Natural Acts

by David Quammen

  “It’s not a purely human disease,” Lahm said. “Humans are the last in the chain of events. I think we should be looking at it as a wildlife-human disease.” Besides doing systematic field research, she has gathered testimony from hunters, gold miners, survivors of Mayibout 2. She has also made field collections of tissue from a whole range of reservoir-candidate species, shipping her specimens off to a virology institute in South Africa for analysis. And she has grown suspicious of one particular species that may be the main transfer agent between the reservoir host and humans, but she declined to tell me what species that is. She needs to do further work, she explained, before further talk.

  On the evening of Day 299, at Fay’s campfire, I hear more on this subject from one of his crewmen, an affable French-speaking Bantu named Thony M’both. Mayibout deux? Yes, he was there; he recalls the epidemic well. Yes, it began with the chimpanzee. Some boys had gone hunting with their dogs; they were after porcupine, and they found the chimp, already dead. No, they didn’t claim they had killed it. The body was rotten, belly swelling, anyone could tell. Many people helped butcher and cook it. Cook it how? In a normal African sauce. All who ate the meat or touched it got sick, according to Thony. Vomiting and diarrhea. Eleven victims were taken downriver to the hospital—only that many, since there wasn’t enough fuel to carry everyone. Eighteen stayed in the village, died there, were buried there. Doctors came up from Franceville (in southern Gabon, site of a medical research institute) wearing their white suits and helmets, but so far as Thony could see, they didn’t save anyone. His friend Sophiano Etouck lost six family members, including his sister-in-law and three nieces. Sophiano (another of Fay’s crew, also here at the campfire) held one niece in his arms as she died, yet he didn’t get sick. Nor did Thony himself. He hadn’t partaken of the chimp stew. He doesn’t eat chimpanzee or gorilla, Thony avers, implying that’s by culinary scruple, not from fear of infection. Nowadays in Mayibout 2, however, nobody eats chimpanzee. All the boys who went porcupine hunting that day, they all died, yes. The dogs? No, the dogs didn’t die.

  The campfire chatter around us has stilled. Sophiano himself, a severe-looking Bantu gold miner with a bodybuilder’s physique, a black goatee, a sweet disposition, and an anguished stutter, sits quietly while Thony tells the tale.

  I ask one final question: Had you ever before seen such a disease? I’m remembering what I’ve read about the horrible, chain-reaction Ebola episodes, with victims bleeding profusely, organ shutdown, chaotic hospital conditions, and desperate efforts to nurse or mop up, leading only to further infection. “No,” Thony answers blandly. “This was the first time.”

  Thony’s body count differs from the careful report in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, so do some other particulars, yet his eyewitness testimony seems utterly real. He’s as scared of Ebola as anybody. If he were inventing, he wouldn’t invent the chimpanzee’s swollen belly. Added to it all, though, is one fact or factoid that he let drop on the first evening I met him—a detail so garish, so perfectly dramatic, that even having heard it from his lips, I’m unsure whether to take it literally. Around the same time as the Mayibout epidemic, Thony told me, he and Sophiano saw a whole pile of gorillas, thirteen of them, lying dead in the forest.

  Anecdotal testimony, even from eyewitnesses, tends to be shimmery, inexact, unreliable. To say thirteen dead gorillas might actually mean a dozen, or lots, too many for a startled brain to count. To say I saw them might mean exactly that or possibly less. My friend saw them, he’s unimpeachable. Or maybe I heard about it on pretty good authority.

  Scientific data are something else. They don’t shimmer with poetic hyperbole and ambivalence. They are particulate, quantifiable, firm. Fastidiously gathered, rigorously sorted, they can reveal emergent meanings. This is why Mike Fay is walking across Central Africa with a little yellow notebook.

  After two weeks of bushwhacking through Ebola’s backyard, we emerge from the forest onto a red laterite road. Blinking against the sunlight, we find ourselves in a village called Minkoula, at which the dependable Tomo soon arrives with more supplies. Day 307 ends with us camped in a banana grove behind the house of a local official, flanked by a garbage dump and a gas-engine generator. The crew has been given an evening’s furlough, and half of them have caught rides into Makokou to chase women and get drunk. By morning one of the Pygmies will be in jail, having expensively busted up a bar, and Fay will be facing a new round of political hassles, personnel crises, and minor ransom demands, a category of inescapable chores he finds far less agreeable than walking through swamp. But somehow he will get the crew moving again. He’ll plunge away from the red road, diving back into the universe of green. Meanwhile he spends hours in his tent, collating the latest harvest of data on his laptop.

