Gorillas in the Mist (20 page)

During succeeding weeks Dian had to rely on her two students to be her eyes and ears with the gorillas, and her legs and lungs on the mountain slopes, and she insisted they be at least as conscientious as she was.

By June 17 it had become apparent that her ankle was not going to heal properly on its own, so Dian reluctantly descended to the Ruhengeri hospital. It took five agonizing hours for her to stumble and slide down the muddy trail through a steady rain. X-rays showed she had snapped her fibula just above the ankle as cleanly as if it had been cut by a panga.

She remained in hospital just long enough to have her leg taped, then hurried to the airport to meet a plane bringing a
new student from the States, a dark, shy, and serious young man named Richard Rombach.

Although Dian was initially cool to him, she soon developed an affection for Rombach. The somewhat solitary student established an excellent rapport not only with gorillas but with the mischievous Kima and with Cindy. Dian was pleased to notice that he put the needs of the gorillas ahead of his own, never pushing them beyond the limits of their tolerance.

Kelly and Sandy, however, seemed to view Rombach as an interloper wanting trackers’ time and access to the gorilla groups they were studying, and thus a competitor for opportunities in which they felt they had a proprietary interest. Consequently, he got the cold shoulder and was ridiculed for his ineptitude at bushcraft and tracking.

Less than two weeks after he arrived, he left camp one morning to visit the gorillas. As a novice, he would normally have been accompanied either by one of the trackers or one of the experienced students. But he was by then keenly aware of the resentment against him and so chose to go alone in search of Group 5—and promptly got lost.

When he was reported missing at dinnertime that evening, Dian demanded to know why he had not been accompanied by Rwelekana.

Kelly replied that he didn’t
like
to go with Rwelekana, who was too slow for him, so Sandy had taken Rwelekana. I said that was nonsense, then Sandy said, “It’s his own fault if he got lost. Visoke was clearly visible all day-he shouldn’t have
gotten
lost!” Finally Sandy said it was my fault for using up too much of the trackers’ time getting them to build new cupboards.

A search party was organized, but when after five tense hours there was no report of the missing youth, Dian became seriously worried.

If the boy is dead, it is Sandy’s fault
totally
for being so greedy for trackers, Kelly’s fault partially for not wanting
the boy to go out with her. They have both mocked him and made fun of him. This I can’t tolerate even though I see no great future for the child. At least he is here honestly.

To everyone’s great relief, the trackers eventually found Rombach and brought him back to camp hungry and exhausted but otherwise undamaged. Thereafter he was treated more generously for a few weeks by Kelly and Sandy. But when Dian departed to attend a conference in Austria and make a quick trip to California, Harcourt lost no time putting Rombach in his place.

“Richard, much as you may dislike the fact, in any research center you will find that a Ph.D. student’s research takes precedence over everybody else’s….

“I regret that I have annoyed you, but the fact remains that if you continue to contact Group 4 and 5 as often and for as long as you have done up to now, your work will interfere with Kelly’s and mine. We have been accepted as Ph.D. students by Cambridge and Dian; we are obliged to produce a thesis. A thesis requires a large amount of data; and we won’t get it if you continue to interpret your topic as you have done up to now. Having read this, I hope you will see that your research must take second place to ours and Dian’s.”

The trip that had taken Dian away from Karisoke was one to which she had been eagerly looking forward—a visit to Vienna for a week-long conclave of the International Primatological Society, a worldwide fraternity of specialists in primate research. She knew she would be one of the stars and looked forward to delivering her paper before a packed and attentive audience. Nor was she too old to wonder what other adventures might await an attractive woman at such a gathering.

On her first morning in Vienna she awoke with severe pain in her ankle. She went to the American embassy for help and soon found herself in the X-ray department at the city’s foremost accident and trauma hospital. After examining the X-rays, the doctors were astonished to learn that Dian had been walking
on the leg for more than five weeks. “How could you stand the pain?” she was asked.

