A Forest in the Clouds

by John Fowler

  “No way . . . !”

  “He’s her spy. If she wants to open it and read it, she does.”

  “How do you know that?” My stomach sank. I had just sent my candid letter to Terry out that morning. . . .

  “She confronted Bill and Amy about some things that they said she could only have learned by reading their mail. They had a big fight about it. She’ll read your incoming mail too if she thinks there might be anything in it about her.”

  I was even more astonished when Peter went on to describe how Bill had been attacked by the silverback, Brutus, of Group 6 while leading a group of French tourists to them. The silverback had sunk his teeth into Bill’s neck in an unprecedented assault, which only cast doubt on the notion that mountain gorillas were peaceful and harmless, despite their “bluff” charges. The unfortunate incident also gave Dian the temerity to say that Bill was too nervous and awkward to work with wild gorillas. I felt a queasy sinking feeling pondering all this new inside information, but my thoughts of camp strife were soon averted when Icarus began to approach me. One meter downhill from where I sat he stopped and sat upright. Folding his arms across his chest, Icarus stared boldly at me. Having learned from Peter to lie down and make a whimpering sound when a gorilla approaches, I did just that. Knowing, too, that an ape may perceive direct eye contact as a threat, I averted my eyes, training them instead on Icarus’s massive forearms directly before me. This was thus far the best view of a gorilla I had ever experienced, and, frankly, more than I wanted at that moment. Icarus was huge, and his close, unobstructed proximity was thoroughly chilling. For what would be the first of many times I ran through my mind the fact that gorillas were actually docile creatures, “gentle giants,” benign vegetarians, just to assuage my second thoughts. Still this four-hundred-pound ape was intimidating as hell. Trying not to make any quick movements that he might perceive as aggressive, I slowly made a note about the approach of this great silverback before me. My hand trembled as I did so, and I hoped that Peter, only a meter away, didn’t notice.

  “Uh-oh . . . here comes Poppy,” Peter said. “She’s my favorite.”

  Looking up, I saw four-year-old Poppy, a round ball of black fluff about one-third the size of the adult females.

  “Why’s she your favorite?” I asked, as the youngster approached my feet with confidence.

  “She’s just nice,” Peter said. “Gets along well with everyone.”

  As the big ball of fur examined my boots, her little cousin Cantsbee climbed boldly onto her back as if mounting a thoroughbred. Then to my amazement, Poppy and her fuzzy little jockey strolled right over my feet and onto my legs. Cantsbee stared me down with what I took to be an impish mocking grin, as if he knew how this was freaking me out and thoroughly enjoyed it.

  As if not to be outdone, Tuck, a full-sized female, crawled past Poppy and . . . this can’t be happening! . . . onto my chest! All under the watchful eye of giant Icarus. Peter wrote calmly onto his notepad as I was pressed into the ground by Tuck’s weight. “Is this okay?” I asked, in a quavering voice.

  “It’s okay for them to touch you, but not for you to touch them.” Peter answered.

  “Huh?”

  “If one of the silverbacks saw you reach out to touch one of them, he’d starting grunting to let you know.”

  “Oh God.”

  “And if you didn’t stop, he’d probably charge you.”

  The shock of it all made me tremble like jelly, my nervous laughter stifled by my struggle to breathe.

  “They do this to new people,” Peter said, smiling nonchalantly as the rest of Group 5, in a promenade of dominion and fright, walked onto and over me, as if I was merely a carpet for them. I abandoned note-taking as I was pressed deeper into the undergrowth, too frozen in shock to even whimper. Peter remained composed and nonchalant, calling out their names as if announcing arrivals to a royal ball: “Pablo . . . Marchessa . . . Tuck . . . Muraha . . . Shinda . . .”

  Excitement mixed with fear, and my trembling continued. I wanted to speak, to make a joke, make light of the situation, but I couldn’t utter a sound. Each individual lingered a moment or two atop my quivering body, inspecting my clothing and gear, their weight holding me onto the substrate on which I lay. Their warm herbal breath filled my sinuses. I was covered in gorillas, literally being pressed into the ground!

