A Forest in the Clouds

by John Fowler

  “Would you mind . . .” Peter asked, pointing to the lawn as we paid for dinner, “If we put our tent out here for one night?”

  “Of course,” he responded. “No problem.” That could at least ensure we’d be eating again in his restaurant for breakfast.

  That night I slept well, but Peter said he woke in the middle of the night half-dreaming that the hookers and their drivers were breaking into our van as burglars. After coffee and breakfast on the guest house terrace over the beautiful Lake Kivu, our spring break was over, and we headed back to the gorillas and our chilly mountain home in the Virunga Volcanoes.

  During the long dry season, Stuart began to come back from Peanuts’s Group with reports of hearing the rumbles and loud trumpets of forest elephants on his gorilla visits. Camp staff were as surprised as the rest of us, saying that elephants hadn’t been around for a long time. They surmised that persecution by bawendagi, their word for poachers, must have driven them up from the lowlands into the mountains with us. These were the true forest elephants, the subspecies, Loxodonta cyclotis, which were slightly smaller than the more familiar savanna species, Loxodonta africana, with smaller rounded ears and downward pointing tusks, versus the larger splayed tusk of their cousins. They had adaptations like the forest buffalo, which had equipped them for a life in the forest. Knowing that the taxonomy as a distinct species was still under scrutiny for these pachyderms greatly intrigued the young zoologist in me. I had to see them.

  “They’re known to be really dangerous.” Peter advised me, when I confessed my desire to go look for them, “But the trackers have seen them. You could ask Nameye or Rwelekana to take you.”

  “Iko kali sana. Hatari kabisa,” Fierce and dangerous, Nameye replied, politely declining my request to take me into Zaire in pursuit of the forest elephants. Rwelekana echoed the same sentiments that these elephants were not worth the risk. These guys were brave, willing to track down poachers, and had seen it all, so their reluctance to encounter these denizens of the forest was worthy of heeding. The elephants’ nervousness at being driven into the mountains only added to their already aggressive nature. In the end, I had to heed our intrepid tracker’s advice, as they knew much from their years in the forest. Still, I secretly longed to encounter them somehow.

  As the weather dried and warmed, pink orchid spires of Disa stairsii bloomed in sunny spots through camp and surrounding the forest, their roots anchored among the other epiphytes growing on live or dead and fallen trees. One orchid, Polystachya kermesina, small and unassuming before, sprouted tiny bright waxy red-orange flowers on the sides of trees where they clung as playful sparks from out of the gloom.

  With dry weather, flocks of brown-necked parrots, Poicephalus fuscicollis, flew up from Zaire in the mornings to feed on something budding or fruiting in the forest canopy across the meadow behind my cabin. Their screeching alerted me to their presence, where they bounced and flitted among the higher branches in joyful raucous discord throughout the day, before flitting westward back into the warmer Congo Basin each evening.

  On a couple of rare occasions, during clear skies, a helicopter appeared over Mount Visoke—Rwandan President Habyarimana flying a few VIP guests over the Parc des Volcans for a bird’s-eye view of the beauty of the Virungas, the crowning glory of his homeland’s thousand hills. Rarely even seeing an airplane overhead in our remote corner of Africa, I wondered what the gorillas must’ve thought of that great mechanical bird circling above Mount Visoke’s hidden lake before veering off and away.

  On May 14, Stuart and I went out with the poacher patrol. Our trek led us on their usual path well into Zaire and far across the saddle area into heavy poacher territory. I thought the area was closer to Dian’s original camp near the Kabara Meadow than it was to Karisoke. There, in the level terrain, we collected 118 wire and rope snares, cutting their bamboo tension poles and freeing four live duikers. An additional six duikers weren’t so lucky, and lay stranded in various states of death and decomposition. We also destroyed smaller hyrax traps, three of which contained decaying corpses of these unique small mammals. It all seemed so wasteful, but in line with Dian’s edict, the men lashed the freshest duikers onto a pole, and brought them back to camp to feast upon that evening.

