The Beasts Of Stoneclad Mountain

by Gerry Griffiths

  So the map would have been unnecessary for her except for a series of red marks that someone had made on it. Most of them were small red x’s, one or two showing in Rwanda, a few more in the Congo, and the largest concentration right on the border of Uganda in the region of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park. Each of the x’s was accompanied by a small number, and she noticed that together they formed a very loose circle, in which someone had drawn a smaller circle with a large question mark in it right on the border between Uganda and the DRC.

  She set that aside and took up the first photo. It had a number one up in the corner, leading Trudy to assume it corresponded to the numbered x on the map. It was a long-distance shot of a mountain gorilla hunkering down in the brush. Trudy’s expertise told her that this was a juvenile, just short of adult, although she couldn’t be sure if the gorilla was male or female. To a human, there was nothing at that age that clearly distinguished sex among gorillas unless they were older. Trudy took a closer look to see that the gorilla was leaning down and doing something. It looked to her like it was disabling some poacher trap.

  “Okay, interesting but nothing new,” she said. “Certain gorilla groups have been seen dismantling traps for many years now.”

  “Take a look at the next picture,” Irving said.

  She did. It was marked with the same number and looked like it had been taken a few seconds after the first. In this one, the gorilla was moving away from the assumed trap. There was less brush covering her view here, allowing her to see that the gorilla was carrying things in its hands. In one there was a long, sharpened stick. In the other, there was a flat, wedge-shaped rock.

  She stared at this one for a lot longer. “Again, nothing new,” she said, although she said it much slower, with less certainty. She looked up at Irving to see that he had arched an eyebrow at her. He knew as well as she did that there was indeed something unusual in this picture. The gorilla hadn’t just found a way to disable a trap. It had used tools. This by itself was not the surprising thing. While it had once been treated as something unique among humans, many animals in nature had since been recorded using other objects to help them obtain their goals, gorillas included. But these tools were always found objects, simple sticks or stones or detritus left behind by humans.

  It was possible that the stone the gorilla held had been found that way, even if it did look suspiciously like it had been chipped away into knife-like tool. The stick, on the other hand. There was no way that stick had gotten that way just by the gorilla breaking it off a branch. Someone had deliberately sharpened it.

  Trudy looked up at Irving, starting to understand why this might be something of importance. The science media loved to pull out the old chestnut from time to time that various apes had entered the Stone Age, but there was a huge difference between using found tools and making their own.

  “That picture doesn’t really prove anything, though,” Trudy said. “The forests around the Virungas aren’t as pristine as Westerners like to believe. Humans have been coming and going through there for ages, and the farmlands go right up to the edge of the forest. This gorilla probably just found things that someone else had already made.”

  “Sure,” Irving said. “But why don’t you keep looking?”

  Trudy flipped through a number of the photos, pausing on each only long enough to identify that many were similar. The majority of the pictures showed the remains of gorilla night nests, the small and simple structures gorillas built every night to sleep in. Most of them, as was common with gorillas, had feces sitting in the bottom. As horrifying as it might be to humans, gorillas thought nothing of defecating where they slept. But alongside many of the nests were more simple tools—sharpened sticks, shaped rocks, and, in one instance that made Trudy do a double-take, a short but thick branch with a wide, flat stone at the end that had been tied together with a dried vine. It didn’t quite look like an ax, but it had obviously been made with some similar purpose.

  Trudy stopped and stared at that ax-like object. She had dedicated her entire life to the study of mountain gorillas. It was unlikely that anyone currently alive knew more about them than she did. And despite their beautiful intelligence, despite their complex brains and social behaviors and patterns, Trudy knew, she absolutely knew, that a gorilla couldn’t have made this. Unless…

  “This isn’t behavior they’ve spontaneously learned by themselves,” Trudy said. “It’s too much too quick. Someone must have taught them, trained them.”

  “That’s what others have told me,” Irving said. “The obvious question, then, is who.”

  “It shouldn’t be any official ranger or guide in any of the parks around the Virungas,” Trudy said. “The general policy these days is supposed to be nothing more than observing from a distance, especially since gorillas can get sick from human diseases and have no defenses against them.”

  Irving gestured at the photos. “There’s still a few more. If you think you’ve seen all there is, you’re in for a shock.”

  Trudy took a deep breath before flipping to the next photo. She’d expected another tool of some sort. Instead, she got something so different that it took her several seconds of staring before it started to register.

  “It’s a stack of rocks,” Trudy said in a monotone voice.

  “You know it’s not.”

  She nodded her head. It wasn’t a stack at all, in fact, but six distinct stones, five in a rough circle on the outside and one in the middle. Four of the outer five were roughly the same shape and size, about the size of a small potato standing on end, with one smaller. The outsides of the stones had been chipped away so that, if she squinted, she could almost believe they were intended to be rough approximations of gorillas themselves. The one in the center was similar yet also three times the size of the others.