  Only when their curiosity of me, the new guy, was satisfied through ogling, smelling and touching in a baptism of fur, did they move on, one by one. Suddenly Cantsbee clambered off of Poppy in a wild dismount and, as if in a dare to walk over hot coals, he mockingly galloped across my chest before rejoining his mother, Puck, somewhere above my head.

  Only Poppy, the first to have begun the siege, lingered upon me. Still sitting on my legs, and intrigued by my rubber rain pants, she began to mouth them. Uh oh, what if she bites? Aware that Mama Puck was still looming above me, just out of my range of vision, I watched in horror as Poppy’s licking turned to nibbles and her teeth began to catch the hairs and skin on my thigh, through the rubber pants. With mighty Icarus still watching over us, I was afraid even to moan as the sixty-pound juvenile had her way with my clothing. When she caught another piece of my flesh between her teeth, I actually flinched. With that, Poppy stopped and drew back. I could see her pondering what she had done. She seemed to care about my reaction. Looking up, she scanned the rest of my outfit one more time before scampering over me to join the others just uphill, knocking my shoulder back to the ground in the process. I craned my neck to see that Puck was gone, and Icarus shifted to watch the others move on up the slope.

  The old silverback, Beethoven, had traveled around us and upward from another direction, but Icarus decided to use the same path as the rest of the group and followed their trail over the crushed weeds along the length of my body. Is he going to walk on me too? Too cool to show any interactive interest in me, he strode quietly past, his girth brushing against me as he blocked out the sun like some great ocean liner. Soon, he and the rest of the group were out of sight, and I collapsed onto my back like a boneless chicken, while Peter simply penciled in his last notes, casually checking his altimeter. Just another day for Peter, this was the experience of a lifetime for me! We’d be heading back to camp soon, and facing Dian again, but just then I didn’t care; I was riding the high of my gorilla communion.

  EIGHT

  GORILLA WITHOUT A NAME

  Her father’s drinking and run-ins with the law brought an end to Dian’s parents’ marriage when she was only six. A year later her mother remarried an ambitious building contractor. Despite financial success, her mother and stepfather refused to indulge little Dian, instead insisting she eat in the kitchen with the housekeeper at dinnertime. Pets were not allowed either—though the child was clearly fascinated by animals—save for a goldfish that soon died, causing their little girl to grieve for a week. She was not allowed to get another. Dian’s mother never talked about her daughter’s biological father, who drifted out of Dian’s life early on. As an adult, she had sporadic reconnections with him via letters, until finally receiving news that he’d killed himself.

  Dian’s first career choice was veterinary medicine, but she lacked the academic aptitude to pass the necessary chemistry and physics courses, settling instead for a degree in occupational therapy and a budding career working with disabled children in Louisville, Kentucky, far from her mother and stepfather. There she rented a small cottage on a farm, surrounded by animals domestic and wild.

  In 1963, Dian took out a loan to follow a dream of touring Africa. A fortuitous meeting with the famed archeologists Louis and Mary Leakey led to Louis encouraging this attractive young woman to follow up on George Schaller’s landmark gorilla studies. Three years later, the determined would-be scientist set up camp at the former site of noted naturalist Carl Akeley’s camp at the base of towering Mount Mikeno on the Zaire side of the Virunga Volcanoes, just a half day’s hike through the forest and across the border from Karisoke’s loca
tion.

  Within a year, political strife in Zaire forced Dian to move her base into Rwanda. Despite an acute fear of heights, Dian persisted by sheer force of will at habituating several gorilla groups as they traveled through deep ravines and up steep volcanoes. Simply by enduring the bluff charges from the silverbacks long enough to wear them down to the point of blasé indifference to her persistent presence, she was eventually rewarded with the ability to sit among the giant apes and observe.

  Dian had long since ended her regular treks to the gorillas, remaining instead in her cabin to peck away at her book manuscript on an old field Olivetti typewriter between drags from Impala cigarettes and swigs of Johnnie Walker. By the time I arrived, all of the gorilla research had long been carried out by students.

