Natural Acts

by David Quammen

  “Last year the wolf was killing for me two sheep,” he says as we walk. “Because the shepherd was drunk. Was like an invitation to eat.” The shepherd was his employee, helping Marius raise a few animals on the side. Some farmers moan about such losses, but what do they expect? Marius wonders. That the wolf, which has lived as a predator in these mountains for thousands of years, should now transform itself into a vegetarian? As for hunters who would offhandedly kill a wolf for its fur, he can’t comprehend them. “Also I am a hunter,” he says. He shoots ducks, pheasants, wild boar, and in self-defense he wouldn’t hesitate to kill a bear. But a wolf, no, never. It’s much nicer simply to go out with his dogs, hike in the forest, and know that in this place the ancient animals are still present.

  Two miles in, we pick up a signal from Tsiganu’s collar. The bearing is south-southwest, toward a steep wooded valley that descends from a castle-shaped rock formation among the peaks above. Farther along, we get another signal on roughly the same line, and now the tempo of beeps indicates that Tsiganu is alive—at least barely alive, because he’s moving. Here we split into two groups, for a better chance of cutting his trail. Marius and I continue the traverse until we cross a single set of wolf tracks, then back-follow them up a slope. The tracks are deep, softened in outline by at least one afternoon’s melting, and show no sign of blood. Yesterday? Or earlier, before the shooting? They might be Tsiganu’s or not. If his, is the stride normal? Has his wound already clotted? Or is he lying near death with a slug lodged against his backbone, or in his lung, or in his jaw, while his packmates have gone on without him? Are these in fact his tracks, or some other wolf’s? No way of knowing.

  So we hike again toward the radio signal, post-holing our way through knee-deep crust. We round a bend that brings us face-on to the valley below the castle-shaped peak. Here the radio signal gets stronger. We stare upward, scanning for movement. We see none.

  Marius disconnects the directional antenna from the receiver. He listens again, using the antenna cable’s nub like a stethoscope, trying to fine-focus the bearing. Again a strong signal. So we’re close now. Maybe one hundred meters, Marius says. He tips back his head and offers a loud wolfish howl, a rather good imitation of a pack’s contact call. We listen for response. There’s a distant, dim echo of his voice coming off the mountain, followed by silence. We wait. Nothing. We turn away. I begin to fumble with my binoculars.

  Then from up in the beeches comes a new sound. It’s Tsiganu, the Gypsy carnivore, the post-Communist wolf, howling back.

  The Megatransect

  I. INTO THE FOREST

  September–October 1999

  AT 11:22 ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 20, 1999, J. Michael Fay strode away from a small outpost and into the forest, in a remote northern zone of the Republic of Congo, setting off on a long and peculiarly ambitious hike. By his side was an aging Pygmy named Ndokanda, a companion to Fay from adventures past, armed now with a new machete and dubiously blessed with the honor of cutting trail. Nine other Pygmies marched after them, carrying dry bags of gear and food. Interspersed among that troop came still other folk—a camp boss and cook, various assistants, Michael (“Nick”) Nichols with his cameras, and me.

  It was a hectic departure to what would eventually, weeks and months later, seem a quiet, solitary journey. Fay planned to walk across Central Africa, more than a thousand miles, possibly much more, on a carefully chosen route through untamed regions of rainforest and swamp, from northeastern Congo to the coast of Gabon. It would take him at least a year. He would receive resupply drops along the way, communicate as needed by satellite phone, and rest when necessary, but his plan was to stay out there the whole time, covering the full route in a single uninterrupted push. He would cross a northern stretch of the Congo River basin, then top over a divide and descend another major drainage, the Ogooué.

  Any big enterprise needs a name, and Fay had chosen to call his the Megatransect—transect as in cutting a line, mega as in mega, a label that variously struck those in the know as amusing or (because survey transects in field biology are generally straight and involve statistically rigorous repetition) inappropriate. Fay is no sobersides, but amusement was not his intent. Behind this mad lark lay a serious purpose—to observe, to count, to measure, and from those observations and numbers to construct a portrait of great Central African forests before their greatness succumbs to the inexorable nibble of humanity. The measuring began now. One of Fay’s entourage, a bright young Congolese named Yves Constant Madzou, paused at the trailhead to tie the loose end of a string to a small tree.

