Travels (37 page)

They don’t like to hear it. Telling them facts and statistics only makes them more irritable. Yet the chances are almost vanishingly small that any Western person will have a dangerous encounter with an animal. In America, every year, sixty thousand people die of auto accidents, a possibility no one fears. Some seven people die of snakebite every year, and everyone is terrified of snakes.

Then, too, fear of animals is a part of popular culture, a theme of books and movies and TV. If you drop it, it gives you the same feeling of loss as not watching the latest hit TV show, or not knowing about this year’s intellectual pinup, or not following professional sports. You lose something in common with other people.

The other thing that happens is that, since fear of animals is a part of popular culture, it reminds you that one of the deep, unquestioned beliefs of popular culture is wrong. This is a little unsettling, because you are obliged to wonder what else is wrong, too.

Fear of animals is also a pleasantly childish feeling, and to give it up is to exchange some of the magical feelings of childhood for some of the more practical feelings of adulthood. At first it’s not comfortable. Later you wonder why everyone doesn’t do it.

In the end, how does anyone benefit from being afraid? Maybe it’s bolstering of the values of civilization, by making nature the bogeyman. Here I am sitting in this traffic jam, breathing carbon monoxide and pollutants, staring at a hideous manmade landscape, but I really am better off because, if all this were gone, lions and bears would attack and eat me.

If wild animals—and wild nature—were less frightening, perhaps civilization would be less palatable. But the truth is that civilization does not protect us from wild animals. It attempts, however imperfectly, to protect us from ourselves.

Gorillas
 

“I wouldn’t study gorillas,” Nicole said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“They are men.”

Nicole was Belgian and spoke English with occasional unintended meanings; I assumed this was one startling instance.

“Gorillas are men?”

“Yes, of course.”

My French was bad, but, between her English and my French, we straightened things out. “
Vraiment? Des gorilles sont des hommes?
”

“
Oui
. The same as men.”

“Do you think so?” I asked. Nicole was a zoologist, with a special interest in an antelope called the topi. After years of studying the topi, no doubt gorillas appeared indistinguishable from men. I said nothing.

“You do not believe me,” she said, “but I have seen them in Virunga. Gorillas are not animals. They are men.”

Now we were flying west to Virunga. I was wedged into the cockpit of the small plane, next to the pilot. “There, you can see the volcanoes,” he said, pointing.

Ahead, emerging from the mist of Rwanda, were three shadowy mountain cones. It didn’t look very spectacular: not the way I had imagined it.

“On the left, Karisimbi; in the middle, Visoke; on the right, Sabinyo,” the pilot said. “And there’s the town.”

Turning away from the line of volcanoes, he circled Ruhengeri, a shantytown built along a single muddy street. It looked incredibly romantic.

We landed, and checked into the Muhrabura hotel. In the bar, I ran into Don Fawcett, my professor of anatomy who had lectured me, that first day so many years ago, about cadavers. Dr. Fawcett had left Harvard to work at the International Laboratory for Animal Diseases in Nairobi; he had been to see the gorillas that day with a group of scientists; they had had an exciting time. Everybody in the hotel was excited about visiting the gorillas. In the bar people talked of nothing else.

I walked through Ruhengeri in the afternoon, a little town ringed by five volcanoes. A single paved street, ramshackle shops in bright colors. A taxi, filled to standing with women singing African songs, rumbled past. Young kids tried to sell me Impala cigarettes in plastic sacks.

Nicole explained about the gorillas of Rwanda. Her husband, Alain, worked with the Park Service and had been instrumental in setting up the program. The story was this:

The Parc des Volcans, on the border of Rwanda and Zaire, represented a large land area for that tiny country. The rich green mountain slopes were increasingly coveted by Rwanda’s expanding population, which had grown five hundred percent since World War II. Some years ago, under this pressure, a large section of the park had indeed been turned over to farmland. There were incessant calls to release the rest, but conservationists inside Rwanda had three reasons to resist the pressure.

The first was that making parkland available would do little to ease the population pressure in the long run. After all, each year twenty-three thousand additional families required farmland. If all the land in the park were released, it would provide farmland for only thirty-six weeks of population growth.

The second was that the land on the mountain slopes served as a water catchment area. The spongy volcanic soil held rainwater and released it gradually during Rwanda’s two dry seasons. If the slopes were cultivated, the runoff would be immediate, and surrounding farms would suffer immeasurably.

The third reason was that the park, and the adjacent parkland in Zaire, provided the only remaining habitat for the magnificent mountain gorilla. If that land was taken away, the mountain gorilla was doomed to extinction.

To keep the Parc des Volcans intact, conservationists in 1979 decided
to make it self-supporting and even profitable. To do that, they habituated three groups of gorillas to human contact. Over a period of years, they made these gorillas, in essence, tourist attractions.

Some years before, the American researcher Dian Fossey had learned that it was possible to approach wild gorilla troops closely. Fossey was able, after many years of patient work, actually to sit amid a troop, watching behavior and taking notes.

Now Fossey was gone, expelled from the country by the government. (This was some years before she returned, and was murdered.) Her original troop, group 5, was reserved for ongoing research by scientists living at Karisimbi Research Station, located between the volcanoes. But other workers employed her techniques over a period of years to habituate three troops, designated 13, 11, and 8, to daily visits by human beings.

The procedure had become routine. If you wanted to see gorillas, you made arrangements well in advance (now several years in advance), and then joined one of the groups of four or six people who would be taken that day to see a gorilla troop.

