Gorillas in the Mist (14 page)

Dian’s life did not quiet down with the departure of Coco and Pucker.

On May 10 about 1:30 in the morning I awoke to find the opposite wall and ceiling above the fireplace a solid sheet of flames! With great calm and presence of mind I ran screaming and yelling out of the house, fell over the first fenced path I encountered, managed to return with two containers of water from the kitchen, and was throwing these on the walls when my men came running with more water-oh, what a mess, but we did get it out.

Then the next day my beloved chickens began to die-all had names and were pets of several years-from a disease brought up from the village by chicken bought for eating. I can’t kill mine. I immediately put them in individual boxes that lined the cabin, for segregation, medicine, and warmth, but out of nineteen, only two are still alive and I think one is on its way tonight.

Repairing her charred cabin gave Dian an excuse for a general improvement of the campsite. Alyette de Munck volunteered her contracting skills and in four days had supervised the erection of a new, corrugated-iron kitchen and food storage building. This permitted the dismantling of the old kitchen, which had been slapped together out of tin sheets and canvas, and the striking of the original food storage tent, which was suffering from terminal jungle rot. The camp now consisted
of two permanent metal-sheathed shacks and two tents: one for the camp workers and one for Bob Campbell, both situated some distance down the meadow from Dian’s cabin.

It was not until nearly two months after the departure of Coco and Pucker that field work settled back into its “normal” routine. Bob Campbell had to be trained in gorilla tracking and contact etiquette, a chore Dian enjoyed since her liking for the quiet, sensitive Scot was growing day by day. The real difficulty hinged on the fact that a prolonged drought had driven the gorillas to seek new feeding grounds beyond their normal ranges, and it required several weeks to locate them all again.

By early July Dian was picking up on her observations where she had left off in May.

Yesterday and today afforded two wonderful contacts with Group 8, mainly Peanuts, who is curious and playful enough to seek proximity. He showed reasoning ability yesterday when he sought to obtain a candy bar I had laid down by my side.

I’d made a big thing of this candy bar, imitating the vocalizations of Coco and Pucker whenever they were eating favorite foods while I unwrapped it and nibbled on the end. Peanuts was in a real frenzy by the time I laid it down and turned partially away, yet instead of just reaching out for it, which he could easily have done, he tried to slowly pull the foliage stalks upon which it was lying toward him. He almost had it when suddenly it slipped through the matted vegetation and onto the dirt below and out of sight. Was he mad!

The problem of finding a student for the gorilla census work seemed to have been solved with the enlistment of a young Englishman Leakey had met in Nairobi. However, as Dian was to discover over and over, people working with gorillas in the isolation of the Virungas required physical and mental abilities that most either did not possess or, lacking her own dedication to the animals, did not care to exercise.

The student was given a crash course in gorillas and before long found himself encamped with a native tracker on a mountain some miles from Karisoke. His field notes, brought to Dian by runner, quickly became so bizarre that Dian grew concerned about his mental stability. Then she learned from her staff that he had become a heavy user of hashish. By mid-September Dian was asking Leakey’s permission to fire B—.

B—was forthwith given his walking papers, but the traumas of the past months had taken their toll on Dian, and this latest setback with the census that was so important to her research was the last straw. Her health had also taken a sudden and disturbing turn for the worse. Severe chest pains led her to fear she had contracted tuberculosis. The threat of this dire disease had haunted her childhood and her dread of it had been intensified by her experiences with it when she had worked for a brief time with tuberculosis patients at the City of Hope Hospital in Duarte, California. When a doctor at a Seventh-Day Adventist school near Rosamond Carr’s plantation tentatively confirmed her suspicion, she became so alarmed that she wrote to Leakey telling him she had to see him in Nairobi.

As always, Leakey was frantically busy—dashing down to Olduvai, flying off to raise money and receive awards in England, Europe, and the United States, but he had a clear week starting October 8 and he asked Dian to come to Nairobi then.

Leakey made no attempt to hide his pleasure when he met her at the airport. Tall and straight, comfortable in jeans and workshirt with her long, thick hair close-braided, she was one of the most striking women he had ever seen.