  The three study groups lived within a practical morning’s hike. At least, they started out that way. Peanuts’s group consisted of the lead silverback and younger remnant males from Group 4, which had been tragically decimated by poachers just two years earlier, as reported by previous student Ian Redmond who returned to camp one day with the horrific news that the lead silverback, Digit, had been slaughtered by poachers. In the course of this struggle, other gorillas in the group had also been killed. The fracturing of these groups subsequently generated even further losses; for when a group loses its lead males, it’s not long before other silverbacks draw these females away into their own groups. Tragically, after transfer, these new males kill any of the dependent youngsters that come with their new mates. This serves the selfish gene by getting the mothers cycling again so they can produce offspring with their new silverbacks.

  Our gorilla orphan’s rescue had been no small feat. When poachers had approached a local French doctor, Pierre Vimont, about purchasing a baby mountain gorilla, Dr. Vimont quietly alerted authorities. The good doctor then heroically agreed to participate in a sting operation to locate and confiscate the baby, even allowing himself to be arrested in the process so as not to blow his cover. Dr. Vimont was released immediately afterward, but the poachers stayed in jail, and the baby was brought to Dian.

  The little one’s care and well-being became a full-time job for Carolyn and me, sharing duties on alternate days. I was captivated by the baby gorilla and enjoyed spending time with her. Covered in lustrous black fur, save for her leathery black face, hands, and feet, the little ape was entirely childlike, playful and curious, with obvious emotions. At one point, as it started to rain, I took her into my cabin. When I tossed her onto the nylon sleeping bag on my bed, she slid across it on her own sleek fur. Excited by the sensation, she raised herself up and spun into another slide. Inspired by her play, I grabbed her arms and made her slide again. At that she chuckled happily—“uh uh uh uh uh uh . . .” like a child at a playground.

  When that novelty subsided, her eyes were drawn to objects in the room, the water bottles, the typewriter, the papers, my notes . . . Nothing was out of reach for this long-armed little climber and she grabbed at everything, knocking over bottles, pulling papers to the floor. I whisked her back outside, but put her down too soon. There she spied the fruit cage suspended just outside my door, containing my last few bananas. At the sight of the tempting fruit, she scrambled over to the spindly poles and attempting to climb, nearly pulled the whole thing down on top of her. I peeled her arms and legs from the dilapidated structure and carried her out of sight of any human temptations where she could instead resume feeding on her own natural bounty from the forest.

  After realizing the baby was not a male as she had originally thought, Dian dropped the name “Charlie” and left her nameless. Needing a means to refer to the little orphan in my notes, I began using the name “Sophie” after a feisty, favorite aunt of mine.

  “Sophhhieee,” Dian said, crinkling her nose while drawing out the ph sound with a scowl. “What kind of a name is that?” The next day, Dian began calling the baby “Josephine.”

  Dian worried constantly about little Josephine’s health, fearing the little thirty-pound gorilla was suffering from bloat, declaring that the baby’s stomach was too tight because she wasn’t passing gas.

  “I want you to make a note of her bowel movements and urinating,” Dian instructed. “If she stays bloated she’ll die.” Dian had a knack for emphasizing the dire in things. “Same for passing gas, and you and Caroline need to collect her dung so I can weigh it at the end of each day.”

  And so, by the end of each day, the pockets of my jeans bulged with gorilla dung that I had wrapped in leaves.

  While I was still an undergraduate, Dr. Joshua Laerm, my zoology professor at the University of Georgia, had agreed to grant me credit toward my BS in zoology as an independent study in what he agreed was a rare and unique learning experience. Otherwise, I had little knowledge of research methods, but Terry Maple had suggested a couple topics and provided me with written research proposals prior to my arrival. Despite my ignorance, I finally made bold to present these to Dian. One idea proposed the study of adult males, or silverbacks, and the role they played with gorilla group dynamics, but the other was a focus on mother/infant behavior. Caring for our little orphan certainly seemed in line with such a study. I expected Dian to see these proposal efforts as a serious commitment to the mission of her research center. Her response, however, was no reaction at all. After I had handed her these in written form, she never mentioned them again.

