Gorillas in the Mist

by Farley Mowat

  An hour later she flew on to Frankfurt, then to Hamburg, where the conference was being held. Here were no friendly faces to greet her, so she found her way to a “horrid room in a horrid hotel” and collapsed. She spent the following day mostly in bed, pain-racked and depressed.

  On the morning of September 19 she rose and went out into the busy streets.

  I had the morning to kill and hated it. So I went to the Hermes shop across the street from the hotel and for the hell of it bought a $750 dress! It really is made for me…. Then went to register at the conference where everything went wrong. No one spoke English and I began to be very confused…. I tried to walk home but got lost and had to take a cab.

  The purchase of the dress did what perhaps nothing else could have done—it lit a little flame in her heart. Next morning she returned to the conference, still without having established any meaningful human contact. She sat alone through several scientific dissertations that she would probably have found inordinately boring even if they had not been in German. Near the end of that ponderous afternoon she delivered her own paper on gorilla behavior.

  I guess I gave my talk, but I didn’t give a damn what I said. I was just happy to get the hell out of there.

  She decided that for the duration of her stay in Hamburg she wouldn’t think about serious matters at all. She had her hair set, then wearing her new dress, went out to set the town on fire.

  She encountered two young men, an English anthropologist and a German student. There followed one of the more memorable nights of her life. Her journal notes are succinct, but they give the flavor of what followed.

  Oh, what an evening. We bought a big balloon dog from a man on the street-just because it had such a beautiful tail! Had beer and schnapps in a dozen cafés, then went with them into a whorehouse just for fun, and the girls got mad and went after me … met a Great Dane and tried to take him with us into a bar and got chased out … one of the boys got pretty sick…. I was very funny dancing at a beer house … finally took one to his hotel, and the German student took me to mine … into a trance with him, he was so gentle.

  Dian was probably still in a trance of sorts when she left Hamburg the following morning.

  To Brussels—I think so…. Left hotel in very early hours, after almost two hours sleep, and for first time I am feeling no pain!

  She spent the succeeding five days under the aegis of the Gespars, who took her on a seemingly endless round of examinations and consultations and entertained her at small dinner parties. Her lifelong predilection for doctors and for older men sharpened her interest in Jean Gespar, an ebullient and effervescent fellow in his early fifties who radiated empathy and competence. He responded to her admiration, taking her on excursions through the city and into the nearby countryside to show her his favorite places and to drink wine at his favorite bars.

  By September 27 medical specialists had decided that although both lungs were scarred by lesions, there was no indication of active tuberculosis or of cancer. More X-rays were taken and it was finally concluded that Dian had splintered her seventh thoracic rib so badly (when she fell from her window while photographing the giant rats) that a number of bone splinters had been set adrift in the pleural cavity. The doctors proposed surgery …

  to sever the main nerve in that region and relieve the pain, and to find out how much more is broken up. When they told me this I cried.

  Dian cried from relief.

  That afternoon, Jean and his wife and I went down to the big square for tea, beer, and wine. I was wearing my gorgeous new Hermes dress, and we did have fun. It was a lovely afternoon and we spoofed Americans walking up and down the square.

  Next morning, after gaily buying yet another new dress, this time a silk creation from Jaegars, Dian entered the hospital in an almost ebullient mood. On the following day surgery was performed.

  Jean came in-was I glad to see him, but I was too weak to raise my hand to touch his … he was so kind. I slept most of the next day and again Jean came alone-I held his hand for the first time-he says such nice things. I could dream about him forever.

  On October 2, I was lonely in A.M., then Jean came alone and we held hands and talked and talked and talked with no concept of time passing. Very special good-bye from him that left me glowing.

  She had become so engrossed with Jean Gespar, and he with her, that she seemed relatively uninterested in what had been done to her body. She was unconcerned when further X-rays showed a buildup of fluids in her left lung and a lab report indicated that she had hepatitis. She was alive. She had a new love.

  On October 2 her doctors told her she could leave the hospital in two days’ time but must spend the next two weeks resting and recuperating. They also assured her that she would be able to return to Karisoke, though not for a month or more.

