by Lara Blunte
The darkness I had seen yesterday had been replaced by the most breathtaking forest, rising on the other side of a valley from me. It felt like the beginning of time: all that curly green, the vines, the birds flying in and out of it.
And as I turned my face up to the sun, it was bright, warm, majestic.
I suddenly felt very good about this trek, though I hoped it would not take six hours to see the gorillas, as I am not a great walker. But it was with hearty appetite that I had my breakfast outside, looking at Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and taking photos.
Godfrey himself came for me at six o'clock. The drive to the point within the forest where we would start our trek would take over an hour. I went to put my boots on, then grabbed my camera and met Godfrey outside. We climbed into his SUV and drove away, as Edward happily got inside the rented car to sleep some more.
The meandering road took us through beautiful green terraces still surrounded by mist, where men and women with long baskets on their backs picked leaves.
"Tea," Godfrey told me.
We stopped so I could take some pictures. Children appeared running to look at the mzungu, or white person. "It must be nice to live like this," I told Godfrey.
He spluttered with laughter, covering his mouth.
"What, only a mzungu would say something like that?" I asked and he spluttered some more.
Mzungu in Swahili, Luganda and other Bantu languages means someone who wanders aimlessly, or even someone turning around the same spot and getting dizzy. Now it refers to white people, in either an affectionate or disparaging way. A lot of us must have arrived through the years and looked foolish to the locals as we walked around with vague smiles on our faces, looking at everything.
"It's peaceful!" I explained, though I knew better than to envy people their lives. There is hardly a paradise on earth and I knew those people must work very hard and fear for their crops. Besides, it was a bit too wet there.
As he drove, Godfrey talked about the gorillas. They were a big tourism draw for the country, though the forest also went on to Rwanda and DRC ─ but it was in Uganda that people felt safest. The Wildlife Authority had to be very careful about the number of tourists going there, as half of the extant population of mountain gorillas, thought to be less than one thousand, lived there.
We could stay no more than twenty minutes with the gorillas, as we share 98 per cent of their DNA and they can catch our diseases. Even a cold could prove fatal to them.
As we got into the forest, I asked Godfrey if there had been people living in it and he told me about the Batwa, pygmies who were displaced when the conservation of the gorillas began in earnest. He said that Dr. Burton treated them too, and I should ask him.
"Dr. Burton does a lot, doesn’t he?" I asked
Godfrey nodded emphatically. "He does a lot!"
"Is he from here?"
"No, from the other side of Uganda. From Mount Elgon, near Kenya. His people are coffee growers. He came here for the gorillas, then he started helping at the hospital."
"Doesn't he have a family of his own?"
"He's not married ─ he has his mother in Mount Elgon and an adopted brother."
"So he's quite alone here," I muttered. "It can't be easy..."
"He's very, very busy. I don't think he even has time to think about it."
I thought I had better stop prying into Burton's life, but when we arrived at the starting point, I confess my heart skipped a beat ─ there was the doctor, dressed in khaki trousers and a long sleeved T-shirt. He was having coffee from a small metal cup and talking to the guards. I had not realized that he would be trekking with me.
"Morning!" he greeted me.
"Morning!"
I smiled as I joined the group and he introduced me to Patrick, the guide and two other guards. One of them had a rifle.
"Coffee?" he asked
I nodded, smiling. Patrick poured me some in the metal cup.
"It's coffee grown here," Patrick said. "The farmers belong to a fair trade organization."
"Oh, how interesting!"
As soon as I put the coffee in my mouth I knew it was going to be bad. I swallowed it with an audible gulp and I suppose my face said it all, because Burton started laughing from his belly.
"Interesting, huh?"
"Give me a break, I'm Italian!" I cried in distress.
The whole group was laughing, as people only laugh in Africa.
"Did Godfrey brief you?" Burton asked me. "Don't run away, don't look the silverback in the eye, all that?"
"Yes! I have a question, though ─ can it take six hours and then we don't even see them at all?"
"Yes. Anything else?"
“Are there snakes?”
“Might be. Anything else?”
“That just about covers it all…” I said in a voice that trailed off.
He looked amused again, and I sat down on a bench to tuck my pants into my boots, but when I stood up they came out. I bent to try again and found myself panting like an old lady.
“Let me,” Burton said.
He crouched at my feet and pulled up my thick socks, tucking the trousers into them as if I were a child.
Then he looked up and I felt my heart thumping quite hard. How ridiculous; he might be a tall, handsome man with a deep voice and a decisive manner, but I was hardly in love with him. Again he was smiling.
"You're not having a heart attack," he said. "It's the altitude. Your body will get used to it."
“Thank God!” I muttered. “I did think I was about to faint”
"You don't have a cold or anything contagious, do you?" he asked me as we started walking up a path.
"No, I don't think so!" Maybe later I will have malaria and dysentery, I thought, eyeing the forest.
But still, it was exciting to see the mountain gorillas with an expert. I had to admit I was lucky and this was what I loved about my job. I was the only outsider in the group, no other mzungus with us.
