Gorillas in the Mist (34 page)

Also in attendance was Robinson McIlvaine, one-time American ambassador to Kenya, now executive vice-president of the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, a prestigious organization that numbered amongst its officers such luminaries as Kermit Roosevelt.

McIlvaine was an urbane, older man, well versed in diplomacy, whom Dian had known briefly in Nairobi. Delighted to meet him again and warmed by his interest in her, she was soon confiding her problems with the Digit Fund. Rob, or Bob, as she called him, was gratifyingly sympathetic. They arranged to meet again in Washington where he promised to help her organize the Digit Fund and to give her the benefit of his own experience in raising money for a cause.

Dian’s ninety-five-year-old uncle, Albert Chapin, died in Fresno, California, while she was still in Charleston. Although Albert and Flossie Chapin had been less than pleased when Dian affectionately named two of her gorillas after them, she now learned that she had inherited fifty thousand dollars from Uncle Bert’s estate. This was an enormous sum to a woman who had been impoverished all her life.
However, she did not see it as money to be personally enjoyed.

It is a big relief to know that even if the grants don’t come through, now I can keep Karisoke going for three years at least.

The legacy almost failed to materialize. Although Dian’s mother had benefited from Uncle Bert’s death, it was not to the degree Richard Price thought proper, so he decided that his wife and Dian should challenge the will in favor of an earlier one by which the two women stood to inherit the bulk of the estate. Dian had no wish to do this; indeed, Brylawski warned her not to get involved, but Price brought such pressure to bear that she eventually capitulated. Fortunately she recanted after returning to Karisoke. It was well she did. The will contained a clause to the effect that any beneficiary who dared to challenge it and lost would receive the sum of one dollar and not one cent more. Eventually Dian realized some forty thousand dollars.

On the fifth she arrived in Washington, there to spend the next twelve days striving to turn the nascent Digit Fund into a lusty champion of the gorillas.

The National Geographic Society proved supportive and not only gave the Digit Fund a special five-thousand-dollar grant to be used “in equipping and beefing up your patrols to hold down poaching,” but the chairman of the committee, Dr. Melvin Payne, was also reassuring about her application for a 1979 operating grant for Karisoke. “You may be sure I will help to give it a fair wind when it comes before the committee,” he told her.

The World Wildlife Fund (U.S.) also donated five thousand dollars, although not without considerable internal conflict. Increasingly malicious reports of Dian’s “illegal” activities in Rwanda were now raising the hackles of reactionary scientific colleagues who acted as advisers to organizations such as
WWF
. One such venerable pundit tried to veto
any
assistance to Dian on the grounds that she would “use the money to equip a police state.”

Even the National Geographic was affected by the spate of stories coming out of Kigali and Karisoke. Near the end of her
stay in Washington, Dr. Payne had a long, fatherly chat with her, during which he strongly advised that she return to the United States to spend at least a year writing up her scientific studies and finishing her book. In truth this was less a suggestion than an ultimatum, since Dian was given to understand that if she did not follow this sage advice, she could expect no further grants from the society.

Dian believed that an organized conspiracy to get her out of Rwanda came into being during the autumn of 1978. Certain it is that a number of associates thought she was getting “bushed” and ought to be “persuaded” to leave Rwanda. These included Frank Crigler, several senior people at the National Geographic and the Leakey Foundation, and even, although she did not know it at the time, her new and ardent supporter, Robinson McIlvaine.

There were also those who wanted her out because she was causing problems for them. These included the U.S. State Department, the Belgian Aid organization in Rwanda, the executive officers of some prestigious conservation organizations, and last but by no means least, some of the researchers who worked or had worked at Karisoke.

Although Dian’s intimate relationships with men were often disastrous, she could develop enduring friendships with professionals such as lawyers, doctors, accountants, and men of God, particularly if they were considerably older than herself. She had a singular need for the supportive and protective qualities such men could supply and that she had not enjoyed either from the one father she had never really known or the one who never really knew her.

Fulton Brylawski, senior partner of the legal firm of Brylawski and Cleary in Washington, D.C., had been recommended to Dian in the early 1970s by mutual friends at the National Geographic. By the spring of 1978, when she wrote asking for help in setting up the Digit Fund, he had proved himself a firm friend and doughty defender who could be relied upon in any eventuality.

While Dian had been losing the Digit Fund in England to the Fauna Preservation Society, Brylawski had established its existence in the United States on such an unshakable basis that it is still very much alive today. When Dian arrived in Washington in November, Brylawski presented her with Digit Fund Incorporated, a registered charitable body with full legal powers to receive and dispense funds and to perform all other necessary corporate functions. Brylawski refused to accept any payment for the work he and his firm did for the fund.

All that was still needed was a board of three trustees and an executive officer. Dr. Snider agreed to serve as a trustee; Brylawski also volunteered; and Dian, as president, became the third. There was still the problem of finding someone to run the show.

Dian believed she knew exactly the right person. Within hours of her arrival in Washington she had been in touch with McIlvaine. After having a long lunch with him on the sixteenth, she wrote a note to Brylawski:

“Had a meeting with Bob and he agrees to be the secretary-treasurer of the Digit Foundation. He prefers that title rather than executive director. I don’t think the title is of much importance as long as we have someone of such tremendous integrity and value who is willing to help toward the mountain gorilla aid program.

“I do want to thank you for everything you’ve done in making the Digit Fund possible. As you said the other day—it is like giving birth to a baby, but quite frankly I feel more as if it is giving birth to three sets of twins of different fathers simultaneously.”

McIlvaine had agreed to supervise the work of the fund—said work to consist mainly of raising money for it—until a permanent, salaried manager could be found.

