Gorillas in the Mist

by Farley Mowat

  Steaming, she emerged from this confrontation to descend on two Rwandan officials whom she identified only as “the president’s no. 2 and 3 men.”

  I really liked them. The president himself called to say he would really like to see me, but this week was badly timed because there were rumors of a coup. I am insisting on the death penalty for Munyarukiko at least, if he is ever caught. Both the no. 2 and the no. 3 men agreed that he should be killed-oddly, they prefer hanging to military execution.

  She also demanded, and got, an interview with the director of ORTPN, General Dismas Nsabimana.

  He is typical of an African Big Man, pompous and overbearing, but he ended up being very straight with me, although initially he was a bit terse because of the BBC team. One reason I think we finally hit it off is that he was very very enthusiastic over my “no-no” of last year when I burned some of the belongings of Munyarukiko’s house. He said I should have burned down the whole house and was amazed to know I had had to pay six hundred dollars for my activities. He considered it an accomplishment, not a misdemeanor.

  One can imagine an audible sigh of relief from the official in Kigali when Dian finally rounded up two new research students who had just arrived by air from the United States and shepherded them up the mountain.

  The newcomers appeared rather unlikely candidates for life as it was lived at Karisoke. In her mid-twenties, Amy Vedder was “pretty as a china doll.” She seemed much in love with her companion, Bill Weber. Both had spent time in the Peace Corps, but Dian’s initial evaluation of them was not overly optimistic.

  I believe Bill is slightly helpless-for sure he will never take up a gun nor will I ask him to. I wish he was stronger stuff. I think the girl is the real engine in that bus, but there is a hard gleam in her eye.

  Dian’s most pressing concern was to establish the antipoaching patrols she and Ian had envisaged. First she had to find the money to pay and outfit the men. The Digit Fund was to be the financial instrument; but being isolated on a mountain in equatorial Africa, there was no way Dian could organize the fund herself. In this extremity she was forced to turn to others for assistance.

  Her choice in the United States was her legal adviser, Fulton Brylawski, in Washington, D.C. She wrote to him on January 17 about her difficulties:

  “I am writing for help to everyone I can think of concerned with mountain gorillas. If they decide to give money to the Digit Fund, can I use you as a recipient? … I believe I could get five thousand dollars within the next months but I don’t want to handle the money, and I don’t want this to be just another vague conservation plan that spends half of its money on so-called overhead.

  “I do not want Digit to have died in vain, thus the reason for this fund. Many, many other gorillas have suffered a death similar to his … he cannot be a lost cause; he must not be a lost cause. Digit typifies all that may happen to the rest of the mountain gorillas. It is a chance to save the entire subspecies, or turn our backs and let them all be killed off for their skulls. The Parc des Volcans was established by international treaty in 1929 for the protection of gorillas and other wildlife—I want to push this law and enforce it as it has never been enforced before.”

  Because of the slowness of the mails, Brylawski’s acceptance did not reach Dian until early in March. Meantime, she had been concentrating her efforts on another front, from which she hoped for quick results. On January 16 she had sent her Cambridge friend Richard Wrangham a long description of Digit’s death and of her plans to turn that act of butchery to the account of the surviving gorillas. She concluded with a plea for assistance in getting her message to the British public.

  Wrangham did not disappoint her. Despite his own teaching commitments, he set about rousing the well-known English sympathy for animals in distress and recruiting assistance from conservation organizations. He acted with such dispatch that by the twenty-seventh he was able to report to Dian that public horror about Digit’s death was already mounting in the United Kingdom. “I met with the Fauna Preservation Society two days ago … they are acting as quickly as possible and hope to have five hundred pounds sent to you by mid-next week. They are setting up a Digit Fund at once. However, they are calling it ‘Mountain Gorilla Fund, U.K.’ because, they advised, the name Digit Fund simply wouldn’t raise the money.”

  Dian’s gorilla friend Digit, who became the symbol of her fight to preserve his species and in whose memory the Digit Fund, Inc., was established.

