A Forest in the Clouds

by John Fowler

  That afternoon I sketched the baby’s nose on a piece of paper from the art pad I had brought with me. I had always been good with pencil and paper, and so rendered a much more detailed drawing than the crude sketches on the walls of Dian’s cabin.

  “Oh John, you’re an artist!” Dian exclaimed when I handed her the nose print that evening. “This is the best noseprint I’ve ever seen! Eht mwah, hmm wah hmm waaah . . .”

  Score one for me!

  ELEVEN

  LOCKDOWN

  It became more and more evident on my days with the baby, that our leader’s indulgence of the little ape we were then calling N’gee had created nothing less than a simian Helen Keller, pre–Annie Sullivan. Under Dian’s indifference, Carolyn’s arms became covered in bite marks and bruises in her struggles to manage the small but sturdy thirty-pound gorilla. It was one thing to be the fruit and candy giver, but quite another to be the gorilla handler. Restraining N’gee became particularly difficult in the evening when it was time to return her to Dian’s cabin. Candy was like a drug to her, and knowing it was waiting for her on the other side of the door, the mighty little ape, sweet and calm moments before, fought furiously, tooth and nail, for these seductive treats, grappling and biting with powerful arms and jaws.

  Detached and unconcerned, Dian took her time. If we let the baby go, she would try to climb the flimsy poles supporting the entryway’s sheet metal roof, dismantling it in the process. This, of course, annoyed Dian.

  “You need to control her, goddammit!” Dian yelled when this happened. “Until her nest box is ready!”

  The nest box could be fully ready, the totos having replaced the old nesting material with fresh new fronds, but if Dian wasn’t ready with the treats, or otherwise distracted, it was a wrestling match with the baby just outside. Determined to master the situation, and drawing upon a childhood filled with animals of all types and sizes—from cats and dogs to cows and horses—I had to develop a means to hold the little ape that evaded her opposable thumbs. By grasping her from behind, high on both sides of her back, and extending her outward, I avoided not only her agile arms, hands, and feet, but her savage little bites too. When even this failed, and she managed a nip, I thought, what would gorillas do . . . ? Gorillas would bite back! Finally, I bit back, sinking my own dull teeth through a mouthful of her hair. The baby was stunned, but the tactic won respect. Her biting was instinctive, but just then she learned what it felt like to be on the receiving end of another’s teeth. From that moment on, I developed a new sort of rapport with my surprised but much more compliant little charge. I became big brother gorilla.

  Settling into my new roles, I began to understand that research itself was not Dian’s priority for her “research center”; indeed it was in some ways by then a thorn in her side, necessary to justify Karisoke’s existence and funding sources so that she could attend to her real interests, maintaining occupancy and control of her remote mountain home among her gorillas, and waging her ever-escalating war with poachers. Peter was the only one of us settled into a real research focus, and she allowed it to play out, if only because it added legitimacy to the camp’s official research mission. There was no push for the rest of us to get started with projects of our own. Quite the contrary, we were there to take directives, serving her mission of keeping up with her gorillas, taking care of the baby, and battling the poachers.

  And so my duties changed by the day. One day I accompanied Stuart on an arduous, but fruitless, climb to find lost gorillas, the next day I hiked with Peter to Group 5, and then the next I give Carolyn a break with baby gorilla duties. When I optimistically turned in my field notes at the end of the day, Dian informed me that they were “reeeally bad.” She offered no specific guidelines by which to make them better, nor what she was looking for specifically, except to say that Peter’s notes are some of the best she has ever seen. I thought she took some sort of satisfaction in letting me know this, as if bringing me down reaffirmed her authority. And so I tried to emulate Peter’s method of simply writing down every possible action I observed among the gorilla subjects:

  Beethoven moves away from Effie 5 m, sits, eats gallium. Puck rolls on back, closes eyes, naps 5 min, Cantsbee approaches from downhill, suckles from Puck’s left nipple 10 sec, switches to R nipple 1 min. Cantsbee naps across Puck’s belly . . .