  She thought of the stone she had seen in the gorilla’s hand in the second picture, of the strange tool sitting in the night nest. Judging from the way these six stones were chipped into their rough shapes, Trudy could imagine that those tools had been used to make these.

  Art, Trudy realized. These gorillas were making art.

  “This is a hoax,” she said.

  “Is it?” Irving asked, his tone making it clear that this was not just a rhetorical question. This was why she was here, she realized. Irving wanted to know if this was for real.

  “It… it has to be.”

  “Haven’t gorillas been known to make art before? What about Koko?”

  “Koko’s different,” Trudy said. Everyone always had to bring up the famous gorilla Koko, and it annoyed her. “Koko was raised from a baby by humans. She was socialized like a human. Yes, she can speak sign language. Yes, she’s been known to paint. But that’s completely different than what gorillas in the wild naturally are inclined to do. Comparing Koko to the wild Virunga mountain gorillas is like comparing a pampered rich white dude to an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon. Just because they’re the same species doesn’t mean they have any context to understand each other’s culture.”

  “And do wild mountain gorillas have that?”

  “Have what?”

  “Culture.”

  Trudy opened her mouth to speak, but she couldn’t think of anything to say. Mountain gorillas were intelligent. They had rituals. They had something akin to language. Beyond that, they were different enough from humans that it wasn’t fair to say what they did and didn’t have. They certainly didn’t have a culture in the way most humans would understand it, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. Just like her own example, humans might just not have the context to understand it.

  “Okay, so maybe these gorillas have been making art. They’ve been making something. But are we sure it’s them and not someone trying to pull an elaborate hoax?”

  “Skip ahead to the last picture and you’ll see. Don’t lose your place, though. The most important pictures are yet to come.”

  Trudy pulled the picture from the bottom of the stack. Here
was another photo that had been taken from a distance, but the angle on it allowed her to see better what the gorilla was doing. Just like in the other photos, there was one rock in the center. Two more were on the far side while a gorilla seemed to be setting up a third one, with two others sitting by its side.

  “I guess that answers that question,” Trudy said as she started to set the photo aside.

  “Wait,” Irving said. “You might want to take a closer look at that one.”

  She frowned but did what he asked. Was there something here she was missing? The stones looked nearly identical to one of the other pictures, enough that Trudy thought one of them might have been taken of the gorilla’s handiwork after it had left. The gorilla itself was a good-sized specimen, obviously a fully matured male, as evidenced by the silver fur all down the saddle of his back. The gorilla was turned just enough to the camera that she could see his nose, and…

  She gave an audible gasp.

  “See, I thought that would interest you,” Irving said.

  “How do I know this isn’t photoshopped?”

  “You don’t, but do you really suppose I would go to all this trouble just to prank you?”

  Trudy supposed not, but she couldn’t see how the picture could possibly be real. To anyone else in the world, this would just be a picture of a random gorilla. They couldn’t tell one from the other. What the average person didn’t know, though, was that each and every gorilla had a distinct “nose print,” with slight inconsistencies in the nose’s shape that allowed researchers to identify specific animals.

  This nose print had a distinct diagonal scar on it running from the center and up to the right. Trudy knew that nose print. She’d better, considering she’d been photographed with it for the most famous gorilla picture in the world. This was Kramer, the exact same gorilla from the cover of Hollis in the Virungas.

  “This can’t be him,” Trudy said. “He’s dead. He was killed by poachers.”

  “According to your own writings, you never found a body.”

  “No, just massive amounts of blood and the headless bodies of several others in his group.”

  “So couldn’t that be him?”

  “I… I suppose.” She stared at the photo with an unexpected ache in her heart. She’d sobbed for nearly a week at his death. All the gorillas in his group had been special to her, but Kramer more than the rest. In as much as it had been possible across species lines, Trudy had considered Kramer to be her friend.

  “Is this why you wanted to bring me in on this?” Trudy asked.

  “Yes,” Irving said. “I had some of my people looking into tourism in a number of foreign countries with a special eye for conservation. I figured there was a way to make money and make the world a better place at the same time. And while they were looking, they found all the evidence you’ve seen here. I know that you’re persona non grata right now to pretty much anyone with an internet connection, but I figured that if there was anyone who would best be able to look into this, maybe even who had the most right to look into this, it would be you.”

  Trudy wanted to thank him, but a lump formed in her throat before she could say anything. The right, he’d said. In Trudy’s mind, after what she had done, she didn’t have any right at all to continue working with these massive creatures. The drunken exile she’d put herself in was more than just self-pity and preservation against the death threats. It was her penance, and personally, she didn’t think she’d finished paying it.