“I don’t like doing this,” she told him in explanation of her visit, “but I’m nearly at my wits’ end. Everything’s ganged up on me. I miss Coco and Pucker more than words can say, and I hate to think what will happen to my babies in Cologne. I’m desperate to continue with the census work, but it’s impossible without decent help. The poachers and herders are driving me crazy. And to top it off, I’m afraid I’ve got tuberculosis.”

“Ah, my dear,” Leakey said cheerfully, “what you need is a proper little holiday. Need one myself, come to think of it. You leave it to me and I’ll get something going. Meantime, I shall take you to the best doctor in Kenya and arrange to have him check your lungs.”

Dian underwent a series of tests and was given some drugs for the treatment of her symptoms, but a diagnosis could not be completed for several days. Undeterred, Leakey pushed ahead with his plans, and one bright morning he and Dian left Nairobi for a safari through the grassy plains of south-central Kenya. In the company of this enthusiastic and much admired—if somewhat elderly—companion, Dian put her worries behind her.

The guided Kenyan safari organized by Leakey was a far cry from the exhausting journey Dian had made with John Alexander, her “Great White” hunter, six years earlier. The vehicles were well-sprung and air-conditioned. Camp facilities were elaborate, including sleeping tents with attached shower stalls and big, cozy beds. Superb food was accompanied by vintage wines. Under such sybaritic conditions, Dian succumbed to the romance of star-filled nights on the sweet-smelling savanna. Leakey did more than succumb—he fell deeply, wildly in love.

After a week they returned to Nairobi just in time for Leakey to fly off to London. On the day of his departure he wrote Dian
three
letters which were as ardent as those of any heavily smitten teenager. He was distraught that they were to be separated by so much space and time but solaced himself with memories of the “heavenly week we had” and with the conviction that they now belonged to each other.

I
n letter after letter over the next few weeks Leakey continued to pour out his passion for Dian; but it was a oneway flow, and his pleas for a response from her became ever more plaintive. Back in Nairobi in mid-November, he was becoming desperate to see her or at least to hear from her. He proposed that they make another safari together, and when this elicited no response, he wrote to tell her that he was giving her a ruby but needed to discuss the setting and ring size with her. “I want you to have it soon as a deep token of my caring….”

Leakey’s letters had an inhibiting effect upon Dian. As she tried to think of how best to answer one of his outpourings, another would descend upon her. She was embarrassed that the great Louis Leakey, that paragon of strength and purpose, should have become so besotted. She may also have been feeling guilty, since she was becoming ever more interested in Robert Campbell.

Eventually she wrote Leakey a short and rather formal note to accompany a report on a visit she had recently made to Kabara. Perhaps she hoped his ardor would be diminished by it and that their old relationship could be restored, but this was not to be.

Leakey’s reply exuded enormous happiness and relief at having heard from her, and he was authentically pleased to be
the bearer of good news from the doctor who had tested her for tuberculosis and who was now convinced she was free of the disease.

Moved by gratitude and perhaps pity for this sixty-seven-year-old lover, Dian responded with a warm and cheerful letter full of news about the gorillas, although sparing about her own feelings. In her journal she wrote distractedly:
Don’t know what to do about L. God-what a mess.

His reply, which seemed to arrive by the next post, was ecstatic. It included plans to meet her in Cambridge—a prospect that did not delight her, for she had hoped her long absence in England would cool his passion.

From the hour of her return to Karisoke, Dian had been buried under a mountain of field notes that had to be worked into shape in preparation for her first semester at Cambridge.

She was also extremely busy in the field. Early in November she chanced a journey across the mountains to Kabara in the Congo, although she was fully aware that she might be imprisoned should she be caught by park guards or the military. However, she badly wanted to know what had become of her Kabara gorilla groups.

