Natural Acts

by David Quammen

  Meanwhile Fay’s own data gathering had continued, providing some new and significant impressions of Odzala National Park. For instance, one day in a remote floodplain forest, Fay, along with Mambeleme and Kossa-Kossa, had sighted a black colobus monkey, the first report of that rare species within the park. In the famed bais of Odzala he saw plenty of elephants, as he had expected, but during his long cross-country traverses between one bai and another he found a notable absence of elephant trails and dung, suggesting that a person shouldn’t extrapolate from those bais to an assumption of overall elephant abundance. His elephant-sign tallies, recorded methodically in the current yellow notebook, would complement observations of elephant distribution made by ECOFAC researchers.

  Maybe those notebooks would yield other insights too. Maybe the Megatransect wasn’t just an athletic publicity stunt, as his critics had claimed. It occurred to me as an intriguing possibility, not for the first time, that maybe Mike Fay wasn’t as crazy as he looked.

  After a few days at Ekania we set off toward the Mambili headwaters and a large bai called Maya North, near which was another ECOFAC field camp used by elephant researchers and visiting film crews. The usual route to Maya North camp was upriver along the Mambili, traveling some hours by motorized dugout to a point where ECOFAC workers had cut a good trail. We came the back way, bushwhacking on an overland diagonal. That evening, as we sat by the campfire trading chitchat with several Congolese camp workers, the talk turned to boat travel on the upper Mambili. Well, we didn’t use a boat, Fay mentioned. You didn’t? they wondered. Then how did you get here? We walked, Fay said. Walked? All the way from Ekania? There’s no trail. True but irrelevant, Fay said.

  At daybreak on Day 188 we were at the bai, watching eighteen elephants in the fresh light of dawn as they drank and groped for minerals in the stream. Some distance from the others stood an ancient female, emaciated, failing, her skull and pelvic bones draped starkly with slack gray skin. Amid the herd was a massive bull, who swept his raised trunk back and forth like a periscope, tasting the air vigilantly for unwelcome scents. He caught ours. There was a subtle shift in mood, then the bull initiated a deliberate, wary leave-taking. One elephant after another waded off toward the far side of the bai, disappearing into the trees. By sunup they were gone.

  By midday so we were, walking on.

  From the upper Mambili, Fay planned to ascend toward an escarpment that forms the divide between the Congo River basin and a lesser system, the Ogooué, which drains to the Atlantic through Gabon. I would peel off again on Day 195, using another resupply rendezvous with Tomo as my chance to exit. As it happened, Tomo needed three boatmen and a chainsaw to get his load of supplies that far up the snag-choked Mambili, but going back downriver would be easier, and we figured to reach the airstrip in two days.

  On the morning of the day of my departure, Fafa was laid flat by a malarial fever, so Fay himself oversaw the sorting and packing of new supplies: sacks of manioc and rice and sugar, cans of peanut butter and sardines, bundles of salted fish, big plastic canisters of pepper and dried onions, cooking oil, granola bars, freeze-dried meats, cigarettes for the crew, many double-A batteries, a fresh stack of colorful plastic bowls, and one package of seaweed, recommended by Tomo as a complement to the salted fish. Finally the packs were ready, the tents struck; Fafa rallied from his fever, and I walked along behind Fay and Mambeleme into the early afternoon.

  Fay and I had agreed where I would rejoin him next: at an extraordinary set of granite domes, known as inselbergs (“island mountains”), that rise up like huge stony gumdrops from a forest in northeastern Gabon. The forest, called Minkébé, is ecologically rich but microbially menacing; many months earlier, as we had knelt over my map on the floor of an office at the National Geographic Society in Washington, this was where Fay had written “Ebola region” in red ink. “We’ll meet you on the other side of the continental divide,” he told me cheerily now. “On our way to the Atlantic Ocean.”