  This was good news, but it posed a problem. She could not return immediately to Karisoke, but she was too poor to stay on in Brussels. The alternative was to take a cheap, standby flight to the United States, where she could visit friends while recovering and try to arrange for some badly needed funding for Karisoke.

  The day before her departure, Jean brought her a special pair of Zeiss binoculars—for gorilla watching—and the two made tentative plans for the future. Dian suggested they might meet in Nairobi, whither Jean was bound in a few months’ time on a research project.

  On October 6, Dian flew to New York, then on to Washington. She was in a cocky and exuberant mood. Although the incision in her chest was by no means healed and she was still in considerable pain — I was a basket case by the time I arrived — she was not about to obey the injunctions of her Belgian doctors.

  More urgent matters required her attention. Delivered from the valley of death, as she now believed herself to be, she was brimming with new plans for Karisoke, but in order to implement these she had to ensure support from her major sponsor, the National Geographic Society. To this end she spent her first week in the United States haunting the society’s offices in Washington and reestablishing relationships with such key figures as Dr. Edward Snider, secretary of the Committee for Research and Exploration. Only after Snider had agreed to arrange a funding meeting early in November, and after a Washington doctor had warned her that rest was imperative for her recovery, did she leave Washington to seek the care and comfort of the Henry family in Louisville.

  This was a healing time during which she saw old friends; revisited the Korsair Children’s Hospital; had a picnic on the grounds of her old cottage; and stocked up on her favorite junk foods in the local supermarkets. On one of these shopping expeditions she found and bought a small, plush gorilla-which she named Jean.

  Rested and invigorated, she flew on to San Francisco for the usual obligatory stay with the Prices. Her record of this visit is notable for its brevity. It was clearly an ordeal during which Dian had to fend off further attempts to persuade her to abandon Africa and return to a sane and normal way of life.

  She fled to Chicago for a few days’ postproduction work with Warren and Genny Garst on the Wild Kingdom film. While there, Dian interviewed three applicants for research work at Karisoke-David Watts, Bill Weber and Amy Vedder-all of whom would have a considerable impact on her future life.

  By November 6 she was back in Washington to present herself before the august Research Committee of the National Geographic, presided over by the Olympian figures of the president, Dr. Melvin M. Payne, and the vice-president, Dr. Gilbert M. Grosvenor. Dian found these two patriarchal gentlemen sympathetic. When she left Washington a few days later, she carried with her the assurance that the society would continue to support her work.

  As she boarded her plane for the long and weary flight back to Rwanda, she was content. The gorillas awaited her, and in her handbag rode a furry little toy that was the token and assurance that the times ahead would not be devoid of human passion.

  One of the first things Dian did on her return to camp was draw up a “plan for the future.” It committe
d her to a concentrated effort to finish what she had now begun to refer to as The Book, a determination to shake Karisoke out of its current doldrums by bringing in new students, and a decision to put “X” out of her working life.

  Warmly greeted by Ian Redmond and the staff, she was soon hard at work. There was also time for pleasure. One day near the end of November she took advantage of a rare burst of sunshine and accompanied by Rwelekana, climbed to Group 4.

  I had a wonderful contact, especially with Uncle Bert, who was an angel and led the whole group over to my side of a steep ravine I couldn’t cross to get to them. Digit came over last, taking his time as if he couldn’t have cared less. Then he finally came right to me and gently touched my hair…. I wish I could have given them all something in return.

  On the way back to camp Dian was startled by a Batwa bursting from cover at the edge of a meadow. He went racing across the opening, arrogantly brandishing a bow and arrows over his head. She took this as a flagrant challenge and set off in hot pursuit, but was in no shape to outrun an agile hunter. Gasping as much with anger as fatigue, she ordered Rwelekana to hasten back to camp and fetch Ian with a gun.

  Meantime, she backtracked the Batwa and soon found a bloodstained clearing where several men had slaughtered a duiker and had been butchering it when she happened near the spot. She realized that the Batwa had deliberately flaunted his presence in a successful ploy to draw her off.

  By the time Ian and Rwelekana reached her, she was raging. “I want those bastards caught at any cost.”

