Gorillas in the Mist

by Farley Mowat

  “By concentrating on tourism, salaries for the expatriates, cars, staff housing, etc., the Mountain Gorilla Project has almost, not quite, neglected its responsibilities toward safeguarding the remaining gorillas in the Virungas. Yet if it were not for the M.G.P., you, and several hundred others, would never have had the privilege of meeting these extraordinary animals. So it would hardly be fair of me to say that they are all wrong and I am all right.

  “Nevertheless, far away from the fanlight [sic] my Digit Patrols keep on working…. None of the gorillas being monitored by the Digit Fund were harmed or injured in any way by poachers during 1984, because of constant surveillance by Karisoke patrols; but four were trapped in the area patrolled by Mountain Gorilla Project. They actually lost eight gorillas to poachers last year, but of course the public won’t hear about it.

  “As an example of the problems here, three nights ago poachers’ dogs killed a magnificent old bushbuck who had been King of the Forest long before any of us came around. He probably sired half the few remaining bushbucks around Visoke until these dogs brought him down by his testicles. Subsequently we have been spending many patrol hours trying to find these dogs, for this is the fifth bushbuck they have killed in the last two months. This kind of thing doesn’t attract tourist or grant money, but it is what my work is all about—active conservation.”

  By mid-February, when she wrote to her old friend Glenn Hausfater, now living in Minnesota, she was in a better mood:

  “People continue to come and go at Karisoke, some helpful, some not. The majority of them are able to do good footwork, which I find next to impossible now. Their reports leave a lot to be desired, but this I can remedy with the help of the Africans—I have designed a neat check-sheet and map system that the trackers follow to every group religiously every day. It makes European observers almost superfluous. It goes without saying that my main purpose in life is keeping the Digit Fund antipoacher patrols going and training park guards for the gorilla guardian program….

  “One last project is now well under way—one that I’ve wanted to do for years, unraveling the meanings of all the names of hills, streams, rivers, etc., within the Virungas. This is truly proving to be exacting work and the men relish it as much as I. I have roughly six hundred such names with great history behind them, most dating back to the early days of the Tutsi, but many still used by the Hutu, almost with reverence. It’s a constructive way for the old lady to spend her spare time. Needless to say, these work goals are slipped in between beating the Africans, starving them to death, or shooting at tourists! Would you believe, these stories are still flying hot and heavy down below.”

  The campaign of calumny against her no longer bothered Dian excessively. In fact, now that the fund-granting organizations had cut her off and she could suffer no further financial damage, she could find a flicker of amusement in the fearsome reputation her enemies had given her.

  However, when that reputation threatened her continuing residence in Rwanda, she was not amused. On March 5, with her current visa about to expire, she reluctantly and with considerable apprehension climbed down the mountain and headed for Kigali. Word had reached her a few days earlier from the American embassy that there was a possibility her visa would not be renewed at all. “Representations have been made that you ought to be excluded from Rwanda on the grounds that you have abused the country’s laws and hospitality.”

  Dian went straight to the ambassador’s residence, where she was warmly received. After her return to camp she wrote to Deedee Blane, the ambassador’s wife, “I can’t thank both of you enough for all of your kindness and generosity. The five days in your company seemed like a five-star vacation. I only wish I hadn’t been so worried about the visa, as this gray cloud sure didn’t make me a very responsive houseguest.”

  The gray cloud seems to have been dispelled largely because of lobbying by Ambassador Blane. His arguments must have been impressive, because not only did the government renew the visa, it did so for a period of six months. Dian became euphoric when she heard the news—somuch so that she managed to crash a borrowed car (her own combi had long been hors de combat for lack of money with which to repair it) with such gusto that she broke two ribs. When she returned, more-or-less triumphantly, to camp on March 10, it was in a litter carried by ten porters. Fortunately, the ribs had broken cleanly this time. They healed fairly quickly and without the agonizing complications she had endured in 1977.

