A Forest in the Clouds

by John Fowler

  “Okay,” I relented, and they rushed around to the side door. As the zamu’s helper slid the door open, Marchessa’s body was exposed again to the onlookers. This new group gasped at the sight, stumbling backward in shock. I urged the men into the car quickly, the friend helping the zamu over the body and onto the back seat. I was relieved once again when the zamu’s friend closed the door and we could get moving.

  “I can drop you off at the hospital,” I informed them in Swahili, as we bounced along the stony road, “but I won’t be able to bring you back.” Relieved to have transportation, they were fine with that. And so I drove down and away from the base of Mount Visoke with a dead gorilla and a skewered zamu.

  I didn’t even know when I was coming back, or exactly where I was going, for that matter. I knew where Dr. Vimont lived, but he would probably be at work at the hospital. How long would I have dead Marchessa in the van? What if Dr. Vimont was out of town? Peter and I had decided, if he wasn’t available, or couldn’t do the post-mortem, I’d head to Jean-Pierre’s home before dark. After that, I’d simply return and get Marchessa’s body up to camp for burial. Either way, we would bury the remains in the gorilla graveyard.

  Forty-five minutes later, my cargo and I rolled into town. I headed straight for the hospital, a pale stucco compound near the center of town, and dropped off my forlorn passengers at the entrance.

  “Murakoze cyane,” each thanked me sincerely in their native tongue, while the zamu’s friend helped his charge along the walkway toward the hospital entrance. I felt for them under the circumstances, and was happy they had flagged me down. I didn’t know how they’d get back home, but as resourceful Rwandans, I knew they’d find a way.

  I sat for a moment, pondering how I might find Dr. Vimont there on the sprawling hospital grounds. I dared not even open the side door for the crowd it would draw. These thoughts gave me flashbacks to Stuart’s and my travails with dead Kima in tow months earlier, and our terse encounter with Dian’s scorned ex-fiancé, Dr. Weiss, right near this same spot. I didn’t want to run into him again, knowing the disdain he’d already showed us. With those memories fresh in my mind, I headed for Pierre Vimont’s home. If I was lucky, at least his wife Claude would be there. By then, I had been to their house at least once, and remembered it to be on a side road along the way out of town toward Gisenyi.

  Claude didn’t speak much English, nor I much French, but she greeted me at her back door, where I had parked the VW.

  “Gorille . . . morte . . .” I muttered, pointing to the van with emphasis. Claude, attractive, coiffed, and always neatly dressed, tilted her head in perplexed attention.

  “Hein?” she responded quizzically.

  “Is Doctor Vimont . . . uh,” I persevered, “Doctor Vimont . . . here?” I continued, pointing at the ground to represent “here.”

  “Pierre? Oh, no . . . à l’hôpital.”

  At least he wasn’t out of town. Relieved, I coaxed Claude over to the van.

  “Gorille . . . morte . . . autopsie?”

  “Gorille?” she muttered quizzically. Perhaps she thought I had another orphaned baby inside.

  “Oh!” she gasped, as I slid the van’s door open. I wanted to tell her the whole story, but that was way too complex and elaborate for our sign language. Claude simply held her hands up in astonishment, mouth open, staring at Marchessa’s lifeless form. At that, she seemed to know exactly why I was there. With our best efforts in our own languages and hand signals, I understood that Dr. Vimont would be returning later.

  “Pierre . . .” Claude said, pointing at her wristwatch, then at the ground, “Quatre ou cinq heures.”

  Thanks to Madame Slack’s Parlons Français program on our elementary school televisions in the Washington, D.C. area, I at least knew how to count in French—Pierre would be back at four or five o’clock.

  I didn’t want to take any more of Claude’s time, and with the awkwardness of our language barrier, I decided to run an errand, and pick up the Karisoke mail at the post office. I explained as best I could, and saw that Claude understood that I’d return. I killed more time by taking the opportunity to write a letter home, describing to my parents, in the least alarming way, what I’d been up to lately.

