Gorillas in the Mist

by Farley Mowat

  Now Cindy is very very housebroken, and I’d been very worried about this. At Brussels airport there was a “greeting girl,” and I told her I had to get my dog out of cargo to be with me during the nine-hour layover.

  There were also two little boys, sons of an American embassy guy in Kigali, on the flight, and the three of us were taken into a special lounge for kids. I felt like I too should be wearing an identification tag and sucking a lollipop. Finally the “greeting girl” came back to our kindergarten to tell me I could go down into the pits of the airport among dozens of revolving belts, noise, and utter chaos.

  There was Cindy in her cage without water or anything. I took her out immediately, but she still wouldn’t pee on the cement, so I had to take her through immigration and finally found a bit of grass right in front of the airport. I thought she was going to flood the whole of Brussels. One of the little boys had come with me, and he kept saying, “Wow! Look at that!”

  Cindy’s ordeal was not yet over. Somehow she weathered the long trip across the Atlantic, a mad taxi ride between John F. Kennedy Airport and La Guardia, and a final flight to Ithaca—again demonstrating her remarkable ability to retain her water.

  Dian and her weary old dog were met by Stacey Coil, a young secretary at Langmuir who had been assigned to work for Dian, and who had developed an admiration for her bordering on hero worship.

  “My mom and stepfather were up from Florida and had rented a cottage on Cayuga Lake that was big enough for fifteen people. Well … I somehow invited Dian to stay with them.

  “When my husband and I arrived with Dian from the airport, my poor mom had heard so much about her and read everything I had been able to give her and was keyed up to the hilt with nervousness. When we finally got to the cottage it was late and dark…. You would have convulsed with laughter if you could have seen my mom’s face when my husband unloaded an empty, very large cage from the back of the car. Of course, Dian was very much in charge and made herself at home and started bringing in everything while we got this surprise out of the other side of the car (my mom could only see this very large, dark, moving animal being taken out).

  “We all went inside and had coffee to get acquainted. Then Dian went to the door and hollered in her big, booming voice for Cindy (my mom by this time is a little hysterical, but I thought it was just from having this famous person staying with her).

  “In comes big, old, slobbering Cindy. Well, my mother almost cried she laughed so hard. She had thought Dian had brought a gorilla with her.”

  Temporarily leaving Cindy with the Coil family, Dian made her first visit to her own family since her return to the United States in early March. She was in California ten days and has left no record of what took place. By August 22 she was back in Ithaca, sharing her North Lansing apartment with Cindy and concentrating her energies on her book and on preparing a lecture course on Comparative Behavior and Ecology of the Great Apes, which she would begin delivering in September.

  With her return to Cornell she began making a strenuous effort to compartmentalize her life and to relegate that aspect of it concerned with the ongoing feuds and tensions surrounding the Karisoke Research Center to a kind of limbo from which she could remain emotionally detached. Although in her role as program coordinator she continued to receive and reply to letters from Harcourt, the board of scientific directors, and others of that ilk, she dealt with them distantly, almost ritualistically.

  Like a wounded and exhausted animal, she withdrew herself until she could heal her hurts and renew both her physical and psychic strength. Cornell, and the easygoing and self-contained academic life of the town and the university, provided the refuge she so badly needed. But Dian never intended it to become a permanent shelter for the rest of her days. She saw it as a sanctuary from which, in due course, she would emerge to renew the fight for what she believed in—and for what was hers.

  She did not develop a large circle of friends, but did enjoy a special warmth with the half dozen or so men and women whom she came to know with some degree of intimacy. These included one or two students, Stacey Coil, and some other Cornell staff members. Glenn Hausfater continued foremost among them. What had begun as a passionate and all-engrossing love affair had now burned down, but Glenn remained an enduring pillar of support throughout Dian’s time of need. In late September she wrote to him while he was away in Colorado:

  “I love it here tremendously and my lectures are going well, even though each takes an entire week to prepare … Cindy and I have walked Monkey Run about six times. We also did Sapsucker Woods, though apparently no dogs are allowed there. It was beautiful and we saw a huge stag. Other than write and do lecture notes, I honestly don’t do anything except walk Cindy. It sounds rather boring, but I feel myself falling into place again for the first time since Digit was killed in December 1977.

  “I will stop now and take Cindy back to Sapsucker Woods to see the lovely beaver pond with all the turtles and birds. I love it there. I do miss you so much and wish I could be the only one to meet you once you return to Ithaca. I know that I can’t because of—and probably others. Just know, please, that your return is special to me.”

  Not all her autumnal excursions into the countryside were so pleasant. One Saturday afternoon she drove Cindy north to a state forest Hausfater had shown her. She and the dog went for a ramble through the fields at the edge of the woods. Dian was reveling in the first flush of fall colors when she was startled by a barrage of shotgun fire. A few minutes later a party of camouflage-costumed hunters emerged from the woods nearby.

  They were dragging the body of a yearling deer and it was just a bloody mess, its intestines dragging behind. When they saw me and Cindy, they stopped and grinned as if their faces would split. One of them yelled, “Hey, lady, look at what we just got ourselves!”

