Gorillas in the Mist (15 page)

Just as I was ready to leave, Mrs. Carr drove up. She had heard that I was in trouble and just dropped everything to come to my rescue-I don’t know when I’ve been so happy to see anybody in my life. Within an hour I was released and on my way to her plantation, where I had to continue the rabies injections for another eleven days. Once there, I was given a lovely bedroom overlooking acres of beautiful garden and was really waited on hand and foot by her staff, all of whom are spoiled rotten, until the rabies series was terminated.

On December 30 I left for camp, and happily this was the same day that Bob Campbell returned to Ruhengeri, so we climbed back up the mountain together, taking a very long time to do so.

As 1970 began, the perennial rain and mist vanished and the forest again glowed with sunshine, tempting Dian out of the cabin in search of the gorillas even before she had recovered her strength. Accompanied by Bob Campbell, she experienced ten near-perfect days that came to a deeply symbolic climax when Peanuts, the young blackback of Group 8, reached out in what was the first friendly physical contact ever recorded between a wild mountain gorilla and a human being.

Peanuts left his tree for a bit of strutting before he began his approach in my direction. He is a showman. He beat his chest, he threw leaves in the air, he swaggered and slapped the foliage around him, and then suddenly he was at my side. His expression indicated that he had entertained me —
now it was my turn. He sat down to watch me “feeding,” but didn’t seem particularly impressed, so I changed activities; I scratched my scalp noisily to make a sound familiar to gorillas, who do a great deal of scratching.

Peanuts has just touched Dian’s hand. The photo captures a momentous event—the first photo record of physical contact between gorilla and researcher. Dian is using the technique of imitation of gorilla gestures that won her the confidence of the animals.

Almost immediately Peanuts began to scratch. It was not clear who was aping whom. Then I lay back in the foliage to appear as harmless as possible and slowly extended my hand. I held it palm up at first, as the palms of an ape and a human hand are more similar than the backs of the hand. When I felt he recognized this “object,” I slowly turned my hand over and let it rest on the foliage.

Peanuts seemed to ponder accepting my hand, a familiar yet strange object extended to him. Finally he came a step closer and, extending his own hand, gently touched his fingers to mine. To the best of my knowledge this is the first time a wild gorilla has ever come so close to “holding hands” with a human being.

Peanuts sat down and looked at my hand for a moment longer. He stood and gave vent to his excitement by a whirling chest beat, then went off to rejoin his group, nonchalantly feeding some eighty feet uphill. I expressed my own happy excitement by crying. This was the most wonderful going-away present I could have had.

The icing on the cake was that Bob Campbell recorded the event on film in a sequence that
National Geographic
splashed over a two page spread. The expression on Dian’s face is one of pure ecstasy.

A week later, on January 11, 1970, Dian was wandering the narrow and venerable streets of Cambridge, trying to find her way to Darwin College, where she was to begin her first three-month term as a doctoral student in one of the world’s most ancient and prestigious centers for the study of natural science.

At first she was charmed by her surroundings and stimulated by the company of her fellow Ph.D. students, but she soon began to have second thoughts.

During the winter in this part of England it is dark until about 9:00 or 9:15 in the morning, then there are a few periods of gray that last until about 4:30 to 5:00
P.M.
, at which time it becomes dark again. I feel like a mole. Robert Hinde, my doctoral adviser, picks me up about 8:30 for the drive to the Maddingley lab where I spend the days working on my field notes and using computers and sonographic equipment to work up the data.

I’m not particularly happy here as there are so many thousands of rules to follow, the town is so crowded and rushed, the people so terribly self-important, the air so heavy, gray, and smoggy all of the day, and there is no privacy whatsoever. I guess it will all just take getting accustomed to—never had this problem of adjustment in Africa, but now it seems as though I must rely on others for everything, a situation I detest.

Leakey, out of touch and frustrated in Nairobi, continued to plead for news—and for some recognition of his love, but with no success.

Dian wrote briefly that she felt confined and alienated in Cambridge and did not care for all the formalities and protocol. “I don’t feel at ease with the people, and the whole thing doesn’t seem worth it.”

Leakey responded with some news to lift her spirits. He was attempting to persuade Robert Hinde to try and get the time she must spend in England reduced and even suggested that she might forget about earning her Ph.D. He just wanted her to be able to present her data “in the best possible way to the scientific world.” He planned to be in London by February 5 or 6, he told her, and would meet with her then.

Since Leakey’s travel depended on grants from various foundations, he had to hew to a strict itinerary, but when he boarded the
BOAC
jet for London at Nairobi airport early in February 1970, he was eagerly looking forward to the dinner and “quiet talk” with Dian he had managed to wedge into his schedule.

It was not to be. Leakey was felled by a heart attack shortly after arriving in London and was rushed to a hospital.

Dian wrote to him immediately, but it was nearly a month before she took the ninety-minute train ride into London to visit him in his convalescence. There is no record of what took place between them, but at least there was no rupture in their relationship.

Leakey made a good recovery and, against the advice of friends and medical advisers, continued to work and to travel incessantly. He saw Dian only on a few occasions when their paths crossed in their travels, and she was always careful to limit their encounters to settings where decorum would be preserved.

Nevertheless, Leakey continued to pour out his un-requited love in letter after letter, scratched out in his nearly illegible scrawl, and in notes furtively scribbled at the bottom of their
“official” correspondence, which he’d dictated to a secretary. For a time he encouraged Dian to write to him at his personal postal box in Nairobi, assuring her that only he would see the letters.

