by John Fowler
With Rosalind gathering up as much equipment as she could carry, Conrad, Sandy, and I tried carrying Nshuti’s limp form, lifting arms and legs. The three of us were too awkward to move in unison. We switched to pairs, one taking gorilla arms, and one taking legs. Even then, the steep slope and convoluted terrain made it cumbersome. By the time we returned to the main trail, it was obvious the only way to make any kind of progress was for each of us males to take shifts, carrying the full sixty pounds of gorilla as far as we could before exhaustion. Then each of us would rest while another carted our drugged gorilla as far as they could.
We were lucky that Group 11 had at least fled in a general line along the open trail from the lake, and in the direction homeward. Still, this was an arduous task, and the going was painfully slow. Even after the first hour of transporting our living cargo, we seemed no closer to finding the group. None of us was certain of how long the effects of the ketamine would last. The thought of Nshuti recovering from anesthesia during transport added another dimension of concern to our travail. What would we do with a fully recovered gorilla on our hands? As a juvenile, we couldn’t just abandon him alone in the forest, and he damn sure wouldn’t let us carry him anymore.
As another hour passed, Nshuti remained immobilized, while our level of exhaustion increased. Rosalind looked for vital signs, checking for breathing and heartbeat during each stop. Realizing we just weren’t covering distance fast enough, Conrad ran ahead to see if he could catch up with Group 11 and at least get an idea of how much farther we needed to go.
Sandy and I continued as best we could, swapping off with our sixty pounds of gorilla as we stumbled up and down the trail in shifts. It was a long time before Conrad returned with at least the good news of having located Nshuti’s family. Still far ahead, but at least they seemed to have stopped fleeing, and had settled down enough to feed. But the other twist had begun, Nshuti was beginning to recover from the effects of the drug. Instead of being the dead weight we had been dealing with for the last four hours, he had begun flopping his arms and legs in a determined but haphazard way. One of the side-effects of ketamine is hallucinations, and we could see the fear in the young gorilla’s eyes. For him, he was waking into the nightmare of being captured by humans.
It was nearly another hour before we caught up with Group 11, which had finally slowed their momentum. By this time, Nshuti was soon going to be too much to handle. Rosalind gave him one last examination before Conrad, Sandy, and I, holding whichever appendage we could manage, lugged him as close to Group 11 as we could without startling them further. As we released our hold, I remember Nshuti staring into my eyes, and managing a terrified grunting, eh, eh, EH, at the horror that was no hallucination.
Immediately, we all retreated back onto the main trail, but still within sight of Nshuti, who then flailed sloppily, unable to crawl away. Then, the most touching event occurred. A female emerged from the group, mostly still hidden. It was Nshuti’s mother! With a caustic glare at us humans, she approached her son, and put her arms around him. Clearly confused by his inebriation, she tried pulling him up on her back, as if he were still her infant. When he failed to hold on, she grabbed her boy by the arm and dragged him back to the group.
Only then could we breathe a sigh of relief that our work was over. The four of us, exhausted from the longest day, were happy to rest a while longer as Group 11 moved onward and upward out of sight onto Visoke’s forested slopes.
TWENTY-SIX
GOING BUSH
Only with Dian’s absence did Karisoke become a tranquil place, temperate and wonderfully livable in what remained of the long dry season. I had been warned about feelings of lonely isolation there, but settled back into my daily routine of a two-hour trek to gorillas, observing for four hours, and then the two-hour trek back home, to change into dry warm clothes, light my fire, and prepare my one meal of the day, as had become my custom. I looked forward to this mealtime with great hunger and anticipation. And if the rare surprise visitor wandered into camp at my feeding time, I felt as raw and territorial as a dog at his bowl—not really interested in seeing anyone.