  There were five of the big bastards, and the yearling was hardly bigger than Cindy, but they were so damn proud of themselves. Fun hunters make me vomit!

  She wrote Rosamond Carr in Rwanda:

  “Cindy now looks like a puppy; well, almost, has a beautiful coat and is sleekly healthy. I know she misses camp, but I spend about two hours a day walking her in the woods around the apartment and around the laboratory where I work in the country. She still isn’t accustomed to being kept in the apartment except when I am with her, but they are always on the hunt for dogs around here as so much experimentation is done by the Cornell vet school that dogs are in constant demand. I am so glad I brought her back and only wish I could get rid of the guilt that I didn’t bring Kima.

  “I love my apartment, which is scarcely five minutes from work. But I don’t like the proximity of neighbors—upstairs, downstairs, and next door—and would like to find a more rural place. All of the mattings, pictures, and carvings are now on the walls just as they were in my cabin.

  “You won’t believe it, but my lectures at Cornell are going just great! I can’t believe it either, I was terrified of trying to teach since I only knew about gorillas and not about orangutans or chimpanzees. You’ll never know how frightened I was that first day of class. Have now managed seven lectures, each of two hours, and can’t get over the receptiveness of the twenty-five to forty students that show up each Tuesday. More and more people continue to show up, and we all learn from one another. The students range from freshmen to graduates to professors, so there is a great exchange of thoughts.

  “WOW, I am working eighteen hours a day preparing the lectures and doing a second rewrite on my book, plus giving gratis lectures to schools in upstate New York. I don’t recall ever working so hard in my life—mentally that is, but not physically. It’s nice to get fat on junk food and I am finally FAT!

  “No, Rosamond, I am not meeting very many people because I have so much to do, and everyone is so much younger than I am. I am inclined to get very, very lonely, but that is only because of missing the gorillas and Kima and the home that was, in Rwanda. But you know me well enough to realize that I am not giving
up all that for good. I’m not just going to settle down here and ‘reap my laurels.’ But first I have to fulfill my obligations to Cornell and, above all, finish my book. I must also get all my health back, or as much of it as I can. At the end of December I hope to spend a week in Toronto for enzyme injections in my spine to take care of the sciatica that gets progressively worse in the cold weather.

  “I think of you so much and would give anything to visit you for tea this afternoon! Honestly, for me, going from Ithaca to Gisenyi would be far less traumatic than going there from Karisoke, where I am, I guess, an alien now.”

  This was no overstatement. On September 25, Sandy Harcourt had arrived at Karisoke to take command. Although he only remained for a month before giving himself a leave of absence in England that lasted until January of 1981, he made it abundantly clear that Dian was, and would remain, persona non grata at camp during his tenure as acting director (he did not use that title, but always referred to himself either as center or scientific director).

  Winter came to Ithaca, and Dian worked diligently at her lectures and her book. She saw enough of Glenn to assuage somewhat her loneliness, but for the most part was reclusive, spending her spare time reading or walking Cindy. She spent one entire weekend counting Canadian geese flying south. On another occasion she lost herself and the dog while trying to track a band of white-tailed deer. Then the snows came and restricted her excursions because the cold and the hard going made walking too painful an ordeal.

  The human being she probably saw most was her secretary and busy young housewife, Stacey Coil. One November day she took Stacey with her in her rusty little car, into which she had to fold herself like an accordion, while she went for her driving test. It was a disaster. A white-knuckled driver at the best of times, Dian was so infuriated by a testy examiner that she ended the ordeal by slamming on the brakes, pulling hard into the curb, levering herself out of the driver’s seat, and threatening to abandon car, Stacey, and examiner.

  Her lectures continued to be well received. In fact, her students voted her the best professor of the year, a compliment she accepted gruffly in class and wept over in her apartment afterwards.

  All through December she was preoccupied by thoughts of an appointment that had been made for her at a Canadian hospital where she was to undergo a new and radical procedure for her damaged back. On the second-last day of the year she flew off to Toronto on what she described as “maybe the last chance to beat being a cripple the rest of my days.”

  Her appointment was with Dr. John McCulloch, an orthopedic surgeon who had pioneered the use of a papaya enzyme to dissolve fused spinal disks. On a bleak winter afternoon she reported to St. Michael’s Hospital.

  Later she shared her experience with a friend afflicted by the same problem:

  “Try and get a private room if you can (I couldn’t) and prepare for horrid food. You go to the operating room in a wheelchair, totally awake with no prior shots. Once there you lie belly down on a cold, flat slab that wakes you up even more. Then the anesthesiologist starts an IV of liquid Valium.

  “Still very, very, very much awake, you lie there as the doctor injects the enzyme into the particular disk involved. It takes about fifteen minutes for all of the joy juice to get into you. Part of the reason you are kept awake is so that McCulloch knows he is hitting the right spot! I got the impression that the more it hurt, the better a job he thought he was doing. That’s all there is to it.

