Gorillas in the Mist

by Farley Mowat

  Even though the implication that she was acting like a “theoretical conservationist” made Dian see red, she remained unpersuaded. She was not afraid of legal action if she exposed the sleaziness of the internecine wars engaged in by players in the “conservationist game”—she was just genuinely reluctant to pillory anyone in Gorillas in the Mist.

  This book is about gorillas, not people. It is not even about me, and there is too much “me-itis” in it already as a result of editorial decisions. I would prefer there be no people in at all, good or bad, but I guess that’s too much to ask.

  February 1983 brought good news from Dr. Snider to the effect that the National Geographic’s Committee for Research and Exploration had authorized a grant of $21,860 for 1983. This manna was accompanied by a warning: “Our committee is reluctant to make grants to support a facility [as opposed to an individual]. We are making a rare exception for Karisoke. However, I don’t think the committee will do so indefinitely, and the committee urges you to seek funding from other sources for the center itself.”

  February also produced its share of problems. By the twenty-fifth Dian still did not know when Harcourt planned to leave Karisoke, nor had she heard whether ORPTN had issued work permits for her new students—Americans David Watts and Karen Jensen, and the Englishman Richard Barnes—without which these three could not proceed to Rwanda. She wrote urgently to Kelly:

  “I know only that you intend now to leave in March, though when in March I don’t know. Do you have any idea if the work permits will be ready for Watts, Jensen, and Barnes by the time you leave? They are, naturally, ever so eager to get on their way.”

  Kelly’s reply, written on March 10, was disconcerting—and ominous. “We have not received Watts’s application forms, so he has not been applied for,” to which was added the information that Barnes and Jensen had been accepted by ORPTN, “and so we have sent Dr. Barnes a telegram, and I have written to Jensen.” The letter closed on this pessimistic note: “Even if we received David’s application next porter’s day, I don’t think there is much chance he will be able to come here before June.”

  Watts’s application for a work permit had been mailed to Karisoke almost four months earlier, in November 1982, for forwarding to ORPTN.

  On March 22, Richard Barnes arrived from England. Eight days later Sandy Harcourt and Kelly Stewart took their much-belated departure. The Harcourt era was at an end-but the shadow lingered.

  One day before their departure, Watts’s application turned up. Harcourt sent it on to ORPTN, but neither Watts nor Dian heard anything more about it until late May when Watts got a letter from Jean-Pierre von der Becke, who, it will be remembered, was the director of the Mountain Gorilla Project. The message was that ORPTN had refused Watts a permit because it would not “accept the fact to have two directors for KRC. Indeed they do not think the station is important enough, and I must say, I understand their point of view.”

  This was too much for Watts, who could plainly read the writing on the wall. He withdrew his application to work at Karisoke—whose new and now sole director would be Harcourt’s choice, Dr. Richard Barnes.

  The effect of all this on Dian was to precipitate a bout of depression, but it also convinced her that she dared no longer delay her return to Rwanda if she ever hoped to regain control of her creation.

  She wrote to Ian Redmond with something of the old fire of earlier days:

  “Remember that horrid, horrid night when I asked Rwelekana to bring you over to my house when I thought I was going ‘bonkers’? In many ways I am going through those same unearthly feelings now, though certainly to a lesser extent, for I was leaving the animals then, and there is nothing here in the United States to leave except junk food or TV….

  “I am nearly packed up to go back to Karisoke, but for only three months—mid-June through mid-September. I have been told that someone is trying to arrange for me not to get a visa back into Rwanda—he did try same in September 1980, but to no avail.

  “Most of my news comes from sources not connected with Karisoke, obviously. I know that poaching is heavier there, and within the Virungas as a whole, than ever when I was there. I

  know that young gorillas are being captured…. I also know the physical facilities at Karisoke are nearly rotted out because no one cared about the upkeep of the cabins; the car is finished for the same reasons. Everything I worked for nearly single-handedly over thirteen years is just about finished.

  “What really bothers me, Ian, about you is that you say you will give proceeds from your lectures to the Mountain Gorilla Project, when you, of all people, know that cutting a trap is one hell of a lot more important than showing conservation education cine to Africans….