  Backtracking on the trail to catch Tomo’s boat, I shook hands with Kossa-Kossa, Fafa, and each of the Pygmy crew, thanking them for their good company and support. I was fascinated by these rough-and-ready Bambendjellés, whom Fay had somehow cajoled and bullied across hundreds of miles, leading them so far from their home forest into an alien landscape, an alien realm of experiences. They had been challenged beyond imagining, stressed fearfully, but so far they hadn’t broken; they put me in mind of the sort of Portuguese seamen, uneducated, trusting, adaptable, who must have sailed with Ferdinand Magellan. By way of farewell, I told them in bad Lingala: “Na kotala yo, na sanza mibalé.” I’ll see you in two months.

  I was wrong. It would be three months before Fay reached the inselbergs, an interval encompassing some of his most hellish times since the Green Abyss. And when I did rejoin him there, Mambeleme and all the others would be gone.

  Fay and his team followed the escarpment northward along its crest, a great uplifted rim that may have once marked the bank of an ancient body of water. Kossa-Kossa left the troop, as planned, to return to his real-life duties. The others shifted direction again, heading into a thumb of territory where the Republic of Congo obtrudes westward against Gabon. They struck toward the Ouaga River and found it defended by a huge swamp, which at first seemed passable but grew uglier as they committed themselves deeper. By insidious degrees, it became a nightmare of raffia palms and giant pandanus standing in four feet of black water and mud, the long pandanus leaves armed with rows of what Fay recalls as “horrid cat-claw spines.” He and the crew spent two nights there in a small cluster of trees, among which they built elevated log platforms to hold their tents above the muck. Pushing forward, Fay saw the route get worse: deeper water, no trees, only more raffia and cat-claw pandanus, and five days’ distance of such slogging still ahead, with a chance that any rainstorm would raise the water and trap them. Finally he ordered retreat, a rare thing for Fay, and resigned himself to a long detour through a zone for which he had no map.

  After circumventing the Ouaga swamp, they converged with a human trail, a simple forest footpath that serves as an important highway linking villages in that northwestern Congo thumb. The footpath took them to a village called Poumba, where they picked up two pieces of bad news: that the Gabonese border crossing would be difficult at best, due to festering discord between local authorities on the two sides, and that a Muslim trader who dealt in gold and ivory had vanished along the footpath under circumstances suggesting foul play. From a certain perspective (one that the local gendarmerie might well embrace), the trader’s disappearance coincided suspiciously with another bit of odd news: that a white man with an entourage of Pygmies had materialized from the forest on a transcontinental stroll to count aardvark burrows and elephant dung (so he claimed) and was making fast tracks for the Gabonese border. It could look very incriminating, Fay knew. He felt both eager to move and reluctant to seem panicky. Added to those concerns was another, seemingly minor. For the third time in two weeks one of the Pygmies, Mouko this time, seemed to be suffering from malaria. But a dose of Quinimax would fix that, Fay thought.

  Over the next few days Mouko got weaker. He couldn’t lug his pack. At times he couldn’t even walk and had to be carried. Evidently it was hepatitis, not malaria, since his urine was dark, the Quinimax brought no improvement, and his eyes were going yellow. Fay slowed the pace and took a turn carrying Mouko’s pack. Hiding his uncertainty, he wondered what to do. All the Pygmies think Mouko is going to die now, he wrote in his notebook on Day241. Mouko seemed languid as well as sick, with little will to live, while the others had already turned fatalistic about his death. Fay became Mouko’s chief nurse. He scolded the crew for sharing Mouko’s manioc, using his plate, making cuts on his back to bleed him, and various other careless or well-meant practices that could spread the infection. To the notebook, Fay confided: I am so sick and tired of being the parent of 13 children, it is too much. Thank god I never had children—way too much of a burden. Solo is the wa
y to go—depend on yourself only. The trouble in a group like this is it’s like you’re an organism. If one part of you is sick or lost the whole organism suffers. For another ten days after that entry, Mouko’s survival remained in doubt.

