A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (4 page)

Nunkie was a mountain gorilla, and his death is mourned. He was one of only 250 to 260 mountain gorillas left in the world. Most live on the high forested slopes of a chain of extinct and dormant volcanoes in central equatorial Africa. Stewart’s firsthand account of the gorillas was couched in dispassionate scientific terms—cross-over, interaction, estrous, di-morphism—but the larger subject of her talk was unstated. It was no less than the survival of a species. Her lecture was titled “Friends and Foes in Gorilla Society.”

In the question-and-answer period following her lecture, someone asked if she wouldn’t be afraid to return to Rwanda in the wake of Dian Fossey’s brutal murder at the Karisoke Research Center there. Kelly Stewart said no, she wouldn’t be afraid. The tragic violence seemed to be directed against one person only.

No one asked what would happen to the last mountain gorillas on the face of the earth now that Fossey was dead. Many people believe that in the aftermath of Dian Fossey’s death, the gorillas’ future is bleak. They are, fortunately, wrong.

I
n the spring of 1980, after thirteen years at Karisoke, Dian Fossey left Volcano Park (Parc National des Volcans) in Rwanda to take a position at Cornell University. A year later, my partner, Berkeley photographer Nick Nichols, wrote to ask her permission to go to Karisoke. Nichols and I both considered Fossey a hero. In her years at Karisoke, she had amassed an incredible quantity of data about gorillas. She had courageously taken on the poachers who killed gorillas for profit—men who cut off the head and hands of the animals, boiled away the meat, and sold the skeletal remains to tourists. Fossey’s antipoaching patrols in the seventies may have actually saved a species. Additionally, she had spent years learning the intricate rules of gorilla behavior and habituating the animals to her presence. Photos and films of Fossey sitting in the midst of a gorilla group, of Fossey being touched—lightly, quizzically—by four-hundred-pound silverbacks (mature males), struck a chord in the viewer’s mind, something that echoed with the divinity of Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel: God and man, reaching out to touch one another, to understand one another. It was Dian Fossey—through her writing, through these films and photos—who single-handedly changed the public’s perception of gorillas. The King Kong image gave way to Fossey’s formulation: the mountain gorillas were “gentle giants.”

It was a remarkable record of lonely courage and achievement.
The word “single-handedly” seemed appropriate. Nichols and I, quite frankly, were in awe of Dian Fossey, and the letter Nick wrote to her was humble, respectful. It fell a yard or two short of outright cringing.

Fossey must have fired off the telegram within hours of reading that letter. “Proposed visit of yourself and Cahill for Karisoke filming and writing permission emphatically denied,” it read, “letter following.”

The letter arrived two days later and it was very nearly scalding: “It is quite impossible for you and/or your colleague, Tim Cahill, to ‘go to Karisoke and work with some of the researchers.’ ” Fossey made it clear that “the Karisoke Research Center is a scientifically oriented institution maintained and supported under my direction” and “is not open to the public for purposes of tourism and/or photography.” A bit harshly put, I thought, but fair enough.

The last paragraph, however, was an insult no matter how I read it. “Numerous people are on ego trips concerned with mountain gorilla conservation, a very popular pastime at present. On this end of the ocean, such interest is called ‘Comic Book Conservation.’ It might be advisable if you did not add your name to the list.”

What I had had in mind was a celebration of Fossey’s work with the gorillas: something that might end with a plea for more funding for her project. But, it seemed, Fossey would do that herself. Single-handedly.

I suppose Fossey thought Nick and I would blunder around disturbing the gorillas and end up writing an article based on her research anyway. Maybe it had happened like that before. Maybe she was right: perhaps my simple interest in the subject amounted to no more than comic book conservation. Even so, there was a demonstrable lack of tact involved. That last paragraph felt like a slap in the face. Every time I read it, I felt like something the dog left on the lawn.

