Gorillas in the Mist

by Farley Mowat

  I have jailed the man I feel is responsible for the shooting of the silverback, Brutus, in Group 13 in December-the same man who killed Uncle Bert and Macho.

  Although the conservation establishment continued to look askance at her antipoaching activities, she had her supporters. One such was the manager of the Nippenose Equipment Company in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Having heard the sad tale of Mutarutkwa’s boot trouble, he had a pair of size 14 Vesque boots especially made.

  Wow, I don’t know who was the most amazed-the Africans, myself, or Mutarutkwa…. We all joined in, showing him which boot was worn on which foot and then lacing them up for him, still kind of unbelieving that such huge feet could actually be shod.

  Mutarutkwa simply sat there at first with a dazed smile, then he slowly stood up from the bench outside my cabin, took a few steps, lengthened his stride, and broke into a run around the side of the cabin where he thought nobody could see him. Here he stopped, gazed lovingly at his feet, and began bounding through the big meadow just like an antelope, until he fell into a deep drainage ditch. He hauled himself out with a chagrined expression but, fortunately, with no broken bones.

  He went out on patrol several minutes later with his eyes riveted to his feet, and if he’d run into an elephant, I don’t believe he would have noticed it.

  Some people believe that conservation requires the use of airplanes, jeeps, tarmac roads, and fancy buildings-they should learn about boots!

  As January ended Dian entertained the new U.S. ambassador, Bob Melone, together with the French ambassador to Rwanda. She was forced to endure another scolding for her “illegal” activities and to swallow a warning that the State Department would be unable to protect her in the event that the Rwandans moved against her. Dian got the strong impression that such an action might even receive State’s support; but she was more amused than angered. She knew that her stock had never been higher with the president of Rwanda, who had just ordered that the baby gorilla, Charlie, should remain in her custody until it was well and that she could then release it back to the wild if she so wished.

  Five days later she was unexpectedly visited by Robinson McIlvaine. On February 10 he wrote a memo from the AWLF office in Nairobi to the several partners in the new, expanded Mountain Gorilla Project describing his visit.

  McIlvaine was met at Kigali Airport by project manager Jean-Pierre von der Becke and U.S. ambassador Melone. He stayed with Melone except when he was “up country.” The day after his arrival von der Becke drove him to the bottom of the Karisoke trail but did not accompany him as he climbed upward in the pouring rain. According to McIlvaine, Dian no longer spoke to von der Becke or to the Webers, who were camped at the foot of the mountain.

  McIlvaine reported that Dian was suffering from acute sciatica, a bad hip, and emphysema, but was also experiencing severe trauma over her imminent departure and forthcoming assignment at Cornell University. He thought it quite possible that at the last minute she might not muster the courage to leave Karisoke at all. “In her more rational moments,” he wrote, “she thought of forming an oversight committee of distinguished American scientists to govern the research center.” Meanwhile, “having refused Sandy Harcourt’s bid to take over,” she was prepared to leave the camp in charge of one of the two new students. McIlvaine suspected that once Dian was gone, Benda-Lema would invite Harcourt to take over.

  The report also discussed the progress of the Mountain Gorilla Project, now almost two years old. Having noted that the Rwandan government had still not signed the agreement initiated by him, McIlvaine described the Parc des Volcans headquarters at Kigali as a “shambles.” According to him, the conservateur was seldom there, was often drunk, and had run up 20,000 kilometers on a WWF-donated Land Cruiser before rolling it into a ditch. “Obviously the park guards have no morale, and five of them are in jail.”

  McIlvaine concluded his report with these brave words: “Although the situation could hardly be worse … we decided we must push ahead.”

  Dian’s reaction to this memo, which she received from a sympathizer in Nairobi, went unrecorded. Perhaps it is just as well.

  To further complicate her last weeks at Karisoke, a three-man Japanese movie team arrived on February 3 to spend a month filming her and the gorillas. She was already well-known in Japan, but this film would make her famous there.

  The filmmakers were delighted with Charlie. Now restored to health, the young gorilla was in the process of taking over Karisoke.

  She has become a spoiled brat who does what she wants. But we now have to start getting her ready to go back to the forest. Fortunately John Fowler has turned out to be a great baby-sitter and is now changing her back into being a gorilla. She must be withdrawn from all of the fruit and bread she craves and become accustomed to out-of-door temperatures at night rather than sleeping above my fireplace in my bedroom in her lovely sleeping box that she has torn apart dozens of times. Fortunately Fowler is willing to sleep outside with her.

  As February drew on, Dian had a worrisome problem to resolve. Should she attempt to introduce Charlie into one of the study groups before her own departure, now scheduled for March first, or leave it up to Perlmeter? In the end, although she did not feel Charlie was sufficiently prepared for a return to the life of a free gorilla, she decided to make the attempt herself.

  We began the reentry plans in mid-February. My choice of the wild group was Group 4 since it had no infants or “hot” females or any approaching parturition who might have been jealous of the appearance of a new baby out of the blue. I turned down Group 5 partly because of this, and also it was now too far away and therefore vulnerable to poachers.

  A week before I was to leave, I sent John Fowler and Nemeye to set up a bivouac camp in Group 4’s territory. They had no fire and no food, only sleeping bags. The idea was to keep the baby away from camp to adjust to being in the forest again.

  We chose the twenty-ninth to make our attempt. Wouldn’t you know that would be the day when Group 4 was having an interaction with one of the fringe groups? The rain was pouring down, and the gorilla trails were horrid, horrid, horrid, filled with fear dung and fear odor, crisscrossed like a plate of noodles. In the confusion and rain we lost Group 4 and ended up with the fringe group, whose silverbacks charged John, who was in the lead with Rwelekana, while I followed with Charlie and the cine crew.

  We went back to the bivouac camp and I pondered what to do. I had only two days left, and the students did not want to take the responsibility to reintroduce the infant without me. Very reluctantly I decided next morning to attempt reintroduction into Group 5. I was very apprehensive because one of the young females, Tuck, was “hot” and another older one, Effie, due to have her own baby anytime-like yesterday.

  To make a long story short, we set out early next day with Charlie riding piggyback on John’s shoulders. And we were all very nearly killed!

  Reaching Group 5, John and I climbed a tree with baby so she would have the option of staying with us, going down to join the wild group, or coming back to us. I also thought it would give us a bit of advantage if there was aggression from the group.

  Beethoven, Group 5’s leader, saw us first, then the others. Tuck and Effie sniffed and stared, then both came to the base of the tree and Charlie wiggled out of John’s arms and climbed straight down to them. For just a moment all went well with Tuck embracing the baby, then everything went wild! Tuck and Effie began to pull the baby like a rag doll. Icarus, the young silverback, then came over and began to bat the baby. It was mauled and hauled, bitten and nipped, thrown and dragged, and the noise of gorillas screaming and roaring was blood-chilling. Even Beethoven charged to the base of the tree.

  I retrieved the baby once from Tuck and Effie, screaming and cursing like only Fossey can, but she climbed back down to them of her own accord and the mauling began again. After nearly an hour of this, heavy rains began and most of Group 5 took shelter under nearby bushes-Pablo carrying off my camera, which I’d d
ropped. Finally the baby limped over to our tree, and I again retrieved her and shoved her up to John, who put her under his rain jacket. I felt that was enough horror and we would have to take her home.

  We had to wait another hour before we could go, as Icarus and Tuck maintained a threatening watch four feet from the base of our tree. Every time we moved a fraction, they pig-grunted and snarled and he beat his chest. His head hair stood straight up, and he gave out that bad aggression odor. They knew we had the baby, even though they couldn’t see it, and they sure did want it.

  This second hour was one of two (the previous hour was the first) times in my life I’ve ever been afraid of gorillas. Finally the rain let up, and Beethoven led the group slowly off, except Tuck and Icarus, who tried to climb the tree, and I had to kick them. Finally they all left and we sneaked home.

  I had to leave for the States next day, with the baby back in my bedroom and nothing solved.

  Three weeks later Stuart Perimeter and the Karisoke native staff successfully introduced Charlie—now renamed Bonne Année—into Group 4, where she quickly became one of Peanuts’s family.

  — 19 —

  The fears of McIlvaine and the Mountain Gorilla Project sponsors that Dian might not be able to “muster the courage” to depart were set at rest on the morning of March 3, when she descended the long muddy trail to the car park, accompanied by a train of porters.

  The farewells at camp had been, to use one of her special words, schmaltzy. Parting from Cindy and Kima was hard, and parting from her staff not much easier. Nemeye, who had now been with her for eleven years, begged for and got her promise that she would soon return, then broke into tears. Vatiri and the six men of the antipoaching patrol volunteered their services to help carry her sixteen wooden boxes, cartons, and suitcases down the mountain. When she climbed into the front seat of the pickup waiting at the parking lot, chief porter Gwehandagoza gave her a small effigy of a gorilla carved in gleaming hardwood. “He didn’t say,” Dian noted, “but I think it was good suma.”

  She had need of a little benevolent magic as her time of exile began.

  On the fourth I left Kigali and flew right on to Ithaca from New York-it was a long haul and a big jump. Glenn Hausfater and some other people from Cornell kindly met me, then I had to start in looking for a place to live. After a week I got flu and was flat on my back for ten days between changes of motels/hotels. The transition from camp to here was grim enough without having my temperature fluctuate from 105 to 100 and back in five minutes’ time. My brain was totally broiled. I kept screaming for my Africans. A bad scene, and I felt as if all was finished.

  Finally found an apartment-not what I had in mind but not bad. It is somewhat naked but does have a bed, a color TV, and an ironing board that I can use as a table to eat, sort slides, and type on. The thought of having to find and buy everything again from scratch is depressing. I am often inclined to feel I should quit playing the fool in trying to set up housekeeping again at my age. I keep wanting to yell for Kanyaragana to give me a hand-in fact I was told by a friend that I actually do this in my sleep!

  At least I’ve learned to remember to flush the toilet and how to turn on the lights-a remarkable achievement after only three weeks in this country. Have also bought a ‘76 car, a bit on the rusty side. I will eventually get a driver’s license-perhaps.

  On March 23 I went to Washington for a meeting with Mr. Brylawski and others about the Digit Fund, but also to get my stuff that was shipped there with the Criglers’ when they left Kigali. It was stored in Fidelity Storage, and their fidelity was so strong they wouldn’t even let me in to look at it, let alone take it away. So I don’t know when I’ll be able to get my African furniture, pictures, and clothing. For sure, life isn’t as simple in the States as in Rwanda!

  Spring term at Cornell ends about May 10, before when I have to give two public lectures and am supposed to work on scientific papers. Cornell has given me an office with the use of a secretary at Langmuir Laboratories. Have been able to do really up-to-date reading thanks to Dr. Hausfater’s library and the campus library. Have become quite stimulated by all the reading, notes taken, ideas formulated for lectures, and the opportunity to get on with my writing. All is made simple by the ease in which one is able to commute to Langmuir along near-rural roads, even though my car is not great. It blew up the first day and today had to be towed to a garage.

  The ABC film made at camp last December was aired last weekend, and I wanted to crawl into a box after watching it. I looked like my own great-grandmother and was just about as articulate as she would have been without her teeth! Amazing to think of all the money they spent just to produce a half an hour filled with advertisements.

  Have found a good doctor in Ithaca who has diagnosed a long-term internal condition, and his medication really seems to be working. Have been on it two days and feel like a wobbly colt. Perhaps I may eventually become “humanized” here at Cornell. For sure it is a great place to rehabituate long-term field-workers, but every time I think of camp I feel knives turning over in my heart.

  It is difficult to see how Dian would have been able to accomplish the “grim transition” from Karisoke to an utterly foreign way of life in Ithaca without the powerful and sympathetic support of Glenn Hausfater. Within ten days of her arrival in Ithaca they had become lovers.