  The long rainy season was full on, as I became painfully aware of during a subsequent outing to Group 5. As the first drops began to fall, members of the group began to huddle around the silverback Beethoven, while Peter and I donned our hoods. I assumed my raingear would keep me dry and warm, but as the deluge settled in on us, things began to leak like a bad roof. While the gorillas huddled motionless, and as unamused as we humans, I peered through the shower at Peter. Having been through this many times by then, he obviously knew his rain posture, cross-legged and hunched over, hooded well over his face.

  I struggled to find a position that stemmed the leakage. When I thought the rain couldn’t come any harder, it did. Rain hit my face, and drizzled down my cheeks, neck, and down into my shirt collar as if I was standing under a waterfall. If I moved my hand upward, water poured into my sleeves. Somehow, in my shifting, the rain even soaked past the elastic waistband of my rain pants, trickling into everywhere. My clothes were already sweat-soaked from the climb, and soon I was soaked to the skin as if I was naked. The cold air blew down from the mountain, taking the last remnant of my body heat with it, and I felt as cold as I’d ever been in my life. After days like that, my dry cabin and smoldering fire felt like a luxurious haven.

  After returning to my cabin from another rain-soaked day in the field, I noticed that my porter list, and money envelope, had been picked up by Gwehandegaza, the head porter. I was disappointed that I had not received any mail from home, but I had my first delivery of food. The porters had placed the provisions I had ordered on my desk: fresh miniature bananas, a can of salmon, rice, eggs, sugar, onions, potatoes, bread, and a head of cabbage. I was beginning to see how the system worked, but alas, I still had no cooking or eating utensils.

  I inspected my can of salmon suspiciously; its top and bottom were puffed out, instead of tightly drawn as they should be. Half-expecting an explosion, I punctured it carefully with my can opener. Inside, it looked normal, as far as canned fish goes, and although it had a strong smell of salmon, it seemed fine. The label said “Product of Peru” and I surmised that being canned on the South American coast, my altitude of ten thousand feet was responsible for the puffy can lids. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to eat it, and I dumped the contents into the grass outside my cabin.

  Back inside, I looked out my window to see a white-necked raven swoop down to inspect the salmon. Immediately, it gulped down several chunks, seemingly delighted by the find. I wondered if I had just killed the bird. Upon eating its fill, the raven couldn’t simply leave the remains, instead it gathered another beak-full and hopped purposefully toward a tall, thick clump of grass. There it poked the mouthful deep into the base of the tussock until it was hidden. I watched, impressed by its intelligence, as it did this several more times, until all the salmon was cached. There went my dinner.

  Stuart soon returned to his side of our cabin after his day in the field with Group 4 and he described this group of males—Peanuts, Tiger, and Beetsme—that was a remnant of their original large family group. Peanuts, who was a young male when Dian first encountered the group, was now a mature silverback. Beetsme was about fifteen years old and showing the first signs of becoming a silverback. Tiger was a twelve-year-old subadult, or “blackback.”

  Peter soon joined Stuart and me at our cabin and we talked idly for a while before Carolyn also wandered down the trail toward us. She had been living in the guest room at Dian’s cabin and was somehow surviving there. The sun was drifting behind Mount Visoke, which cast its great shadow over camp, and the air rapidly cooled down to sweater weather. Moisture in the air began to condense, forming mist that drifted from the edges
of the forest.

  The cold sweat under my wool shirt made me shudder as I asked Carolyn how her day was with Josephine. Carolyn described a day very similar to the day before. Josephine had foraged in the undergrowth around camp, but wasn’t too excited about her natural foods. Then, when Dian offered Josephine fruits and candy while letting her inside for the evening, the little gorilla became aggressively ravenous for the sugary treats.

  “I hate the way Dian takes her sweet time doing that,” I said, “while the baby’s grunting and fighting to get out of your arms.”

  “How do you keep from being bitten?” Carolyn asked, rubbing her arms. I realized then where all the bruises on Carolyn’s hands and arms had come from.

  “I just grab her behind the arms,” I said, gesturing the position with my hands, “on the upper back.” I realized how difficult that must be without the necessary strength. Carolyn, unable to hold on to the gorilla, was relegated to being fiercely bitten. Dian had little sympathy as she dallied in her cabin each evening preparing the box of treats that made her the center of Josephine’s attention. Meanwhile, the little gorilla attacked her handler in an effort to break free and approach the cabin door.