“P
ermission emphatically denied” are probably not words one should use to working journalists. Two months after receiving Fossey’s letter, Nick and I were in Rwanda. The acting director of the Karisoke, in Fossey’s absence—it was thought she wasn’t coming back—was Dr. A. H. “Sandy” Harcourt, who was living there with his wife, Kelly Stewart. Stewart and Harcourt introduced me to a British couple, Drs. Conrad and Rosalind Aveling, who lived well below Karisoke, at the boundary of the park. We sat in the Avelings’ cabin, where the assembled scientists succinctly listed the inaccuracies and idiocies committed by previous visiting journalists. There had been promises made and broken. Journalists were only looking for a story, only looking to advance their careers. They weren’t interested in facts, only controversy. The scientists said they hoped I might be different. Their expressions said they didn’t hold out much hope.

Later, after this disagreeable session, I trudged an hour downhill to the nearest village. There, in a wooden hut with a dirt floor, was a place where
pombe
was sold. This is an immensely disgusting alcoholic beverage made from fermented bananas, and drinking it is almost as unpleasant as being scolded by scientists. But not quite.

Sometime after the second quart I believe I expressed a bit of anger about the scientists above. Oh no, I was given to understand, the new ones were friendly. Not that Fossey—the old woman who lives alone—hadn’t been friendly. She was very nice. Yes. No trouble.

I bought some
pombe
for my new friends. No trouble, huh? Well … And the stories came out, in whispers, with much looking about for eavesdroppers. They were filtered through various translations, and some of them were told in body language, but I could piece one incident together well enough. It seemed that trackers working for the old woman had captured a poacher. The man was detained at
Karisoke, where he was stripped and tied to a tree. There he was whipped with stinging nettles; whipped, I was given to understand, specifically on the genitals. Pictures of the man’s humiliation were distributed to the villages below the park. This, the message of the photos was, is what happens to people who kill gorillas.

Could anyone show me those photographs? No. Who would keep such pictures?

Later I checked the story out with Conrad and Rosalind Aveling. Yes, they had heard of the incident: it was being talked about in all the villages. They didn’t know if it was true. They hadn’t been in Rwanda at the time.

Whether the story is true or not—I like to believe it is not—the fact that it was being told, and frequently told, suggested to me a sure diplomatic failure between Karisoke and the villages below.

I
n the five weeks that followed, Nick and I learned, firsthand, the inflexible etiquette of gorilla conduct. Volcano Park is a dense forest on the upper slopes of a line of extinct and dormant volcanoes that separates Rwanda from Zaire and Uganda. The undergrowth is often wet, waist high, and hideously tangled. Gorilla trails seem easy enough to follow—a family of ten moving through such foliage will flatten a path in such a way that it looks as if a five-hundred-pound boulder had been rolled through the jungle. The problem is that these trails peter out, they double back on themselves, or they just seem to end out in the middle of some idyllic gorillaless meadow. To find the gorillas, Nick and I hired trained Rwandan trackers.

After a time, I found that I could separate the odors of the jungle from the smell of gorillas, and that I could often smell the animals before I saw them. The odor was sharp, musky, somewhat skunky with a splash of vinegar to it and not nearly as unpleasant as that may sound.

The smell was an obvious clue, and it was sometimes possible to sneak up on a group which, typically, might consist
of a dominant male (the silverback), several females, infants, and a couple of sub-dominant males called blackbacks. Sneaking up on a group, however, is an outstandingly dumb idea: you don’t want to startle a family of apes who may feel the need to, well, nip at you precisely because they have been startled. Instead, it is best to attract the attention of the dominant silverback, whose job it is to protect those he dominates. Make a little noise. And don’t ever get between the silverback and an infant.

Once you are certain that the silverback knows you are present on the periphery of his group, it is polite to signal your intention to move in. A throat clearing sound—two raspy exhalations called a DBV or “double belch vocalization”—signals a lack of aggressive intent. If the silverback replies, it is time to begin inching forward.

Watch the silverback’s face to see if you are being accepted. Gorilla faces read like human faces: the animals smile when they are happy, frown when they are upset, and often look slightly puzzled. This last expression is the one I most frequently encountered when approaching a silverback. It is the sort of expression you feel on your face when you are sitting alone in your house and there’s a noise in the kitchen.