  “If you have suddenly joined the ‘aren’t we great, ‘cause we teach the Africans how to conserve their country’ scheme, I guess our paths have diverged. That plan is super, super fine, but it is putting the cart before the horse, and you know it. It takes one bullet, one trap, one poacher to kill a duiker, a buffalo, a gorilla, an elephant. No number of cute cine films are going to stop the slaughter now going on. It takes one small, preferably five small, patrols to cut traps, confiscate weapons, capture poachers, to preserve the animals remaining in the park. You know that also. The more popular the Mountain Gorilla Project grows, the less chances the gorillas have—that has been proved in the last two years.”

  As May progressed and the time for action grew closer, Dian rallied. Writing to Craig Sholley, who had been with her at Karisoke in 1979, she sounded almost buoyant:

  “I am returning shortly. Perhaps not for a long stay, as I am quite too far over the hill—God, fifty-one years of indulgences—for a full-time stint up and down those hills; but I need to bring things to the wonderful men (no way to explain how I miss and love them) and to work on the cabins Fossey-style…. I bet I will be going up there, even if carried, with paint, new mats, stovepipes, lamps, and nails every year until I join my betters: Digit, Uncle Bert, Macho, and all the others.”

  Dian was now receiving mail from the new director at KRC, addressed very formally to “Dr. Fossey.” The arrival of Karen Jensen, an attractive twenty-seven-year-old, on May 10 was good news. However, a report on the physical condition of the center made worse reading even than Dian had anticipated. Barnes wrote: “We have no cooking facilities and no lamps here other than the ones Karen and I are using at the moment; all the other stoves and lamps are broken, so it is essential that you bring something to cook on and to see by.”

  Dian was incredulous— “There were sixteen pressure lamps and eight working stoves in camp when I left” —but there was worse to come. Due to several years of neglect, the combi was a write-off, and a replacement would cost fifteen thousand dollars; guns for the patrols, much of the optical equipment, cutlery and dishes, even a large proportion of the bedding had also vanished. The list of replacement items Barnes begged Dian to bring with her from the United States or Nairobi kept growing until it was pages long. The disappearance of the bedding seems to have been the last straw. Dian replied to Barnes’s appeals: “I will bring everything needed for writing, eating, seeing, but bloody @#$% if am bringing sleeping bags or linens. If these are all gone, the shit is going to hit the proverbial fan!”

  With her arrangements nearing completion she booked a flight to arrive in Kigali late on June 20, 1983. Her stay at Karisoke would be shorter than originally planned. Publication of Gorillas in the Mist was scheduled for August 25, and Houghton Mifflin was arranging a promotional tour beginning only a week later.

  Everything I own is packed now as I get ready to wing back to camp. Much will be stored but I have five suitcases-UGH-filled with everything, literally, from soup to nuts. I have to take all this on to camp because just about nothing remains. In preparation for that I’m trying to pack my temper along with my belongings! Am only able to stay until August 27 when am due to return to the States for a bloody lecture tour arranged primarily for the book. My heart is certainly
not in this. I reckon if people want to buy a book, they will buy it. They don’t need the author shoving it down their throats. I don’t know where I am going to go after the tour. If my old bod can take the altitude and the work, then I shall plan on returning to camp, but only if I can function there. I really can’t tell. The first thing is to get Karisoke functioning again the way it used to, for the good of the students and of the gorillas. Then we’ll see.

  She arrived in Kigali on schedule—and had to spend the next four days in the capital. ORPTN had decreed that she too must now have a work permit and was reluctant to give her one. When a permit was finally produced—it was good for only six months. Nevertheless, her waiting time in Kigali was well spent, literally, shopping in the dingy little dukas scattered along Kigali’s dusty streets for yet more replacement items needed at Karisoke.

  On the morning of the twenty-fourth she finally climbed to camp.

  In the midst of a horrid hailstorm that had to be meant for me, since this is the beginning of the dry season.

  Once she reached camp the sun began to shine.

