A wolverine is eating my leg

by Tim Cahill

  J J^^^ermission emphatically denied" are probably III ■not words one should use to working journal-^^V ists. Two months after receiving Fossey's letter, ^f Nick and I were in Rwanda. The acting director ■ of the Karisoke, in Fossey's absence—it was thought she wasn't coming back—was Dr. A. H. "Sandy" Harcourt, who was living there with his wife, Kelly Stewart. Stewart and Harcourt introduced me to a British couple, Drs. Conrad and Rosalind Aveling, who lived well below Karisoke, at the boundary of the park. We sat in the Avelings' cabin, where the assembled scientists succinctly listed the inaccuracies and idiocies committed by previous visiting journalists. There had been promises made and broken. Journalists were only looking for a story, only looking to advance their careers. They weren't interested in facts, only controversy. The scientists said they hoped I might be different. Their expressions said they didn't hold out much hope.

  Later, after this disagreeable session, I trudged an hour downhill to the nearest village. There, in a wooden hut with a dirt floor, was a place where pombe was sold. This is an immensely disgusting alcoholic beverage made from fermented bananas, and drinking it is almost as unpleasant as being scolded by scientists. But not quite.

  Sometime after the second quart I believe I expressed a bit of anger about the scientists above. Oh no, I was given to understand, the new ones were friendly. Not that Fos-sey—the old woman who lives alone—hadn't been friendly. She was very nice. Yes. No trouble.

  I bought some pombe for my new friends. No trouble, huh? Well . . . And the stories came out, in whispers, with much looking about for eavesdroppers. They were filtered through various translations, and some of them were told in body language, but I could piece one incident together well enough. It seemed that trackers working for the old woman had captured a poacher. The man was detained at

  Karisoke, where he was stripped and tied to a tree. There he was whipped with stinging nettles; whipped, I was given to understand, specifically on the genitals. Pictures of the man's humiliation were distributed to the villages below the park. This, the message of the photos was, is what happens to people who kill gorillas.

  Could anyone show me those photographs? No. Who would keep such pictures?

  Later I checked the story out with Conrad and Rosalind Aveling. Yes, they had heard of the incident: it was being talked about in all the villages. They didn't know if it was true. They hadn't been in Rwanda at the time.

  Whether the story is true or not—I like to believe it is not—the fact that it was being told, and frequently told, suggested to me a sure diplomatic failure between Karisoke and the villages below.

  In the five weeks that followed, Nick and I learned, firsthand, the inflexible etiquette of gorilla conduct. Volcano Park is a dense forest on the upper slopes of a line of extinct and dormant volcanoes that separates Rwanda from Zaire and Uganda. The undergrowth is often wet, waist high, and hideously tangled. Gorilla trails seem easy enough to follow—a family of ten moving through such foliage will flatten a path in such a way that it looks as if a five-hundred-pound boulder had been rolled through the jungle. The problem is that these trails peter out, they double back on themselves, or they just seem to end out in the middle of some idyllic gorillaless meadow. To find the gorillas, Nick and I hired trained Rwandan trackers.

  After a time, I found that I could separate the odors of the jungle from the smell of gorillas, and that I could often smell the animals before I saw them. The odor was sharp, musky, somewhat skunky with a splash of vinegar to it and not nearly as unpleasant as that may sound.

  The smell was an obvious clue, and it was sometimes possible to sneak up on a group which, typically, might con-

  sist of a dominant male (the silverback), several females, infants, and a couple of sub-dominant males called black-backs. Sneaking up on a group, however, is an outstandingly dumb idea: you don't want to startle a family of apes who may feel the need to, well, nip at you precisely because they have been startled. Instead, it is best to attract the attention of the dominant silverback, whose job it is to protect those he dominates. Make a little noise. And don't ever get between the silverback and an infant.

  Once you are certain that the silverback knows you are present on the periphery of his group, it is polite to signal your intention to move in. A throat clearing sound—two raspy exhalations called a DBV or "double belch vocalization"—signals a lack of aggressive intent. If the silverback replies, it is time to begin inching forward.

