by Farley Mowat
In effect, he had quit the job—but would not leave.
The National Geographic Research Committee, which had recently granted $16,800 toward the cost of running Karisoke, was not pleased by this letter. However, Kelly Stewart acted swiftly to limit the damage. Her apologies on behalf of her husband calmed the storm somewhat, and a long and chatty letter that she sent to Dian ten days later soothed some ruffled plumages amongst the Karisoke board members. Dian herself was remarkably unperturbed by Harcourt’s new eruption and was even slightly sympathetic.
The boy is getting “bushy.” Kelly should take him to England for a rest.
Houghton Mifflin Company, Dian’s American publisher, was now pressing for a title for the book, and Dian obliged with Gorillas in the Mist. It did not generate an outburst of enthusiasm.
They don’t like it. Nobody likes it. It seems only the gorillas aren’t complaining!
Like it or not, Dian stuck to her choice.
Am now undergoing the grind of the appendices, tables, charts, references, etc. I deplore it. I am finding it very difficult to know how to divide time on a daily basis between book, updating course work, analysis of field data, correspondence. There are simply not enough hours in the day, particularly in this country where there is no incentive to wake up in the morning.
By March 12, Dr. Eisenberg had had enough. He wrote to the members of the board:
“We seem to be entering a new phase in the continuation of studies at Karisoke…. I suggest the board phase out its involvement and that Dr. Fossey take a more direct hand in matters. In any event a new chairperson will have to be selected shortly since I would like to relinquish this position.”
Many other board members also felt that Dian should now be encouraged to pick up the reins that had been so firmly taken out of her hands. More and more of those who had earlier been convinced that she and Karisoke ought to be divorced were now concluding that they might have erred.
Work on the book was disrupted at the end of February when Dian flew west to give some lectures in Oklahoma, including one at Tulsa, at which she was introduced to a young graduate, Wayne McGuire, who was keen on going to Karisoke as a research student. Although he did not make much of an impression on Dian at the time, McGuire was to loom large in her future.
Lecture tours were not an exercise in ego feeding—they were Dian’s bread and butter. While she had been based at Karisoke, lecture fees had helped keep the center going; in exile in the United States, they made up a large part of her somewhat meager income.
On March 18 she and Cindy flew north to Plattsburgh, a small city not far from the Canadian border, where Dian had been hired to teach a month-long course. Although she had rather dreaded having to go even further “into the tundra,” the interlude turned out to be a pleasant one.
I’m teaching a mini-course in comparative behavior of the three Great Apes and am living in the country for the first time since leaving Africa. There is no way to explain what it means to me to have space and trees and animals and birds around once again. Cindy and I are both doing very well considering our ages, and the spring weather makes our old bones young again. I’m expected to remain here until the end of April. The students are super as are the faculty. Everyone is friendly, inquisitive, and enthusiastic over the course. I’ll be sorry to leave.
Back in Ithaca again she found herself required to make a difficult decision. The Karisoke board had delegated to her the task of choosing an interim replacement for Harcourt; someone to keep things going until she herself was able to resume command at Karisoke.
The temptation to return to Rwanda herself was strong, but several factors militated against it. Her current contract with Cornell would not be completed until September, and she considered it a matter of “integrity” that contracts be fully honored. Gorillas in the Mist was still not complete. Harcourt remained “in residence” at Karisoke, and there was no way she was going to return until he had vacated camp for good. Finally, there was Cindy—and the welfare of the old dog was by no means the least of Dian’s considerations.
“I imagine Cindy would also like very much to return to camp,” she wrote a friend, “but I don’t believe she could endure the trip … her hind legs just don’t work and she can’t get up without assistance. I’ve bought her an electric fireplace that looks almost like a real camp fireplace. In front of it I’ve put down a ‘people’ mattress and pillow, and that is where she spends most of her time, stretched out like a queen-in-waiting.