  The return was very emotional as I once again met my African staff (nine men), some of whom have worked for camp since 1967. We simultaneously hugged one another, shook hands, cried, laughed, and exchanged all kinds of gossip and tales. They kindly said that I seemed ten years younger (good old Miss Clairol), and they liked my new “fat” look…. About ten minutes after I had arrived, bathed and cleaned up, Kanyaragana, my houseboy since 1968 (now about thirty years old), came into the living room and said, “Habari Mama yako?”—How is your mother? Basili asked the same question next day. This isn’t just politeness; they have a real concern for the families of close friends, and I believe they think of me as one.

  I then had tea with Richard Barnes and the American girl, Karen Jensen. They are enjoying a sweet, new love affair and are both actually very nice, particularly Richard, who works hard; but the Africans are still the backbone of this place.

  In the afternoon I took my first good look around. My heart really sank. I had never imagined such decay and neglect. The Africans watched me, and when I got so mad I was really crying, Kanyaragana said, “It hurts us too. But now you will bring it all back again.”

  My own cabin-some people call it the manor-was worst of all. Everything I loved was broken or removed. The big fireplace in my room was closed off; the stoves all removed; the pens for chickens and other animals destroyed; the gorillas’ graveyard totally obscured by vegetation; outdoor tables all rotted; wall mats rotten and paint peeling off everything inside and out. The whole camp has been totally neglected as white people have come and gone, taken what they wanted, never bothering to replace or refurbish anything. Where the hell am I going to find stovepipes in Rwanda just now? BUT I will find them somewhere in Africa! I just do not understand how or why anyone could hate me this much.

  The work of restoration began next day, and within a week—such was the fervor Dian brought to the task—the little world of Karisoke was looking considerably better, although it would take the best part of two months to finish the job. Meanwhile there were other old friends whom Dian urgently wished to see. The meeting, when it came, was unforgettable.

  One of the outstanding moments of my life happened on July 5 when I set out with some degree of mixed anticipation and anxiety to renew acquaintance with Group 5, who were the only gorillas fairly close to camp. Would they remember me after three years’ absence? I doubted it sincerely.

  To reach them meant a bloody long climb lasting two hours and filled with such oaths from me that the long-dormant volcanoes should have erupted, because a new tracker, Kana, took the most energy-wasting and zigzag route. We finally found them in a bowl between First and Second hills south of camp. Kana headed back right away, leaving me huffing and puffing like a run-out old buffalo.

  The females and youngsters of the clan (sixteen in all) were resting in thick vegetation in the warm sun on the steep slope of the bowl where they had made their day nests. When I got my breath, I worked my way down toward them, though I could see only the occasional one. When I got twenty feet from them I sat down and began making Fossey-style introduction noises—a soft series of rumbles like gorillas make when expressing contentment.

  The nearest female was old Effie, mother of six, whom I had known since 1967. She’d had a new baby in my absence, little Maggie, who sure didn’t believe in making shy. Maggie came scrambling over right away—not to look at me, but to investigate my clothing and equipment. This dismayed me because I thought it was the result of too much habituation with the tourists the park gang has kept on sending to Group 5.

  But my dismay only lasted a second or two. Effie glanced my way while chewing on a stalk of celery. She looked away, then did a double-take myopic scrutiny as if not believing her eyes. Then she tossed the celery aside and began walking rapidly toward me.

  Meantime Tuck, another female I had known nearly as long, appeared out of the underbrush and started to pick up Maggie, I guess to take her off to safety, then Tuck too did a second take. She dropped Maggie and walked right up in front of me, resting her weight on her arms so that her face was level with mine and only a couple of inches away. She stared intently into my eyes, and it was eye-to-eye contact for thirty or forty seconds. Not knowing quite what to do, for I had never had this reaction from gorillas before, I squished myself flat on the bed of vegetation. Whereupon she smelled my head and neck, then lay down beside me … and embraced me! … embraced me! … embraced me! GOD, she did remember!