  Before each sundown, as the dry air cooled, shy bushbucks would saunter cautiously into the camp’s clearing to nibble on grasses and other tender plants that grew in sunnier spots. They munched warily, lifting their heads between bites, their russet brown fur glowing in the low-angled sunlight. The smaller females, lacking horns, were doe-like and delicate while males were crowned with a pair of spiraling horns, forming the graceful shape of a lyre.

  Always guarded, these ungulates stared at our comings and goings, prepared at any moment to bound away with an upright flash of their white tails and sound their warning call, a bark similar to a dog’s. Often their alerts would trigger the much smaller black-fronted duikers, feeding unseen among them in the tall weeds. These tiny red-and-black antelopes, when startled, snorted an airy whistle alert as they leapt and vanished into thickets.

  After dark, the camp was stunningly silent with the creek having dried and retracted to a series of small, still pools in its deepest places. Too chilly at night for noisy insects or tree frogs, the occasional voices of tree hyraxes sometimes broke the stillness with their vocal madness. Only the evasive forest elephants provided a show of sound to rival their cousins the hyraxes when they rolled through one night. Their mass and voices shook the ground as they traveled through where the big meadow narrowed across the creek just behind my cabin. With trumpets, deep roars, and rolling rumbles from all directions they barreled through to their next new feeding grounds. Bravely, I opened my door, shining my flashlight, feeble as it was, into the darkness toward their sounds. But they were moving swiftly, beyond my weak beam of light, as if made nervous by the smell of us humans and the smoke from our chimney pipes.

  The next morning I walked into the meadow and found their footprints sunk deep into the mud of recent rains. Flattened weeds and broken saplings indicated they had headed east, farther into Rwanda, and toward the lower portion of Group 5’s range, not far from the shambas and human habitation. From then on, our treks to Group 5 were comingled with these deep and treacherous holes. Baraqueza quietly complied with my request for him to pose in one, and I snapped a photo of him up to his knees.

  On May 25, Baraqueza served once again as Peter’s and my tracker to Group 5. Forty five minutes down the trail that ran along Camp Creek, we wandered into old and new elephant paths. Then, we saw them, two of the great gray behemoths feeding calmly, accompanied by a younger one half their size. None had visible tusks. Although we stood in plain sight, just thirty meters away, they appeared not to see, nor hear, nor even smell us, and fed idly, wrapping their trunks around myriad vegetation, stripping the leaves and placing it into their mouths oblivious to our presence. Although we couldn’t see the others, we could hear at least two more, tearing away at the abundant forage the forest provided them there. Perhaps lacking the coveted ivory tusks had saved them from poaching thus far.

  “Iko mingi,” Baraqueza said, surmising that there were many more dispersed in the forest beyond. Silently, we marveled at the sight of the trio for a half an hour, before slipping away to a visit with Group 5.

  Twelve days later, on June 6, we encountered more, with young Toni as our guide, just north of a small side volcano called First Hill toward the base of Mount Karisimbi. We perched on a small knoll to observe. Eight were clearly visible, gathered around a mud hole, where they drank from deep puddles, slurping up the water with their trunks and squirting it contentedly into their mouths. Three of the adults, about seven feet tall at the shoulder, had tusks, as did one juvenile about two-thirds grown. Three other adults lacked tusks, although they were as big as the other full-growns. A tusk-less baby, only four feet tall, mingled among them. Two more adults fed nearby, partially obscured by the undergrowth upon which they fed, and we coul
d hear countless others feeding in the forest ahead of them. Although we were in plain view of those at the watering hole, and within twenty meters uphill, they seemed completely unaware of us. These were the true forest species, Loxodonta cyclotis, and I marveled at their differences from their savannah cousins, Loxodonta africana. Their tusks pointed downward and close in to the line of the trunk when relaxed, compared to splaying widely outward as for L. africana. Their heads looked smaller too, in proportion to their bodies, and lacked their lump on the forehead, and their ears were more rounded.

  We observed them quietly for over half an hour before they began to move away from the mud hole. As soon as they did, it was as if they had moved into our line of scent. Clearly startled, they suddenly packed together in a group to move quickly on ahead of us, and disappeared amid their weighty cracklings and thrashings into the forest.