“Like Cindy, I too am now fat and menopausal (thus, very pleasant and congenial!)…. I don’t want to go through another winter here though. I do want to get back to camp and also get into writing full time rather than the half-teaching, half-writing schedules that now pay the rent.”
In the end she decided to consider an application for the post of center director from David Watts, who had been with her at Karisoke from March 1978 to July 1979. She arranged to meet him in Chicago in mid-May to discuss arrangements. But first there was to be another “trimate symposium,” this time at Hunter College in New York City.
By prior agreement, Goodall, Galdikas, and Fossey decided to use this opportunity to emphasize the urgent need for an all-out effort for the preservation of the remaining Great Apes. Dian was the last of the three to speak. The New York Times reported:
“Dr. Fossey described the fight to save the endangered African mountain gorillas, which are threatened both by the encroachment of farmers who want to cultivate the land and by poachers.
“Dr. Fossey’s voice broke as she told of a group of mountain gorillas that were hunted down and killed.
“The audience was hushed as Dr. Fossey showed a slide of a graveyard near her campsite where the gorillas were buried. ‘I keep the graveyard as a memorial,’ she said, ‘in the hopes that the day won’t come when there are only graveyards and memories in the mist.’“
Dian and Jane had too little time together on this occasion. After a convivial gathering at the Explorers’ Club, Dian caught a flight to Chicago. Her meeting with Watts went well, and it was agreed that he would take over at Karisoke as soon as Harcourt moved out. The assumption was that Harcourt would be cooperative about departing.
When Dian returned to Ithaca in May, she received a copy of a letter written by Harcourt to her British publisher, Hodder and Stoughton, threatening legal action if the book contained anything about him that he considered derogatory. Harcourt believed she might have made such comments, not only about himself, but about other people “concerned with conservation of the Virunga Volcanoes.” If this was indeed the case, he warned the publisher, “you might have not just one, but several, lawsuits for libel on your hands, some of them international.”
Dian and her publisher chose to ignore this challenge, but she sent a note to Anita McClellan about it.
“Oddly enough, on that same day, Kelly also wrote to me-a very fine, newsy letter signed ‘Love, Kelly.’ Kind of makes one wonder.”
While Dian persevered with the book through the long, hot summer, Harcourt and Kelly flew off to England, then on to the United States, leaving a Japanese biologist, Juichi Yamagiwa, in charge of Karisoke. According to the accounts Dian received, the camp had not run as smoothly since her own departure.
For a time Dian and the board believed Harcourt and Kelly had left Karisoke for good. Watts was making preparations to go to Rwanda when, in mid-September, the couple arrived back at camp and settled in again as if they had no intention of ever leaving.
A new stalemate had apparently developed. Although most members of the board had acquiesced in Dian’s choice of David Watts as the new acting center director, there was opposition from the Harcourt camp, which preferred that an Oxford graduate, thirty-two-year-old Dr. Richard Barnes, should succeed him. Apparently Harcourt did not wish to hand over to a Fossey appointee.
Finally Dian offered what seemed to her to be a workable compromise. She proposed that Barnes and Watts should share the management of Karis
oke as codirectors. This appeared to be such an eminently reasonable solution that the board gratefully accepted it, and left Harcourt with little choice but to acquiesce.
Early in December, Dian received a letter from Juichi Yamagiwa that poured acid on her heart:
“I was so afraid to inform you of bad news. On the sixteenth of November guards and Vatiri found four poachers hunting the Musakama Group and chased them to get back a baby (one month female). Unfortunately Sandy and Kelly were absent from Karisoke. I sent the baby down the mountain quickly to get the care of doctor, because I was afraid it got damaged seriously.
“On the seventeenth ORPTN did not send up any guards in spite of my strong request. So I went with Vatiri to check the hunting place. My God! There were several bloody trails and we found a dead silverback killed by the poachers with spears. Bloody trails showed that another gorilla must have been killed or seriously wounded.
“In that evening Nemeye and Mukera, who had been tracking Group 5, reported they got attacked by several poachers with dogs on the eastern slopes of Karisimbi. Poachers seem to know that we are disarmed these days. I went down to Mountain Gorilla Project headquarters, and we arranged six armed park guards to stay at Karisoke and to escort us for at least a week, and sixteen porters to carry the poor silverback down to camp.”
Dian had known for almost two years that her antipoaching program had been effectively abandoned, but this evidence of just how bad the situation had become was almost more than she could bear.
I had in mind to fly right away to Kennedy and take a chance on standby for Brussels and Kigali. Friends talked me out of it. They said it was too late to help the Musakama Group for now, and we had to put our efforts into getting things straightened out at camp. I wonder if we ever will … meantime the gorillas go on dying.
Dian had been able to entertain the spur-of-the-moment impulse to fly to Rwanda, and was perhaps impelled toward it, because she was now alone in her Lansing apartment. On October 19, Cindy had come to the end of her time.
Okay, Cindy, I promised you that I would do this, the only epitaph I can give you, but now in the first few hours after your death, I am wondering what life is all about. I so wished I had touched your body beneath that blue blanket at the vet hospital. I didn’t because I did not accept the fact that you were dead, I guess. And I guess I was afraid that I would cry. Remember, you and I had a pact that we wouldn’t cry in front of one another, but of course that was after you became a mature lady.
You were no ordinary dog. I know most of us like to think our dogs are extraspecial, but you were just that. Your mother was a registered boxer, born in Poland and brought to Rwanda by a real, honest-to-God count. Like most Europeans there, he kept your mother chained up as a watchdog. Well, somehow that fine lady of royal blood met an unknown male and the inevitable happened. I don’t know how many of you there were in the litter, but that highfalutin count only kept three, and one was you.
In 1968 I’d been living in the Virungas more than a year. My company, in the way of talk-to folks, were my Africans and my chickens, Wilma and Walter. Walter liked to sleep in my tent at night and even rode on the carriage of my typewriter-which made for messy type. A good friend thought I needed more company than a couple of chickens and gave me this little, stump-tailed puppy. Of course you weren’t born stump-tailed, but the Polish count wanted you to look real smart so he had your tail lopped off. It wasn’t terribly clever of him, but still you kept that old stump wagging all these years.
Lord, were you ever an unwelcome visitor when you first came. While Walter was doing his thing all over the typewriter, Wilma was laying eggs in a corner of the tent, and you sure made their lives pretty rough. But as you grew up your playmates also grew in size. Nothing you liked better than playing at night, especially full moon nights, with the elephants that came to drink at the creek in front of my cabin. I’ll never forget watching you with your little stump wagging madly, running in between the legs of those old mammoths, making them squeal and trumpet and flap their ears. Your play partners increased as you learned about buffalo, antelope, gorillas, mongeese-and the list was probably a lot longer, but that only you can tell.
Cindy, you were one lesson in courage, but remember, you loved people so much you failed as a watchdog. When Sebarari came into my cabin and swiped my valise with all the money I had in the world plus all my jewelry, you didn’t bark. He just petted you on the head. No big deal, right? Everything being relative.
And so you grew and grew, not just in body, but in love. Seems you loved everybody-all the porters, the animal guests around the camp, the sick or wounded gorillas and duikers you helped look after, even the European visitors. Remember how each morning you would make your rounds from cabin to cabin just to give all a good-morning kiss with that big, wet tongue. Yes, Cindy, you were the “love” in Karisoke. Cindy, Cindy, there are too many memories, I’m sorry….
The epitaph was never finished, but at the bottom of it one additional paragraph was scrawled.
Wed. 6:30 A.M. Cindy, remember the little newspaper boy who came over here after you died and really made more sense than most adults who try to express their sorrow but lack the words? This little boy said, “You must be really lonely now, and you must cry a lot. Whenever I’m lonely I cry too-but only when no one can hear me.”
