with relief that, after almost two months, she saw them off the mountain. She had become disillusioned with the way films are made.
Bullshit film finally finished. It is not to be believed how much time and energy gets wasted. And everybody has to play a part, including the gorillas. Simply to cine the real thing would be too dull!
She was again reliving the nightmares of her childhood when it had been mistakenly thought she had tuberculosis. In her middle class milieu, the disease had been—and still was—viewed as a shameful affliction denoting poverty, filth, and fecklessness. Dian’s phobic horror of it, exacerbated by her contact with tubercular patients at the City of Hope Hospital during her internship as a physical therapist, was beyond reason. And this time there was no Louis Leakey to banish the phantom. She was now convinced that the disease was real. Shortly before the Garsts departed, she declared in her journal in a still, small voice.
I am not well in lungs - TB.
As summer drew on and her fear mounted, she became consumed by a passion for housekeeping. She drove the Africans into a frenzy of cleaning, painting, and repairing. She even had Nemeye abandon his normal tracking duties and devote his time to picking up the bits of litter that had accumulated on the porters’ path as a result of the steadily increasing tourist traffic. Not even Redmond was exempt. Dian harried him mercilessly to bring his reports and records up-to-date.
During the first week of August she started sorting through the documents that had accumulated in camp over the past several years and then began systematically burning her private papers. She was ruthless about this. Only her journals and a scattering of other writings survive from the period between 1974 and the latter part of 1977. A sense of impending doom lay over her.
Today I finish burning last boxes of letters nobody should see and tomorrow begin contents of suitcases and start on green box that contains much of my thesis and Peter’s letters, which will all go into the fire.
Among the few letters to escape the flames was one from Walter Baumgartel of the Traveler’s Rest. Baumgartel had returned to Germany and had written a memoir about his years in the eastern Virungas. He had taken some minor liberties with Dian’s own story, and an indignant American friend sent her a copy. Instead of being annoyed, Dian wrote a glowing letter to Baumgartel, to which he replied:
“I have not the right words to express what I felt on receiving your long, warm-hearted letter. It is such a relief to know you are still my friend. Thank you, dear Dian … now Doctor Fossey! Congratulations on your Ph.D. You earned it the hard way, having collected your material over years under strenuous and risky circumstances. But I am not happy about your state of health, particularly about your lungs. You are still young and pretty tough, but there are limits to what a body can take. Living ten years like a mountain gorilla and at that high altitude is enough, I should say…. I also fear for your life—not that a gorilla might do you any harm, but that the herdsmen and poachers will try to get rid of you. It is amazing that they have tolerated you all these years.”
On August 17, Dian entered the French hospital at Ruhengeri. Her friend, Dr. Pat Desseaux, X-rayed her hips and lungs. The hip pictures showed severe inflammation of the right joint. The chest photographs revealed a dense pattern of lung lesions that Desseaux feared were indicative of advanced tuberculosis. Deeply perturbed, he told Dian to return immediately to the United States and put herself into the hands of a specialist there.
The prospect of undergoing a major operation did not in itself deter Dian. Anything would have been better than having to endure the torment that was now her lot. She was, however, appalled at the prospect of having the nature of her disease become public knowledge, something she believed was sure to happen if she returned to the United States.
Pat wants me to go home. Home? I don’t have any unless it is here. My God, to end up in a place like the ward in Hope!
Where Dr. Desseaux failed to persuade her, the Spanish surgeon, Lolly Prescada, succeeded.
August 26: Lolly climbed this A.M. Had heard from Pat I was dying. She came up with three porters and tons of medicine, and then she gave me shit!
In Dian’s little living room, Lolly listened as her friend tried to explain her obduracy.
“I’ve likely had it for years. Maybe since I was a kid. I doubt there’s much to do about it now. And there is no way I’m going into a TB san at home. God, they are awful places! Even some of the nurses act as if the patients are untouchables. You must know what I mean—you work with lepers!”
The slight, still-young Spanish doctor proposed an alternative; and she was persuasive. She reminded Dian that a mutual friend, Dr. Jean Gespar, a Belgian cancer specialist who had spent several months in Rwanda, was now back in Brussels.
“Jean will arrange everything for you there, Dian. He is so discreet and so ver
y kind. I shall cable him at once. Nobody need know anything about it. But you must go. What would happen to the gorillas if you were to die?”
In the end, perhaps as much to please her friends as from any belief that good would come of it, Dian gave in. It was agreed that she would accept an expense-paid invitation to attend an anthropological conference in Germany in mid-September and would then go on to Brussels.
During the first part of September smoke continued to curl from her chimney as stacks of paper fed the flames. She avoided human contact even more than usual. As the months drew on she packed in desultory fashion but spent much of her time communing with her attendant animals—Cindy and Kima, a duiker named Prime, the giant rats, and, on better days, with her gorilla friends.
At nine-thirty on the morning of September 16 she descended the mountain for what she feared might be the last time.
A Peugeot half-ton “taxi” was waiting to carry her to Ruhengeri airport.
Just as the taxi pulls into the airport the plane comes in from Kigali with Peter, Fina, and two kids, all dressed up. The pilot wants me to go on board, but I stay in the Peugeot and hide so I barely got a glimpse of Peter. Got on the plane only when they were gone-it smelled of Fina’s perfume, or of his.
At 5:00 A.M. on September 17 the Sabena flight from Kigali touched down at Brussels. For Dian it had been “a long, long, long trip with little sleep and lots of pain”—lots of time to dwell, too, on what was behind her and on what lay ahead. However, the arrival at Brussels, where she was to transfer to a Frankfurt flight, was not as grim as it might have been. While slumped in the transit lounge, Dian heard herself being paged. When she went to the gate she was greeted warmly by Jean Gespar and his wife, who, alerted by Lolly Prescada, had driven to the airport at that ungodly hour to reassure Dian that she would be in the hands of caring friends when she returned from Germany. Indeed they pleaded with her to cancel the onward flight and to go home with them to rest until her first appointments with the doctors. Dian refused. For her, it was virtually impossible to welsh on a commitment.