  I paused beside him, because I’d heard about the string and it intrigued me. In the technical lingo, it was a topofil. Its other end was wound on a conical spool inside a Fieldranger 6500, a device used by foresters for measuring distance along any walked route. The topofil pays out behind a walker while the machine counts traversed footage, much as a car’s odometer counts traversed miles. Each spool holds a six-kilometer length. Madzou carried a half-dozen extras, and somewhere among the expedition supplies were many more. Being biodegradable, the string would quickly disappear down the gullets of termites and other jungle digesters, I’d been told, but the numbers it delivered with such Hansel-and-Gretel simplicity would be accurate to the nearest twelve inches. You can’t get that precision from a Global Positioning System (GPS) and a map. Running the topofil each day from the red plastic box on his belt was to be one of Madzou’s assignments.

  Now, as he stepped out after Fay in the first minutes of Day 1, the Fieldranger gurgled in a low, wheezy tone, like an asthmatic retriever catching its breath between ducks. Madzou trailed filament like a spider. The string hovered, chest-high, under tension. And I found it pungent to contemplate that if Fay’s expedition proceeds to its fulfillment, a thousand-mile length of string will go furling out through the equatorial jungle. That string seemed an emblem of all the oxymoronic combinations this enterprise embodies—high tech and low tech, vast scales and tiny ones, hardheaded calculation and loony daring, strength and fragility, glorious tropical wilderness and a mitigated smidgen of litter. As he walks, Fay will gather data in many dimensions by many means, including digital video camera, digital audio recorder, digital still camera, notebook and pencil, GPS, conductivity meter, thermohygrometer, handheld computer, digital caliper, and hand lens. The topofil will be a quaint but important complement to the rest.

  Within less than an hour on the first day we’re shin-deep in mud, crossing the mucky perimeter of a creek. “Doesn’t take long for the swamps to kick in around here,” Fay says cheerily. He’s wearing his usual outfit for a jungle hike: river sandals, river shorts, a lightweight synthetic T-shirt that can be rinsed out each evening and worn again next day, and the day after, and every day after that until it disintegrates. River sandals are preferable to running shoes or tall rubber boots, he has found, because the forest terrain of northeastern Congo is flat and sumpy, its patches of solid ground interlaced with leaf-clotted spring seeps and blackwater creeks, each of them guarded by a corona of swamp. A determined traveler on a compass-line march is often obliged to wallow through sucking gumbo, cross a waist-deep channel of whiskey-dark water flowing gently over a bottom of white sand, wallow out through the muck zone on the far side, rinse off, and keep walking. Less determined travelers, in their Wellingtons and bush pants, just don’t get to the places where Fay goes.

  He stops to enter a datum into his yellow Rite-in-the-Rain notebook: elephant dung, fresh. Blue-and-black swallowtail butterflies flash in sun shafts that penetrate the canopy. He notes some fallen fruits of the plant Vitex grandifolia. Trained as a botanist before he shifted focus to do his doctorate on western lowland gorillas, Fay has an impressive command of the botanical diversity on which big mammals depend—he seems familiar with every tree, vine, and herb. He knows the feeding habits of the forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis, the smaller species of African elephant adapted to the woods and soggy clearings of the Congo basin) and the life cycles of
the plants that produce the fruits it prefers. He can recognize, from stringy fecal evidence, when a chimpanzee has been eating rubber sap. He can identify an ambiguous tree by the smell of its inner bark. He sees the forest in its particulars and its connectedness. Now he bends pensively over a glob of civet shit. Then he makes another notation.

  “Mmm. This is gonna be fun,” he says, and walks on.