He pressed her endlessly to accept the ruby which had now been set in a ring. Although she eventually did so only with reluctance, it became one of her most precious possessions.

The last letter from him surviving in her files was written early in January 1972 when she was again at Cambridge.

He was despondent; everything seemed to be going wrong for him in his fund-raising efforts. The people who promised to support Biruté Galdikas’s study of orangutans had reneged. He was having trouble getting money for his own research and for a research station at Tigone. He closed with the wish that she could be “near him to calm the awful uncertainty and give him peace.” Perhaps he knew his time was running out. Later that year a second heart attack would put an end to Louis Leakey’s life and loves.

D
ian never really enjoyed Cambridge, but by the time she was preparing to leave the university in March 1970 at the end of her first three-month semester, she had reluctantly come to accept the necessity of going there.

You have to obtain a union card in the scientific field. Without a Ph.D. at the least, it is very hard to get adequate grant support or to get really good students to come and work on your project. Without that Big Degree, you don’t cut much ice no matter how good you are.

She planned to return to Cambridge in October for a six-month stay, but was faced with the problem of finding someone capable of caring for the camp and the gorillas during her absence.

This time there was no shortage of candidates. The publication of a cover story by and about her and the gorillas in the January 1970 edition of
National Geographic
magazine had made her moderately famous, and her mail was filled with requests from all sorts of people wanting to come to Karisoke. However, she had little use for most of these volunteers.

It may sound terribly conceited, but I don’t want my camp overrun with hippies, freeloaders, or other similar unqualified, adventure-seeking people who will “work
for nothing.” This kind can always spend their time protesting in America-I don’t want them here.

At last she found a candidate who seemed ideal. He was a onetime schoolteacher who had returned to Liverpool University to gain a bachelor’s degree in zoology, following which he had studied captive orangutans. He had written Dr. Hinde in Cambridge looking for doctorate-level research work, and Hinde had passed his letter on to Dian.

“I’ve finally found the right man for the job,” she wrote Leakey. “His name is Alan Goodall—no relation to Jane! I know that you would like him, Louis, for he’s honest, forthright, intelligent, completely dedicated, has a good sense of humor, common sense, humility, and, above all, maturity. This young man is definitely the one to replace me when I’m away from camp, or for that matter to help me out in pursuit of special study topics when I’m there, for it has gotten to be too much to cover for one person.”

Alan Goodall was married, and when Dian interviewed him at Cambridge, he and his wife were expecting their first child. After her disastrous experience with the dope-smoking census taker, Goodall seemed to represent the kind of stability and maturity for which Dian was looking.

Since he was a family man with responsibilities, Dian agreed that he should be paid a small salary (fifty pounds a month) and provided with transportation to Rwanda for his wife and child.

Leakey objected. “Don’t you think you’re being overly generous? After all, I’m the one who has to raise the money.”

“Generous!” Dian flared back. “Not everyone can work for nothing! If I can’t get some decent help, I may be forced to abandon the whole project!”

Leakey capitulated. It was agreed that Goodall would take charge of Karisoke while Dian returned to Cambridge for her next two semesters.

Back in the Virungas for the summer, Dian spent every possible hour with her gorillas. She was often accompanied by Bob
Campbell, who was shooting still pictures to illustrate a second
National Geographic
article scheduled for October 1971, as well as cine footage for the planned television special. Close contact with the gorillas was now routine, and though working under extremely difficult conditions, Campbell was able to record some remarkable moments of communion between the two species.

Dian took considerable pleasure in his presence. Ever since sharing her grief with him over her father’s death, she had felt an affinity with this unassuming man who worked so unremittingly and uncomplainingly. She sometimes wondered what his life was like in Nairobi, but although she knew that he had a wife, she never probed into his personal affairs.

During the progress of his assignment, the relationship between them was gradually transformed from that of two professionals to an intensely personal rapport. For his sake, Dian began dyeing her hair to hide the gray that, at thirty-eight, had begun to salt it. Campbell brought out the domestic impulse in her. She delighted in cooking for him and on his birthday and other festive occasions would prepare elaborate meals. For his part, Bob Campbell had a calming influence on her mercurial personality.

From time to time he returned to his home in Nairobi, and Dian dreaded these departures. She missed him deeply and sometimes turned to drinking at night to dull the loneliness. During his absence, she would spend hours sewing curtains or making other wifely improvements to his quarters in preparation for his return.

Her private life did not, however, interfere with her gorilla studies—or with her war against poachers and herders. She was indefatigable and implacable at breaking snares, destroying shelters, and chasing cattle to the park boundaries. A ghastly incident occurred in May, to which she reacted with such ferocity that she horrified herself.

A poor buffalo had gotten wedged into a tree fork, and some Tutsi herders had come along and found it that way.
They cut the meat off its hind legs and left it alive and horribly tortured when my men found it some time later. I loaded my little pistol and went to find the poor animal, which was still full of courageous bluff-snorting with every inch of life left within it and trying so hard to defend what remained of its life. I detested killing such a display of courage, and of course I was crying my eyes out when I pumped the bullets into its skull. I don’t think I will ever forget those eyes.

Killing that poor animal has done something to me that I didn’t think possible, for now I am finding myself out to avenge the cruelty of the Tutsi by crippling their cattle with bullets. I used to shoot above or below or near the cattle of the Tutsi, but now I shoot them in their hind legs and have crippled several since the buffalo was found.