  Watch the silverback's face to see if you are being accepted. Gorilla faces read like human faces: the animals smile when they are happy, frown when they are upset, and often look slightly puzzled. This last expression is the one I most frequently encountered when approaching a silver-back. It is the sort of expression you feel on your face when you are sitting alone in your house and there's a noise in the kitchen.

  You can move in a bit on a slightly puzzled silverback, but in all cases you must begin to crawl. Your head should always be lower than that of the silverback. This is a submissive posture, and it convinces the dominant gorilla that you are reasonably tractable—no challenge—so he will not feel compelled to rip you to shreds. Do not stare directly into the gorilla's eyes for more than a few seconds at a time as this is interpreted as a challenge and will irritate him. You may smile at him, but do not show your teeth, which is an aggressive and impolite thing to do.

  A good time to visit gorillas would be just after noon on a sunny day when the animals are drowsy from their morning feed and ready for a short nap. If you approach carefully, politely, the silverback will watch for a time, then, with a figurative shrug, begin to accept your presence. He may roll over onto his back and yawn. The silverback's

  teeth are a revelation: here is a strict vegetarian with a set of canine teeth the size of carrots. Gorillas do not—as many people suppose—pound, stomp, punch, or crush their enemies. Instead, they bite. A silverback skull was once found in the jungle, and embedded in the heavy ridge of bone was another silverback's tooth.

  Generally, after some period of lying still, the family group will virtually ignore you. There is the occasional glance in your direction, but the animals will go about their daily business. They will groom one another, the children will tussle—their play chuckles are so infectious you want to smile (but don't show your teeth)—the blackbacks nap, the silverback may copulate with one of the females. One bright afternoon, I watched Mrithi, a good-sized silverback, mate with a young female, Ichingo, in the strange, subaqueous light of a meadow in the midst of a bamboo grove.

  In observing the various groups, I came to understand that gorilla life, like a daily soap opera, is incredibly slow moving. You can see what is likely to happen before the characters themselves know it. You can identify those characters most likely to fall in love (or at least copulate); you can see groups ranging closer together and know that there will, one day soon, be a fight (or at least "an interaction") between rival silverbacks; you can see that a silverback is getting old and is about to be deposed. You could even miss a few days, then tune in on, say, group thirteen, and pick up the continuing story in about ten minutes. It's like "Dallas" on downers.

  The scientists in the park were very professional. They strictly avoided anthropomorphism in their scholarly works, but I can tell you that they often applied human qualities and the faint thrust of human emotions to gorillas when speaking about them in private. There isn't much to do at night under the Virunga volcanoes, and an evening's entertainment is often an evening spent gossiping about gorillas. I approached the scientists—Harcourt and Stewart, the

  Avelings—in much the same way I approached the gorillas: head down, submissive, respectful. Instead of DBVs, I found myself saying words like interaction and display. The scientists replied in kind and, it seemed, slowly became habituated to my presence. Sometimes one or the other of them might even scribble down a quick note about something I had seen in the field. They were entirely sincere, and I began to like them.

  One day
I watched Sandy Harcourt in the field. He was studying Beethoven's group, one of the families Dian Fos-sey had habituated. Dian had worked with them so long and so well, Harcourt didn't need to crawl and show cringing submission. He simply stood near an animal, stood perfectly erect, perfectly still—the man has exquisite posture— and took notes on a reporter's pad. Harcourt recorded what the gorilla ate, the vocalizations it made, the way it interacted with other gorillas. After an hour on one animal, Harcourt moved on to another.

  The gorillas were so used to this behavior that Harcourt was absolutely ignored by them. He might have been a ghost in their midst.

  Kelly Stewart and the doctors Aveling worked in much the same way. Rosalind Aveling, Nick, and I once were lounging in the bamboo, at the periphery of Mrithi's group, when Mtoto, a three-year-old female, took a sudden interest in us. She performed what is called a "display," the gorilla dance of intimidation, which consists of standing upright and beating the chest, of jumping up and down and throwing vegetation. Mtoto weighed all of twenty-five pounds.