  They pushed toward Garabinzam, a village near the west end of the footpath, on a navigable tributary of the Ivindo River, which drains into Gabon. On the last day of walking to Garabinzam, the team covered nine miles, Kati carrying his brother Mouko piggyback for most of the way. That evening, Fay wrote: I need to ship these boys home. You can just tell they are haggard, totally worn out. No matter how good they were they are just going to go down one by one. I would love to keep my friends but I would be betraying them if I made them stay on any longer—it would be unjust.

  Several days later, he departed from his line of march—and from all his resolutions about continuity—to evacuate Mouko downriver by boat. They would try for a village at the Ivindo confluence, on the Gabonese side; from there, if Mouko survived, he could be moved to a hospital in the town of Makokou. Fafa would meanwhile escort the others back to their home forest, hundreds of miles east, sparing them from the onward trudge and the unwelcoming border. Fay himself would pick up the hike in Gabon. One stretch of the planned route would remain unwalked—roughly eighteen miles, from Garabinzam overland to the border—as a rankling gap in the data set, a blemish on the grand enterprise, and a token (this is my view, not his) of Fay’s humanity.

  Left Garabinzam, all is well, he wrote briskly on May 24, 2000, which in Megatransect numeration was Day 248. But he also wrote, almost plaintively: Pygmies didn’t say goodbye.

  Mouko survived and went home. Starting from scratch, Fay gathered a new crew from the villages and gold-mining camps of the upper Ivindo region. He found an able young Pygmy named Bebe, with good ears for wildlife and a strong machete arm, who emerged before long as his new point man; he found a new cook and eight other forest-tough Pygmy and Bantu men; he found energy, even enthusiasm, to continue. They set off on a long arc through the Minkébé forest, targeting various points of interest, most dramatic of which were the inselbergs. That’s where I next see Fay, on Day 292, when Tomo and I step out of a chartered helicopter that has landed precariously on one of the smaller mounds.

  Skin browner, hair longer and whiter, Fay looks otherwise unchanged. Same pair of river shorts, same sandals, same dry little smile. I have brought him three pounds of freshly ground coffee and a copy of Michael Herr’s Dispatches, another of the Vietnam war memoirs that he finds fascinating. If he’s pleased to see me, for the company, for the coffee, he gives no sign.

  At once he begins talking about data. He has been finding some interesting trends. For instance, regarding the gorillas. It’s true, he says, picking up a discussion from months earlier, that there’s a notable absence of gorillas in the Minkébé forest. Since crossing the border, he hasn’t heard a single chest-beat display and he has seen only one pile of gorilla dung. Back in Odzala National Park, over a similar stretch, he would have counted three or four hundred dung piles.* Elephants are abundant; duikers and monkeys and pigs, abundant. But the gorillas are missing. He suspects they were wiped out by Ebola.

  The Minkébé forest block, encompassing more than 12,500 square miles of northeastern Gabon, represents one of the great zones of wilderness remaining in Central Africa. Much of it stands threatened by logging operations, bushmeat extraction such as inevitably accompanies logging, and elephant poaching for ivory. But the Gabonese government has recently taken the admirable step of designating a sizable fraction (2,169 square miles) of that block as the Minkébé Reserve, a protected area; and now, in addition, three large adjacent parcels are being considered for possible inclusion.* The Gabonese Ministry of Water and Forests, with technical help and gentle coaxing from the World Wildlife Fund, has been studying the farsighted idea that an enlarged Minkébé Reserve might be valuable not just in ecological terms but also in economic ones for its role in the sequestration of carbon. With greenhouse gases and climate change becoming ever more conspicuous as a global concern, maybe other nations and interested parties might soon be willing to compensate Gabon—so goes the logic—for maintaining vast uncombusted carbon storehouses such as Minkébé.