I said I didn’t have much choice at Karisoke. They put me on a stretcher in the hall and put my foot up with wet compresses and tell me to lie there for an hour. One really attractive doctor goes by and asks if it’s still hurting. He said it would have healed in a month if I’d stayed in bed with my foot up. Then a young intern, Anton, begins to talk to me about gorillas. He is well read. He stays on when I go to the drying tank to get my cast dried. He takes over…. He gets in a cab with me and we go downtown, of all places, and walk! Then to a coffee shop. He is really very, very much too young, but interesting. It is then pouring rain. We walk more, then cab back to my hotel and to my room.

The next day she worked on the paper she was to deliver to the conference until Anton arrived to take her to a performance at the Vienna Opera House and from there to dinner, then back to her room in the Hotel Astoria for a second, disappointing encounter, which reinforced her preference for older men.

The conference began the next day, and Dian was busy attending sessions, renewing acquaintances, and generally enjoying herself.

Robert Hinde leads off the talks-I don’t think he was at his best. Jane Goodall was next. A Dutchman gave a talk and was boring as hell-he was the only person worse than I.

For some reason I sure had the blues. At the dinner afterward they didn’t give us much time for booze at the bar, but instead pushed lots of wine on us at the meal. That didn’t do it for me! I was actually crying at the table!

Then two singers appeared-one of them yodeled for me. I yodeled back and felt a whole lot better. Everyone danced and I
SAT
with my leg in the cast, but then Robert asked me to dance. He held me under the arms-it was like dancing with a statue, I guess, but he sure did his best.

Things got better and better after that. Jane Goodall pulled off her hair band and went wild. She also “presented” to her partner, which was gross but made us giggle. I’ve never seen her quite like this…. I stayed up till four. Another hangover in the morning.

Dian learned how widespread her notoriety had become when she caught a ride back to her hotel the next day with a group of Japanese primatologists, who told her they had heard she had trained an army of gorillas, which she led in armed attacks against poachers. Still giggling at that as she stepped out of the cab at her hotel, she was further amused when one of the Japanese gentlemen tipped his hat in a polite good-bye and offered, in his less than idiomatic English, “I hope you make out here.”

From Vienna, Dian flew to London where she spent several days in a recording studio doing the voice-over narration for a forthcoming National Geographic TV special on primates. She had a surprisingly small voice for a woman of her commanding stature and sounded rather shy when reading the narration.

From London she took the train to Cambridge for a pleasant week of visiting climaxed by an idyllic afternoon boating along the banks of Trinity and St. John’s colleges with her thesis adviser, Robert Hinde. Her international stature was now solidly established even at Cambridge, and she found the atmosphere at the Maddingley research lab subtly changed.
Everyone very friendly
, she noted with some surprise.
In fact very nice
.

At the end of the week she flew to San Francisco for a brief visit with the Prices and to formally offer her condolences to her Uncle Bert on the death earlier that month of his wife, Flossie. It was not a pleasant trip. She was full of sadness for her uncle and suffering the distress she so often felt when with the Prices for more than a day or two. She did find time for lunch with her “beloved Ralph,” Dr. Ralph Spiegl, for whom she had carried a torch for more than twenty years, and who had been the Prices’ family physician for even longer than that.
Unfortunately Spiegl, who was usually tender and solicitous, even romantic, seemed to her to be in the throes of a midlife crisis, so even that reunion proved disappointing.

When she arrived in Nairobi a week later, it was as if the whirlwind trip had never happened.

The sky over Kenya is ever so much brighter blue and the sun in the morning seems so much higher than in England. It is so good to be almost home.

Now that she had become a major celebrity, Dian’s trips in and out of Africa usually involved a courtesy call at the American embassy in Nairobi. While waiting for the twice-weekly plane to Rwanda, Dian lunched with the well-connected ambassador, Robinson McIlvaine, and his wife, who told her the latest gossip from Washington and East Africa. For Dian, whose main source of information on world events was her subscription to
Time
magazine, issues of which invariably arrived at Karisoke a month late when they arrived at all, such conversation had a special fascination.

Back in Rwanda, Dian was met at the airport by an aide to the American ambassador in Kigali, who conveyed an official request for her to appear at the embassy that evening with her National Geographic film and show it to a gathering of diplomats and dignitaries from Rwanda, Zaire, and Uganda.