  Within the past fourteen days, he informs me, we have stepped across 997 piles of elephant dung and not a single dung pile from a gorilla. We have heard zero gorilla chest-beat displays. We have seen zero sprigs of Marantaceae chewed by gorilla teeth and discarded. These are numbers representing as good a measure as now exists of the mystery of Minkébé.

  Measuring that mystery is a crucial first step; solving it is another matter.

  I make my departure along the laterite road and then by Cessna from the Makokou airstrip. The pilot who has come to chauffeur me is a young Frenchman named Nicolas Kozon, the same fellow who circled the Green Abyss at low altitude while Tomo tossed bombs of manioc and sardines to Fay and the others below. Now, as we rise from the runway, climb further, and point ourselves toward Libreville, the road and the villages disappear quickly, leaving Nicolas and me with a limitless vista of green. Below us, around us in all directions to the horizon, there is only forest canopy, and more canopy, magisterial and abstract.

  Nicolas is both puzzled and amused by the epic daffiness of the Megatransect, and through our crackly headsets we discuss it. I describe the daily routine, the distances made, the swamps crossed, and what Fay faces from here onward. He’ll visit the big waterfalls of the Ivindo River, I say, then turn westward. He’ll cross the railroad line and two more roads, but otherwise he’ll keep to the forest, following his plotted route, staying as far as possible from human settlements. He can do that all the way to the ocean. He’ll cross the Lopé Reserve, yes, and then a big block of little-known terrain around the Massif du Chaillu. Another four months of walking, if all goes well. He’s skinny but looks strong. He’ll cross the Gamba complex of defunct hunting areas and faunal reserves along the coast, south of Port-Gentil, and break out onto the beach. He expects to get there in late November, I say.

  With a flicker of smile, Nicolas asks: “And then will he swim to America?”

  III. END OF THE LINE

  November–December 2000

  On the 453rd day of his punishing, obsessional, fifteen-month hike across the forests of Central Africa, J. Michael Fay stood on the east bank of a body of water, gazing west. It was not the Atlantic Ocean. That goal, the seacoast of southwestern Gabon, the finish line to his trek, was still twenty miles away. And now his path was blocked by a final obstruction, not the most daunting he’d faced but nonetheless serious: this blackwater sump, a zone of intermittently flooded forest converted to finger lake by the seasonal rains. Soaked leaf litter and other detritus had yielded the usual tannin-rich tea, and so the water’s sleek surface was as dark as buffed ebony, punctuated sparsely by large trees, their roots and buttresses submerged. Submerged how deeply? Fay didn’t know. Eighty yards out, the flooded forest gave way to a flooded thicket, a tangle of dense, scrubby vegetation with low branches and prop roots interlaced like mangroves, forming a barrier to vision and maybe to any imaginable mode of human passage. How far through the thicket to dry land? That also Fay didn’t know.

  “This is the moment of truth, I think,” he said.

  If it’s only waist-deep, I said, with vapid good cheer, we could easily wade across.

  “If it stays no deeper than shoulder,” he corrected me, “we can make
it.” But he wasn’t optimistic.

  Fay took the machete of his point man, Emile Bebe, the young Baka Pygmy who had cut trail for him across hundreds of miles of Gabon. Slipping off his pack, wearing only his usual amphibious outfit (river sandals and river shorts), Fay waded out alone, probing the dark water ahead of him with a long stick. Bebe, two other walking companions—the photographer Nick Nichols and a videographer from National Geographic Television, Phil Allen—and I stood watching him go. Soon he was waist-deep, chest-deep, then armpit-deep, groping with his feet against sudden drops, seeking the shallowest route. Then there was just a little head and two skinny arms vanishing into the thicket. I climbed onto a woody loop of liana against the base of a tree, putting me six feet above the water and better positioned to listen, if not to see. I was concerned for him out there alone because of the crocodiles—not just Crocodylous niloticus, the fearsome Nile croc, but also a smaller species found hereabouts, Osteolaemus tetraspis, commonly known as the dwarf crocodile yet not to be taken too lightly. Of course my concern was futile, I realized, since from this distance, perched like a parrot on a trapeze, I couldn’t give any timely help if a crocodile did grab him. I heard the whack of the machete. I heard fits of cursing, which alternated oddly with what sounded like bursts of demented song. We waited. He was gone for a half-hour, forty minutes, longer.