— 21 —
Early in January 1983, Dian wrote Rosamond Carr about the Karisoke situation: “Another little gorilla was taken from poachers on November 16. I heard most of the details from the Japanese student who has been at Karisoke for some time but had to return to Japan. Just about everything I learned factually about camp came from him, and I shall miss his letters. Kelly sends on the monthly reports, which are very brief and positive, yet a number of students and visitors who have been at camp give me a whole new slant. Poaching is as bad as ever, but one simply doesn’t hear about it now. The slaying of the silverback and others from the group from which the newest captive came would also have been hushed up had it been possible.
“I should very much like to return for about three months, but only after Harcourt leaves. He was due to leave at the end of December, but is staying on. He refuses to say when he intends to go.
“I’m sure my men must think I’ve dropped off the edge of the earth, and I so want to come back to convey my love and gratitude to them. I do want them to know that they, and the camp, are deeply etched in my heart and mind…. The students who have returned say that the cabins are falling apart…. It will be disheartening for me to see what I worked for for so many years getting in disarray, but if the men are cheered up and the camp gets a new sparkle, then I think the three months will fly by. I would obviously prefer to stay longer, but I don’t know yet if I am capable because of the high-altitude breathing problems that are bound to be more acute now.”
And in a more personal vein: “Have cut down on my smoking a lot—only one cigarette an hour, which must still sound excessive to you, however it sure beats three and four an hour! Rosamond, I am TRULY quite a mellow person compared to what I was. It must be the fat, or perhaps getting over the horrid menopause. So, the new Fossey is a jolly old lady who needs glasses to find her glasses, though she still has her own teeth….
“The book is done at last … I am so glad! I hadn’t realized just how depressing it was to wake up each morning knowing how much more writing had to be done about the animals I so loved—those that had been killed. It was, at times, unbearable, and I was often close to giving up on it completely.”
January had seemed to be going well this year, but on the twenty-fourth a missile with multiple warheads was dispatched from Karisoke targeted on the offices of M. Le Directeur, ORPTN; the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation; the Fauna Preservation Society; Cooperation Belge (the Belgian aid program in Rwanda); and the National Geographic Society.
It was a denunciation by Harcourt of the Digit Fund. Having vehemently denied that the fund and/or Dian deserved credit for driving the ca
ttle out of the park or, for that matter, for saving what was left of the mountain gorilla population, Harcourt gave the credit to the park authorities and to “international organizations that have between them donated many thousands of dollars to active conservation of the mountain gorilla.”
He went on to state that, though the KRC did indeed play an active role in gorilla conservation, it did so “in the absence of D. Fossey, in the absence of funds from the Digit Fund, and in the absence of any representative of the Digit Fund.” As the director of the KRC, Harcourt formally disassociated himself and the center from all statements in the fall 1982 Newsletter from the Karisoke Research Center.
This outburst was sparked by the rejuvenation of the Digit Fund.
By mid-1980, Dian had decided that, in good conscience, she could no longer solicit donations for the fund since the antipoaching campaign it was intended to support was not being implemented by the new director. She therefore stopped publicizing it and, of course, sent no further monies from it to Karisoke. However, in the autumn of 1982, in anticipation of her return to camp and of renewing the patrols, she reactivated it. The newsletter announcing this decision and describing the Digit Fund’s accomplishments was what had so stirred Sandy Harcourt’s wrath.
At the end of January, Dian got something of a dressing down from Anita McClellan, who had been trying to persuade her to put more about the core conservation issues into Gorillas in the Mist.
“Your being polite and reluctant to describe Africans’ attitudes toward government or park regulations; conflict of interest; misuse of cash from conservationists; bad land use; capture of animals for foreign zoos, etc., will not save gorillas’ lives. Such reluctance to confront the tough issues is a bit like advocating theoretical conservation, which doesn’t save the animals from traps and guns, but sounds okay.”
