Governor Johnston encouraged the Pygmies to recuperate in Entebbe that spring as he made the preparations for their difficult journey back to the Congo. But the governor was an amateur cryptozoologist—interested in mythical or mysterious or undiscovered species—and since Europeans had yet to explore most of Africa’s forested middle, he began quizzing his guests about their home in the Ituri. What did they hunt? What kinds of unusual animals did they know about?
The conversation between the Pygmies and the governor could have included a little spoken language and a lot of pantomime. But the governor also had a good idea of what to ask about, since he was familiar with an account published in 1890 by the Welsh-American journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley about a strange animal of the Ituri. Stanley had never seen this animal, but he had spoken to some Mbuti who described the elusive “Atti,” a kind of forest-dwelling donkey, Stanley thought, whom the Pygmies captured with pit traps. They weren’t actual donkeys, of course. They were some other kind of quadruped, adapted to live in the dark and leafy world of the rain forest. “What they can find to eat is a wonder,” Stanley wrote. “They eat leaves.”
Based on Stanley’s brief account, Governor Johnston held up before his guests the picture of a donkey, and they confirmed that, yes, they were familiar with an animal like that. When Johnston pulled out a zebra skin, the Pygmies again confirmed a resemblance. They called this animal an “o’api,” Johnston would later write. The word soon became Anglicized to okapi.
Johnston knew enough to be excited. Such an animal, never heard of by a European before Stanley’s brief mention, never seen by a zoologist anywhere, never written about in any of the world’s zoological literature, could amount to a great discovery for some enterprising person like him. He therefore organized a full expedition out to the eastern Congo and placed himself at the head of it.
By July of 1900, the expedition had made it as far as the Belgian outpost of Fort Mbeni, on the edge of the great Ituri. The Pygmies left at that point, returning to their village, while Lieutenant Meura, the commander of Fort Mbeni, declared that he too believed there was a donkey-like creature in the forest, although perhaps more horse than donkey. In any case, Meura provided Johnston with trackers and some extra supplies, enough for a several-day journey right into the hot heart of that oppressive place.
At least Johnston thought it was oppressive. Johnston’s negative impressions may have been intensified by the malaria. He was soon stupefied enough that when his trackers showed him what they claimed to be o’api or okapi tracks, Johnston refused to follow—thinking, apparently, that he was about to be tricked by devious natives. Donkeys and horses, the governor knew very well, did not have cloven hooves. The tracks being pointed out to him were of a cloven-hoofed animal. Couldn’t be an okapi.
He was wrong, of course, but by then everyone in the expedition was too wracked by malaria to think about it. They returned to Fort Mbeni, and from there back to Entebbe. Too bad for Harry Johnston.
Luckily, Lieutenant Meura was a generous sort who rummaged about and found two small pieces of okapi skin that had been sewn into a pair of bandoliers. He presented those to Johnston as a parting gift, and he promised to send more okapi pieces as soon as he could. Meura then died of blackwater fever, whatever that is, but his faithful second-in-command eventually sent to Johnston a full shipment of okapi pieces, including a complete skin and a couple of skulls along with, it seems, a jawbone. Cloven hooves also in the package, according to an accompanying note, disappeared in transit.
Still, there was enough specimen material to justify Governor Johnston’s mailing it to an expert at the British Museum in London, who, after a quick examination, announced in 1903 the discovery of an entirely new mammal, a new genus and species, actually, which was named Okapi johnstoni. In that way, Harry Johnston acquired his own mote of immortality. But the important part of this story—and the main reason Karl (photographer of giraffes), Dan (ivory guy, along for the ride), and I (writer of a book about giraffes) are now strapped into a missionary plane and being bumped along in our passage above the green and misty sea of the Ituri Forest—is that the expert at the British Museum also announced that okapis are the only living relatives of giraffes.
How can that be? you ask yourself. When you first look at an okapi you don’t see anything like a giraffe. You see a strange and ghostly beast, shy, with a bony face and a body that reminds you of a horse with a beautiful chestnut-brown coat that, in a filtered forest light, glows and turns dark chocolate with orange highlights. A horse with, when you examine him or her more fully, horizontal zebra stripes wrapping the forelegs and, at the rear, a wavery burst of zebra emerging from the rump, fanning out and spreading forward in a feathering of wavery horizontal stripes. The stripes look like strips of sunlight reflecting off a fan of rain-wet leaf layers. Ghostly? Especially the face, which is bony with black circling around the eyes and nose, with a dusting of white or gray cast gently over the rest of the face. It’s a gray mask, making this animal look like a horse dressed up for Halloween and wearing a horse-skull mask topped absurdly by a pair of moth-eaten donkey ears. Donkey? Horse? But then you look down at the cloven hooves.