  If Stuart’s commitment to the camp had been faltering before, it had spun into a sort of free-fall. He was caught between Dian’s wishes and the pending change of hands ushered in with Sandy Harcourt’s inevitable arrival. He spent more time away from camp, traveling with Jean-Pierre to Akagera, Rwanda’s beautiful plains park. He also accompanied his elder pal to Lake Kivu, and even made a clandestine crossing over the border into Goma, Zaire, during which he had to lay low in the vehicle so as not to be seen without an entry visa. But with the state of Karisoke so tenuous under the pending return of Dr. Harcourt, and Dian’s return visit canceled for the moment, he hung on in a kind of limbo, even as Jean-Pierre did his best to keep his morale up.

  “You worry too much, Stuart,” he told his young pal. “How doez zat song go? ‘Every day’z a ‘oliday, zee skies are baby BLEUUU . . .” he sang, comically on his visits to the camp, swinging his arms around in a wide waltzing swath. “Don’t worry about Dian Fussy!”

  We all laughed, enjoying Jean-Pierre’s supportive spirit, and he often wrapped up a conversation saying, “Let’s get cracking!” As he’d say this, he exaggerated the staccato of his guttural French ‘r’ for added effect, rolling and snapping the final word like a whip crack. But despite his elder friend’s pep talks, Stuart remained doubtful of his fate with the unease created by Karisoke being pulled in two directions, and the eerie pall caused by Dian’s letters with strange claims and accusations.

  Cindy the dog was always slightly overweight in a fat-and-happy sort of way, but now she had started looking thin. I also noticed she had developed a rash at the base of her tail. Typical of what I knew as “flea allergy” in my own childhood dog, the hair on her lower back had become sparse, and the skin was red and irritated. Also, I hadn’t ever noticed fleas at the high altitude of the camp. Thinking it may be a fungal infection of some sort, I treated the irritated area daily with iodine solution. Cindy certainly didn’t mind the massage that came with that, the rubbing application doubling as a good scratch of her itch. She stood cooperatively with her best dog-smile as I scrubbed the solution into the skin. Within days, the skin started looking normal again, and the hair began growing back.

  With Stuart away again in late June, Ann Yancey took a few days off from the US Embassy to visit Karisoke. Peter and I hosted her on a visit to Group 5, during which she got to experience an immersive gorilla baptism of her own, with members of the group crawling over her and checking her out, with the same fascination they had shown me months before. Ann reveled in the experience as the “new girl,” with smiles and giggles, and was so appreciative of our hospitality she insisted Peter and I stay with her on our next visit to Kigali.

  Like Easter, the Fourth of July became a vacation target date from which to break from our duties, especially after we received an invitation from the American Embassy to attend their annual Independence Day party; we knew Judy and Ann were responsible for this honor. Stuart, perhaps by then feeling guilty about his wavering commitments and time away from camp, passed the privilege on to Peter and me, insisting on staying in to run things while Peter and I attended the festivities. By then, through our embassy connections, we had met Susan Poats, a visiting scientist who was studying the lowly, but important, pomme de terre à Rwanda—otherwise known as Rwanda’s potato—and its value in agriculture and the local diet. Susan knew a few US Peace Corps workers, and soon we had a group of young peers with which to make a tour of Rwanda’s plains park of Akagera on the border with Tanzania. Someone even came up with a roadworthy vehicle for our safari.

  Because the park’s wildlife hadn’t been adequately protected over the years, there wasn’t the diversity and abundance of animals like in Kenya or neighboring Tanzania. But there were the basic herds of zebras, Cape buffaloes, and clusters of giraffes gracing the wide open spaces. And it was dry, sunny, and warm, a welcome change from the cloud forest. The one thing the park did have over many places, perhaps because of the lack of predators, were vast herds of the unique topi antelope, Damaliscus lunatus. With their odd blue-gray rumps, these cousins to hartebeest welcomed us in great numbers soon after our entry into the park. Hundreds of them leaped before our vehicle, crossing the road en masse, merging into other hundreds in the open plain, bounding in great balletic leaps, as if pursued by predators, and yet there were none. At the time, Akagera had been under-served with protection against poaching, and was all but devoid of predators like lions, leopards and hyenas. Elephants too had been obliterated by the hand of man. Those few that had been reintroduced by relocation were so traumatized by the violent culling from which they’d come that they remained hidden to us, skulking in the gallery forests which ran through the park.