Burton explained that the man with the rifle was there in case we encountered elephants in the forest. They could get aggressive, in which case a shot in the air would sent them away from us. He reminded me again not to run away, no matter what happened, as the silverback would think I was scampering with a baby. Often encounters between groups would result with gorillas from one side trying to steal babies or females from the other, so it was important to look innocent.
I wanted to ask what else we could encounter, but didn't. Instead I started to feel my heart skip more beats as I walked next to Burton, then I started huffing and puffing.
“Are you all right?” Burton asked.
I panted and raised my hand in assent. He laughed out loud, but took the camera bag from me to carry it. I couldn’t even protest.
We suddenly turned into the forest from the dirt path and I started to breathe in and out through my mouth: snakes, elephants, pygmies and gorillas, here I come!
The forest was a beautiful light green and cool. We saw black and white colobus monkeys looking down at us, swiftly changing trees as they followed our progress. Patrick got on his walkie-talkie, trying to figure out if anyone had seen our gorilla group.
"We'll find them," Burton said. "Or they will find us."
Burton helped me down some slopes and up others, as Patrick cut branches and foliage so we could get through.
"Dr Burton?"
"Call me Chris. Do you mind if I call you Roberta?"
"No, of course not," I replied. Just don't call me Robbie, which is what Pig Clive used to call me.
"I'm not the only Dr. Burton you know, so it's best if we go by our given names," he said with a wicked twinkle.
After about twenty minutes walking, with Burton taking my hand to help me up some slopes and down others, we sat down to drink some water and suddenly Chris raised his hand. Patrick, Gideon and the man with the rifle all waited.
"Just sit still," Chris told me.
I did, until there was a gurgling and a rustling of
leaves behind him. A form emerged, still gurgling. It was a female gorilla and she sounded like a dove in love. She went straight to Chris, making a motion of lips towards his cheek as if she were kissing him.
"Oh, my God!" I exclaimed, before I could stop myself from sounding like a teenager. "I can't believe this!"
She did not come unaccompanied. Soon the leaves parted again and a few babies and two grown females came out. One of the babies ran up to me and peered into my face. I could see his nose moving as he smelled me. A female, probably its mother, sat next to me as the other baby climbed on my back and opened my hair to inspect my skull.
"They're looking for bugs or lice," Chris said. He was receiving the same treatment from his female. "It's a sign of acceptance."
I was tickled by the fingers in my hair and laughed. The little gorilla that was rolling on the ground stopped to show its teeth as well. They had accepted us quite quickly.
"I thought we were not supposed to touch them!" I said.
"Well, they're touching you!"
Burton explained that these were “habituated” gorillas, used to people, as many of the mountain gorillas had become in the effort to keep them from extinction. The female close to him, whose name was China, had switched from her original group to this one and had gotten hurt in an initial scuffle. She had then stayed three weeks at the sanctuary, being treated by him.
Two other gorillas arrived, more females who sat gurgling and looking inside hollow pieces of wood, into which they stuck their fingers, searching for insects. Blackbacks, or junior male gorillas, joined them after a while. The junior males didn't seem to be as interested in us, they were just checking that we were not harming the females or the babies. Much like human teenagers, they were more interested in showing off, grabbing vines and climbing them to display their dexterity.
The group normally had only one alpha, or silverback, though sometimes the power was divided between two. In this group there was only Rukina. I think the earth trembled a bit when he arrived, parting the leaves dramatically and looking around his fiefdom.
"Don't look him in the eye," Godfrey reminded me.
What was he, some sort of medieval monarch? I looked down but peeped over my brow: Rukina had a massive head and hands. He could certainly tear any of us apart using his big fangs. He moved around in a circle, pushing a baby here, pulling another there, staring down a blackback and nudging a female. It seemed as if he were ordering his group. He wasn't gurgling like the others, but rather grumbling like an old man in a bad mood. Quite the control freak.
Finally he sat down near Chris, proceeding to look anywhere but at us. He approved the situation for the moment. I managed to raise the camera to take a few photos of Rukina, and of China with Chris. I got the babies, their mothers and the blackbacks as well. Then I got the guards and guides together in the green, unaware that they were being photographed.
The forest was damp and there were millions of tiny flies around us and the gorillas, but I didn't mind; it was one of the most magical moments of my life, this meeting with our cousins and being in their company.
Rukina got bored after a while and, getting up with a grunt, he left: he had the manners of a gorilla, really. As soon as he walked away into the foliage, the others began to follow, with the babies summoned by growls. The only one left was the first female, China, who chewed on her piece of wood and threw a few looks at Chris.
"You'd better go," he told her, "You're going to get in trouble."
I could swear she understood him: she whimpered, then a roar went up. Rukina was getting angry. She gave a little shriek, sat up and also disappeared. We heard her shriek more loudly a little later.
"Oh, is she being beaten?" I asked
Chris raised his eyebrows. "She probably got a smack. She is still the only female who hasn't had sex with Rukina. He likes to remind her of it."
"What an asshole!" I said, my eyebrows lowering into a frown.
The guides began to laugh.
"Come on, Rukina isn't that bad!" Godfrey said.