  To which Dian enthusiastically replied: “It was very fine of fps to offer the five hundred pounds. That’s great news as it means I can start the extra mobile patrols that even my own Africans wish to increase—they’ve been working their guts out.”

  The next news from Wrangham was less palatable. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature had concluded it could do nothing directly to assist her work. Instead, “there was considerable support for the idea of a group of gorillas being habituated for the use of tourists as the best means of encouraging Rwanda to protect the animals.” The implication seemed to be that the chosen group should be one of Dian’s. Wrangham also reported that Sandy Harcourt—now Dr. Harcourt—who had initially responded to Dian’s and Wrangham’s SOS with some alacrity, was supporting the tourism approach.

  That was not all. Very apologetically Wrangham told her that the bulk of any monies accruing to FPS’s Mountain Gorilla Fund would probably go to ORTPN, not to Karisoke. Dian’s reaction was predictable.

  “If any monies are sent directly to the Rwandan government or, as you have put it, ‘routed through the national parks,’ then I disavow it. It is not my responsibility to keep the Rwandan park guards in pombe. To support the current people directly in charge of the park is only to continue the decimation of the mountain gorillas…. I hope you know that the more cash the FPS gives to the Rwandan government, the more you are encouraging the killing of individuals in the study groups.”

  She was equally vehement about the suggestion that the best way to aid the gorillas was through tourism.

  “I don’t see how it is possible to talk about tourism when the park is overloaded with gorilla killers. You and others, Richard, sit on distant perches across the ocean and talk about tourism while ignoring Digit, poachers, and the killing of game within the park. His killers have to be apprehended. There is another bit of really bad news. Seven gorillas from one group in the northeast sector of the park have been killed since Digit died, but this is apparently not important to people who want to concern themselves about tourism.”

  Wrangham replied in a letter charged with gloom. He told Dian that even payments for her own articles on Digit’s death had somehow gone into the Mountain Gorilla Fund, which now amounted to nearly three thousand pounds. Worse still, he reported that the FPS would not send any of this money either to Dian or to her Digit Fund in Washington.

  “I will remind them,” Wrangham wrote, “that the FPS fund was initiated as a holding fund for money coming from public subscription and that it was your initiative in the first place…. The FPS wrote to General Dismas [Nsabimana], head of ORTPN, asking what he would like done with the money. Dismas [Nsabimana] replied, copy to World Wildlife Fund, that he’d like to see the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/World Wildlife Fund education/tourism approach to primate preservation supported. So WWF is expecting it, and Dismas [Nsabimana] is expecting it … but it will all be very tragic if the public response to the Digit Fund doesn’t get used properly.”

  To call the situation merely tragic was an understatement. Since Digit’s death Dian had been investigating the gorilla trophy trade, with bleak results.

  All but eight of the gorillas living on Karisimbi have been killed for heads and hands. In 1976 a doctor in Ruhengeri swears thirty-six heads were brought into town during that one year. Eight of these came from Mt. Sabyinyo, that I know. I guess that four of them came from Mt. Muhaburu, some from the northern slope of Visoke, and all remaining from Karisimbi. The Belgians ha
ve a huge Technical Aid Assistance program going for the Parc des Volcans, getting more money in one year than I get in four, but the park guards are now paid less than my men and they are lazier than ever. They will no longer even enter the forest.

  I am out of funds but am continuing with my plans, in memory of Digit. Daily we keep up the patrols. Although I have four students I need many more Africans…. Today I sent two of the student kids out with Rwelekana after poachers whose dogs we could hear in the saddle, but they didn’t move fast enough and only collected one spear, three hats, three hashish pipes, and one freshly killed duiker. One of the poachers was Munyarukiko, a second was Gashabizi, and they had five dogs with them. Today was a perfect example of our not getting the English Digit Fund money. If I was able to hire two or three more Africans, they’d have caught the lot. Every day that the conservation groups procrastinate means more and more animals are killed. Tomorrow it will be the same, and my personal savings can only go so far.