Well, I was so tired I couldn’t believe it. But the evening was a smashing success-I narrated the film, all seventy-three minutes of it, in French, Swahili, and Kinyarwanda. Somehow it clicked and they were rolling in the aisles with mirth. In fact, it was so successful that the president of Rwanda
ordered
me to return to Kigali in ten days’ time to show the film to him and his private ruling committee and top-ranking military personnel.

I wore my Greek dress to the palace and went through the same language problems. The president seemed vastly amused-I was nervous. The ambassador was relieved when it was all over, but very pleased with how it went. We were
the first white people, except for some king and queen, to be allowed in the palace since the military coup last year.

Then the final straw-last week I was ordered by the president of Zaire, Mobutu, to fly to Kinshasa and show it to
him
. That was another story. His palace was full of drunken wogs and their fat wives. I was glad to get out of there, but I must say that Mobutu seemed to care about the gorillas and that made the trip worthwhile.

That leaves only the presidents of Tanzania and Uganda to give orders, but I doubt that I will obey Big Daddy Amin!

Her ankle was now out of its cast but continuing to cause her a great deal of pain, so she had to keep her contacts with the gorillas to a minimum. Work on her thesis and innumerable reports took an ever-increasing toll on her time, as did her burgeoning correspondence with friends, colleagues, and well-wishers around the world. There was also a steady trickle of VIPs, diplomats, and others to be dealt with. These visitors would arrive for a look at the gorillas, planning on an overnight stay, during which Dian would have to do the cooking as well as entertain as graciously as she could manage. So the summer of 1974 slipped away.

By mid-September, Sandy Harcourt and Kelly Stewart had begun making preparations for leaving Karisoke—Sandy to do eighteen months of paperwork on his doctoral thesis, and Kelly for three months of course work at Cambridge. On September 24, while Kelly was packing and organizing her field notes in her cabin, Sandy decided to pay one last visit to the gorillas.

On his way out to Group 5 he was attacked and badly gored by a buffalo.

About 9:30 in the morning I was typing at my desk by the window and looked up to see him staggering to my door. His face was full of blood and there was blood pouring from his nose. I opened the door and he collapsed in my arms. I then saw blood all over his pants. I asked if it was a dog. He said no, and then went into shock.

I called my houseman, who nearly fainted on the spot!
I covered Sandy with blankets, elevated his left leg, put a pillow under his head, and took off his trousers to find all of his leg, the upper, inner thigh, with muscles hanging out like so much hamburger. He was within inches of having to be renamed Sandra! It took me three hours to clean everything properly, put it all back together again, and finally stop the bleeding. When he was conscious, he was screaming, hissing, and groaning-it was unbearable and I had only Darvon to give him, which, thank God, I had got a big supply of from Dr. Spiegl before leaving California. I wouldn’t have given him anything stronger anyway because of his condition of shock-his pulse was weak, his face was green, he was cold and clammy, and his respiration was bad.

After three hours of closing the wound with butterfly bandages topped with tons of gauze, and stopping for tourniquets every ten minutes, my houseman helped me put him to bed. I stayed awake with him for three days and nights before having him carried down the mountain on a stretcher.

Dian could not resist a little crowing.

Kelly was a lot of help. She cried for three days and nights and ended up absolutely insanely jealous of me because there was nothing she could do at all, and Sandy ended up so immensely grateful, to say the least.

She then went down the mountain with him to the Ruhengeri hospital for tetanus and penicillin shots, and to Gisenyi to get a plane to fly them both to Kigali and off to England.

Apparently he had looked up and seen the buffalo at about a five-foot distance-it was simply standing there. He just lost his cool and charged at it, hoping to frighten it away. Naturally the reverse happened and the buffalo went for him. She got him in the groin with her horns, threw him, and then rolled on him before standing up to repeatedly gore
him before running off. How he made it back to camp I’ll never know. His body was in tatters, and you wouldn’t believe what she did to his knapsack and clothing!