  It was after four when I headed back to the Vimonts’ home. I pushed back thoughts of how I’d find the road to Jean-Pierre’s after dark. Dr. Vimont and a friend were standing in the backyard when I returned to his house, and both greeted me heartily. I was lucky that the English word for “autopsy” is similar to the French “autopsie,” so I didn’t have to say much before both men helped me hoist Marchessa out of the car, and onto her back on a concrete slab under an outdoor covered storage area.

  Pierre’s friend was Giles, who had lived off and on in Africa for some time. He didn’t speak English either, but he did speak Swahili. At that revelation, Dr. Vimont’s enthusiastic friend became our interpreter. I couldn’t help seeing the irony of two mzungus having to communicate via an African language. But with that we were off and running. I spoke to Giles in Swahili, Giles spoke to Pierre in French, Pierre spoke back to Giles in French, who spoke to me again in Swahili. And so I described the macabre story of Marchessa’s death to these men, who responded with wide-eyed bewilderment.

  I emphasized to Pierre that we wanted to know if Marchessa may have been sick prior to Icarus’s beating. The good doctor then armed himself with a scalpel from his medical bag, and expertly made an incision down Marchessa’s midline from just under her sternum, down to the vagina. I marveled at his skill, with the blade cutting so cleanly even through the tough gorilla hide.

  Giles served as willing surgical assistant, helping peel back the skin and viscera to reveal the organs beneath.

  At first glance the severe hemorrhaging from Icarus’s repeated pouncing was apparent on the soft tissues beneath the skin of her stomach and chest. Even the bases of both lungs had hemorrhaged, explaining Marchessa’s labored and gurgling final breaths. Results of the beating extended internally to what Pierre described as la grande courbe of the stomach, comprising a good third of that organ’s outer surface. I was most shocked to see that the trauma by the repeated pouncing of a four-hundred-pound silverback had also caused a one-inch slice-like puncture through the old female’s stomach wall. It was very telling to see that the stomach itself was full of undigested vegetation, indicating that Marchessa had been feeding normally just prior to her death. This made the killing all the more perplexing.

  Pierre gave it his all with an enthusiastic curiosity of his own. This was his first gorilla autopsy, and for him a chance to see how similar an ape was to humans internally. He located and identified each organ deftly. Fortunately I’d already studied vertebrate anatomy, because both Giles’s and my Swahili did not extend to internal organs. As he probed, prodded, and sliced, Dr. Vimont could see that Marchessa was indeed an old female, with some atrophy of the leg muscles. Other organs looked normal and healthy, except the spleen, which had a large golf ball–size hydatid cyst, filled with fluid. There were numerous other pea-size cysts of the same type throughout her spleen, but Pierre emphasized that the biggest one was unusually large. Hydatid cysts contain the larvae of tapeworms, which gorillas and other wild animals are naturally exposed to, and are part of the parasite’s life cycle.

  As Giles and I looked on with interest, Pierre moved on to the reproductive organs. Marchessa was neither in estrus, nor pregnant at time of death, although these organs appeared normal and healthy. He did note some atrophy of the uterus. A mountain gorilla’s gestation is eight and a half months. With mountain gorillas typically giving birth every four years, and with her offspring, Shinda, at three and a half years old, she was just beyond the point where she would be expected to be pregnant again, if she was even going to reproduce. Her death guaranteed no further reproduction.

  When Dr. Vimont was finished with his careful assessment of Marchessa’s cadaver, we loaded the body back into the VW for transport back up to Karisoke and
the gorilla graveyard. As I described details of Icarus’s unexplained beating of Marchessa, our conversation turned to a fatal incident Giles had witnessed at Akagera, Rwanda’s plains park near the border with Tanzania.

  Peter had told me a story of Dian’s fear of sumu, or black magic, the stuff of African lore in which someone might put a curse on you. This usually requires the services of a witch doctor, and a piece of the intended victim’s hair or fingernails. Because of this, Dian always pulled the hair from her hairbrush and tossed it in the fire. Her fears were exacerbated by the death of someone she had known. In 1975, a twenty-nine-year-old female photographer friend of Dian’s, named Lee Lyon, had visited her at Karisoke in 1975. She had asked Dian what she knew of sumu. She had explained to Dian that someone had gotten some of her hair and used it to put a curse on her. Lee was deeply disturbed by this. A week later she was dead, killed by an elephant.