  By the end of March Dian still had received none of the money raised in England on behalf of the gorillas. She wrote to Bettie Crigler with growing bitterness. “The Digit Fund in England has accumulated four thousand pounds as of Tuesday’s mail. I’ve been told I may get five hundred pounds out of it. The rest will go to General Dismas for a new Toyota.”

  In early April, Richard Fitter, secretary of the Fauna Preservation Society, wrote Dian:

  “I am sure you will agree it is essential for any project to have the full cooperation and blessing of the Rwandan wildlife and tourism authorities…. In order to coordinate fund raising and publicity of this we have persuaded Sandy Harcourt to work for FPS as project coordinator of the Mountain Gorilla Fund.”

  This was followed by a letter from Harcourt himself, in which he confirmed that he had become coordinator of a major FPS fundraising project. He stated his opinion that if as much money was to be raised, a major emphasis would have to be made to encourage gorilla “tourism,” and he asked Dian for any thoughts she might have on this. He also told her that he had arranged for a veterinary student, Paul Watkins, to come to Karisoke that summer, funded by the FPS, “as a way of getting a larger share of the £4,000 Mountain Gorilla Fund to you.”

  Figuratively grinding her teeth, Dian replied that she had no need of another student—and if she did, she would choose her own. “What I need is funding for the patrols,” she told Harcourt. As for the question of tourism:

  “Two guides were trained here by ourselves in 1975 for the Rwandan park branch, specifically for guiding tourists to the gorillas … of the Sabyinyo area. Many Land Rovers and Toyotas donated by the World Wildlife Fund were to be used in this program. Until two years ago tourists were being taken to the Sabyinyo gorillas on a regular basis. Then Alain Monfort took over and claimed the gorillas there were far too aggressive to expose tourists to and there were far too many ‘man-killing’ elephants constantly posing dangers to tourists. As a result, all tourists have been sent to our Group 5 for the past year. You can imagine what this is doing to the research program. How would you have felt if eighty percent of your contacts with Group 5 had been interrupted by a horde of loudmouthed Europeans? This is the case now despite the fact that Dismas, the Director of Tourism of Kigali, has stated that Group 5 be left alone as a research group….

  “I am only one person, but one person on the spot. I know what needs to be done for the protection of the gorillas-long, tiring, strenuous roving patrols over the entirety of the Virungas using Rwandans who can prove themselves. This is actual conservation, not theoretical conservation.”

  Harcourt’s response offered scant comfort. He pointed out that the FPS rules, which stipulated that before more than £500 could be allocated to a project, the society would have to evaluate a proposal from the applicant-one, moreover, which had been approved by the proper authorities in the country concerned. He suggested she send an outline of her training scheme, drawn up jointly between herself and the Parc Conservateur of Dismas Nsabimana; if she did this, he said, there would be no reason why the society would not agree to send her an additional £1,000.

  He also explained that, since the FPS had already told Nsabimana about the fund and how much was in it, it would be “tactless” not to contribute the £2,000 toward the construction of guard huts near the park, a project near to Nsabimana’s heart.

  “Therefore, Fauna Preservation plans, at the moment, to contribute about two thousand pounds from the fund toward construction of huts near the park for the guards, following a direct request from Mr. Nsabimana.”

  As far as Dian was concerned, this was meaningless doubletalk. She was furious with Sandy Harcourt.

  He knows damn well that Dismas won’t endorse any antipoaching proposal of mine. That “Big Man” has got other fish to fry with the help of the Mountain Gorilla Project and Digit’s blood money. I never thought Sandy would turn out like this.

  She was now face-to-face with the cruel realization that not only would contributions made by British well-wishers in the memory of Digit be withheld from her, they were earmarked for projects she considered either nonessential or downright trivial.

  Digit has died in vain!

