Gorillas in the Mist (24 page)

Trouble began on March 7. Nemeye and Ian were visiting Group 5 on the distant western slope of Mt. Visoke when the gorillas were spooked by some unseen presence and fled panic-stricken. Leaving Ian to follow the gorilla’s flight trail, Nemeye climbed upward through the sopping tangle to emerge upon a path above the place where the gorillas had been feeding. Here in the soft ooze he found several sets of naked human footprints—so fresh that they had not yet filled with rain. Nemeye could not muster the courage to pursue that many poachers single-handedly, but when he tried to rejoin his
bazunga
, he found that Ian had returned to camp without him.

That evening Dian called a council of war, at which she chewed Redmond out for failing to pursue the poachers.

“Why the hell didn’t you follow through? You could have caught them if you’d really tried!”

Ian knew better than to defend himself. He listened quietly until Dian was done, then volunteered to lead a counterattack next day.

This was the kind of reaction Dian admired. Together they planned a sweep right through the study area and deep into Zaire,
where poachers were in the habit of establishing temporary camps.

The animals of Group 5 with silverback Icarus in control.

If he had made a bit of a muck-up the day before, Ian redeemed himself on March 8. Shoeless because his companions had no shoes, and clad only in a T-shirt and tattered shorts, he led the three trackers out of camp at dawn on a cold, glum day. When the little posse returned at nightfall, they were exhausted but triumphant. Scouring the saddle area right to Mt. Mikeno, they had found and destroyed three poachers’ shelters and twenty-one recently set snares.

Ten days went by before the poachers struck back. On March 18 at least two groups infiltrated the distant northwestern portion of the study area and saturated it with traps. Although Ian and Nemeye found and destroyed thirty-five of these in two days, Dian remained extremely concerned for the safety of the Group 5 gorillas, who were then roaming this distant region.

They are too far away. We can’t find all the traps. Sooner or later one of them will get caught.

Very reluctantly, for she hated to interfere with their ordered ways, she decreed that Group 5 must be herded back into safer territory.

This was a traumatic business for all concerned. Ian and four other men made a circuit to the north of Group 5, then cautiously closed in on the gorillas while at the same time ringing poacher dogbells and making poacher whistle signals.

Pandemonium ensued. The chill air quickly grew rank with the stench of fear. The young male, Icarus, roared furious challenges as he became the vanguard of what soon turned into a rout. The females and younger animals crashed through the undergrowth hard on the heels of Beethoven, who was leading the escape. Implacably the bells and whistles followed. Several times Icarus charged the unseen persecutors. The flight trail of smashed and shattered vegetation was awash with diarrheic dung in which the herders slipped and fell. The forest echoed and reechoed to the screams of terror-stricken animals.

Dian took no part in any of this.

I stay in and make sure I won’t hear anything. It is
HORRID
, but it must be done.

Her fury against the poachers who had forced her to inflict this indignity on her friends was mounting to white heat.

On April 1 Kelly Stewart said her farewells and departed to rejoin Sandy Harcourt in England, there to prepare for her marriage to him in early June. Although Dian and Kelly had often been at odds in recent months, Dian’s affection for the younger woman had survived all their tribulations, and she wept unabashedly at the parting. Perhaps some of her tears were shed because Kelly was traveling to her love, leaving Dian behind to mourn the loss of hers.

On April 3 a party of six poachers struck again. This time they set their dogs on Wageni’s Group, pursuing its members for several hundred yards. Ian and Vatiri happened on the scene in time to prevent what might well have been a gorilla murder. They chased the poachers right across the crest of Mt. Visoke at an altitude of nearly thirteen thousand feet, with the temperature only a few degrees above freezing, but they failed to catch them.

Dian was convinced that the poachers were again hunting gorillas for their heads and hands, so next morning she and the entire camp staff mounted a counterraid. It hailed off and on all that day, and when it was not hailing, it was raining and bitter cold. Dian plodded as far as Group 5 but was by then so exhausted she had to return to camp where she collapsed. Vatiri, Nemeye, Rwelekana, Ian, and two other men patrolled all the way around Mt. Visoke but found no poachers and only a handful of snares.

It was at this tense juncture that a new student arrived upon the scene. Leonard was a young American biologist whose ideas of Africa and gorilla-watching seem to have been more than usually romanticized. The reality of what was to be required of him struck home the day after his arrival when Ian hauled him off on an antipoaching patrol that lasted for five drenching hours and entailed a lung-straining climb almost to the crest of Mt. Visoke. Instead of a leisurely life viewing gorillas in a tropical jungle, Leonard found himself involved in a forest war against unseen pygmies armed with spears, bows, and arrows, all in a dank and frigid world inhabited by testy elephants, invisible leopards, and pugnacious buffalo.

A week after Leonard’s arrival, Nemeye was treed by a charging buffalo that kept him shivering in a hagenia tree until long after dark. When Dian went to inspect the scene next day, the buffalo thundered out of a nearby thicket and sent
her
up a tree.

It was all too much for Leonard. The last straw seems to have been Dian’s request that he spend part of his time dissecting gorilla dung in search of parasites. Early on the morning of April 15 he packed it in. It was probably as well that he left when he did for the events of the rest of that day would have appalled him.

In midmorning Basili joyfully called Dian out of her cabin to savor the spectacle of five park guards frog-marching a diminutive prisoner into camp. Dian recognized the ragged, barefooted Batwa as Munyarukiko, the leading poacher of the Virungas who had for so long been a thorn in her side. When
he stood, downcast, in front of her, she was so ecstatic that her native shrewdness deserted her.