  Giles had been present at the time, and witnessed Lee’s death. By 1975 all of Akagera’s elephants had been eliminated by poaching. A group of young elephants had been orphaned by culling of adult elephants in Rwanda’s heavily human-populated Bugesera District. Lee was there to photograph the event. During the unloading and release, one of these young elephants came after her, knocking her to the ground.

  “Alipiga, na piga, na PIGA!” Giles explained, punching his fists downward, describing how the elephant repeatedly struck the ill-fated photographer into the ground. Although the elephant was young, it was still huge relative to the young woman. Giles and the others tried their best to distract the elephant and ward it off, but Lee was injured beyond hope with just the first couple of blows.

  Before I had to worry too much about how I would make it on to Jean-Pierre’s before dark, dead Marchessa in tow, Claude graciously invited me to join them for dinner and to spend the night, offering me a clean, comfortable bed, and the first shower I’d had in months.

  Back at Karisoke, we buried Marchessa in the gorilla graveyard and I made a plaque for her to match the others. Group 5 continued on as normal, but for the next three days, Beethoven would whimper spontaneously with a mournful high pitched moan as he led the group through their usual feeding grounds. I hadn’t heard him make that sound before, nor again after those few days.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  NAIROBI

  Terry Maple came through on his promise of flying me to Nairobi on September 19 for a bit of reprieve. Seeing the riot of bougainvillea colors down the grass median of Uhuru Highway felt like a homecoming of sorts, as Terry drove me from the Nairobi airport to the Jacaranda Hotel, where his academic entourage had their base camp. The hotel was an upgrade from the University of Nairobi’s Spartan dorm rooms from which we had based our forays the summer before, but I wouldn’t have traded the immersive experience the dorms had provided us into Kenyan academic life.

  My fellow UGA student and roommate from the previous year, Jim Weed, was serving as Terry’s assistant with a group of ten other students. It was great to see Jim again, who had been truly excited for me being at Karisoke, but knew little of the details of my experience so far. The students’ makeup of nine females to one guy showed the impact that the celebrated women in field biology were having on the rising student population.

  The lone male student, Dan Reed, was a wiry little guy apparently overwhelmed among so many bright young females. He seemed to invite the teasing and taunting the girls bestowed upon him as we got acquainted at the hotel’s bar. While I enjoyed the change of scenery among rounds of Tusker beer with these coeds, Dan sipped on soft drinks or water, while some of the girls threatened to buy him a beer. It was clear to me that he had landed on the bottom of the pecking order, as their tour was drawing to a close. Among these students, I began to feel again like the undergrad I really was, away from the responsibilities of Karisoke, and the dependency of Dian.

  Soon we were on the streets of Nairobi as the group made their final forays for souvenirs among the shops and marketplaces to take home to friends and family. The shopping safari ended at the Stanley Hotel’s iconic Thorn Tree Café, where Terry pulled me aside to a streetside table for a pep talk. My letters to him had been quite honest about my experience at Karisoke so far, and the experiences of those who had arrived when I did, now gone. Jim Weed was interested in taking my place after I left, and Terry hoped for Karisoke to remain a unique and important opportunity for other students. I knew he wanted my experience to be one of the successful ones, and I reassured him that I would persevere. Besides, I had already survived Dian’s vengeful return to camp, and somehow came out on a high note, and she was back in the States.

  Our reverie ended with Terry informing his students that I’d be speaking to them at a gathering the next day. He had blocked out a full hour for the presentation. This caught me off guard. I had never been comfortable speaking in front of a group, and hadn’t prepared myself for that. Still, I didn’t let it show, and lay awake, pondering what I might talk about. So many things ran through my mind, I fell asleep knowing there was indeed much to tell.

  I began by describing the average day of the mountain gorilla, and the group listened politely as I went on to describe the different habitat zones of the Virungas, and the gorillas’ food sources. When I began talking about taking care of the baby gorilla, the group seemed quite captivated, and as my story evolved into Bonne Année’s harrowing, ill-fated release attempt into Group 5, my listeners were riveted with mouths agape. I, myself, nearly choked as I recalled zipping her exhausted body up under my raincoat to make our escape.