  Meanwhile the rest of the traveling crew—two other Baka Pygmies and seven Bantu men, all carrying heavy packs of camp gear and scientific equipment and food, plus a middle-aged Gabonese forestry technician named Augustin Moungazi, whose role was to census trees—caught up and joined us at the water’s edge. Where’s the boss? they asked. Somewhere out there. The crewmen cast their eyes across the black lake with varying gradations of weariness and dread. Most of them had worked with Fay seven months now, since he had crossed into Gabon from the Republic of Congo, and they had been through such moments before. In the way they shrugged off their packs, uncricked their shoulders, inspected the route forward with leery scowls, they seemed to be saying: Oy, what manner of muddling travail gets us around this obstacle? It looked bad, but they had seen worse.

  After nearly an hour I climbed down from my perch. Bebe smoked another cigarette. Nick aimed his Leica at anything remotely interesting. We swatted at filaria flies. We ate our crackers, nuts, and other piddling snacks representing lunch. We wondered silently whether Mike Fay would ever come back and, if not, how we’d find our way out of this forest without our mad leader. Then we heard shouts.

  Fay had reached landfall beyond the thicket and returned just far enough to holler instructions. Mainly he was calling to the crewmen, in French, through the wattle of vegetation and the heavy equatorial air. Admittedly my French is lousy, Nick’s and Phil’s even worse, so we were befuddled; yet the Francophone crewmen appeared befuddled too. If we could just understand what Mike was saying, all of us, we would gladly comply. But to my ears he sounded like a bilious colonel of the French Foreign Legion screaming orders at new recruits through a mattress.

  He had been right, in some sense, when he called it a moment of truth. Whereas Fay had come to study the forest, I had come to study Fay, and adversity is a great illuminator of true character. But then again, truth?—it’s a quicksilver commodity, not so easily gathered as data. The moment was still unfolding, and so far there was more confusion than illumination. Did he want us to come or to stay? If we should come, then how? Should we cut logs and build a raft or just swim for it? The voice from the thicket seemed to convey almost nothing but purblind certainty and impatience. Was he mustering his troops for a final heroic lurch? Or, stressed by the long months of walking and the burden of forcing discipline on a group of freely hired men, by the nearness of the end, by his own ambivalence about reaching it, was he having a meltdown?

  Days after this episode in the black lake, I would still be asking myself those questions. I would still be puzzling over the matter of J. Michael Fay and the complicated, provocative subject of leadership.

  It was both the logic and the momentum of Fay’s grand enterprise, which he had labeled the Megatransect, that had brought him and his entourage to this point of exigency on the 453rd morning. The logic was that he would walk a zigzag route from the northeastern corner of the Republic of Congo to the southwestern coast of Gabon, a distance of at least 1,200 miles, passing dead center through vast blocks of roadless and uninhabited forest, gathering data on vegetation, wildlife, and forest conditions as he went. The forest blocks, lying contiguous to one another, could be seen as gobbets of raw meat on Africa’s last great kebab of tropical wilderness. Fay’s route was to be the skewer.

  The momentum derived from 452 days of footslog persistence, including many swamps mucked across and creeks forded, many resupply problems, many hungry nights, many nervous elephants with half a notion to make Fay himself a kebab, many hours of campfire laughter and bonhomie with the crew, many explosions of anger, many points at which it seemed almost impossible for Fay and his comrades to go on, after which they went on. Fay’s logic insisted that this gargantuan transect be continuous and unbroken, both in space and in time. There had already occurred the one unavoidable gap, back in northwestern Congo just short of the Gabon border, when he departed from his plotted line to evacuate Mouko, who was verging on death from hepatitis. Although that short unwalked stretch—about eighteen miles, which he called the Mouko Gap—continued to nag Fay with a slight sense of incompleteness, he had put it behind him, marching on. By now his momentum included so many miles traversed (more like 2,000, in fact, than the 1,200 originally foreseen) and so many crises passed that it was unthinkable to be balked again, this time within twenty miles of the beach.