  By then it was early evening and hardly the time to enter the darkening forest in pursuit of a gang of well-armed hunters. But Ian was game, and Rwelekana so cowed by Dian’s fury that he preferred to face the poachers rather than his boss. The two loped off on the poachers’ trail, leaving a fuming Dian to make her way back to camp.

  As it turned out, the lateness of the hour worked to the advantage of the pursuers. Thinking themselves safe as darkness fell, the Batwas circled back to a crude hut they had built near Fifth Hill on the saddle between Visoke and Karisimbi. Here they lit a fire, loaded their hashish pipes, and began cooking some of the antelope meat. Being in a happy mood, they laughed a lot; and as the hashish took effect, some of them began to sing.

  Darkness comes swiftly and suddenly in the tropics. So did Ian and Rwelekana as they homed in on the sound of voices and the glint of flames. Screaming like a veritable banshee, Ian leapt out of the dense bush into the center of the poachers’ circle while Rwelekana thrashed noisily about in the underbrush attempting to sound like ten instead of one.

  Abandoning most of their belongings, the pygmies dived headlong into the blackness of the surrounding forest with such celerity that neither Ian or Rwelekana managed to catch one. To discourage any thoughts of a counterattack, Ian fired a few pistol shots after them, though aiming high enough to miss.

  Having smashed the hut, the victors loaded themselves with the meat of four duikers and a baby bushbuck, three spears, three bows with about thirty arrows, and two hashish pipes. Then they beat a hurried retreat, not without some apprehensive backward glances.

  They reached home at about 9:00 P.M. to find a contrite Dian pacing back and forth by the camp cooking fire, fearful that she had sent them to their deaths. Her relief at seeing them was so great that she gave them both a tongue-lashing for “taking silly risks.”

  Most winter days at the tag end of the year were less exciting. As the weather worsened, it became a misery to go anywhere. Torrential rains and stinging hailstorms became the daily norm. Dian typed away at the book and did other paperwork, while Ian squinted down the barrel of his microscope at worms and yet more worms. In mid-December he sallied off the mountain to fetch a Christmas tree as the centerpiece for the “Wog’s Christmas Party;” and thereafter Dian busied herself for days, wrapping innumerable presents for the men and their enormous families.

  The party was held on December 23 and was attended by some fifty people ranging from suckling babes to an old crone who, much to everyone’s merriment, claimed to be Basili’s abandoned wife. Despite a persistent drizzle, the party went on far into the night, with dancing, miming, and singing around a roaring bonfire. Dancing with the best of them, Dian was in her element.

  Carried on like crazy … I got a little X but no one noticed. Really had a good time … was very happy…. There have been some rough spots but this year on the whole was pretty good…. I’ve got two or three new students coming in January, and if they are any use, things should look up around here…. I’m working well on my book. The poachers seem to have crawled back into their holes and the gorillas are fine. Digit has become a “big man” now, and you’d be proud of the way he helps Uncle Bert look after the group. So I guess it’s safe to say things look pretty good for 1978.

  Dian Fossey was looking into a clouded glass.

  — 15 —

  Sunday, January 1, 1978, broke warm and sunny. Dian wanted to visit the gorillas, but was preoccupied with the imminent arrival of a BBC film unit for the television series Life on Earth. The star of the show, David Attenborough, would be on hand, and Dian was anxious that Karisoke make a good impression.

  Only Nemeye could be spared from sprucing up the camp. Dian sent him to locate Group 4, which had not been visited since December 28. Happy to avoid the fuss, he set off early, but the animals were missing from their usual haunts on the southwestern slopes of Mt. Visoke. After a search lasting several hours he finally came on their travel trail leading across the saddle toward Mt. Mikeno. At the same time he encountered an obstreperous herd of elephants and prudently turned back.

  The weather next day remained so lovely that Dian could not stay in camp. Having dispatched Ian and Nemeye to locate Uncle Bert’s errant family, she set out nominally to look for poachers’ traps, but actually to revel in the welcome heat of a blazing sun and to enjoy the rich smells and sounds of the steaming forest.