In December 1978, he initiated a direct mail fund-raising campaign sponsored jointly by his own African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, the International Primate Protection League, and the Digit Fund Incorporated. Contributors were
told to make their checks payable to the African Wildlife Foundation. According to McIlvaine, five hundred thousand solicitations were mailed. However, the Digit Fund Inc. received none of the proceeds.

Some years later McIlvaine wrote of his association with the Digit Fund, in this wise:

“When Dian Fossey was in the States in the fall of 1978, she asked me to take over management of the Digit Fund…. I told her that since I was the full-time operating head of another foundation, there was no way that I could do justice to the Digit Fund in my spare time. I also told her that, in my opinion, the situation in Rwanda required a formal, institutionalized approach in order to involve the government and, in particular, to coordinate activities already in train by World Wildlife International, the Fauna Preservation Society, and perhaps others. I also told her it was politically risky, as well as an interference with her research work, for her to be intimately involved in such an effort.

“I suggested that one solution … would be for the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation to take over, seek agreement of all interested conservation organizations on a unified program, and then negotiate an agreement with the government … the Digit Fund would eventually be dissolved and its remaining funds transferred to the AWLF-managed project….

“In March 1980 I suggested … that perhaps it was time to dissolve Digit and transfer what funds were left to the AWLF project. For reasons of her own, Dr. Fossey decided that she did not want to dissolve Digit at that time. I subsequently concluded that I should resign as secretary-treasurer and did so.”

Dr. Shirley McGreal, whose International Primate Protection League had lent its name to the fund-raising campaign solely as a means of assisting Dian’s Digit Fund, was not pleased with the outcome. She has gone on record as saying that, while McIlvaine claimed he had an agreement with Dian to merge the Digit Fund into the
AWLF
, Dian herself denied this— “she said she would
never
have agreed to abolish her own Digit Fund!”

When asked to explain how she thought Dian might have been misled, McGreal replied, “I think the leverage they had on her was that she was very unhappy, insecure, traumatized, and genuinely upset about her gorillas dying. She never saw their deaths as an opportunity for herself. You know, it often happens that the only person who is grieving for dead friends may be exploited by a host of relatives who are looking for opportunities.”

But this was still in the future.

Sure now that all was well with the Digit Fund, Dian traveled to Louisville in early November of 1978 for a comfortable visit with Mary White’s older sister, Betty Schwartzel, whom she once described as “the mother I wish I’d had.”

From there she flew to San Francisco and on to Atherton for a not-so-comfy visit with the Prices. Richard Price insisted she must challenge Uncle Bert’s will. He wore her down.

I am so sick of arguing with him and watching my mother’s disintegration that I really don’t care one way or the other what happens to the will as long as she can be left in peace.

Dian escaped by telling the Prices she was booked to fly back to Rwanda via New York on December 10.

In truth, she was not due to leave New York until the fifteenth.

She spent the intervening days there mostly in the company of Robinson McIlvaine. Those were good days. Dian indulged herself with a shopping spree at Saks Fifth Avenue, where, amongst other things, she bought a $175 sweater as a present for Bob.

We did the carriage ride and the discos-it was so great an evening! I doubt I will ever know another one like it! I danced all night in my new silk dress.

Arriving in Kigali on the sixteenth, she taxied to the foot of Visoke and climbed the mountain trail in an hour and thirty minutes, as she noted with some pride, following Gwehandagoza and leading a long string of porters loaded with camping gear,
clothing, boots, and other equipment bought in the United States for the antipoaching patrols with money from the Digit Fund.

It ought to have been a triumphant homecoming, and so it was as far as the blacks were concerned since Dian brought gifts for everyone. But Ian Redmond was the only white on hand to greet her. The V-W couple were not in evidence, nor was David Watts or the new student, Craig Sholley. In a way, Dian was just as pleased. She was not looking forward to another attempt to coexist with Amy Vedder and Bill Weber.

Ian had mixed news for her. During her absence he, Vatiri, and Rwelekana, occasionally assisted by Craig Sholley, had carried out many patrols but had found only a handful of traps. It seemed that the poachers had abandoned the research area, and Ian believed they would stay away as long as the patrols remained active.

The bad news was that gorilla skulls were “still being hawked around to Europeans” in Gisenyi, and at least one was from a recently killed animal. (When the poacher Sebahutu was captured by Dian’s men in 1985, he confessed to the 1978 killing of a young adult female from Nunkie’s Group, on Mt. Karisimbi, during another attempt to capture a baby gorilla. The skull of the dead female was sold to a dealer in Ruhengeri and was probably the one referred to here.) The park guards, both in Zaire and Rwanda, were still mostly notable by their absence, and poaching in the regions they were supposed to patrol was at a new high.

Ian also showed Dian a letter he had recently received from Sandy Harcourt in which Sandy complimented him on his anti-poaching work, but pointed out that the
FPS
could not condone “illegal anti-poaching activities in another country’s national park…. I hope,” he wrote, “you can see the distinction between us personally admiring the work you are doing, but the
FPS
collectively having to disassociate itself from that work.”

“Digit’s got his fund—so to hell with them!” was Dian’s response.

Ian’s wounded hand was causing him so much distress that he now felt forced to return to England. On December 23 he drank a farewell Christmas toast with Nyiramachabelli, then set out on a most peculiar odyssey that found him stranded in Moscow on New Year’s Eve when the Aeroflot flight to London he had booked out of Nairobi was diverted home.

At that he probably had a better time than did Dian. In the lonely hours of New Year’s Eve she had to content herself with the company of Max—an electric dildo she had been given just before leaving New York.

Alas, Max’s sojourn in the misty Virungas was to be short-lived, as a letter from Dian written on January 22, 1979, eloquently testifies: