Gorillas in the Mist

by Farley Mowat

  This seemed like victory, but if Dian thought she had checkmated Sandy Harcourt, she greatly underestimated his tenacity. She would also have had to overlook the fact that he was still the first choice of those who wanted her replaced or, depending on how one looked at it, supplanted, at Karisoke.

  On April II, Stuart Perlmeter wrote again:

  “This afternoon I was called upon by Mr. Sandy Harcourt, who proceeded to inform me in his customary style that he was coming to Karisoke whether I like it or not.” Harcourt informed Perlmeter that he had authorization from ORTPN and grant money from the Guggenheim Foundation to support both Kelly and himself. “I knew at that point I was dealing with a very ambitious man who was intent on taking this place over as soon as possible.”

  Perlmeter concluded that if Harcourt did return to Karisoke, he would have no alternative but to leave, even though, “if I leave I’ll be giving in to what Harcourt is hoping for and ushering in a new dynasty.”

  This letter did not reach Dian until late in April, which, until then, had been a good month for her. She had given free rein to her deep-rooted domestic instincts, and the apartment was becoming a home. It became uniquely hers when her crates and cases arrived from Washington, and the walls could be hung with African mattings, spears, carvings, and gorilla portraits, giving this otherwise sterile cubicle in a concrete cliff at least an illusion of the ambience of Africa.

  During this period she delivered two well-received public lectures and settled into her office at the Langmuir Laboratory. Anita McClellan, a pretty young woman with a strong romantic bent, arrived, bearing an edited copy of Dian’s manuscript. Although the two had previously known each other only through correspondence, they discovered during the next four days that they could become boon companions.

  Upon receiving Perlmeter’s cri de coeur, Dian dispatched a cable reassuring him that Harcourt and the Mountain Gorilla Project interlopers could and would be kept at bay. To make sure that he stood firm, she proposed to return to Karisoke for a brief visit in July, at which time she would undertake to clear the air with ORTPN.

  Ten days later another letter from Perlmeter reached her. Its contents were devastating. Paulin Nkubili— “Uncle Billy” —the one Rwandan official she trusted implicitly and who had been her shield through the years, had been accused of involvement in a coup against the president and would probably be executed. Perlmeter then told Dian that he could no longer endure the pressures of Karisoke: “I’ve loved the work up to this point, but I’m afraid if I don’t leave soon I will no longer be able to perform the job I was assigned to do…. Since you are planning to return in July, would it be possible for you to find an interested student who would like to take over the position until you return permanently…. I am serious about a replacement, Dian. I don’t know how much longer I can survive at Karisoke.”

  This letter effectively shattered Dian’s fragile sense of wellbeing.

  A horrid, horrid day. Bad letter from Stuart. Harcourt will never give up. I don’t know what to do.

  Perlmeter’s threatened defection was not the only circumstance fueling a feeling of defeat and depression. She now heard that the National Geographic grant to Harcourt and Kelly was “only on hold” and that a growing number of prominent primatologists were convinced that Harcourt would do a better job of running the center than she had done because:

  “He is a more objective and a better-trained scientist.” Despite her long experience in the field and her Cambridge Ph.D., Dian realized that she was still an amateur in the eyes of the scientific establishment.

  Throughout May and early June new blows continued to descend upon her. The discovery that she was not the only woman in Glenn’s life temporarily turned what she had called her “rhapsody in Ithaca” into an emotional cacophony.

  On May 13 she was told by a prominent neurologist that the damage to her spine was probably irreversible and that she should prepare herself for the likelihood of becoming a paraplegic. She was still suffering from emphysema and undiagnosed thoracic pains. The internal infection (having to do with her kidneys), which she had so optimistically believed defeated, returned to plague her. To further compound her bodily ailments, she had missed several menstrual periods and was afraid she might be pregnant.

  The fates gave her no respite. On May 19, McIlvaine abruptly resigned from the Digit Fund Inc., leaving her with the problem of finding someone to sort out the financial tangle between that fund and the AWLF/Digit Fund. Mercifully, the doughty Dr. Shirley McGreal of the International Primate Protection League volunteered her services.