  “I’m going to have Carolyn take care of the baby gorilla full time.” Dian wailed to Stuart soon after, with me within earshot. “John can just go out to Group 5 with Peter, or help you look for Nunkie.”

  Dian was frantic about her research gorilla Nunkie and his group of females who had moved out of the study range, and were last known to be in heavy poacher area far into Zaire.

  “Nunkie’s dead!” Dian shouted. “They’re all dead! I know they are! And nobody gives a damn about it except me!” These outbursts served well to illicit a sympathetic response, and Dian calmed down when Stuart willingly agreed to make a series of arduous treks well into Zaire without visas or permits in search of this missing gorilla group. Dian directed me to accompany him, but on alternating days, she had me back in camp taking care of the baby while Carolyn went to Group 5 with Peter. She seemed unable to make any long-range plans, and decided our tasks each night for the next day. We dared not argue otherwise for fear of a hostile backlash. Our long, tiring hikes to find Nunkie were futile, even accompanied by the skilled trackers, but we made them dutifully, and hoped against hope to find him.

  It became apparent to me that Dian had an acute need for people. In fact, she could only work through others to achieve her goals. There was so little she could do alone, and yet she held such contempt for everyone. I think this dilemma fueled her anger. The word she coined and accused others of was “me-itis” in reference to anyone thinking for themselves, but all our efforts were directed at her needs, as we could best interpret them.

  On my second day of babysitting, I arrived at Dian’s cabin at 8:00 A.M. sharp to pick up the baby, now dubbed Josephine. Stuart was outside with Dian when I arrived. The little ape clung to Stuart’s arms playfully while he swung her by her long arms to me as I approached. As usual, Dian didn’t acknowledge my presence, and feeling like an intruder, I carried Josephine away to a patch of tall thistles.

  “I told the men to unlock the Empty Cabin this morning,” Dian said to Stuart, “so John can take the baby in there if it rains.” Dian gave Stuart instructions for me as if I wasn’t standing there.

  “You’ve got a place to get out of the rain,” Stuart said to me, grinning.

  “Oh . . .? Okay, great . . . which one is the Empty Cabin?”

  “Eht mwaah . . .” Dian growled, showing her contempt of my mere presence.

  “It’s the first one coming into camp from the other end.” Stuart said, softening the first blow of the day. I was increasingly thankful to have Stuart as a buffer between myself and Dian. His job as her right-hand man was no easy task, and I certainly didn’t
envy the demanding position he was now in.

  “The toto is out cutting some food for her,” Dian said, referring to her new young Rwandan camp staffer, Toni, with the Swahili word for kid or child. “That is if the little woggie-poo can ever figure out what the hell is what out there, and not just bring in more goddamn weeds.”

  Josephine crawled from me to Stuart’s legs and reached upward to him. Stuart grabbed her arms and swung her back to me. I pulled the little ape upward and she latched her arms around my neck while I carried her the fifteen yards away from Dian’s cabin to the edge of the forest. Upon reaching an area of tall thistles and mound of climbing gallium rising above my head, I placed Josephine on the ground. Out of sight of Dian and the cabin, the baby made no attempt to leave me.

  After pondering her surroundings for a moment, Josephine immediately pulled down a tall thistle and walked to its distal end. One by one, she deftly broke off the crispy leaves. With each handful of food, she came back to me, sat on my lap like a child, and ate before going back to the thistle or nettle or gallium for another handful of leaves. I was impressed by her adeptness at feeding on the spiny thistle. Despite her leathery little face and fingers, I thought that Josephine’s gums and tongue looked as tender as my own, and it amazed me to see her place the thistle’s thorn-tipped leaves into her mouth and chew contentedly. But I noticed that she intuitively positioned each leaf with the spines facing outward, directed away from her teeth and gums, as she drew them into her mouth always backward, thereby avoiding spine trajectory from head on. With her small but powerful jaws, she ground each mouthful to a harmless pulp, spines included. While she ate, her deep brown eyes darted about, scanning the foliage in front of her to make each next selection before swallowing the last. I made a note on my paper of each plant species that she chose to eat from the abundant choices around us.