You can move in a bit on a slightly puzzled silverback, but in all cases you must begin to crawl. Your head should always be lower than that of the silverback. This is a submissive posture, and it convinces the dominant gorilla that you are reasonably tractable—no challenge—so he will not feel compelled to rip you to shreds. Do not stare directly into the gorilla’s eyes for more than a few seconds at a time as this is interpreted as a challenge and will irritate him. You may smile at him, but do not show your teeth, which is an aggressive and impolite thing to do.

A good time to visit gorillas would be just after noon on a sunny day when the animals are drowsy from their morning feed and ready for a short nap. If you approach carefully, politely, the silverback will watch for a time, then, with a figurative shrug, begin to accept your presence. He may roll over onto his back and yawn. The silverback’s
teeth are a revelation: here is a strict vegetarian with a set of canine teeth the size of carrots. Gorillas do not—as many people suppose—pound, stomp, punch, or crush their enemies. Instead, they bite. A silverback skull was once found in the jungle, and embedded in the heavy ridge of bone was another silverback’s tooth.

Generally, after some period of lying still, the family group will virtually ignore you. There is the occasional glance in your direction, but the animals will go about their daily business. They will groom one another, the children will tussle—their play chuckles are so infectious you want to smile (but don’t show your teeth)—the blackbacks nap, the silverback may copulate with one of the females. One bright afternoon, I watched Mrithi, a good-sized silverback, mate with a young female, Ichingo, in the strange, subaqueous light of a meadow in the midst of a bamboo grove.

In observing the various groups, I came to understand that gorilla life, like a daily soap opera, is incredibly slow moving. You can see what is likely to happen before the characters themselves know it. You can identify those characters most likely to fall in love (or at least copulate); you can see groups ranging closer together and know that there will, one day soon, be a fight (or at least “an interaction”) between rival silverbacks; you can see that a silverback is getting old and is about to be deposed. You could even miss a few days, then tune in on, say, group thirteen, and pick up the continuing story in about ten minutes. It’s like “Dallas” on downers.

T
he scientists in the park were very professional. They strictly avoided anthropomorphism in their scholarly works, but I can tell you that they often applied human qualities and the faint thrust of human emotions to gorillas when speaking about them in private. There isn’t much to do at night under the Virunga volcanoes, and an evening’s entertainment is often an evening spent gossiping about gorillas.

I approached the scientists—Harcourt and Stewart, the
Avelings—in much the same way I approached the gorillas: head down, submissive, respectful. Instead of DBVs, I found myself saying words like
interaction
and
display
. The scientists replied in kind and, it seemed, slowly became habituated to my presence. Sometimes one or the other of them might even scribble down a quick note about something I had seen in the field. They were entirely sincere, and I began to like them.

One day I watched Sandy Harcourt in the field. He was studying Beethoven’s group, one of the families Dian Fossey had habituated. Dian had worked with them so long and so well, Harcourt didn’t need to crawl and show cringing submission. He simply stood near an animal, stood perfectly erect, perfectly still—the man has exquisite posture—and took notes on a reporter’s pad. Harcourt recorded what the gorilla ate, the vocalizations it made, the way it interacted with other gorillas. After an hour on one animal, Harcourt moved on to another.

The gorillas were so used to this behavior that Harcourt was absolutely ignored by them. He might have been a ghost in their midst.

Kelly Stewart and the doctors Aveling worked in much the same way. Rosalind Aveling, Nick, and I once were lounging in the bamboo, at the periphery of Mrithi’s group, when Mtoto, a three-year-old female, took a sudden interest in us. She performed what is called a “display,” the gorilla dance of intimidation, which consists of standing upright and beating the chest, of jumping up and down and throwing vegetation. Mtoto weighed all of twenty-five pounds.

Clearly, the animal was playing. She stared at us for a moment with a mischievous smile, then started for Rosalind, her arms held out in front of her. Mtoto, I was sure, wanted to be held. Rosalind began a locomotive cough, which is a series of small slightly swinish-sounding grunts that mean “you’re too close,” or “go away,” or “keep doing that and there’ll be trouble.” Mtoto retreated to the silverback, Mrithi, who was lounging on his back in a field of thistles. There, she bounced up and down on her father’s ample belly.