  “Dr. McCulloch’s success rate is now in the ninety percent area simply because of his cautious approach, and people have gone to him unable to walk because of pain and have walked out of there Lourdes-style. They told me I could leave at 10:00 A.M. next day, but seemed to ignore the fact that I couldn’t stand up! Finally they found me an oversized corset that helped a lot, but getting back to my hotel with my luggage was a nightmare. One should never go alone for a job like this….

  “Within one month my pains were half gone; within two months practically all gone; and after four, no pain at all. It’s like a new life to be without it. Since I’d had it for some three years, I found it difficult to break the habit of limping.

  “A lot of American doctors disapprove of the procedure, thus it is illegal in this country. Thank God for Canada!”

  — 20 —

  It took Dian some time to recover from having her disks “digested by the papaya monster.” A spring, 1981, teaching semester was offered by Cornell, but she was in no condition to cope with it. After a few weeks of rest, however, she was able to drive between the apartment and her office at Langmuir in her dubious little car.

  January had another nasty surprise in store. Early on the sixteenth, one of Karisoke’s trackers came running to Peter Veit to report that Dian’s cabin had been broken into. Veit, who had been the only white in camp since the beginning of the new year, hurried to investigate. He found that someone had used tin snips to cut a crawl hole through the corrugated tin wall directly below a corner window of Dian’s bedroom. Two intruders had thoroughly rummaged the room, stuffed their loot into six bed covers converted into makeshift bags, and then fled down the main trail. They must have been singularly powerful individuals, since they took with them a movie camera together with fifty pounds of batteries and accessories, three typewriters, two microscopes, two pairs of binoculars, a desk chair, a pillow, ten towels, six sleeping bags, four camera tripods, and a variety of smaller objects.

  They were never caught and no trace of the stolen property was ever found. This was the first time that Karisoke had been burglarized during the dozen years of its existence. The worst aspect of it, from Dian’s point of view, was not the loss of equipment, valuable though this was, but the feeling that her home, the place she had helped build with her own hands and that was an essential part of her, had been violated.

  It would never have happened had I been there. It’s like an omen. Karisoke is coming apart at the seams, and things will probably get worse.

  This gloomy prediction was undoubtedly inspired by the knowledge that, on the day after the robbery, Sandy Harcourt had finally taken up permanent residence as the new master of Karisoke.

  Harcourt’s regime was rigorously devoted to ensuring that Karisoke function as a research center. He had no intention of allowing anything to detract from what he conceived to be the camp’s legitimate purpose—the collection of data. The nature of the data was not a matter of much moment so long as it had scientific merit. During his time, researchers would concern themselves with such disparate subjects as the weather, insect pests in the native shambas, regeneration of hagenia trees, and high-altitude vegetation. The compilation of esoteric facts and fragments of facts about Mountain Gorillas also continued, but this aspect was largely the private province of Harcourt and Kelly Stewart.

  His priorities were not Dian’s. In her view the most important role for Karisoke was to ensure that the creatures of the park continued to exist in life, rather than in the abstract as mere accumulations of information.

  Data gathering surely is important, but things haven’t changed that much from the days when scientists shot everything in sight to gather data. They built their reputations then on mainly dead animals. Now they use live animals too, but the principle is the same. Alive or dead, you use the data to pile up a lot of research papers until you’ve got enough to get “silverback” status. Nothing terribly wrong with that, except that many modern scientists, just like their predecessors, don’t seem to care if the study species perish, just so that they get all the facts they need about them first.

  It was, of course, inevitable that trouble would result between the acting director at Karisoke and the program director in Ithaca. What was not foreseen was the intensity of the battle royal that did ensue.

  An exhaustive, and exhausting, account of the conflict is preserved in a vast accumulation of paper shot-and-shell exchanged between the two combatants, their allies, and supporters. What follows is only a synoptic record.

  On Septem
ber 27, 1980, just two days after he took command, Harcourt complained that he had been given no money to run the camp and that the extensive back-files of gorilla data were missing. He wanted both matters rectified immediately “so this place can begin to function again.” Soon thereafter, he informed the board that ORPTN wanted only “park-relevant” studies to be conducted at the center. These would emphasize such subjects as tourism and would downplay the behavioral studies of gorillas for which Karisoke had been established and had become famous. Harcourt announced that he intended to make ORPTN’s requirements the center’s top priority for 1981, although he and Kelly would, of course, continue with their own behavioral studies.

  His next step was to write Dr. Jeanne Altman, chairperson of the board, to inform her that Benda-Lema had “formally, and in writing,” accepted him as director—not acting director, be it noted. “ORPTN has recognized that the position is tenable for two years,” he added, in what seemed a rather transparent attempt to gain similar recognition from the board.

  Dr. Altman did not take kindly to these “communiqués from an appointee of the board,” and Dian prematurely concluded that Harcourt had been put in his place. She wrote jubilantly to Rosamond: “He is Acting Director now … but although he may be allowed to burp on December 20 (or whenever) at 2:00 P.M., he will have to get permission first.”