  After I answered questions about gorillas, the questions about Dian began to emerge. It was only natural that so many young women would want to know about her.

  “What is Dian like?”

  “What’s it like to work with her?”

  “Actually . . .” I heard myself say finally, followed by a deep breath, “She’s very difficult to work with.”

  I don’t know who was more disappointed, me or them. But my little presentation ended among blank stares that I could only interpret as disappointment and bewilderment.

  I was relieved when attention on me and Dian Fossey was redirected to primatologist Dr. Shirley Strum, whom Terry had arranged to meet with us on the lawn of Nairobi’s Central Park. We sat in an informal circle in the middle of the wide green expanse surrounded by the bustling tropical city as Dr. Strum told us about the extensive work she’d been doing with a group of olive baboons, Papio Anubis, on the Kikopey Ranch in Gilgil, north of Nairobi near Lake Elementaita. Petite beneath dark curls, and tan from the bright sun of the arid uplands, she smiled easily as she greeted us. She had already popularized her work in National Geographic magazine, so it was exciting for us to be hearing her stories firsthand. If Dian Fossey was the Jane Goodall of gorillas, Shirley Strum was the Jane Goodall of baboons. In any case, she certainly wasn’t the Dian Fossey of anything: unabashedly friendly, obviously bright, and enthusiastic in her teaching. Clearly, she enjoyed spending time with people.

  This showed through her research efforts as well, working in a very public forum on the Kikopey Ranch where the world of baboons collided with the world of humans. She worked to alleviate the strife brought upon struggling farmers by marauding baboons, in an effort to meet the needs of both in an arid land where food was all too scarce.

  After her talk, Dr. Strum patiently answered questions before we thanked her and wished her continued success.

  Back at the Jacaranda on their last night, Terry had booked a large meeting room for his traditional awards ceremony, recognizing students for specific achievements during the trip, reminiscing and laughing about high and low points. At one point on their safari, their kombi had become bogged down in mud. The students had to get out of the vehicle and pitch in, wallowing in the muck to push the vehicle out.

  “That’s when you all became men.” Terry informed them, among a collective groan from the women. I remembered from the previous summer, after particularly trying days when things didn’t go
as planned, Terry would say to us all, male and female, “Today, you became men.”

  Obviously, this new group had been hearing this remark as well, but with ninety percent females, they turned the tables on him. At the end of their banquet, the women surprised Terry with a tribute of their own, cleverly written in verse. The contents, which one student read aloud, summarized various points in which Terry impressed them, throughout their travel. The piece ended with the female students uttering collectively, “Terry . . . today you become a woman.”

  At that, a smart, tall blonde named Beth Stevens rose from her chair with a wry smile and approached Terry at the head of the table. In her outstretched hand, she carried the trophy, a small white cylinder the size of a tube of lipstick. But it wasn’t a lipstick Beth handed her professor, it was a wrapped tampon, lovingly adorned with a ribbon. Terry’s face went bright red as he accepted the token, grinning and convulsing in his stifled mirth as the group burst into laughter and applause.

  My return flight to Rwanda left a day later than the group’s, so it was me waving from the sidewalk as they drove off to the airport and back to the USA. Terry had kept a room at the Jacaranda for me for one more night and I was careful not to oversleep. A hotel staffer called a cab for me the next morning, and I waited at the front of the hotel, for what seemed too long. By the time my cab driver was nudging us through the early traffic onto the Uhuru Highway roundabout, I was getting worried about the time. With the long highway stretch ahead of us, my morning plan soon became one of those cutting-it-too-close trips to the airport. My worry was founded when I arrived out of breath at the Sabena Airlines departure gate just twenty minutes before takeoff.

  “I’m sorry,” the agent said in his Belgian-French accent, when I told him my flight number, “it’s too late for you to get on the plane.”

  I was dumbstruck. This was Nairobi. People weren’t that strict about timeframes. My cab driver certainly hadn’t been. Close connections happened all the time. I was sure I’d been in closer calls than this before and still been able to board. I just stared in disbelief with these thoughts running through my mind.