  Clearly, the animal was playing. She stared at us for a moment with a mischievous smile, then started for Rosalind, her arms held out in front of her. Mtoto, I was sure, wanted to be held. Rosalind began a locomotive cough, which is a series of small slightly swinish-sounding grunts that mean "you're too close," or "go away," or "keep doing that and there'll be trouble." Mtoto retreated to the silver-back, Mrithi, who was lounging on his back in a field of thistles. There, she bounced up and down on her father's ample belly.

  Later, I asked Rosalind why she had discouraged Mtoto.

  "You don't want them to take you for an object of curiosity," she told me. u You don't want the children to look at you as someone to play with." The goal was to be the ghost in their midst, a thing no more interesting than a tree. That way, habituated gorillas might behave more like wild groups.

  "But I've seen pictures of Dian holding baby gorillas," I said. "I've seen photos of her touching silverbacks."

  Well, yes, all that had happened.

  "And those photos, those films, they're what changed the public's view of gorillas," I said. "After that it was 'gentle giant' time."

  True enough. But now, Rosalind thought, it was time for another approach. She thought Dian would be in full agreement with her on this.

  "But don't you want to touch them, don't you want them to touch you?"

  "No," Rosalind said.

  "C'mon. I feel it. You're telling me you don't? What, do you turn in your membership to the human race when you become a scientist?"

  "Okay," Rosalind said, "I admit, it's a temptation. A big temptation."

  "So you really did want to hold Mtoto."

  "Of course I did," Rosalind Aveling said, "God, I wanted to hold her."

  The gorillas let you know when you have overstayed your welcome. They let you know with frowns, locomotive coughs, the beginnings of displays. Even so, there was a sense of enormous privilege just sitting with them; privilege felt in their acceptance, no matter what its duration. Once, on the lower slopes of Visoke, one of the volcanoes, a silverback named Ndume woke up from his nap, saw me, and ambled close to the place where I lay. Ponderously, he sat down, yawned, stretched, then reached down to my knee, where he took the

  material of my red rain pants between his thumb and forefinger and rolled it back and forth like a knowledgeable garment buyer. Ndume cocked his head to the side. His eyes were soft, golden brown, and he wore that familiar slightly puzzled expressed.

  "Gore-Tex," I wanted to say. Instead, I grunted twice. Ndume returned the DBV. There was some genuine interspecies communication going on, and it felt like a fantasy, like one of those strange wondrous dreams in which you can talk to the animals, to all of creation, and creation itself responds with approval. There was no science involved in this encounter. It was all emotion.

  I felt a kind of unspecified glow, something within that was very much like love, and it came to me then that for the past fourteen years Dian Fossey had literally lived in that glow.

  Most of the gorilla families I met had already been habituated to humans. There was one researcher, Ann Pierce, who kept tabs on the wild groups that ranged near the Zaire border. A visit to those groups was more than a stiff hike: it was an expedition. Once Ann and I, along with a Rwandan tracker, climbed Visoke, an extinct volcano, where we camped at 11,000 feet, on the rim of the crater lake. The next day we were up at dawn, and we trudged through the tangled vegetation down the west side of the mountain, toward Zaire. It took a little more than five hours, and I was exhausted by the time we began finding fresh dung along the gorillas' trail.

  I could smell them then, somewhere across the vegetation-choked flat. Ann fell to her stomach and I crawled along after her. They were about fifty yards away. The trees broke the light, which fell through thick branches in El Greco shafts. I could see dark shapes, like bears, moving slowly through those purely religious shafts, and then the silverback saw us.

  He charged perhaps five yards. His roar started at a high register then dropped, as a donkey's bray will. It was hard to see him through the vegetation, but he was standing, beating his chest, and the slapping thuds seemed impossibly loud. The rest of the family was moving over a small hillock, and the silverback—I assumed he was the silverback— was covering their retreat. He tore a branch from a tree—a branch the size of a fullback's thigh—and threw it to the ground. He jumped up and down. He hooted at us. I suppose, if I were sitting home watching that display on videotape, it might seem humorous, like a child's temper tantrum. In the jungle, it was terrifying.