Although the distance as the crow flies was little more than five miles, it took Dian and two trackers five hours of slogging through a steady downpour to reach that familiar meadow. Once there, she managed to contact only one of her former study groups, which she found sadly depleted. She encountered no soldiers or park guards, but discovered a great deal of evidence of poaching, and the whole region was overrun with cattle. She and her two men took the considerable risk of destroying more than sixty poacher’s snares and demolished several shelters erected by Congolese cattle herders, but this was hardly more than a gesture. Sadly, she estimated that fewer than half the gorillas she had known at Kabara in 1967 still survived.

Not long after her return from this adventure she found herself at even greater hazard.

On November 17 I was just barely nipped by a sickly poacher’s dog on the lower leg, and since it amounted to nothing, I joked about it. But much to my embarrassment, everyone became most upset due to the fact that the incidence of rabies among wild dogs in Rwanda is sixty percent, and of course rabies is one hundred percent fatal without the series of injections.

Everyone pleaded with me to get the injections, but I refused as I just didn’t have the time-Leakey heard about it and even went out to the airport in Nairobi and had needles, serum, etc., sent to me, but I didn’t use them. By my next trip off the mountain, in December, I’d forgotten all about it. I went down to post my mail, shop, and send Bob Campbell off on his way to Nairobi to spend Christmas with his wife. I returned to the mountain, looking forward to the next few weeks alone so as to get all in readiness for going to England. But soon I began to ache all over, became almost too weak to stand, alternately sweating and chilled, was dizzy with buzzing ears, and my temperature was a neat 10
5°F!

No joking now. I thought I did have rabies-my one medical book on the mountain gave these as initial symptoms-so I knew I was going to die and was really quite provoked as I wasn’t ready yet. Late that evening I crawled to the front door, shot my pistol off to bring the wogs running, and ordered two of them to run directly down to the home of the nearest European, at park headquarters, to ask for medicine as I was very sick. I was proud of these chaps for taking off in the middle of the night with only a flashlight for protection, because the area is thick at night with buffalo, which are the one thing the Africans fear.

I then spent the night just trying to stay awake by dividing my delirium time with reading a pocket book, for I didn’t dare to sleep. By 5:30 the next morning the mattress was soaked with perspiration, yet I was freezing.

Then M. Descamps knocked on the door, and that silly little Belgian looked like a guardian angel. His first words were
“Mon Dieu!”
as I seem to have been a wee bit blue by then. He ordered the boy to bring a freezing tub of water, hauled me out of bed, and wrapped me in dripping wet, cold towels, which can only be described as pure agony! After some ten or twenty minutes of this fever-reduction therapy I was ordered to change clothes, then
“allez!”
out the door to a waiting teepoy-an elongated basket affair with stout rims and handles manned by six Africans. I was trussed up into the basket along with piles of blankets, and before I could say
kwa heri
, the men began carting me off in such a silent and gentle way that I really had no sensation of movement beyond the passage of tree boughs over my head. It was a rather strange experience. I didn’t really possess all of my faculties, and yet I was so aware of the silence of the porters and the sparkling, crisp beauty of the morning.

When we finally reached the Land Rover, I was becoming more aware of my surroundings. I was taken to the nearest hospital and checked in as a rabies patient by all the French-speaking doctors and nurses in Ruhengeri. No one spoke English and I guess I learned more French during the next three days than I’d learned during the past three years.

That day seemed to be a succession of one painful needle after the next, all accompanied by torrents of French. This is a French-run hospital for wogs, so in between the constant comings and goings of the European staff, there was the wailing of sick babies, the buzz of flies, and the smells of their cooking seemed to permeate my room. To be sure, there were comic highlights-like the French nurse who seemed to eat garlic with every meal and would come into my room to inquire,
“Comment ça va?
” exuding odors that would cause me to head for the nearest basin.

After three days and nights of this, I figured that my mind was going to crack before my body, so I packed up
my knapsack and readied myself to face the doctor to tell him I was leaving. Among my complaints was the fact that there was no drinking water available except what the nurses would bring me from their homes, and the food came from a horrible hotel in Ruhengeri, delivered by the proprietor, who breathed fumes of whiskey and who had to have fixed the toast and tea for the next morning the night before as he never woke up before noon.