The guards had quite a story to tell, and despite all the years I’d dealt with these men, who had the habit of losing poacher prisoners while on the way down to park headquarters after collecting a reward from me, I swallowed it this time with all the gullibility of a tadpole.

They claimed to have spent two long days and nights in the alpine meadows of Karisimbi trailing Munyarukiko and his hunting party before finally closing in on him while he and friends were digging a buffalo pit trap. They bemoaned the escape of the others, but at least they had caught the prize poacher of all, so they brought him straight to me to display the efforts of their labors and, more to the point, to collect reward money.

I was surprised when they refused to persuade him to tell who his companions were, with the usual nettle-lashing routine. In fact, they wouldn’t go near him, and I foolishly thought they must be afraid of him because he had some new sumu.

I asked them why they hadn’t brought back Munyarukiko’s bow and arrows, spear, panga, and other paraphernalia always carried by poachers. They replied that the other men had fled with them. Well, that seemed peculiar too because the last things a poacher parts with, even when being chased, are the tools of his trade. The situation seemed even more puzzling when all I could find in his pockets were a comb, broken fragments of a mirror, a razor blade, and a bit of soap-none of which would be much use in a successful buffalo hunt!

When all the formalities had been carried out, including paying the guards the equivalent of a $120 reward, I decided I would go down with them and the prisoner and drive them to Ruhengeri to the parquet where Mr. Nkubili, the
chef des brigades
, would pop him into jail.

This met with strong resistance, the guards insisting their orders now were that poachers had to go first to the conservator’s office near the park for questioning. There was nothing to do but let them go off alone, which I thought they did a bit too merrily.

That was all right, but later that afternoon our woodman came into camp after spending his day off below and told my other men that the park guards had actually met Munyarukiko in the village bar that morning and had planned the entire ruse! They arranged that he would go with them to Karisoke, pretend he’d been caught, and later get his share of the reward, about twenty dollars, which was a small fortune.

I could have endured being made a fool of once more (it wasn’t the first time) for the capture of Mun, but it happened that an hour or two later Nemeye and Ian came into camp to report another bunch of poachers harassing the gorillas of Group 5. This combination of events ticked me off more than I could say and I went on the warpath.

I slid down the mountain in the rain along with Basili and Nemeye. The combi wouldn’t start and I was furious. Finally it went, and we drove to the Twa village of Mukingo and parked. Basili stayed to guard the car while Nemeye and I walked along a narrow track to Mun’s shamba. He had gotten home by that time, after he and the guards had spent part of their reward money filling up on pombe at the bar.

When we appeared on the scene, it was already dark and there was lots of confusion because Mun had several houses-just grass huts-five wives, and I don’t know how many children. By the time we located the house where he lived with his eldest wife, he had fled along with his partner in crime, Gashabizi. All of the poacher’s dogs could be heard barking and yelping as they were run off before I could get to them. Since I couldn’t catch
them, I grabbed one of Mun’s almost-naked kids instead.

Nemeye and I couldn’t handle
all
the wives and children so I told him to hang on to this one youngster (which wasn’t easy) while I took out of Mun’s hut about fifteen dollars worth of matting, baskets, cobs of corn, and old clothing. I took all this stuff about twenty feet from his hut, then threatened to set fire to it, but only after I had told his wives to yell for him to come back and give me the reward money if he didn’t want it burned.

When he didn’t come back, I set fire to his stuff. It made a big blaze and looked scary with all the shining eyes of the Batwa in the background. I decided it was time to go, so we took the kid, who was about four, and headed back to Karisoke. I was so beat I had to crawl up the mountain on my hands and knees. It was still raining and I have never been so cold and muddy in my life. I slipped twice on the trail, but the two men, taking turns carrying the boy, wouldn’t leave me. When we finally got to camp, the child was so happy just to get good food and toys that he set up a squall next day when he knew he was going home. But I had to return him instead of keeping him until I could get the money back from Munyarukiko because the Europeans down at the park made so much yak.

During the next ten days Dian worried about possible repercussions from what she would later call her “worst nono.” The camp staff brought back vague rumors that she was going to be expelled from Rwanda, and for a time she feared that Munyarukiko and his friends might try to fire some of the Karisoke cabins. The wily poacher chose another form of retaliation. He obtained a legal judgment against Dian, under the terms of which she was fined the princely sum of six hundred dollars, much of which went to him in compensation for the material damages he claimed to have suffered at her hands. Dian paid up without demur, ruefully acknowledging that Munyarukiko had got the best of her.

Rwandans viewed this incident with amusement. The account of how Dian had been outwitted, not once but twice, brought uproarious laughter in the pombe bars of the villages lying at the foot of the volcanoes. However, maliciously exaggerated versions of the story portraying her as a racist, sadist, and even worse were later circulated by some of her fellow whites.

With the approach of spring Dian took to spending two or three days a week in her cabin dealing with her voluminous correspondence and the dreary monthly reports. However, she went to the gorillas as often as she could, spending much of her time with her special friends in Group 4. In the evenings she took Cindy for walks and attended to Kima’s insistent demands for attention. During odd moments she drew never-ending pleasure from watching and listening to the many creatures for whom the meadows and woods surrounding Karisoke had become a sanctuary where human beings were not dire enemies. Their numbers included a score of duikers, many bushbucks, ravens, hyraxes, parrots, and even bats. Dian knew most individuals of the larger species by name.

The Africans had their own well-established patterns. Twice a week Gwehandagoza, now the head porter, drove his little Honda motorbike into the parking lot, climbed the mountain path with mail and supplies, and descended again with outgoing mail and shopping lists, which he filled at stores in Ruhengeri and Gisenyi.