  I knew, from reading George Schaller's pioneering work on gorillas, that a silverback will display and make a bluff charge, but will not attack a man who holds his ground. I knew that intellectually. Intellect does not inform the scream-and-gibber mechanism.

  Nevertheless, we held our ground, Ann and I. We did not advance. After five more minutes of display and bluff charges, the supposed silverback turned to follow his family over the hillock.

  "Let's go," Ann Pierce said. "We've disturbed them enough for today."

  I thought about Dian Fossey during the seven-hour walk back to our camp overlooking the crater lake. She had read Schaller; she knew that gorillas could be habituated to the presence of humans, that a silverback would not attack if she held her ground. But what courage it must have taken, what incredible courage, to stand firm in the face of so many silverback charges.

  Late that afternoon, about halfway back up Visoke, a cold rain began to fall. The temperature stood at about 45 degrees. I was sweating heavily inside my rain jacket so that every time I stopped to rest the chill began working at me until, shivering uncontrollably, I began walking again. We had come through fields of waist-high nettles, acres of them it seemed, and my hands stung from their touch. They felt as if they were on fire.

  All this, I thought, for a five-minute encounter. Dian

  Fossey had started with wild groups and just such encounters: twelve hours of hard walking for five minutes of rejection. Never mind Fossey's courage: the physical aspects of the woman's achievement, her stamina and commitment, amazed me.

  If anyone on earth had earned the right to speak for the mountain gorillas of Rwanda, it was Dian Fossey. In 1978, an unimaginable tragedy brought her work again to the attention of the world. The silverback Digit was attacked and killed by poachers. Dian had known the

  animal since he was two and half: a "playful little ball of disorganized black fluff," was how she described him then, "from which protruded two buttonlike velvet brown eyes full of mischief and curiosity." In a report written for the International Primate Protection League Newsletter, Dian, working from evidence found at the death scene, described what must have happened. Digit was not the dominant male of the group, He was a peripheral silverback, charged with the responsibility of "assisting the dominant male in the protection of the more defenseless members of their group.

  "It was in this service that Digit was
killed by poachers on December 31, 1977. On that day, Digit took five mortal spear wounds into his own body, held off six poachers and their dogs, allowing the entire family group to flee four kilometers away to safety. Digit's last lonely battle was a valiant and courageous one in which he managed to kill one of the poachers' dogs before dying. I cannot allow myself to think of his anguish, his pain, and the total comprehension he suffered of knowing what humans were doing to him." Could anyone really understand the horror of Digit's murder? Dian suggested the Newsletter run photos of the death scene, ghastly black-and-white pictures of Digit slumped against a tree, decapitated. Where his hands should have been, there were bloody stumps. One could only compare this horror with film of the living Digit: scenes of the

  nearly mature gorilla and Fossey together; of Digit examining her notebook and pen with that endearing, slightly puzzled expression; of Digit rolling over to sleep by Dian's side. "That was the nature of Digit," Dian wrote, "gentle, inquisitive, trusting."

  The tragedy played on Dian's mind. It affected her work, her relationship with the animals she loved. "I am still allowed to share their proximity," she wrote, "but it is an honor and gift that I feel I no longer deserve."

  In the wake of Digit's death, Dian established the Digit Fund, a charitable organization dedicated to the protection of mountain gorillas. She was joined in this effort by the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation (now called the African Wildlife Foundation).

  The association lasted a year, then AWF pulled out. No one wanted to say that they disagreed with Dian's confrontational style, her strategy of intimidation, her lack of tact and diplomacy. "That would be wrong," Diana McMeekin, deputy director of the AWF, says, "and what's more, it's unfair to Dian." McMeekin said that AWF set up its own charity "because we felt that all the gorillas needed protection. Dian was concerned, quite rightly I think, about protecting her research groups. We wanted to establish a program that would deal with mountain gorilla conservation overall."