  “I… I haven’t done field work in a very long time,” Trudy said. “I’m getting too old for it. Kramer deserves someone younger, someone with the energy to investigate this the way it should be. I’m not your woman.”

  “Even if it was a matter of life or death?” Irving asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The final photos. Take a look at them.”

  As Trudy took out the last set of photos, Irving kept talking. “Everything else you’ve seen so far is weird enough, according to the people I’ve already had working on it. But if that were all, they would have simply published some papers that would have been taken out of context in the science media for a couple weeks and then forgotten. But instead, we’ve been doing everything we can to keep a lid on it. Because of that.”

  She spread out the last several pictures in front of her. Trudy stared at them for several seconds, unsure of how she was supposed to respond to this, before finally managing, “I don’t even know what I’m looking at.”

  “No? Maybe I can help. This over here is a severed head. In this picture over we have, uh, I’m not actually sure if that used to be an arm or a leg…”

  “Not funny,” Trudy said.

  “No, it isn’t. So please, take a very close look at these and tell me everything you see.”

  Trudy took a deep breath and forced herself to examine all the grizzly details. There were four photos, all of them taken out in the forest. Judging from the moisture, she guessed there’d recently been a heavy rain. This hadn’t done much to wash away the blood, or else there had originally been so much blood that it couldn’t be washed away so quickly.

  “Poachers,” she said, looking at the clothing of the three (or at least she thought it was three) men lying in multiple pieces around the murder site. That it was a murder of some kind wasn’t even in doubt. “Although I don’t see any weapons. Most poachers I tended to run into were usually armed.”

  “Good eye. My contact in the field didn’t even notice that right away. What else?”

  “The brush around them is severely trampled. Given that, my initial guess would have been that they’d been trampled by a stampeding herd of Cape buffalo.”

  “But?”

  “But then they would just be crushed. It looks more like someone took a machete to these men and then gleefully flung the parts around.”

  “Does it really?”

  Something about the way Irving said that caused Trudy to take a closer look at one of the photos of a severed arm. “No. I guess you’re right. Even a dull machete would have left a cleaner wound than that. It’s almost like…” She stopped and looked up at him. “No.”

  “Yes,” Irving said.

  “No. That can’t be right. You can’t be about to tell me that gorillas did this.”

  “Could they, though?”

  “I… no. I don’t think so? I mean, an adult silverback might have the strength for it, but no gorilla ever in recorded history has shown that level of ferocity. I’ve lived among them for most of my life. Almost always, when they look aggressive, it’s just a way to scare others away from their… territory…”

  She trailed off, as she was getting far too close to recent events. That was what the digital lynch mobs of social media had tried saying about what happened between her and Killroy. Plenty of fellow experts in the field had come to her defense, saying that yes, a gorilla could be that dangerous under the right circumstances, but the public hadn’t wanted to hear that. And now, whether she’d intended to or not, she was agreeing with them.

  Irving nodded at her obvious discomfort. “I know what you’re thinking, and we don’t have to go there. Let me make this easier for you. Look at the photos again. Look at the track.”

  She did look, although she didn’t see any gorilla tracks. There were some fibers here or that that might have been gorilla fur, but beyond that, she couldn’t see anything at all that even suggested gorillas had done this. Trudy spread the pictures out, looking again. The first three were closer shots of the bodies, or at least what was left of them. The fourth shot was a wide angle of the whole scene, including the flattened vegetation around them, and…

  Holy shit.

  Irving hadn’t said tracks, as in multiple gorillas or even multiple feet.

  He’d said track. Singular.

  “Now you see it. Now you understand why we want to keep this quiet for the moment, and why I want you, the world’s leading gorilla expert, taking point on this from now on.”

&n
bsp; “This can’t be real,” Trudy said. “This is a hoax.”

  “If it is, you’d be the one who could prove it. So what do you say? Will you work for me on this? Find out everything you can about what the hell is going on in the Virungas. I will pay for everything. I will completely outfit you. I will even do everything I can to grease the wheels of diplomacy if you need to cross between the three countries.”

  “And what do you get out of it in the end?”

  “I get the bragging rights of having the foresight to fund all this. I can buy anything I want at this point, Miss Hollis. It gets boring. But going down with you in history and science books? Not boring at all.”

  Trudy tried to pull her eyes away from the final photo. The rain had worn away the distinct edges of the crumpled brush, but now she knew why so much of the blood hadn’t washed away. It was in the middle of a depression. The poachers had been ripped apart, then trampled.

  By a single, wide object. There was no way to be certain, but it looked like a gigantic gorilla footprint.

  “When do I leave?” Trudy asked.

  Lord of Stone is available from Amazon here.