  She scrawled the bitter phrase in heavy letters across a page of her diary, and there are stains on the page that may have been left by tears of anger and frustration.

  In May the five hundred pounds promised her by the FPS almost four months earlier finally reached Karisoke. It did not suffice to cover the patrol expenses she had already incurred since Digit’s death, and she was once again forced to fall back on her own savings in the never-ending battle to keep the poachers at bay.

  She may or may not have appreciated a mea culpa from Richard Wrangham received in early June.

  “John Burton, Secretary of the FPS … assured me that the FPS would receive money as a holding station for you, but then later turned around and said that its disposal was entirely the responsibility of FPS…. It leaves a very bad taste in the mouth that they didn’t state clearly what would happen to the money once in their hands.”

  She certainly did not appreciate a second letter from Sandy Harcourt.

  “Paul Watkins has got his visa and I arranged at FPS yesterday that they would give him five hundred pounds from project funds for his costs in getting to and from Karisoke and for his maintenance while there.”

  Harcourt also informed Dian that he and FPS vice-president, Dr. Kai Curry-Lindahl, would visit Rwanda that summer “to discuss and report on everything concerned with conservation of the Parc des Volcans.”

  Somewhat later Dian wrote to Bettie Crigler: “I have received only five hundred pounds of the sum collected in England. The rest is to be used for huts for ‘guards’ and for air fare for ‘conservationists’ to fly to Rwanda to assure the safety of the gorillas…. An additional five hundred pounds was used—I call it Digit’s blood money—by Sandy Harcourt to send a twenty-one-year-old English boy here after I had asked him not to come…. He was another ‘four-day wonder.’ Has now left for home, but knew he’d been used at the other end since he didn’t want to come here all that badly…. I am more than a little angry. Surely Digit didn’t die to pay the air fare of Englishmen.”

  Amy Vedder and Bill Weber, whom Dian soon came to refer to as the V-W couple, were soon followed to Karisoke by another American, a studious-looking youth by the name of David Watts, who was given to wearing granny spectacles and playing the violin.

  While Vedder and Watts immersed themselves in gorilla research for their doctoral degrees, Weber was gathering material on socio-ecology for his master’s. Ian Redmond, now the veteran in camp, continued to spend most of his time on antipoaching work.

  Ever since Digit’s death, Dian had been apprehensive that another disaster would be visited on the gorillas. In early March she heard that a Rwandan poacher had been arrested while crossing into Zaire with a captive baby gorilla. According to rumor, the young animal had been confiscated by the Zairean authorities and was being kept at
the headquarters of the Parc des Virungas, which abuts on the Parc des Volcans.

  Dian alerted her intelligence network and by mid-March had confirmation of the rumor, together with the information that the young gorilla was very sick.

  She decided to mount a rescue mission. On March 18, accompanied by the V-Ws, she drove to Gisenyi, close to the Zairean border, where she had many friends, both native and European.

  By means that still remain somewhat murky she established contact with an assistant conservateur at the headquarters of the Parc des Virungas in Rumangabo—a young man whose real identity she protected behind the nom de plume of Faustin. Faustin managed to spirit Dian’s party across the border and into the unpleasantly familiar “castle” where Dian had languished during the Tshombe rebellion. Here they were shown a four-year-old juvenile gorilla in a near terminal state of illness and emaciation.

  The park people had a problem. They had strong orders from Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire, a thousand miles to the east, to keep it alive at any costs, but when we got there it was nearly dead. I told the worried conservateur if he would let me have it, I would try to save its life and would give it back to them if I succeeded.

  After a considerable period of deliberation, he concurred, but there was no mistaking his fear of Kinshasa. He told us the gorilla couldn’t be moved until the capital was contacted by radio for authorization. It was too late to do it that day, so in the meantime we were given a guard’s room where I asked Amy to stay with the baby for the night, to hold it and give it the love it so desperately needed. I didn’t dare stay since I was illegally in Zaire and had to drive back across the border before dark.