  We did pass through these scattered forests, in hopes of catching a glimpse of the hidden elephants, but our search didn’t last long. Instead, we found something much smaller and potentially dangerous. Where the brush grew thickest, we were assailed by a barrage of dreaded tsetse flies. These drab brown insects descended upon us like a plague of hungry little zombies, and we sped up immediately upon their onslaught. But despite our speed, they dropped in from all directions, riding the draft at the back of our vehicle in a swarm, before deftly swooping inside the open back to land on us. Just knowing they could carry the blood-borne parasite for sleeping sickness, or trypanosomiasis, put us in panic mode, brushing them off in horror and nervous laughter as they landed upon our bare arms, legs, and faces. Fortunately, upon landing, they were rather sluggish, and none of us were bitten before dispatching each little assailant with a quick slap.

  Out in the open again, we passed by one of the park’s freshwater lakes, wherein dwelled the dreaded bilharzia-laden snails we had been warned about. With its idyllic beauty and wonder, Africa can be a savage paradise.

  Throughout our day, we scarcely saw another vehicle, and at sundown we were alone. We parked in the middle of the dusty road, and laid our sleeping bags around to make camp before cracking open our lukewarm bottles of Primus and quenching our thirst. I had enjoyed Judy Chidester’s recipe for spaghetti carbonara, and loosely planned a remote replica of that for our dinner. To eat, we had a package of spaghetti, eggs, a tin of margarine, Spam, and a can of ubiquitous Lindsay brand black olives we had bought at the grocery store in Kigali. We cooked the mess on a small camp stove in the center of the road, and despite its dubious culinary appeal, ate it with gusto and laughter.

  “Spam carbonara!” someone would shout above the clink of an empty beer bottle, as we lay exhausted and giddy in our sleeping bags strewn upon the open road. This was followed by laughter and another shouting, “With Lindsay Olives!” so well aware we were of the divine absurdity of our meal and open-road accommodations. Still, Akagera’s endless sky, fading from twilight to a spectacle of twinkling stars and glowing planets, provided a dreamlike setting, and we each drifted off to sleep knowing, or at least hoping, that the park was really devoid of large predators such as lions, leopards, and hyenas.

  TWENTY-ONE

  DIAN RETURNS

  Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence—but more generally takes the form of apathy.
r />   —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  I had felt a tremendous sense of relief when Stuart told Peter and me that Dian said in a letter that she had canceled her plans to visit Karisoke in June. Nippon AV Productions had completed their documentary on her and the gorillas, and offered to fly Dian to Japan so she could introduce the film’s premiere showings and give a series of lectures. Dian accepted the invitation, and in a letter told Stuart that because of her tight schedule she would not be able to travel to Africa after all.

  While he was on a trip to Kigali in late July, Stuart learned from others that Dian had developed a different set of plans unbeknownst to us. Still thinking that Stuart was expecting a visit from her, and unaware of anything to the contrary, American Embassy staff told him that Dian’s plane had been grounded in the Seychelles Islands for repairs and that she would be in Kigali in a few days. Stuart was stunned. This information, in light of the ever-increasing reports of Dian’s false accusations and other bizarre behaviors stateside, made this news even more ominous.

  Well on her way back without letting us know, Dian had clearly planned some sort of ambush of her own team. Adding to the alarming news, Stuart received a shocking letter from his father in the States saying that Dian had telephoned him.

  “She told my father I’ve taken five thousand dollars from camp funds!” Stuart lamented to me, incredulous, “and that I’ve stolen her guns!”

  “What? You gotta be kidding!”

  “She even told him I’ve been going out on strange ventures with Jean-Pierre . . . and get this, she told my dad she currently has lawyers looking into this.’” Stuart raised his fingers in quotation marks at the end of his sentence to highlight Dian’s words.

  “Who knows what Gwehandegoza has been telling her?”