  Lithe and limber as a duiker, Nemeye led Ian at a brisk pace toward the saddle. A mile from camp they crossed the unmarked border into Zaire. An hour later the two men came across a wide swath of crushed and flattened vegetation sprayed with liquid dung, testifying to the headlong flight of a dozen or more gorillas. Telling Nemeye to stay put, Ian backtracked to see if he could find out what had frightened them. A hundred yards along the flight trail he entered a little glade and almost stumbled over the crushed body of a native dog.

  A few paces beyond loomed a black and shapeless mound hazed with an aura of blowflies—the huge corpse of a gorilla, mutilated almost beyond recognition. The head was missing and the arms terminated in blood-encrusted stumps from which shattered slivers of bone protruded. Belly and chest had been deeply ripped and gashed. Everywhere the once-sleek black hair was matted and spiked with coagulated blood and fouled with body fluids.

  Shortly before noon Dian was making her way back to camp after what had amounted to a languid stroll under the hagenia trees. With shirt unbuttoned and hair swinging loose, she was delighting in the warmth, in birdsong, and in the feeling that strength was returning to her body.

  She had reached the camp meadow when she saw Ian jogging along the trail toward her, Nemeye following well behind. She paused and waited. As Ian came to her, he blurted out, “Oh, God, Dian! I hate to tell you this. Digit’s been murdered.”

  There are times when one cannot accept facts for fear of shattering one’s being. As I listened to Ian’s terrible words, all of Digit’s life since my first meeting with him as a playful little ball of black fluff ten years earlier, poured through my mind. From that dreadful moment on, I came to live within an insulated part of myself.

  During the final two days of December, Group 4 had been chivied by six poachers and their dogs away from the relative safety of the Visoke slopes, onto the saddle and into Zaire where there would be small likelihood of anyone’s interfering with what was intended. There, on December 31, the exhausted and terrified animals had been brought to bay.

  True
to his task as the rearguard defender of the family, Digit had charged to cover the retreat of the rest—to be met by a phalanx of men with upraised spears. During the melee that followed, Digit killed one of the dogs but was himself speared to death. The effect on Dian of Digit’s killing was catastrophic. No previous experience, not even her own botched abortion, had ever dealt her so savage a blow or imposed worse mental anguish. And no other conceivable disaster could have fired her to such a pitch of passion as did this bloody butchery.

  At first she managed to keep her grief and fury moderately in check. While several of the men were bringing Digit’s body back to camp lashed to a bamboo carrying pole, Dian was writing letters. One was to Major General Juvenal Habyarimana, president of the Republic of Rwanda. Considering the circumstances, it is remarkable for its control:

  “You have had the kindness to show interest in the gorillas of the Parc des Volcans…. I’m sure you remember the gorilla who took my notebook and pen in the National Geographic movie and then returned them to me very gently before rolling over and going to sleep at my side. That same gorilla, named Digit, is also pictured on a big poster for Rwandan tourism saying ‘Come and see me in Rwanda.’ … On December 31, Digit was speared to death by Rwandan poachers. They killed him, then cut off his head and hands and fled with them…. These killers are all of the Commune of Mukingo…. I would like to ask that they receive full punishment for their crimes…. I would have given my life to have saved Digit’s life, but it is too late for that now.”

  Writing to Dr. Snider at the National Geographic she was less restrained. “Poachers have never before dared attack any of my working groups, and I am now wondering if this is the beginning of the end … for if they get away with this killing, how much longer are the others going to last? I feel … that probably most of the gorillas on the other mountains, barring Mikeno, have been killed off by now for heads and hands…. I can assure you I’ve done nothing illegal in retribution for Digit’s death, but I am not allowing myself to think about how he must have suffered…. My plan of action is to publicize the affair as strongly and graphically as possible to every conservation society I can reach to ask them to apply pressure onto the Rwanda government to threaten to cut the vast amounts of money coming in to the Parc des Volcans for guards and a conservateur who do NOT work at protection of the park—that work is done by this camp—and to put pressure on the government to enforce extreme penalties for poachers—either prolonged imprisonment or death, and to allow guards to kill poachers within the park.”