  Mike Fay isn’t the first half-crazed white man to set out trekking across the Congo basin. In a tradition that includes such Victorian-era explorers as David Livingstone, Verney Lovett Cameron, Savorgnan de Brazza, and Henry Morton Stanley, he’s merely the latest. Like Stanley and some of the others, he has a certain perverse gift for command, a level of personal force and psychological savvy that allows him to push a squad of men forward through difficult circumstances using a mix of inspirational goading, promised payment, sarcasm, imperiousness, threat, tactical sulking, and strong example. He’s a paradoxical fellow and therefore hard to ignore, a postmodern redneck who chews Red Man tobacco, disdains political correctness, knows a bit about tractor repair and a lot about software, and views the crowded, suburbanized landscape of modern America with cold loathing. Born in New Jersey, raised there and in Pasadena, he sees no going back; he’ll live out his life and die in Africa, he says. What makes him different from those legendary Victorian zealots is that he’s not traveling in service of God or empire or the personal enrichment of the king of Belgium. He does have sponsors, most notably the National Geographic Society, and also the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) of New York, for which he’s a staff member on paid leave, but he’s certainly not laboring for the greater glory of them. His driving motive—or rather, the first and most public of his two driving motives—is conservation.

  His immediate goal is to collect a huge body of diverse but inter-meshed information about the biological richness of the ecosystems he’ll walk through and about the degree of human presence and human impact. He’ll gather field notes on the abundance and freshness of elephant dung, leopard tracks, chimpanzee nests, and magisterial old-growth trees. He’ll make recordings of birdsong for later identification by experts. He’ll register precise longitude-latitude readings every twenty seconds throughout the walking day, with his Garmin GPS unit and the antenna duct-taped into his hat. He’ll collect rock samples, note soil types, listen for half a dozen different species of skrawking monkey. He’ll detect gorillas by smell and by the stems of freshly chewed Haumania dankelmaniana, a monocot vine they munch like celery. Beyond the immediate goal, his ultimate purpose is to systematize those data into an informational resource unlike any ever before assembled on such a scale—and to see that resource used wisely by the managers and the politicians who will make decisions about the fate of African landscapes. “It’s not a scientific endeavor, this project,” Fay acknowledges during one of our talks before departure. Nor is it a publicity stunt, he argues, answering an accusation that’s been raised. What he means to do, he explains, is to “quantify a stroll through the woods.”

  Then there’s his second driving motive. He doesn’t voice it explicitly, but I will: Mike Fay is an untamable man who just loves to walk in the wilds.

  Completing this marathon trek won’t be easy, not even for him. There are dire diseases, minor health hassles, political disruptions (such as the civil war that racked the Republic of Congo in 1997), and other mishaps that could stop him. He’s familiar with malaria, aware of filariasis and Ebola, and has found himself inconveniently susceptible to footworms, a form of parasite that can travel from elephant dung into exposed human feet, burrowing tunnels in a person’s toes, only to die there and fester. He’s aware that every scratch on an ankle or an arm in this feculent environment is a potential infection. He has tasted the giddy vulnerability of facing armed poachers unarmed, confiscating their meat, burning their huts, and wondering bemusedly why they didn’t just kill him. But the biggest challenge for Fay will come after all his walking.

  Can he make good on the claim that this encyclopedia of field data will be useful? Can he satisfy the doubters that it isn’t just a stunt? Can he channel his personal odyssey into practical results for the conservation of African forests?

  He’s very stubborn; maybe he can.

  Suddenly, two kilometers on, Fay makes a vehement hand signal: stop. As we stand immobile and hushed, a young male elephant appears, walking straight toward us through the understory. Ndokanda slides prudently to the back of the file, knowing well that a forest elephant, nearsighted and excitable, is far more dangerous than, say, a hungry leopard or a runaway truck. Fay raises the video camera. The elephant, visually oblivious and upwind of our smell, keeps coming. The videotape rolls quietly. When the animal is just five yards from him and barely twice that from the rest of us, too close for anyone’s comfort, Fay says in a calm voice: “Hello.” The elephant spooks, whirls around, disappears with its ears flapping.

  Tusk length, about forty centimeters, Fay says. Maybe ten or twelve years old, he estimates. It goes into his notebook.