  Her relief at obtaining a six-month visa was immense. As she wrote to Stacey Coil, “I don’t believe I could have borne it if they had told me to leave. The longer I work here, despite the fact that I cannot go into the field as often as I used to, I realize more and more just how important it is that I am here. Stacey, this is the only place where I belong.”

  By late March, Mike Catsis had returned to England and had been replaced by a thirty-four-year-old American, Peter Clay. Dian’s feud with Watts was still being maintained, but had settled into a ritualized conflict without much animosity on either side.

  On March 17, Watts resigned but brought a paper saying what a good fellow he is on the eighteenth. So I guess he stays.

  Dian would probably have missed him if he’d gone. Clearly she did not miss the Spaniards, who departed on March 27.

  SPICS GONE. Thank God.

  She did not relinquish her vigilance after their departure, being now convinced that an attempt would be made to kidnap one or more young gorillas from the Virungas.

  Tiger’s illness remained a major preoccupation.

  He is doing better, though I am inclined to worry about the effect on him of the rainy season, which will surely last another month. He is just behind my cabin now and I visited with him yesterday, which wasn’t easy with my two broken left ribs. He seems to be moving better and is perhaps perkier, but his chest wound hasn’t healed and he has a deep cough, but since I am lung-prone myself it is quite possible that I overreact to such symptoms. He continues hanging around back of camp, either because of my scintillating company or the big bamboo clump in my front yard. On the sly (because I won’t let anyone cut any living growth near camp) I have been taking him fresh bamboo shoots every day. Not enough to make him dependent on it, just enough to perk his spirits up a bit. I really believe he hangs around because he is lonely and knows this is a safe place where he can see/hear people every day.

  Ziz, who was a runt and a whiner as a kid, has now turned into the King of the Mountain. He has acquired five new females, which is a record for even an experienced silver-back. I believe two came from Group 6, one from a fringe group, and Simba of course from Tiger. The influx of these new females into Group 5 led to a lot of fighting between them, so Ziz finally left Group 5, taking his harem with him. This leaves old Beethoven, the only silverback left in the group, with old Effie, his six daughters, two sons, and three grandchildren. If he meets up with another, stronger silver-back, it could mean the end of Group 5. Ziz is wearing out his little thing covering his five females. If there isn’t a gorilla baby boom it won’t be his fault. Ziz the whiz!

  The other groups remain far, far away, and I just can’t get to anyone except Tiger. It is ever so frustrating after so many years of going out daily no matter how far the animals were roaming. I guess I shot my wad by overworking during the first twelve years here and in Zaire.

  April was crammed with incident. The final contract with Universal Studios for a movie to be based on Gorillas in the Mist arrived, was signed, and sent on its way.

  Dian received an invitation from a New Zealand advertising company.

  They want me to do a TV commercial for American Express of, you’ve got it, Fossey sitting with a lapful of gorillas, saying, “and don’t leave home without one.” I think I’ll pass on this assignment.

  Another invitation arrived; this one from the Morris Animal Foundation of Los Angeles, asking Dian to speak at the foundation’s annual meeting at Universal City, California, in mid-June, then attend a primate medical semin
ar in San Diego. Since the foundation would pay all expenses, Dian decided to take advantage of the opportunity. Tongue in cheek, she wrote to her agent in New York, “What a chance! Could go to Disneyland! Visit the Universal lot!! Got to be the dream of a lifetime.”

  Next she heard that paperback rights to Gorillas in the Mist had been bought by Penguin, which intended to publish in June, and that the book had already been translated into French, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, and Dutch.

  To top it all came the news that the Humane Society of New York was awarding her its special medal in recognition of her work with the gorillas.

  April in Rwanda had produced some of the worst weather in recent years. That month it rained or hailed at Karisoke on twenty-nine out of thirty days, with a total precipitation of almost fifteen inches! When it was not raining—and often when it was—the mountains and the forests were shrouded in black fog.

  On May 1 the sun came out. Next day the poachers, who had been rained out of the forests, returned to the attack.