It was with no small irony that in the end Dian could only rely on we whom she had dubbed the “selfish, young, and stupid.” To compensate for Peter’s and my dual role in running the camp, its staff, the poacher patrol, wages, finances, and monitoring of the research gorilla groups, we split what had been Stuart’s one-hundred-dollar monthly allowance for food evenly. Peter suggested we also salvage perishables from Dian’s pantry, and so we raided it like starving rebels that had just overthrown an oppressive despot. While Peter seemed to survive on bananas and rice for breakfast, and beans and rice for dinner, I had long grown weary of this readily available but monotonous fare, even developing severe stomach cramps from repeated bean dinners, although I’d learned to pick the rat turds and broken glass out of the beans before cooking them. The pain, which ebbed and flowed, had become so bad that on one hike to Nunkie, I doubled over just as I reached the group. With Nunkie rushing down upon me and screaming, the agony was more than I could bear, and I ended my contact, making the return hike between doubling over in pain and resuming only when it intermittently subsided.
After that, I was done with beans for a while. Instead, I got creative with flour, eggs, canned margarine, and such meager supplies as I had at my disposal. When avocados were available, I added tomatoes and onions to make guacamole. This I ate slathered on stovetop-toasted bread slices. From raw flour, I made pizza dough covered with tomatoes, peppers, onions, and cheese, baked in a makeshift oven made from my wash pot and stove. When forest blackberries came into season, I baked them in crude cakes, or made syrup with them to pour on pancakes. Peanuts, sugar and margarine yielded peanut brittle, and seeing a recipe in one of Dian’s cookbooks, I even made a crude candy nougat from powdered milk. But my absolute favorite dish—which soon became my staple—was sautéed onions and peppers topped with a flour, egg and baking powder batter, all baked inside my wash pot to a fluffy mound. This I called my Karisoke Soufflé.
Despite the difficult climbs and wild-goose chases, finding Nunkie led me on some of the most beautiful treks high on Mount Visoke. I can’t say how many times I’ve summited that mountain. Returning from one exhaustive hike, I stumbled upon an immense side crater of the mountain before joining up again with Nameye, who waited somewhere downslope toward camp. I had taken a wrong turn, and came to a halt above the chasm. It was a rare clear day, and the view was breathtaking. I later learned this landmark was known in camp simply as the Big Hole, or Chimo Mkubwa in Karisoke Swahili. The name didn’t do it justice.
I sat to rest above its stunning sheer volcanic cliffs, which plummeted to a lush green meadow at the bottom, a hidden valley, invisible from below. Little yellow white-eyes, Zosterops senegalensis, which favored these altitudes, flitted among the low shrubs in the thin air, searching the leaves for bugs with their bright white-rimmed eyes. Mounts Mikeno and Karisimbi served as splendid backdrops with this special place at center stage, and I felt as if I were the first human to ever sit at that exact spot, and one of the rare few to witness that hidden world below me. Much of the time the Virungas, with their mercurial climate and exhaustive climbs, could take everything you had. Other times, they only gave back to you, surrendering their dazzling beauty.
On another trip, Nameye and I trekked up into an odd precipitation akin to some form of snow not far below the volcano’s rim. Different from the familiar hail, the tiny swirling crystals were barely visible in the hand, and melted instantly, as if frozen mist. I could only surmise we had walked up into a frozen cloud. The fine flurries scarcely accumulated on the ground, instead swirling off and away like dust. In the middle of this, we stumbled upon a handsome francolin hen, Pternistis nobilis, in a grassy lava clearing, frantically trying to lure her chicks out of our path and into a thicket of giant senecios. I was surprised to see this partridge-like bird up so high, especially with her hatchlings. The frightened peeps
hid among the grasses at our approach, and Nameye and I were able to pick them up. We marveled at each tiny speckled ball of fluff while carrying them to the forest edge and releasing them to their frantic, squawking mother.
The Elephant Trail was our usual path down Mount Visoke, because it routed us quickly downward right into camp. Halfway down, the trail took me under a grove of tall pygeum trees, Prunus africana. There I’d sometimes spot a pair of Ruwenzori turacos, Gallirex johnstoni, feeding on the cherry-like fruits. They’d cock their eyes at me warily as I admired their gaudy green, red, blue, and violet plumage. They hopped and bounced among the branches while foraging, before flapping away in a flash of crimson flight feathers.
Near there, I’d once stumbled upon a patch of white bird droppings. Looking upward, I saw a pair of long-eared owls, Asio abyssinicus, staring silently back at me from their roost like two mottled brown moths, their long ear tufts resembling tufted antennas. Despite glowing golden eyes, they wore blank and stoic expressions, blending in with the tree’s bark and limbs.
