A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (6 page)

Worse, the population is growing at a rate that exceeds 4 percent a year, which puts another 23,000 families on the land each year. And there is no more land. None. The tiny farms are simply subdivided. Famine is a very real possibility.

No wonder Rwandans look to the park’s forty square miles for desperately needed farmland: the volcanic soil is some of the richest land in all Rwanda. It is there, people feel, for the purpose of putting food into the mouths of children. And there is precedent for turning the land over to farming.

In 1968, 40 percent of the park was cleared, and pyrethrum, a natural insecticide, was planted. It would be a cash crop that would provide jobs and bring money into the country. In that year, there were an estimated 480 mountain gorillas in the park. Now there are about 260. The destruction of 40 percent of the gorillas’ habitat was followed by the loss of almost 50 percent of the population.

It is a commonplace observation that the quickest way to destroy an animal is to destroy its habitat. The Rwandan government, for its part, had a clear duty: its people must not be allowed to starve. One proposal under consideration
in the capital city of Kigali involved turning over a major section of the park to cattle ranching.

The Mountain Gorilla Project tourist program was a strategy for saving the gorillas’ habitat. Tourists would bring money into Rwanda, they would provide jobs for local people, they would spend for ancillary services, for hotels and food and transportation. A healthy tourism industry would help feed Rwanda, and a healthy tourism industry required a healthy population of gorillas secure in their traditional habitat.

D
uring my visit to the park in 1981, Dian’s highly trained trackers were still patroling the area around Karisoke. Jean Pierre van der Becke, of the MGP, was leading antipoaching patrols into the remote areas of the park. Mark Condiotti, an American working for MGP, was habituating two new groups for the purpose of tourism. The program was two years old.

The park had always operated at a loss—salaries for guards and administrators and the cost of maintaining facilities were a drain on the already strained economy—but fees paid by tourists had increased by two and a half times in the two years MGP had been operating. In 1981 the park managed to pay for itself for the first time in its history.

In only two years, some real progress had been made. Aside from the tourism program and the antipoaching patrols, the MGP was working with the people who lived on the farms—called
shambas
—that roll, bare and treeless, to the very borders of the park. An estimated 780 people occupy each square mile in the land below the park. Conrad and Rosalind Aveling, working for the MGP, were charged with convincing these people that the fertile land above them was best left uncleared, uncultivated, unspoiled.

One evening, about twilight, the Avelings went down to the first village below the park to get their tiny pickup truck. It was time to take the traveling MGP show a few miles down the muddy, rock-strewn joke of a road to a
village called Karindagi. There were perhaps fifteen huts in the village—one- or two-room affairs with dirt floors—and Conrad parked just outside town in a large, fallow potato field. He set up a loudspeaker on the top of the truck, dropped a cassette into the tape machine, and cranked the sound up, loud. It was a song with a disco beat about “Rasputin, rasputeen, lover of the Russian queen,” who, the singers declared earnestly, was “Russia’s greatest sex machine.” To the west—by way of a light show—a florid equatorial sunset backlit the line of volcanoes above.

People gathered around the truck. There were more of them than could possibly have lived in those few poor huts. Farmers seemed to rise up out of the ground itself. By the time it was dark, there were hundreds of people surrounding the truck. Some were dancing to the song about Russia’s greatest sex machine, others were watching Rosalind work the clever panels on the pickup, which folded out to form a large movie screen. When Conrad snapped on the projector, the people of Karindagi sat rapt before a film about gorillas.

There was much laughter, as there is anywhere in the world when gorilla films are shown. I suppose it has something to do with the obvious intelligence in the animals’ eyes, the human quality of the facial expressions. There is a shock of recognition. The people of Karindagi, who do not go into the park, who do not have televisions and never see specials about mountain gorillas, who do not subscribe to
National Geographic
, were beginning to learn what Dian Fossey had taught many in the outside world: the gorillas who ranged above, who could be heard roaring at the edges of the park, were not savage beasts after all. The animals in the film were gentle with humans, inquisitive, trusting. It seemed a revelation to the people of Karindagi.