  Carolyn listened intently as I described my gorilla-holding technique, but she maintained a solemn defeated expression. She had something else to tell us.

  “I’m probably going to leave soon.”

  Stuart, Peter, and I were dumbstruck. Carolyn went on saying that she had been pondering her future at Karisoke while her boyfriend, Don, had been writing to her from back home, saying how much he missed her. That day she got another letter from Don again asking her to come home.

  “At first Dian had been very supportive,” Carolyn continued, “when I told her I was uncertain about how long I would stay. I told her about my letters from Don, and she spent a lot of time talking to me about her early days here. I really appreciated her being so open with me. She told me about the sacrifices she had made, and that I would need to do the same . . . to show a commitment to the gorillas.” Carolyn paused and took a deep breath, water welling in her dark brown eyes. Stuart, Peter, and I listened silently, feeling the awkward tension and confusion in Carolyn’s voice. “But this afternoon, I told Dian I was thinking of leaving and she just blew up. Her personality completely changed . . . she became really hostile.”

  I had already seen Dian hostile, so I could only imagine what really hostile meant.

  Carolyn pulled her jacket close around her and stared toward the meadow behind us, adding, “She said a lot of cruel things to me tonight.” She didn’t elaborate on the painful details of Dian’s cruelty, and Stuart, Peter and I didn’t press her for any more that might be embarrassing. I imagined the worst.

  Stuart broke the gloomy silence by suggesting we all have dinner together. Having not been invited to eat with Dian that evening, the four of us, happy to be among peers away from Dian, agreed to pool our resources and have a communal dinner at Stuart’s and my shared cabin. Carolyn and I both had new provisions, but neither of us had the makings of a proper meal, since I had just fed my entrée to a raven. Of course, I knew where some of it still was, but bugs were probably already snacking on that. Peter had beans that he had soaked overnight, which the men had cooked for him during the day. Carolyn and I had offered anything from our new rations, and Stuart said he would cook rice to serve with the beans.

  After gathering our meal components, the four of us reconvened in Stuart’s half of our duplex and we settled in for a relaxing dinner. Over steaming plates of beans and rice, we joked about our culinary efforts and reminisced about the foods we missed back home. The lightness of the moment took our minds off the weighty responsibility of keeping Dian happy, and Carolyn’s downheartedness had lifted.

  The revelry of our evening, however, ended with an unexpected knock on the door. Each of us froze, forks in the air, silent.

  “Yeeesss . . .?” Stuart said, eyes wide and unable to hide the baffled surprise in his voice at this unexpected visitor. A faint, breathy “ahem” we all then knew too well, revealed our visitor’s identity, and her lack of sobriety.

  “Ahem . . . Stuart?” Dian’s voice was low and weak, and she followed this query with a choking cough.

  As Stuart rose and opened the door, Dian squinted and stared into the glare of the pressure lantern. Her hair was disheveled and she swayed a little as she glanced at each of us.

  “Ahem . . . has everyone typed up their notes from today?” Dian asked, blinking and squinting into the light of the small room. Stuart remained in the doorway and did the talking.

  “Carolyn and John didn’t have much to eat, so we got together for dinner.”

  “Eht mwaaah . . . Uh, that’s really good,” Dian muttered in a phrase I knew by then to mean not so good. “A fucking dinner party? We’re here for gorillas, not to worry about our goddamned motherfucking bellies.”

  The four of us paused in dazed silence.

  “We’re about finished, Dian.” Stuart responded. “I think we all still have plenty of time to type up our notes.”

  “Ahem . . . you guys have a lot of work to do here,” Dian added, peering around Stuart to the rest of us, “and everyone needs to get their goddamn rest. Really and truly Stuart, we don’t have time for little fucking communal dinners.”

  “Okay Dian . . .” Stuart lamented, “We’re going to work on our notes next.”

  “Everyone needs to get the hell back to their own cabins NOW!” Dian shouted before finally turning to walk away. “I mean it! NO MORE COMMUNAL DINNERS!”