In the morning, we went to the park station at nine thousand feet on the slopes of Mount Sabinyo. From here we would begin to look for gorillas. Each tourist group had a guide and a tracker; we would be taken first to where the gorillas had last been seen the day before; the tracker would follow the gorillas’ trail on the volcanic slopes until we caught up with the troop. We would then follow the gorilla troop until they paused for their midday rest, when they were quiet and usually allowed people to approach closely.

Sometimes tourists found the gorillas in a few minutes; sometimes it took as long as five hours to find them. We were told to be prepared for several hours’ hard climbing; that we should wear gloves to protect against the stinging nettles; and that, once among the gorillas, we should stay silent and low, always being sure to keep our heads below the level of the dominant male. We were also told that if the gorillas charged we were to stand our ground, be silent, and
not move
.

With that we set off.

A gorilla trail is fairly easy to follow. There is not only the characteristic three-lobed spoor, but also a great many broken-down branches. In places, it looked as if a jeep convoy had recently passed through.

This should have given me a clue of what was to come. Yet my first
view of a gorilla—a silverback male, glimpsed through a stand of bamboo—was shocking. The animal was huge. He appeared so large, I thought I was experiencing an optical illusion caused by the intervening bamboo. He didn’t look like a gorilla, he looked like a hippopotamus.

Mountain gorillas are
big
.

Mark, our guide, nodded. By now we were speaking in whispers. “Yes, they are big,” he said. “In zoos you see lowland gorillas, the other subspecies. Mountain gorillas are substantially larger. That fellow there is four hundred pounds.”

That fellow there was now moving away, through the bamboo. For a hippopotamus-sized creature he was quick. We humans gasped and panted to keep him in sight. Gorillas move with a characteristic loping gait, balancing on stiff forearms, with their hands curled under so they rest on their knuckles. That is genetically determined behavior, but, looking around, I saw we humans were moving exactly the same way. The low bamboo forest forces you to bend to hands and knees, and the stinging nettles on the ground make you close your sensitive palms, and absorb the pain on your knuckles.

It was odd to see: the gorillas moving like gorillas, and the people in pursuit, also moving like gorillas. Except, of course, the people were awkward, particularly when we moved fast. It’s hard to jog on your hands and knees.

Soon we observed more animals, in brief, tantalizing glimpses. An adult female, then a juvenile male. This particular troop, group 13, was wary; Mark, who studied the troop, explained there was an elephant in its territory, and the silverback male was jumpy.

For an hour we followed the gorillas at a near trot through the bamboo. Most of the time we could not see them, but we could hear them crashing through the underbrush. Sometimes they were very close, but we were never able to see them well.

Finally the gorillas stopped for their midday rest. The big male rolled over on his back and lazily chomped bamboo. He was perhaps ten yards away. I was frustrated: I wanted to take his picture, but he was low in the brush. For a while, all we saw was a huge hand rising up, grabbing the bamboo, and descending again out of sight. Occasionally he would raise his massive head, look at us, and then lie back again. I busied myself with cameras and lenses, trying to get ready for a coming opportunity to film him. Changing lenses, adjusting f-stop …

What happened next was extraordinarily fast. There was a deafening roar, a sound as loud as a subway rushing into a station. I looked up to
see the huge male charging directly at me. He was moving incredibly swiftly, bellowing with rage. He was coming right at me.

I moaned and ducked down, pushing my face into the underbrush, backing off. A strong arm gripped my shirt at the shoulders.
This is it
. There had been cases where the gorillas attacked people. Picked them up and bit them and threw them around like a dishrag. Months in the hospital. Now the gorilla was grabbing me.…

But it was Mark, holding me down. Keeping me from running away. He whispered fiercely, “
Don’t move!
”

My face was buried in the grass. My heart was pounding. I didn’t dare look up. The gorilla was right in front of me. I could hear him snorting, feel the earth shake as he stomped around. I felt him back away. I heard a rhythmic ripping sound, off to the right.

Mark whispered, “You can look up slowly. He’s tearing grass.”

I didn’t look up. I didn’t move. And a good thing, because the gorilla roared again. He beat his chest, a hollow sound.

“You can look up,” Mark whispered. “It’s okay.”

I didn’t look up. I didn’t move. I waited, and finally I heard the crashing sound as the gorilla moved away. Then I looked up.

I saw the big male drop down into the grass again. I saw the big hand reach up for bamboo and pull it down.

“He was just reminding us who’s boss,” Mark said.

I understood that. No question.

“Why did he attack?”

He shrugged. “Something about you he didn’t like. Probably too much movement with the camera.”

Then he proceeded to give me a lecture about not moving when a gorilla attacked.

The thing was, I knew all about how to behave during a gorilla attack. I had studied gorillas, read all the books. But somehow I hadn’t understood, from the books, how fearsome a gorilla charge could be. The noise, the speed of the charge, and the size of the animal were incredibly intimidating. To stand your ground in the face of a gorilla charge was like standing your ground in the face of an onrushing express train, somehow trusting that it would stop before it hit you. It required incredible courage.

Or perhaps just experience. We were charged a couple of other times in the course of the two days, and it was never as terrifying as that first time.

* * *

On the second day, I went with Nicole and Rosalind Aveling, a naturalist at the park, to see group 11. When we arrived, we found the gorillas in a kind of cul-de-sac of foliage. There were fourteen animals in the immediate area, juveniles here and there, young ones crashing through the branches overhead, and the big male in the center.

We approached cautiously. The big male watched us come. Finally he moved. We all froze.

The male went up to the guide. He raised his massive hand to deliver a blow and swung it down at the guide, who did not move a muscle. At the last moment, the gorilla checked his swing, and lightly tapped the guide on the side of the head. A little tap. Playful.