  Vatiri’s patrol, consisting of himself, Munyanchosa, and Sekaryongo, found the fresh footprints of four Batwa poachers along the Suza River. It was then late in the day, but they followed the tracks across the boundary between Zaire and Rwanda until it began to get dark and they had to return to camp.

  Vatiri concluded the poachers hadn’t made any kills yet, so would remain on the mountain. He also thought they might be interested in gorillas, so I felt a special effort was needed. I split the available men into two patrols, Vatiri and Munyanchosa in one and Sekaryongo and Nemeye in the other, both patrols armed with pistols.

  They left camp at 7:30 A.M. While circling Five Hills, they found the fresh trail of one man climbing up the Suza ravine. Vatiri, the senior tracker, sent Nemeye and Sekaryongo to follow this one while he and his partner went off to search for other tracks.

  Nemeye and Sekaryongo carefully followed the lone trail above the 4th Hill and across the Rugasa River. Continuing cautiously into Zaire, they smelled smoke and guessed there was a poacher’s ikiboogi close by. They split up and closed in on it, pistols in hand, but the poacher saw or heard them coming and, clutching his panga and his bow, fled into a creekbed covered over with vegetation. Sekaryongo opened fire but missed. They were then all madly running down the gully, and Nemeye shouted not to shoot again for fear someone would be killed.

  At this point the poacher must have thought he would be killed, and stopped. When the trackers reached him, they were amazed to find it was Sebahutu-the most notorious poacher left in the Virungas, who had never before been captured in the forests because he could run like an antelope, hide like a mole, and was as aggressive as a tiger if cornered. Sebahutu had also been reported dead a few months ago, but that had been just a ruse.

  The patrol brought him back to the ikiboogi and tied up his hands and ankles so he couldn’t run while they packed up his stuff: a salt sack filled with red potatoes, corn, and beans, which showed he expected to be in the forest several days. At this time he offered my men five thousand Rwandan francs apiece if they would let him go and as many elephant tusks as they could carry. He said it was useless to take him back to the Ruhengeri prison because of his “connections” there and in the park headquarters. According to Nemeye, he wasn’t worried because he said he was in the park to do a job for some of the “big men.” I doubt that “job” was getting ivory. Probably it was to set up an attempt to get a young gorilla.

  The patrol brought him back to camp, and I kept him in my living room, tied up of course, for twenty-four hours. Much like a man confronting a deathbed confession, he willingly (I didn’t touch him) gave us over sixty poachers’ names, and locations where they enter the forest; the names of those with guns; makes of same; where they obtain them; and where they hide them. Then he gave names and locations of dealers and middlemen that make a living off selling trophies such as elephant tusks and feet, gorilla skulls, hands, and feet and infants, and antelope and buffalo meat. Then Sebahutu came up with the names and descriptions of whites and Pakistanis who deal with the middlemen exporting the above trophies out of Rwanda.

  The wealth of information was mind-boggling. If the government will truly cooperate, this capture will put the biggest dent in poaching within the Virungas ever known. Already it has set the park department and its guards on their ears-raids have been started everywhere by the judiciary in previously “secret” places. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

  Unlikely as it might appear to Dian’s critics, Sebahutu’s confession seems to have been voluntary. Dian insisted that no force was used, and this was confirmed by Sebahutu himself in the course of an interview with Mark Condiotti, the one employee of the Mountain Gorilla Project Dian trusted. She sent Sebahutu down the mountain to the custody of the military, accompanied by a note from her to Condiotti: “I sure hope they don’t mistreat Sebahutu after all this information he has so decently given.” Mark responded the following day, “I felt you had been gentle with Sebahutu and he told me you were nice to him. So you need have no worries about any false rumors about you coming from M.G.P. or the park conservateur.” To which Dian replied, “Am glad to hear that I haven’t yet been accused of beating or castrating him, etc., etc. I actually became quite fond of the little fellow—he didn’t have to open his mouth, but he sure did!”

  The simplest explanation for Sebahutu’s loquaciousness is that he feared the Lone Woman of the Forest would otherwise kill him for his many crimes against the gorillas. Perhaps the “law” would not have harmed him; but Dian was outside the law—and incorruptible. In any case she found herself in possession of a mother lode of information, some of it dynamite.