On one visit to Nunkie’s Group, low on Visoke’s western slopes, I finally heard the startling roars and rumbles of forest elephants myself. Sublimely excited, I moved to a clear vantage point from which I could see through the trees of the saddle area below me. They sounded as if they were just right there, and should be in view, but try as I may, I couldn’t catch even a glimpse. Certainly they were large enough. Obviously on the move, their sounds faded away before it was time to leave. So close I felt I had come to their rare sighting.
Kanyaragana, Dian’s longtime servant and my friend, came to my cabin door one afternoon after I returned to camp.
“Ninataka kupanda Visoke,” he said. He wanted to climb Mount Visoke.
“Visoke? Kwa nini?” I asked why, baffled by this idea. He was a Rwandan who had worked at Karisoke, in the Virungas, much of his life, who lived in the very shadow of this volcano. Why would he want to climb Mount Visoke? Surely he’d done this before. The trackers and I surely had . . . on a long, hard day.
“Bado kupanda. Ninataka kuona ngezi huko.”
Much to my surprise, like Dian, he had never been to the top of Visoke. This caught me off guard. His life had been devoted to Mademoiselli, and Karisoke, and we students. He wanted to see the volcano’s lake, which he had heard about for so many years. With Dian gone, he knew things were changing; perhaps he thought his one chance was with me. Throughout his many years at Karisoke, anyone could’ve taken him, or he could’ve simply gone by himself. But just then he was asking me. He wanted me, his msungu pal, to be his guide. When I asked him when he wanted to do this, he suggested the very next day, as if it was a now-or-never option. So moved was I by his unexpected and sincere request, I simply agreed.
And so we climbed the very next day, on the most direct route up the Elephant Trail behind Dian’s cabin. It was a warm day, but with swaths of chilly clouds sweeping around us, Kanyaragana was surprisingly quiet throughout our hike, as if in deep thought about many things. When we reached the top, he became even more introspective. He had brought Dian’s big military binoculars, and quietly glanced through them between gaps in the clouds that swept through us. There were no gasps of awe as he studied the views at his disposal, no looks of astonishment at the quiet lake he had longed to see. Just quiet reflection.
I asked him if he wanted to climb down to the lake.
“Hapana,” he said, decisively.
Standing behind him, I gave him a little nudge toward the lake, just to get a reaction. He jumped back and laughed quietly. I knew the Rwandans had a myth about the lake, that to touch its waters would bring bad luck. Despite my suggestion to venture farther, Kanyaragana had no interest in entering the caldera where the tranquil water lay. Instead, he stood silently, taking in the vast world of Rwanda, Zaire, and Uganda below and around him as if lost in some silent and profound prayer.
After a while, he was ready to go. I had brought my camera, and he let me take his picture before we left.
The giant rat continued to plague me with his nocturnal raids, leaping onto my counters, nudging pot lids off my leftovers to get at the contents, and rousing me from sleep. He had even eaten a small lobelia plant I had brought down from the upper slopes of Mount Visoke and potted in a coffee can, leaving the gnawed stump and soil scattered across my floor. Seeing our tracker Bernardi kill one of these varmints with a single swipe of his panga one night made me realize I didn’t have to put up with it. But, with stealth and agility, the big rodent evaded each swipe of my panga, slipping right back out through the same seam in the wall’s grass matting as lithely as he had entered. Over time I saw his potential weakness—greed, combined with an ever-increasing brazenness as I repeatedly failed to kill him. One night, he mockingly stood his ground, knowing he could outrun my attack. Instead, I opened the pot of beans for him. The smell of food drew him in, and I tilted the pot his way. With my right hand, I reached for my panga, slowly, silently . . . My meager rations were as precious to me as to him, but I saw him as my competitor, each out of place here on the mountain. One of us had to go. Finally, with one fatal crack I rid myself of him.