  Mike Fay is a compact forty-three-year-old American with a sharp chin and a lean, wobbly nose. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, with their round, smoky lenses, he bears a disquieting resemblance to the young Roman Polanski. Say something that’s doltish or disagreeable and he’ll gaze at you silently the way a heron gazes at a fish. But on the trail he’s good company, a man of humor and generous intellect. He sets a punishing pace, starting at daylight, never stopping for lunch or rest, but when there are field data to record in his yellow notebook, fortunately, he pauses often.

  He first came to Central Africa in 1980, after a stint with the Smithsonian Peace Corps (a scientific variant of the U.S. Peace Corps) doing botany in Tunisia. He signed up for another stint on the understanding that he’d go to a new national park in the Central African Republic, near its borders with Chad and Sudan. The park, known as Manovo-Gounda St. Floris, was then just wishful lines on a map. The lines encircled an area rich with wildlife, in a region over which the CAR government exerted virtually no control. It was a savanna ecosystem, fertile and wild, supporting large populations of elephant, black rhino, giant eland, kudu, giraffe, roan antelope, and other big mammals. “A million hectares,” Fay tells me, “and you’re the only white man in those million hectares for eight months out of the year. It was like paradise on Earth.” Yet it wasn’t so paradisaical when Chadian and Sudanese poachers came to slaughter the elephants. Both his love for Central Africa and his ferocity as a conservationist seem to be rooted in that place and time.

  It was at St. Floris too that Fay began to—what’s the right phrase? go AWOL? step off the ranch? disappear into nowhere for long periods?—let’s say leaven his more focused scientific work with wildcat exploratory journeys. Since the park’s landscape was open and flat, he put his Peace Corps–issue Suzuki 125 trail bike to some unauthorized use. “I decided that the way to really see that place was to take long traverses from one road to another, sometimes seventy or eighty kilometers, across the places where no one had ever been.” Too many field biologists, in his judgment, never venture more than a few kilometers from their base camps. Fay rejected such tethering; he hungered to see the wider scope and the interstitial details. He was restless. He would load the little bike with extra fuel, a patch kit for flats, two weeks’ worth of food, and go.

  We leave camp just after dawn on Day 3 and follow the Mopo River downstream along a network of elephant trails. We’re a smaller group now, Nick Nichols and his assistant having backtracked to the start for other work, intending to rendezvous with Fay’s march some weeks later. Fay, Madzou, and I set out while the crew are still eating breakfast, giving us a relatively quiet first look at forest activity. Under a high canopy of Gilbertiodendron trees, the walking is easy. The understory is sparse, as it generally tends to be in these dominant stands of Gilbertiodendron, and well trampled by elephant traffic. Later, as we swing away from the river onto higher ground, the Gilbertiodendron gives way to a mixed f
orest, its canopy gaps delivering light to a clamorous undergrowth of brush, saplings, thorny vines, and woody lianas, through which we climb hunchbacked behind the day’s Pygmy point man. The thickest zones of such early-successional vegetation are known in local slang as kaka zamba, politely translated as “crappy forest.” Today it’s Bakembe, younger and stronger than Ndokanda, who cuts us a tunnel through the kaka.

  The most devilish of the thorny vines is Haumania dankelmaniana, mentioned already as a favored gorilla food. Looping high and low throughout the understory, weaving kaka zamba into a tropical brier patch, forever finding chances to carve bloody scratches across unprotected ankles and toes, Haumania is the bush-whacker’s torment. Even a Congo-walker as seasoned as Fay has to spend much of his time looking down, stepping carefully, minimizing the toll on his feet. Of course Fay would be looking down anyway, because that’s where so much of the data is found—scat piles, footprints, territorial scrape marks, masticated stems, grouty tracks left by red river hogs nose-plowing through leaf litter, pangolin burrows, aardvark burrows, fallen leaves, fallen fruit. Fay’s GPS tells us where we are, while his map and our compasses tell us which way to go. There are no human trails in this forest, because there are no resident humans, few visitors, and no destinations.