  During these weeks Dian’s depression deepened. Night after night she lay awake thinking about Karisoke and yearning for it.

  It is my creation. Twelve years of my life! How can I lose it now? What RIGHT have they to take it away from me just because I wasn’t born with a Ph.D. in my mouth? It will be the end of the gorillas if they win.

  Cindy and Kima began to haunt her too. Not only did she find herself missing them with almost unbearable intensity, but their photographic images by her bed seemed to be accusing her of abandoning them. The gorilla portraits on her walls stared down at her reproachfully.

  I’m having horrid, horrid dreams that they will all be killed and it is my fault, my fault, my fault…. I can’t even look their pictures in the eye.

  Another of the now-dreaded letters from Perlmeter arrived in late June. Dian spent a few minutes nostalgically examining the colorful array of Rwandan stamps—delaying the moment when she would have to face news of more disasters at Karisoke. What actually awaited her inside the pale blue airmail envelope was worse than anything she might have anticipated.

  “Kima’s death took us all by surprise,” Perlmeter wrote. “I’ve rewritten this letter three times and a hundred times in my head but can’t seem to find the right words.”

  He did his best. He described the events of June 4 when he awoke to find Kima almost comatose in her box in Dian’s cabin, where he now slept. After he, John Fowler, and Kanyaragana had tried everything they knew to rouse her, they wrapped her in a blanket and carried her down to Ruhengeri hospital. Unfortunately Dr. Vimont was on holiday and they could find nobody willing to spend time on a monkey. “The last person we asked happened to be Dr. Weiss, who just about threw us out of the place…. It was only after Jean-Pierre told us who he was that we realized our mistake.”

  By then Kima was beyond recall. The three men brought her body back to camp and buried it next day, “just past the large hagenia tree in front of your cabin. John is carving a small plaque with Kima’s name on it. I don’t think anything I can say will help at a time like this. Kima led a good life and chased more porters than there are stars in the heavens and gave you more comfort and love than probably any other creature you know. Please, Dian, hang in there and keep your head up.”

  Dian tells us little of how this tragedy affected her, other than, “Received news of Kima’s death and went bonkers.” Glenn abandoned his work and spent the next two days comforting her, and the solace he brought was sufficient to carry her through the worst of her mourning.

  It was not so much that Kima had given Dian, as Perlmeter wrote, “more love than any other creature you know”—it was that Kima had been the recipient and repository for the outpourings of a woman’s love that could find no other certain channel. Yet Kima was no mere child-surrogate, as some have said. She was a being whose needs kept Dian’s capacity to love alive through years of disappointments with her own species. Her grief at Kima’s loss was intense and long-lived but not so long-lived as the guilt she felt at having left Kima behind at Karisoke.

  Karisoke had now become a frail vessel at the center of a maelstrom generated by agencies of three national governments and such powerful organizations as the Fauna Preservation Society, the World Wildlife Fund, the National Geographic Society, and the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation.

  It was painfully clear to Dian that the center could not continue to exist as the
ad hoc structure she had originally created. If it was to endure, it would have to be provided with a power base of its own. Early in 1980 she had conceived of something she called an “oversight committee.” This was to be a board of directors recruited from among prestigious primatologists and conservationists in the United States and abroad, who would form an impregnable defensive phalanx to protect the future of Karisoke.

  Somewhat to her surprise, even some of those whom she knew to be among her antagonists applauded the idea. By the end of May 1980, sixteen influential men and women had agreed to serve as members of the Board of Scientific Directors of the Karisoke Research Institute. The first meeting was called in Ithaca for June 26 to discuss policy and organization—and to select a field director to run the center in Dian’s absence.

  Dian felt confident that her personal choice, Dr. Hal Bauer, would be accepted. But less than two weeks before the meeting, Dian received a confidential telephone call during which she was told that Harcourt had already been selected as the new director of Karisoke and would be attending the Ithaca meeting to discuss terms. No alternative would be considered. Unless she accepted Harcourt, there would be no further financial support for Karisoke, and the imprimatur of the scientific establishment would be withdrawn.