  But before the reserve extension can be approved, on-the-ground assessments must be made. So in the past several years a small group of scientists and forest workers made reconnaissance expeditions into Minkébé—both the original reserve and the proposed extension. They found spectacular zones of forest and swamp, stunning inselbergs, networks of streams, all rich with species and virtually untouched by human presence. They also found—as Mike Fay has been finding—a nearly total absence of gorillas and chimpanzees.

  It wasn’t always so. In 1984 a paper appeared in the American Journal of Primatology, by Caroline Tutin and Michel Fernandez, in which the authors described their census of gorilla and chimpanzee populations throughout Gabon. Using a combination of field transects, habitat analysis, and cautious extrapolation, Tutin and Fernandez estimated that at least 4,171 gorillas lived within the Minkébé sector, representing a modest but significant population density. Something seems to have happened to those apes between 1984 and now.

  It may have happened abruptly in the mid-1990s, when three Ebola epidemics burned through villages and gold camps at the Minkébé periphery, killing dozens of humans. One of those outbreaks occurred in early 1996 at a village called Mayibout 2, on the upper Ivindo River. It began with a chimpanzee carcass, found dead in the forest and brought to the village as food. Eighteen people who helped with the skinning, the butchering, and the handling of the chimp flesh became sick. Suffering variously from fever, headache, and bloody diarrhea, they were evacuated downriver to the Makokou hospital. Four of them died quickly. A fifth escaped from the hospital, went back to Mayibout 2, and died there. That victim was buried in the traditional way—ceremonies were performed, and no special precautions were taken against infection.

  This bare record of facts and numbers comes from a report published three years later, by Dr. Alain-Jean Georges and a long list of coauthors, in a special supplement to The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Although the raw chimp flesh had been infectious, the cooked meat evidently hadn’t been; no one got sick, the Georges paper asserted, simply from eating it. But once the outbreak began, there were some secondary cases, one human victim infecting another, and the disease spread from Mayibout 2 to a couple villages nearby, Mayibout 1 and Mvadi. By early March, thirty-one people had fallen ill, of whom twenty-one died, for a mortality rate of almost 68 percent. Then it was over, as abruptly as it started. Around the same time, according to later accounts, dead gorillas were seen in the forest.

  Mike Fay isn’t the only person inclined to connect Minkébé’s shortage of gorillas with Ebola virus. Down in the Gabonese capital, Libreville, I heard the same idea from a lanky Dutchman named Bas Huijbregts, associated with the World Wildlife Fund’s Minkébé Project, who made some of those reconnaissance hikes through the Minkébé forest, gathering both quantified field data and anecdotal testimony. Gorilla nests, Huijbregts reported, were drastically less abundant than they had been a decade earlier. About the gorillas themselves, he said: “If you talk to all the fishermen, hunters, gold miners, they all have a similar story. Before there were many—and then they started dying off.” The apparent population collapse, not just of gorillas but of chimps too, seemed to coincide with the human epidemics. In a hunting camp just north of the Gabonese border, someone showed Huijbregts the grave of a man who, so it was said, had died after eating flesh from a gorilla he had found dead in the forest.

  I spoke also with Sally Lahm, an American ecologist who has worked in the region for almost twenty years. Lahm has focused especially on the mining camps of the upper Ivindo, where gold comes as precious flecks from buried stream sediments and protein comes as bushmeat from the forest. Her studies of wildlife and its uses by humans, plus the epidemic events of the mid-1990s, have led her toward the su
bject of Ebola. When the third outbreak occurred, at a logging camp southwest of Minkébé, she went there with several medical people from the Makokou hospital and played a double role, as both nurse and researcher.

  “I’m scared to death of Ebola, because I’ve seen what it can do,” Lahm told me. “I’ve seen it kill people—up close.” Fearful or not, she is engrossed by the scientific questions. Where does Ebola lurk between outbreaks? What species in the forest—a small mammal? an insect?—serves as its reservoir host? How does its ecology intersect the ecology of hunters, villagers, miners? So far, nobody knows.