I forgot to mention the tongue, which is bluey-black and long enough to wrap halfway around the animal’s snout—in fact, a lot like a giraffe’s tongue, which is one unlikely clue to the okapi’s obscure ancestry. It’s true that okapis don’t have long necks, but neither did the direct ancestors of giraffes until only a few million years ago, so the fossils say. It was, in any case, a generally hidden anatomy that convinced the expert in the British Museum back at the start of the twentieth century that he was looking at pieces of a giraffe relative: particularly a specialized set of lower canines that are notched in the middle and flattened into a couple of spoon-shaped lobes on either side of that notch. It’s an odd feature but useful for both giraffes and okapis as a specialized tool for stripping leaves off branches and twigs.
Then there are the okapi horns, which, like a giraffe’s horns, are actually what some experts call ossicones, meaning they began life as pieces of cartilage that eventually turn into bone. Okapi horns are a lot smaller than the horns of giraffes, though, and they’re pointy at the ends. Also, only okapi males have horns, unlike giraffes, while the females are just left out … even though, again unlike giraffes, la femme est plus grosse.
The French I’ll let you figure out. It’s being spoken right now by a handsome and vigorous man named Jean-Prince M’Bayaa at the Okapi Breeding and Research Station, which is where Karl, Dan, and I now happen to be, having just, with the help of the missionaries, magically dropped out of the sky and landed in the middle of the Ituri Forest. We’re actually inside a 13,700-square-kilometer patch of the Ituri called the Okapi Faunal Reserve, not far from the village of Epulu and right next to the rushing, roaring, cool-watered Epulu River.
Here at the Okapi Breeding and Research Station near Epulu, thirteen okapis are living inside fenced pens, but the pens are very large, with plenty of giant trees and other vegetation inside, so it’s possible to look through the chain-link fence and at least imagine you’re looking at wild animals in the forest, rather than ones who have just been suckered into pit traps and put in prison. Anyway, it’s a nice prison. The okapis don’t seem frustrated or unhappy, and they appear to have plenty to eat and, possibly, enough to keep them mentally occupied if mental occupation is what they desire.
Jean-Prince has just brought out a green-painted wooden wheelbarrow full of bundled leaves and personalized in white lettering with the name Tatu, and now he opens a gate to the pen for a female named Tatu. He enters the pen and starts tying the leaf bundles onto an outstretched rope. It looks like he’s putting green laundry on a clothesline, which seems a silly way to feed wild animals, but it probably reproduces the okapis’ usual feeding posture in the wild. Tatu seems satisfied with the deal.
In the wild, Jean-Prince tells us, okapis eat the leaves of a hundred fifty species (or maybe
it’s fifty species, and I misheard the French), while here at the station they’re fed leaves from about forty-five different species. The Pygmies—Mbuti Pygmies—go into the forest every day, harvest the leaves from those species, and bring them into the station.
Three days later, Karl and I, followed by our minder, follow a couple of the Mbuti workers on their morning route into the forest to harvest leaves. The minder, a young, quiet, and rather sweet-looking African named Michel Moyakeso, wears green military-style fatigues and carries an old rifle. He works for the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (or ICCN), which officially runs the reserve from a headquarters based next to the Okapi Station. For some reason, someone at the ICCN has assigned Michel to follow us with his gun whenever we leave the station grounds.
The two workers, Bernard Mtongani and Abeli Doki, are both wearing black rubber boots, standard issue for the project, and carrying machetes. Bernard is older, with a ski-jump nose in a small face beneath a big wool watch cap. When he talks, his face lights up with the pleasure of communication. He’s the talker. Abeli, not so much. Abeli is dressed nicely in an Okapi Center T-shirt and fancy jeans with zippered back pockets and the name Obama embroidered in bright yellow letters going down the front of his right leg.
In the wild, Bernard tells us (his unfamiliar words translated into French by Michel), okapis eat leaves from over a hundred species, while his and Abeli’s daily job is to collect the leaves from thirty to thirty-five different kinds.