  Without Harcourt, Karisoke Research Center would not be permitted to survive.

  Coming hard on the heels of so many afflictions, this ultimatum was a vicious blow. Yet, in all fairness, many of those involved sincerely believed they were acting in Dian’s best interests. As one participant, who does not care to be identified, explained:

  “She was a very sick woman. The life she had led and the terrible physical disabilities had worn her down. They had also seriously affected her judgment. All that she had built at Karisoke was in danger of falling down because of her fixation about poachers. That would have been a terrible loss to science. The only hope was to get her out of it. Not just for a few months, but permanently. In order to save her, we had to out-maneuver her. I don’t think anybody liked it, but it had to be done. She was such a great fighter, you know.”

  Dian was a fighter whose reservoirs of endurance and indomitability had yet to be plumbed. But she was also possessed of the intelligence to know when she had been outflanked and of the ability to fall back and regroup.

  Only five directors actually attended that first board meeting. They were Drs. Stuart and Jeanne Altman, Glenn Hausfater, Emil Menzel, and Ed Snider. All were pleasantly surprised and some vastly relieved by Dian’s tractability. Although she gave an impassioned résumé of the history of Karisoke, and took a trenchant and unrepentant stand on the subject of “active conservation” and the vital necessity of continuing it, she proved remarkably amenable to allowing Harcourt to assume the position of acting center director for one year. In recognition of this unlooked-for cooperation, the board proposed that she accept the post of program coordinator.

  This was not much of a sop. In return for being allowed to serve as “liaison between the board and individuals wanting to carry out research at the center,” she was required to “attempt to obtain funds for the maintenance and basic operating costs of the Karisoke Research Center as well as for the salary for the center director.” This meant finding money to keep Karisoke going at least partially for Harcourt’s benefit, together with money to pay him a salary—something Dian had never had. But she swallowed even this dose of wormwood and gall.

  Several explanations have been proffered as to why she so passively accepted what was intended to be her permanent ouster from Karisoke. The most widely accepted one is that she really was almost at death’s door, had deteriorated mentally, and secretly wanted nothing so much as to be allowed to grow old and die in peace in some academic backwater, but was too proud to admit it.

  This hardly jibes with her own sardonic observations on the meeting.

  Rather than knocking her out of the ring for good, the first meeting of the Karisoke board of directors revitalized Dian. Perhaps this was just the tonic and the challenge she needed. At any rate, she now buckled down to her book with a single-mindedness that startled Anita McClellan. Up until this time, she had viewed the book as her obeisance to science. Now she began to see it as a way to appeal to the general public to support the cause of the Mountain Gorillas.

  For people who come to my lectures, a gorilla isn’t just a stack of scientific data. It is alive. They can feel for it in life and death. They care about Digit and Uncle Bert and all the rest. My book can help them do the same.

  Anita McClellan encouraged this point of view, and the revisions proceeded apace.

  Dian’s health also began to show improvement. A new specialist prescribed a treatment for her back that worked well enough at least to postpone the prospect of radical surgery. Her kidney infection responded to new drugs. She was not pregnant, and hormone treatments brought her gynecologic problems under control.

  By mid-July 1980, she was feeling well enough to swoop down on Karisoke for a quick visit before Harcourt arrived. She told only a few friends of her intention because she had been warned that Harcourt’s Rwandan ally, ORTPN director Benda-Lema, would do all he could to prevent her from returning. She did not fly the usual route via New York and Brussels—she went first to Tokyo to deliver a public lecture and conduct some seminars at the invitation of the Japanese film company with whose team she had worked at Karisoke. It was here she obtained her visa for Rwanda.

  Despite these precautions, when she arrived in Kigali on July 26, it was to be met by a perturbed American embassy official.

  “I have to tell you, Miss Fossey, there might be some trouble about your admissibility to Rwanda. There could be an incident at Immigration, and we certainly don’t want that, do we? The ambassador sent me along to ease the way.”