  Stuart watched Dian shuffle back up the trail toward her own cabin before closing his door. The four of us sat in a moment of stunned silence before finishing our meal under an aura of tension, and retreating to our respective quarters, more with the intent to keep Dian unprovoked than to do our homework of typing gorilla notes.

  The next morning, I walked with great effort up the camp trail to Dian’s cabin. I really had just come to dread any encounter with her, and all the negative energy it brought. I didn’t know I needed positive feedback to stay motivated, but I was learning that negative feedback without constructive criticism or direction was utterly de-motivating. I thought of Carolyn’s words the night before and was beginning to doubt if even I could endure Dian and stick it out at Karisoke. And where would I go? I flew in on a one-way fare and didn’t even have enough money for a return flight home.

  As with my climbing efforts up Mount Visoke, I simply put one foot in front of the other and kept moving toward Fossey’s cabin. I stopped wondering if I liked her, and told myself it was irrelevant whether she liked me or not. The important thing was the gorillas. That was why we were all there, I surmised.

  Kima chirped and bounded across Dian’s roof, disappearing into the upper branches of an adjacent hagenia as I walked around to the graveyard side of Dian’s cabin where I had become accustomed to picking up Josephine in the morning. The front door was ajar, so with trepidation, I entered. In her living area, Dian was pacing in front of Stuart, waving her arms and again ranting about the need to find Nunkie’s Group. Stuart was nodding understandingly and echoing her sentiments.

  “Nobody gives a damn except me, and they want me to leave here?” Dian shrieked. “And what’s going to happen to the baby gorilla?”

  Carolyn sat on a chair in the living area, slumped as if in a trance, staring at the floor. Josephine sat at the doorjamb to Dian’s bedroom, blissfully eating a piece of pineapple from an assortment of fruits on the floor in front of her. Like a zombie, I waited for Dian to exhaust her tirade and give me instructions to take Josephine outside.

  “How can I leave?” Dian shrieked, “with things the way they are?” Suddenly she swung her arm in Carolyn’s direction. “And that bitch over there can’t take care of the goddamn gorilla!”

  Shock snapped me from my apathy, and I flushed with contempt from feet to cheeks. Carolyn winced and shrank into a broken slump, ashen as she stared at the floor. As my hea
rt sank, my mind raced. Did I hear Dian right? How could she be saying such contemptuous words about Carolyn? I had become accustomed to Dian’s vitriol, having endured it from the start, but this was overt hostility beyond what even I had experienced.

  “John’s gonna have to take the baby all day,” Dian said, “We’ll just have to send Carolyn out to Group 5 with Peter.”

  I wished I could have said something, but as usual, I was struck mute. I wanted to confront Dian and defend Carolyn, but instinctively I remained silent. Josephine scampered to my feet and reached her arms up to me, oblivious to the human drama playing out in the room. I picked her up and headed out the door, glancing back at Carolyn, slouched in a heartbroken trance where she sat.

  TWELVE

  A SAD GOODBYE

  The woman Carolyn had admired for so long in the pages of National Geographic magazine was not the woman she found herself working for, and the baby gorilla she adored had covered her arms in bites and bruises, under Dian’s detached apathy. And with the onset of the rainy season, treks out to the wild gorillas were cold, wet, arduous undertakings. We all lived in one camp, but our interactions became only fleeting, so sensitized had we become of Dian’s paranoia. Unless I was out to Group 5 with Peter, I saw little of him or Carolyn in camp. What was worse, I felt like none of us could let our ever-suspicious leader see us fraternizing without triggering her unbridled rage.

  For me, life for the four of us took on the feel of being inside a sequestered cult in which, without question, we needed to carry out the impulsive directives of our mercurial leader in isolation from the rest of the world, as well as each other—“No communal dinners!” Dian reminded us at the end of each day.

  At least by then, I had built up a store of basic foods from the porter list. I kept the dry goods in a metal footlocker on the floor, and the fresh fruits and veggies in the fruit cage on stilts outside my door. If we ordered dried beans, a camp staffer would cook them for us during the day on their campfire so they’d be ready to eat upon our return from the gorillas. After telling Stuart about the supplies I had found in the Empty Cabin, he was able to convince Dian to have them delivered to my space. I finally could have at least one square meal a day. It wasn’t long, however, before my nocturnal visitor returned.