Afterward, Conrad showed some slides intended to demonstrate that clearing any more of the slopes above would destroy the watershed and that the rivers would die in the dry season, just as the rivers below the pyrethrum project had. There was a discussion of the economic benefits of a tourism program.

On the way back to the park, I told Conrad that the
program had certainly worked as entertainment. The question was: did the message sink in? Conrad thought it was too early to tell.

Back in the States, Dian was working on her book
Gorillas in the Mist
and—in letters and conversations—railing against “comic book conservationists,” and “the hordes that have climbed onto the ‘Save the gorilla bandwagon.’ ” She had grave doubts about the MGP tourist program and how it would affect the gorillas’ health, but an incident with a pair of MGP workers probably closed off any avenue of compromise.

I don’t know the gist of that conversation. I suspect it was a discussion that turned into an argument, and that spur of the moment anger triggered the final fatal comment. Perhaps the MGP workers were talking about the education program, suggesting that farmers who saw an economic advantage in a healthy gorilla population would not tolerate poachers. It wasn’t like the old days anymore. You couldn’t keep the people below ignorant of the forest, fearful of the conservationists. It couldn’t be done single-handedly, not anymore. Some benefits had to accrue to the native people, and the fight couldn’t be personalized, so that it seemed as if there was only one person in the world who cared for the gorillas. Perhaps voices were raised at this point. And then the MGP workers said something that others had suggested, but never to Dian Fossey: they said it was possible that some of the gorillas had been killed for no other reason than revenge. They had died not in spite of her work, but because of it.

Ann Pierce, who became friendly with Dian toward the last, asked me if I had any idea how badly that comment had hurt Dian. “All those years up there,” Ann said, “can you imagine, can you even begin to imagine, how badly Dian was hurt.”

I said I thought I could. In 1981 I had seen something in Dian’s cabin at Karisoke that gave me an idea of her pain.

Nick and I had been given to understand that Dian would not be back, and her cabin was opened to us. The house may have been cozy with a fire blazing away, but on this gray
afternoon it seemed cold and barren. Outside, a steady chilling rain fell, and I could hear it on the roof. Papering one wall was a series of black-and-white pictures, full-face shots of gorillas. In the constant damp of Karisoke, the photos had begun to curl at the edges.

Did Dian Fossey need photos to keep the animals straight? Gorillas are eminently recognizable when you’ve lived with them for a while, and Dian certainly did not need to memorize photos. I knew that scientists usually sketch nose prints as an identifying technique. The positioning of the nostrils, the horizontal ridges above, are all distinctive. Maybe these photos were for the purpose of redrawing nose prints taken in field notes. Or for students who might study with Dian.

Nick and I stood side by side, looking at the photos. What was their purpose?

I thought of Rosalind Aveling, her refusal to hold the baby gorilla, and wondered if she wanted to avoid the kind of intense relationship with individual animals that typified Dian’s best work. It is very difficult to do field work with primates of any kind and not be drawn, emotionally, into that world. There was, I imagined, a danger beyond science in loving not wisely but too well.

The photos on the wall were head shots, nothing artsy, just gorillas in different moods, but mostly smiling. I thought of actors and their eight-by-ten glossies. Strange, though. We had been in Rwanda more than a month, Nick and I, we had met most of the habituated groups and a good number of wild groups. We knew the local actors, and these were strangers.

I looked over at Nick. He turned away, but not before I saw a sad, stricken expression on his face. A prickling sensation ran up my back and along the tops of my arms. “Sweet Jesus,” I said, “these are the dead ones.”

1
985 was a banner year for the Mountain Gorilla Project. Tourist fees, paid to the park, had become the third largest source of revenue for the nation. The tourists spent even more money on transportation, hotels, food, and local services.