  The logic of the enterprise had been laid out to the National Geographic Society (his main sponsor) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (his employer) in a forty-eight-page prospectus, with the forest blocks and his route sketched onto a multicolored map. The blocks as he had delineated them numbered thirteen, beginning with the Nouabalé-Ndoki block in northwestern Congo and ranging southwestward from there. Last in the chain was the Gamba block, a cluster of faunal reserves and defunct hunting areas along the Atlantic coast that are now being organized by the Gabonese government, with help from the World Wildlife Fund, into a complex of protected areas intended to preserve good habitat for elephants, hippos, dwarf crocodiles, and other sensitive species all the way to the beach.

  Each of these blocks abuts another, and each is circumscribed by human impact (a road, a rail line, a string of villages along a river) but—this is the crucial part—virtually free of such impact at its interior. Although some armchair experts find it hard to believe, there are still sizable patches of African forest not currently occupied by human beings. Fay’s concept was to travel by foot with a small support crew through these forest blocks and to measure in multiple dimensions the relationship between such absence of human impact and the ecological richness of the forest.

  He described this data-gathering mission as a “reconnaissance survey,” to distinguish it from the more formalized procedure known as the line-transect survey, wherein a field biologist walks and rewalks a short, straight path through the forest, gathering accretions of standardized data with each passage. Instead of cutting a ruler-straight corridor, Fay had elected to use a “path of least resistance” approach, letting the contours and obstacles of the landscape nudge him this way and that against his general compass bearing, and to make a single 1,200-mile walk instead of, say, 1,200 one-mile laps up and down a familiar snippet of trail. “The path of least resistance has the advantage of leaving the forest intact after passage, a significantly increased sample size because of increased speed, and considerably reduced observer fatigue,” he had written in the prospectus. During my own time on the trail with him, totaling eight weeks divided into four stretches, I sometimes recollected the irony of that phrase, “the path of least resistance.” It sounded lazily sybaritic, whereas here we were, clambering through still another tro
pical brier patch and then waddling across still another floodplain of sucking mud.

  Now again on the morning of Day 453, as I squinted toward that thicket across the black lake, somewhere amid which Fay was hacking branches and yodeling orders, I had cause to wonder: This is the path of least resistance? Thank God we didn’t come the hard way.

  Like an unnerving omen of things to follow, Day 453 had begun with leeches. We had spent the night at Leech Pond Camp, thus dubbed by me (I named all the camps, for mnemonic purposes) when Fay returned from his evening bath and reported that ten leeches had gotten to him while he was rinsing. Leeches in moderation are no big deal, since they don’t hurt and don’t generally cause infection or carry disease. But the leeches that greeted us in the camp pond on the 453rd morning were beyond moderation. They swam up like schools of grunion and hooked their thirsty little maws to our ankles and calves, a half-dozen here, a half-dozen there, resisting slimily as we tried to pull them off. We had leeches under our sandal straps, leeches between our toes, leeches racing to every open sore. Good grief, what had they lived on before we arrived?

  Hopping from foot to foot in the shallows, we deleeched ourselves while Bebe, also dancing and snatching at his feet between machete strokes, felled a small tree to bridge the pond’s deeper trough. Then we tightroped across, deleeched again on solid ground, and went on.

  Within a few minutes we heard monkeys jumping through the canopy. Fay did his usual trick, a whistling imitation of the crowned eagle, which provoked raucous alarm calls (kaa-ko! kaa-ko!) from the monkeys, allowing him to identify them: Cercocebus torquatus torquatus, the red-capped mangabey, locally known as the kako. He scribbled the exact time and the species name into his notebook, then took a five-minute sampling of their vocalizations on digital audio. Earlier he had mentioned that this mangabey, with its unmistakable flaming hairdo, was native only to forests near the Atlantic coast; farther inland, months ago, while crossing Congo and eastern Gabon, he had seen plenty of gray-cheeked mangabeys but none of the red-capped. Now here they were, offering a welcome signal that we had entered the coastal zone.