  There are names on the list that could mean big trouble if released. If there was a plan to capture mountain gorilla infants for Spain, it surely won’t happen now.

  The sunny weather that had welcomed May proved short-lived. Ebony clouds again obscured the volcanoes, and Dian wrote to a friend in California, “Aren’t you bored with sun nearly every day? Tell me, what is sun? What does it look like? What does it feel like? I keep telling myself this place can’t be worse than Ithaca in winter, but after nearly three months of almost daily rain and fog, I just don’t know.”

  Peter Clay knew. He left camp for good on May 20, although not without regret. In a moving farewell letter to Dian he wrote:

  “There is a very real sense here of the world being created anew each day. That creation seems a miracle, so close and so stirring in its beauty. Perhaps it is the clouds moving silently through this ancient forest, the cool mist seeming to caress us. It has felt like a return to Eden, and to a kind of innocence, to spend these few months here. Though I know my species is despoiling this fragile earth and is tragically estranged from nature, here it feels not so. The gentle duikers and bushbuck, the strange little hyrax, and most of all, the gorillas seem to have forgiven man’s shortsighted abuse of the earth.”

  The weather was not the only depressing factor in Dian’s life at this time. Her lungs were again “hurting like hell,” and she was out of money. In late May she wrote to Ambassador Blane:

  “I am nearly broke and would like to borrow 100,000 RWF from the American embassy or anyone else who is willing to trust me for same and would be more than happy to pay a reasonable rate of interest. I’m expected in America on June 6, at which time I can collect more funds. In the meantime I must leave money for camp expenses during my absence. I hope this request doesn’t seem outlandish. I make it in desperation!”

  Blane responded by lending her the required sum from his own pocket.

  On May 21, Karisoke was visited by Barry Schlachter, a reporter from the Associated Press, fresh from interviewing employees of the Mountain Gorilla Project and sources in Kigali about Dian Fossey. His feature story was representative of her treatment in the press at this period in her life:

  “The visitors slogged on foot for about an hour and a half through sometimes thigh-deep mud and clumps of stinging ne
ttles to reach Fossey’s settlement in the ghostly beautiful rain forest…. Fossey has emphysema. She chain smokes the local Impala-brand cigarettes. She takes small steps, pausing for raspy breaths of air, while leading visitors to the gorilla cemetery…. She teaches the apes to fear blacks, but not whites, because most of the poachers are Africans. She admits the practice could be branded as racist.

  “She has been known to spray-paint a four-letter word on an errant cow that wandered into the preserve. She once was accused of kidnapping a poacher’s child to swap for a captured baby gorilla….

  “The habituation of gorillas has led to a money-making tourist industry in Rwanda, says Laurent Habiyaremye, forty-eight, director of parks and tourism. About sixteen percent of the national revenue comes from tourism, three fourths of that directly traced to gorilla-viewing activities, he says.

  “The Rwandan park director credits Dian Fossey for making that possible and has a lot of praise for her.

  “‘If my office could grant her sainthood, it would,’ he says.

  “Despite his high regard for Fossey, Habiyaremye flatly denies an allegation in her book that a ranking park official here conspired in the killing of a gorilla named Kweli. He also attacked her policy of teaching gorillas to fear blacks, but not whites…. ‘It is scandalous. She makes a mistake because gorillas live in a country of blacks.’

  “‘I have no friends,’ the tall Californian says with no hint of regret. ‘The more that you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people.’“

  The dichotomy evident in Habiyaremye’s comments is significant. As to the paragraph about Dian’s being friendless, this particular oversimplification proved damaging. It was, and still is, widely used by her detractors as confirmation that Dian Fossey despised her own species and had little concern for human beings. As a self-confessed misanthrope, she therefore deserved little sympathy or support from her own kind.

  A week after Schlachter’s visit, and just four days before she was scheduled to leave for the United States, came bad news.