We follow these two as they wander through the forest, locating the various species of plants, and then—maybe it requires shinnying up a pole-like tree or scrambling into a difficult, thickety branch somewhere over our heads—harvesting the leaves and packing them into little bundles tied with vine. Later on, Bernard and Abeli assemble the bundles into fuller packets, and at the end of the morning’s harvest, which has taken altogether about three hours, the fuller packets are bound into big, clumsy bunches that are then skillfully balanced on their heads and toted off to the Okapi Station.
Once our rented car, complete with driver, shows up from Kisangani, Karl and I, with Dan now coming along (and, of course, our minder, Michel), visit the Mbuti village of Lembongo.
The driver takes us for a short while down the main mud road from Epulu and the Okapi Station and then off the road through a series of twisty ruts until we can go no farther. He stays with the car. On foot, the four of us walk until we reach the edge of the village, where we are greeted by a few sickly looking people, some with hair yellowed from malnutrition, and an old woman, her bare breasts flat and hanging like banana leaves, who sits before a blackened boiling pot resting on three or four logs hotly welded into a small fire.
The full village includes some beehive huts made of palm fronds and several cube-shaped, mud-and-stick huts: maybe four or five dozen dwellings altogether, casually spread out around three or four dusty, flattened centers, along with a few subdued, smoky fires, and one central pavilion made of poles and thatch. We sit down in the shade of the pavilion, and soon half the villagers have turned out for the occasion. We shake many people’s hands, the men dressed in rags, some of the women wrapped in colorful cloth. Someone brings out a yellow-enameled bowl containing a treat of fresh, dripping honey straight from the hive, and the bowl is placed on the ground near where we’re sitting. Several eagerly orbiting bees have already started drowning in the honey, and there’s a reason why: It’s delicious.
The village “chief,” in Karl’s assessment—but do Mbuti have “chiefs”? maybe he’s just the oldest bloke around—comes out of his hut to sit down and chat with the visitors. He’s wearing pants printed with a portrait of Jean-Pierre Bemba, the rebel commander from a few years back who was given a vice presidency as his reward for quitting the war. The old man’s wife stays back inside the doorway of the hut, watching us quietly from the shadows.
His name is Myanamenge, he says, and he has a small, rounded face and a quiet reserve. He speaks in a language that Michel translates into French and then, since I’m missing a lot of the French, is occasionally turned into an explanatory bone of English tossed my way by Karl. Myanamenge says he doesn’t know how old he is. His life has always been hard. He doesn’t eat elephant meat. Sometimes hunting is good, sometimes not—and here Karl inserts his own opinion: “He’s not going to say that in the old days there was a lot more game.”
Meanwhile, as we’re slurping the honey and exchanging words with Myanamenge, a hunting party from the village shows up and seems to confirm Karl’s assessment about the game. We see only a small part of this returning parade, starting with a giant net rolled up like a household rug and looped around someone’s head and shoulders, followed by a solemn-faced hunter with a thin goatee who is carrying a spear and knife. The hunter slips into his hut and then slips out again to greet us and show us the blue duiker he’s just killed: about the size of a Chihuahua, with gray fur, tiny feet, no head. The hunter holds up the duiker. Karl takes a picture. The hunter, dressed in cutoff shorts, a dirty gray polo shirt, and a faded red baseball cap, now slips back into his hut and brings out the duiker’s head, tongue lolling out, which he holds up. Karl photographs that.
Karl now photographs me standing next to the red-capped hunter, whom he calls “the chief’s son,” and the miraculous image at the back of his camera provides an interesting contrast between tall and short in one way and soft and hard in another. Then, after a good deal more random socializing and chitchat, we leave—having arranged to join the village on another hunt for another day.
And so, early one morning, we return to Lembongo as the hunters are fixing and straightening out their nets. The nets are fed and looped around the heads and shoulders of five sturdy men. A partner does the feeding and looping in the style of someone looping a hose or rope, pulling arm lengths of rolled netting, tossing it skillfully over the head and about the shoulders of the carrier, forming at last a large, thick doughnut of netting that settles onto the head and hangs about the face and drops back across the shoulders and down the back to the buttocks. From the front, the net carriers are half hidden by the nets, their faces solemnly peering out, the nets brown and piled high enough to make the carriers look like forest trolls with impossibly spectacular hairdos.