"Well, as long as he's not my boyfriend," I muttered. They laughed again and I saw Chris throwing me a look.
As we walked back, I told him, "I guess they really are very similar to us. I don't know if that makes them good, bad or indifferent."
"Indifferent, I would say," Chris replied, "Nature doesn't much care about what's politically correct."
"What does it care about then?"
"It cares about survival," he said. "It doesn't matter what we do to the planet, whether we kill all the gorillas, elephants and then ourselves. The Earth will go on ─ it doesn't mind if it's filled with oceans and forests or if it's a dry clump of matter, it's all the same to it ─ we are the ones who should mind. The planet has time. After another million years it will regenerate and have other life forms, they just won't be us."
"I wonder if that's a bad thing," I muttered.
He looked at me and gave a wry smile.
"Precisely!"
Adroa
Before we said goodbye in the forest, I asked Chris if I could visit the hospital.
"Are you sure?" he asked me. "I imagine you have seen sad things in your life, being a journalist, but..."
"Yeah," I told him. "It hasn't just been the spas. Don't you want some attention on this issue? I am sure you are often looking for donors?"
"It feels like we do nothing else, sometimes. Do you think your readers will stop for a moment before the signature three-hour treatment at the Ritz and send us a transfer?"
I smiled. "I think some of them might. Though you know how it is, a story like this makes a few waves for a while and then something else comes up."
"You should get a hotel room where we are, in Lake Bunyonyi. It's a pretty place."
I was driven there by Edward the next morning. On the way I asked myself if I were pursuing the story because Dr. Burton had turned out to be a dreamboat. I had to admit that Pete would love an article with a handsome, fiery, caring doctor as a protagonist; so would our spa-readers. And I truly could see many manicured hands sending transfers of money to Christopher Burton. On top of everything, it was a very worthy cause.
The fact that he was good to look at was an annoyance to me, as it made me distrust him ─ a side effect of the horror with Clive. I couldn't help putting them in the same sack: Chris was handsome, intelligent, unmarried. He was obviously playing the field and finding wonderful reasons to be unfaithful in his studies of evolutionary biology. Had he not said we were the same as apes?
Maybe that was the difference between him and Clive, that Dr. Burton might not shy away from saying, "Yes, I am a big ape, I am an animal. So what?"
Most women would call a man like that a prat. I would think he was honest: here he is, warning you of what he is like, of what he wants, of what he will do. He is not offering you any illusions, he is not lying to you, he is not pretending to be someone else. He will steal no years from you, no hope, no loves. He is a truthful man. If you don't believe him, you are stupid; and if you are stupid, then deal with it.
Why did so many women hate the men who warned them, who said the truth? Why did they think they could be changed?
And why did Christopher Burton seem somehow disillusioned by the human race? I found out we were just apes...
Why had he abandoned the apes to take care of people again?
He could probably not explain his own contradictions, so how could I hope to understand them?
I arrived at Lake Bunyonyi in the afternoon and found that Chris had understated it. It was a very beautiful place, the lake as smooth and blue as the sky above, green islands floating on it and lush hills in the distance.
My hotel had a wonderful view and I couldn't get enough of it, even when evening descended and the mosquitoes came out. I ended up putting on some repellent and going into town. There I took photos to my heart’s content, and again found it remarkable how people in Africa react to a camera: they never mind being photographed,
and are utterly unself-conscious.
I sat down for a drink in a charming bar that was rather like a shack. I could really only order beer there, though it was far from my favorite drink. I flipped through the photos in my camera as I waited, shaking my head at how amazing they all looked: a little girl waving in a pink dress, a group of boys jumping in joy, a boat on the lake, the hills in the distance, an old rusty sign of Coca-Cola, a red-dirt road.
Then I heard a little voice, "Will you give me a coke?"
Ugandans don't tend to ask for anything, so I was a little surprised at the request and looked at the boy making it. He could not be more than five or six years old and had the most adorable face in the world, with creamy chocolate skin and enormous black eyes framed by curly lashes. His hands were akimbo on his hips, as if he were asking, Well?
He stared at me very seriously. He meant business!
I couldn't help laughing, as he stood in his little pants, wearing a hoodie that said Star Wars and sneakers. He didn't look very poor.
"Does your mom let you drink coke just like that?" I asked him.
"I don't have a mom," he said keeping his hands on his hips, though he was now bending his elbows backwards. "And I am allowed, if I can get it."
The bold little creature climbed with some difficulty and a lot of determination onto the chair next to me. He put his hands on the table and waited.
I must say I loved him on sight, though children for me usually were the creatures screeching in planes or kicking the back of my seat — or splashing in the pool and sea somewhere when I wanted silence. I thought a small coke might not do any harm. I motioned to the waiter, who came over and started laughing when he saw the boy.
"What are you doing, Adroa?"
"Getting a coke, please!"
The waiter walked away, still laughing.
"Where do you live?" I asked when Adroa had his coke and was sipping it from a straw.
He pointed outside with his little finger.
"In the lake?"
He threw his head back and laughed, showing very white teeth that were all uneven. "Not in the lake! But I can see the lake from my room!"