Dian’s suspicion that tourist visits might upset the gorillas’ reproductive cycles did not prove out. Kelly Stewart and Sandy Harcourt could show that there was no difference in fertility between the research groups and the tourist groups. Perhaps this is because tourism is strictly controlled. There is no touching allowed, and tourists are kept a respectful distance from the animals. Mark Condiotti was actually able to habituate two groups to accept humans, but only from a distance. Additionally, tourists are limited to six individuals, and visits may last no more than an hour and a half once a day.

Both the tourist groups and the research groups were found to be more stable than the wild groups. The animals in the tourist groups were as healthy as those in the research groups, and both were healthier than the animals in wild groups.

There had been no gorillas killed since 1983, probably because the groups most accessible to poachers, those closest to the edge of the park, have been turned over to tourism and are closely monitored; because the trackers take time to destroy traps even with tourists in tow; because the MGP and Karisoke both ran continuing antipoaching patrols.

The combined thrust of tourist dollars and the MGP education program had changed some minds. Bill Weber found that almost all the people living under the park wanted it turned over to farms in 1979. Six years later, another Weber poll showed a majority of farmers in favor of the park.

The government abandoned its plan for cattle ranching in the Virungas, and, in a stunning reversal of policy, actually put forty-five acres back into the park. The Kato Forest,
a partially cleared stand of bamboo, was reclaimed. Group thirteen, a tourist-habituated group, ranged close to those acres, but it often passed over into Zaire. The proximity of good feed, it was thought, might keep them in Rwanda. That has been the case, and recently one of group thirteen’s females gave birth in the Kato Forest.

Conrad and Rosalind Aveling were at work in Zaire, setting up that country’s version of the MGP.

Russ Mittermeier, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Primate Program, calls the MGP “one of the most successful, if not the most successful, conservation program on the continent.” It is, in fact, a model project, and its three-pronged approach—controlled tourism to provide revenue, education, and antipoaching work—is being copied by the WWF in their efforts to save the golden lion tamarin and the muriqui in South America. “Of all the endangered primates,” Mittermeier said, “and I’m talking about the ones who are down to a few hundred individuals, the outlook for the mountain gorilla looks best. The Mountain Gorilla Project is a proven program that works.”

And while the MGP prospered, funding was becoming a problem for Dian. She felt that many people were giving money to the African Wildlife Foundation (which had emerged as the principal MGP funding organization) in the mistaken belief that it was going to her. She felt AWF was siphoning off “Digit’s blood money.” An organization that had funded much of the research work at Karisoke pulled out.

Back at Karisoke in December 1984 for one of her visits, Dian wrote, “My lifework is now being deprived of funding it badly needs. Then, one evening, earlier this year, while I was sitting on the living room floor with my African tracker and patrol workers counting the traps and snares they had brought to camp that day, I realized fully that this was what active conservation was all about and if others want to emulate our efforts, lots of luck to them, the gorillas will ultimately profit by it. In the meantime, the African staff and myself wake up each morning with our integrity intact knowing that our day will be fully utilized for the
benefit of the gorillas. Integrity is the name of the game.”

Dian was also having trouble with the Rwandan government. The Office of National Parks and Tourism took the position that it would deal with only one extranational conservation organization. Predictably, they chose to do business through the MGP rather than the Digit Fund and Dian Fossey, who was intimidating and notoriously “difficult.” To get visas for her research staff at Karisoke, Dian was forced to go through Jean Pierre van der Becke, who had been made director of the MGP. The Rwanda government would only grant Dian herself a three-month visa.

Dian was fifty-one years old and her health was failing. Emphysema kept her out of the field, away from the animals she loved, and it was so difficult for her to breathe at Karisoke’s altitude of ten thousand feet that she had a small “oxygen machine” in her cabin. In November 1985, back in Karisoke on one of her visits, Dian wrote a sad letter to her friend Dr. Shirley McGreal. “There is no way I can be optimistic about the species’ survival, albeit the poachers don’t roam like buffalo anymore, nor are traps easy to find. It is the human presence that is certainly interfering with their privacy and preservation.”

A month later, during the late evening hours of December twenty-sixth, someone hacked through the wall of the cabin at Karisoke with a long knife, and Dian Fossey was brutally murdered.