After that, it was only the tiny groove-toothed rats, Otomys denti, and the pretty little woodland dormice with furry tails, Graphiurus murinus, that shared my cabin with me. The mice were too small to get into my food, but did chew holes in a sweater to make a nest. The tiny rats were mostly uninterested in my supplies and belongings, and only seemed to be using the space below my cabin floor as a warm, dry home. They were usually quiet, but one morning I awoke to a squealing skirmish under the floor. Moments later, a groove-toothed rat emerged from out of where the wall met the floor, staggered onto the grass mats, and fell over dead. A pool of blood flowed from a slit in his throat. I could only surmise that a territorial dispute had led to the tiny rodent’s violent murder.
Bonne Année appeared to be thriving in Group 4, enjoying a close alliance with the silverback Peanuts. I continued my regular forays into Zaire to keep track of her progress with her adopted family. Nunkie still drifted in and out of our study range, even for our intrepid trackers, and so I resumed my monitoring the whereabouts of this irascible renegade gorilla and his band of consorts. I never got quite used to his greetings of repeated screams and charges, followed by a standoff of knocking down vegetation as I lay before him in whimpering repose. It was only against this unwelcoming onslaught that I was able to learn that two of his females, Augustus and Papoose, had given birth. I at least had the honor of naming the new babies, Ginseng and Shangaza.
As Fossey would have it, I developed no specific research project of my own, instead simply writing down everything the gorillas did and their whereabouts, so our director could read it later. I surmised that perhaps someday, some way, I could at least extract some useful data out of the narrative. On other days I accompanied Peter to Group 5. We’d become great comrades in the field, later retreating to our own solitudes back in camp. Sometimes the camp staff asked if we could spend a little more on their rations and they invited us to supe na umbati at their cabin—a pot of hearty vegetable soup with a side of manioc paste that we ate with our fingers around a camp fire until our stomachs were bulging painfully.
We were a tiny remote village of six men at any given time, four of whom rotated out every twenty-one days of work shifts to return to their farm plots below. Each made one hundred Rwandan francs per day, the equivalent of a U.S. dollar, and I paid each twenty-one dollars at the end of their shifts from the few hundred dollars in Dian’s wooden money lockbox.
For fear of theft, Dian had never kept too large an amount in the box at any one time, but I noticed the box was so loose at its joints, that I could simply pull it slowly apart at the bottom. The nails slipped back into their holes as easily as they had slid out. I imagined someone had done this many times, but on my watch, with the box in my cabin, the money count stayed mostly accurate, but for five or ten dollars on occasion, which I attributed to my own account
ing errors. Still, I wondered.
I kept the guns, too, still in their own now-infamous wooden box. These I handed over to the poacher patrol when they came up, and they took them out with them into Zaire to cut traps. Dian’s camp funds had dwindled, and we didn’t have the money to send them out as much as she had before her departure. After Peter and I had cut a cluster of snares we had stumbled into with Group 5 at the base of Mount Karisimbi, Nameye and I went back out farther into the area to cut and confiscate some more. It was eerie with just the two of us, in this distant, unfamiliar territory, especially when Nameye got a whiff of hashishi on the air, always associated with a Twa campsite. Watching Nameye stop and raise the pistol, with eyes wide, silently sniffing the air, gave me chills, as if danger was imminent. I didn’t want to get into a shootout.
On another occasion, while out with Group 5 on the western slopes of Mount Visoke, I spied a pair of poachers in the saddle area below me. As I watched silently from above, I could clearly see a man carrying a dead duiker across his shoulders. The young boy who accompanied him carried a bow and arrow. Except for the fate of the duiker, the scene looked harmless, almost idyllic—a father and son hunting together to provide food for their family as these Twa people had been doing for centuries in these forests. But for the greedy poachers who set dozens of traps in a single area, endangering mountain gorillas and leaving their glut of quarry to die and rot on the pole, subsistence hunting for common duikers and bushbucks may have had little impact.
I received an appreciative letter from Dian, profusely thanking me for writing to her about Marchessa’s death. I saw she was a different person on paper, focused and without angry outbursts, having chosen her words thoughtfully. She recounted in droll detail her trip back to Ithaca with Cindy in tow. I would again read this humorous account as a fond reminiscence in her book, Gorillas in the Mist.