  Hausfater proved to be the kind of considerate and compassionate man who could tolerate Dian’s emotional idiosyncrasies with no lessening of his affection for her. He was also, in her own words, “so full of fun and understanding.” During those first, hard weeks of readjustment, he was her guide, mentor, companion, and “family.” Not only did he pilot her through the intricacies of academe, he introduced her to people with whom she could feel at ease and to the homey comforts of an upstate college town. He took her to such sancta as Curry in a Hurry and the State Diner, and to road-houses and discos. In addition he explored with her the woodlands and open fields within walking distance of her apartment, where she could find squirrels, raccoons, deer, and even an occasional fox.

  But Karisoke remained very much with her. During her visit to Washington on March 23, Fulton Brylawski summoned a meeting of the Board of the Digit Fund Inc. in his offices. It was attended not only by the three directors—Dian, Brylawski, and Dr. Snider—but by Melvin M. Payne, Chairman of the Board of the National Geographic Society, and by Secretary-Treasurer Robinson McIlvaine.

  Dian reported on the use she had made of the fund’s money in training, equipping, and paying antipoacher patrols, and on their accomplishments— “four thousand traps destroyed in a single year.” With regret she told her board that the patrols had been suspended since mid-March because in her absence nobody at camp was willing to supervise and organize them.

  Then it was the secretary-treasurer’s turn. According to the minutes of the meeting:

  “Mr. McIlvaine proposed that the board consider a dissolution of the Digit Fund Inc. as a separate entity, to allow it to be merged into the activities of the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation.”

  He ran headlong into trouble. The tractable Dian Fossey he had known in other days was not at that meeting. In her place was a woman who refused to countenance such a merger and who proclaimed in no uncertain terms that the Digit Fund would continue in existence until the last poacher had been driven from the Virungas. She finished with a ringing repetition of her battle cry— “I will not allow Digit to have died in vain!”

  It was the august Melvin Payne who oiled the troubled waters with the suggestion that a decision be postponed for a year, “upon the understanding that if at that time there was still a consensus for the continuation of the Fund as a separate entity, Mr. McIlvaine might feel compelled to withdraw from an active role in managing the affairs of the Fund.” The meeting was adjourned.

  Meanwhile trouble was brewing in Rwanda. The V-W couple had befriended Peter Veit and through him had sounded out Perlmeter about returning to camp and reoccupying their old
cabin. Politely but firmly Perlmeter rejected this attempted infiltration. But then, a few days later, von der Becke, who had become friendly with Perlmeter, confided in him that Sandy Harcourt still planned to come to Karisoke and not only had the funding support of the National Geographic Society, but had been told by Benda-Lema that he could return whenever he wished.

  The three young men at Karisoke were shaken by the news. None believed he would last very long under Harcourt. So Perlmeter wrote Harcourt a carefully worded letter pointing out that Karisoke was not currently being funded by the National Geographic but by Dian herself, and that the center could accommodate no additional researchers. He concluded bravely: “I feel it is my responsibility as on-site director to discourage any attempts by you and your wife to return to the center during the upcoming year.”

  Harcourt did not reply. However, he informed the V-W couple that he would soon be arriving in Kigali. When this news reached Stuart, he began to panic. On March 27 he wrote to Dian:

  “Harcourt is coming in April—no doubt to visit camp to see what the situation is. What is the status of the camp, Dian? If National Geo gives him money and authority, what course of action do I have to take to prevent his coming and taking charge? You were counting on his pride preventing his coming, but that doesn’t seem to be deterring him in the least!”

  No longer isolated on an equatorial mountain, Dian could now fight back more effectively. She appealed directly to the mandarins at the National Geographic Society for support, pointing out that she had fulfilled the conditions demanded of her and asking that the long-deferred maintenance grant that she had been promised be released to the Karisoke Research Center immediately. Perhaps feeling some compunction, the Society agreed to do this. Furthermore, Dian was told that Harcourt’s grant would be withheld, pending clarification of the situation.