  Tuck began crooning, and I crooned back. Effie had come up by then and she too stared straight into my eyes, sniffed me, then piled up on the two of us and I was really squished. Her and Tuck’s plaintive murmurs reached other clan members in the dense foliage nearby, and one by one the other females came over to us. All the older four that I knew best repeated the eye-to-eye contact, then settled down with long arms entwining all of us into one big, black, furry ball. As they settled in, each one was making prolonged, inquisitive “hmmmmm” sounds as if to ask: “Where the hell have you been? Is this really you?”

  Not to be left out, the youngsters joined us too: Jozi, Cantsbee, Pablo, and Maggie really took advantage of the trust their mothers were showing to work me over, gently hitting, nibbling, pinching me, and pulling my hair, and trying to carry off everything loose. They tried to take my camera, water jug, panga, and my glasses, which, unfortunately, I have to wear in the field now. They did kidnap my new leather gloves (two hours later I found the right one, but the left one is forever on the mountain).

  I could have happily died right then and there and wished for nothing more on earth, simply because they had remembered.

  While the kids cavorted a few feet from us, Effie, Puck, Poppy, Tuck, and I settled down to enjoy a forty-five-minute palaver, all nestled up together amidst the thistle and celery clumps. I’m ashamed to say I did most of the vocalizing, but with an audience like this how could I resist? The problem was that when I used their language I didn’t really know what I was saying, so I talked English. I told them of Cindy’s death, then strayed to life in America (that got me a few sympathetic grunts), and apologized for inflicting Harcourt on them, then ended up just trying to tell them how happy I was to be back. Believe it or not, I’m sure they understood that part at least.

  While we ladies had our confab, old Beethoven, the leader of the group, with the two blackbacks Ziz and Shinda, fed their way down into the bottom of the bowl, paying us no heed. The other silverback, Icarus, stayed on our slope about fifteen feet from the ladies’ gossip circle but didn’t interrupt. Eventually Beethoven looked up at us and barked that the party was over. Time to go. The ladies and their offspring moved off slowly, leaving me with absolute disbelief at what had happened. They knew me—they welcomed me back! Perhaps they were even happy to see the Lone Woman of the Forest again.

  I tried to visit them next day, but they had returned to the high part of the saddle, above eleven
thousand feet and five hours’ walk away. I couldn’t make it.

  I had gone out with Rwelekana; and when we were coming back (I was totally exhausted), he very seriously said, “Yesterday the gorillas had to come a long way to say hello and greet you near camp. Today they have to go on with their own business.” I absolutely choked up at this idea, but he was serious.

  The effect of the reunion with Effie’s clan was transcendental—and enduring. Whatever doubts Dian may have had about her future place in the scheme of things had been resolved.

  I know now that I’ve truly come home. No one will ever force me out of here again.

  Restoration went on apace during a long stretch of warm and sunny weather. Dian was reveling in Karisoke, as this letter to Anita McClellan testifies:

  “Heard the weirdest sound today. Took about fifteen seconds to identify it. The drone of a distant airplane! Now I know I’ve really escaped. Well, not quite. Every now and then I think I hear the phone ringing and just freeze. That particular Ithaca symptom might take another week to disappear. DAMN, phone just rang again….

  “Magical afternoon. Off and on sunshine, warm, quiet. I’d been four hours working on the six-month summary report for National Geographic and couldn’t stand one more minute of same. So in my lavender Nikes and matching windbreaker, I sneaked away from camp chores to go out to Mzee’s grave.” Mzee had been the patriarch of the Karisoke duikers.

  “On the small protected glade where he last lay down, the turf is now filled with neat piles of bushbuck and duiker dung, and buffalo circle the glade. It was spine-tingling, as if the remaining antelope (the population is more than halved since I left here) held nightly séances with the spirit of the wise old sage, seeking the secret of longevity in their doomed habitat….

  “Mikeno, Karisimbi, Visoke, all loomed out of the mist on cue, and there was such tranquillity as I have not known in years and years. Within a couple of dozen feet of Mzee’s grave grows a special orchid known to no one but myself. The striped flowers, a slightly pink shade, were in full bloom. I bade it greetings and once again resisted the urge to take a small sample. Never, never! Nothing is quite as magical as having forest secrets like this—perhaps seashore secrets run a close second. I might share them with you if you are willing to run the risk of having your tongue cut out.