We all leave the village led by the red-capped chief’s son: a party of (not counting Karl, Dan, Michel, and me) about a dozen men (net carriers and hunters gripping iron-tipped spears), a dozen women (including one or two adolescent girls and a mother carrying a baby), and four small brown-and-white hunting dogs. Both men and women are small and, at least some of them, rather delicate looking. The women have cut their hair short or fixed it into cornrows and snaky plaits. The men have given themselves more severe cuts, although, as if to make up for that severity, many have left a scattering of delicate growth on chin and lip. The women are wrapped in colorful print cloths, some of them with wicker baskets strapped to their backs, and the men are dressed in T-shirts and shorts. The men are all flipflopped. Some of the women are barefoot, others flip-flopped. And one of the women carries the fire: glowing embers inside a log small enough that she can carry it in one hand.
After a long walk through the village gardens and other areas that look recently slashed and burned, at last we get into the tall forest. After another hour or so of walking, we come to a small, cavern-like clearing at the base of a giant tree. An old man stacks small pieces of wood below some outreaching branches of the giant tree and borrows the transported embers. With a leaf, he fans the embers into a flame—which he then stifles with green leaves, creating at last a steady column of rising white smoke.
Most everyone is sitting down now, and there’s a good deal of relaxed conversation, some laughing, the women always grouped together tightly and focused on their own society, the men more spread out, several people smoking rolled-up cigarettes and luxuriating in this lovely moment before the hunt.
Now people are getting up and, one by one, bathing themselves in the smoke,
walking over, and reaching with their hands into the writhing immaterial substance, splashing it back like water into their faces and hair. Next the net carriers step one by one into the smoke, thus smoking out the nets for some reason or other, maybe the practical one of neutralizing organic smells in order to confuse the game.
And then, quickly now, all are up and laying out the nets. A net carrier moves sprightly along a game trail, unlooping his long, long net, drawing out a netted line that stretches away along the trail until he’s reached the end of his piece, whereupon another net carrier takes up the task. He begins unlooping his long net, drawing it out into a continuance of the netted line—and then another. The women, meanwhile, follow this unreeling act, expertly joining the nets together at the ends, while spreading them out at the sides and raising them up: deftly attaching one lengthwise side to bits of vegetation on the forest floor, raising up the other side and attaching it to any standing vegetation—bush, vine, small tree—at a height of maybe three feet. The net, which was a rolled line reeled off by the men and stretching along the forest floor for a mile or so, has now become a netted fence, and because the fence is woven from oily brown twine or liana fibers, and vibrating softly in resonance with the secret filtering of air and the quivering greens and browns of the forest, it turns invisible—as do, suddenly, the Pgymies.
Karl, Dan, Michel, and I are left standing in a sleepy daze near the invisible net somewhere around its midpoint, I believe, and everyone else has vanished. Dan smokes a cigarette, and as he does I can picture as in a dream that long net drawn out into a great crescent in the forest, with the Pygmies quietly slipping through the forest and over to the open face at the far side; and now I can hear, in the distance but gradually moving closer, a series of strange, dreamlike, high-pitched whoops and barks that sound like the faint cries of birds and dogs, which, after a while, sound like whistles and flutes, which, after another while, sound like women’s voices. As this ethereal chorus approaches and gathers, closer, closer, I understand that the Mbuti must be chasing or driving or calling out for the game. They could be saying to the animals: Where are you hiding, our sweet little friends? Where have you gone, our dear little ones? And the animals, at first alert and drawn in by the mysterious whoops and barks but now anxious or afraid, might be saying to one another: This is not good. We should run. Some might say: Let’s go this way! Others will say: No, this way! Another says: Quick. Down this hole. Yet another says: No, not that hole! That one leads into the other world! And so the animals are altogether scared and confused but generally headed, one can imagine, toward our part of the net at the closed bottom or pocket of the crescent. After a time, however, the disembodied chorus fades and dies out, and the four of us are left listening to silence, which isn’t silence, of course, but more the in-and-out breathing of a sleeping forest, the eternal susurrus of insects, the turning clockwork of burps and chirps from small birds and hidden frogs. Silence for all practical purposes, though, and it is in this whispering silence that the Mbuti at last materialize and unhang and roll up the nets as deftly as they had earlier rolled out and hung them up.
Menagerie Page 8