  Nervously he guided Dian through the formalities of entry. There were no difficulties, although as she would later discover, Benda-Lema had indeed asked the Rwandan Foreign Office to exclude her. The request had been ignored by the foreign minister, who was an intimate of President Habyarimana. Dian still had friends in high places.

  Benda-Lema did what he could to make her visit difficult. ORTPN had been refusing to renew the visitor’s permits of the current set of Karisoke researchers, and Dian determined to put this right, but for four days was unable even to find the elusive Benda-Lema. It was not until she appealed to higher authority that he emerged from hiding.

  They met at last at ORTPN headquarters.

  He and I had about an hour’s meeting, and it was hard to tell who was the phonier-a fly on the wall would have enjoyed the sweet syrup that flowed…. But he knew, and I knew he knew, he had his orders. With absolutely no difficulty I got Peter Veit extended through January 1981. During our meeting, eventually joined by others of ORTPN, I swear I could hear harp music and the chattering of little angels overhead. B-L himself admitted that Harcourt had advised him that Peter’s work was “unscientific” and, therefore, should be terminated.

  An extension of John Fowler’s permit was also arranged, but there was no need to do this for Stuart Perlmeter, since he had no desire to remain. In fact, on the same day Dian finally climbed the long trail to camp, he departed from a place and situation that had become intolerable to him.

  From Ruhengeri I hired a taxi to drive to the base of the mountain and climbed, and it was really emotional to see the Africans crying, laughing, dancing, and beating their heads over my return. Arrived at camp at about 3:10 and went to the graveyard first. The sadness of seeing again all the names of the dead gorillas was overwhelming … the sadness of not seeing Kima alive left me with such a void and feelings of depression. Many people didn’t like her too well, but I loved her so very much….

  Seeing Cindy was nearly as bad. She was all bald on her back and legs, just skin and bones, and could hardly walk. Like Kima, she hadn’t been fed properly. I knew right away that I couldn’t leave her again.

  Everything looked shabby and run-down; unpainted cabins a
nd overgrown trails. Most of my chickens had died, and I only saw two duikers in the four days I was there. The paperwork was in such a mess I had no time to visit the groups, except one. Saw Group 5, but it was a bad contact, with tourists on the trail before we got there and no chance for a get-together because the gorillas were so nervous.

  Mutarutkwa, the Zairean Tutsi who works on the patrols, came to say hello as soon as he heard I’d arrived. Two or three weeks ago he was attacked by three poachers, and I guess he just picked them up and shook them out. He heard from them that another infant gorilla was captured from the other side of Mt. Mikeno. Patrols from this camp have just about stopped, and as usual the park guards are hardly doing anything. I wonder how many more gorillas have to die before people realize what really needs doing in the Virungas….

  Ian Redmond, who is currently training guards at the park on a short-term contract, also came to camp to say hello. It was like old times to see him, but unfortunately we only had an hour together. He thinks even the parking lot gang are apprehensive about Harcourt’s return now. Well, they made their bed, they can lie in it.

  On August 3, Dian descended the mountain, leaving John Fowler and Peter Veit to run things as best they could until the new regime took over. This time she did not go alone. The old dog followed close at Dian’s heels, and when her stiff legs would carry her no longer, Kanyaragana picked her up and draped her gently around his neck.

  I’m ever so pleased I brought Cindy away with me, though as one might imagine, it was one chaotic trip! In Bujumbura they wouldn’t let me see her in the belly of the plane, but I won out in Nairobi. The stewardess took me to the ramp where they were unloading cargo; the ramp ground to a halt while I climbed up to find Cindy’s cage right near the front door. I put in water and the crappy food given to passengers for a “snack” and talked to her, and the local Africans were really pleased with the show until the military came running up wondering what the hell was going on! Then they got into the act since many of the older men remembered me passing through when the Nairobi airport was just a toto-a baby. I finally had to leave for the terminal since the dog act was holding up the cargo delivery; and I didn’t see Cindy again until Brussels.