Gorillas in the Mist (17 page)

I scold them all. Take amulet band of monkey fur away from one. Next day put on a black magic show for the prisoners, and conservateur climbs up to take part. We put on masks, use kerosene in fire-very effective. All of them terrified.

Dian had at least some sympathy for the cattle herders, even though she was unforgiving of their trespass in the park. She was much harsher with captured poachers. The application of “black magic” to both groups of offenders was a carefully
contrived tactic that she had devised during the winter of 1970-71. It involved the use of a variety of magic tricks of the kind that can be purchased in novelty stores, together with ferocious Halloween masks and other intimidating disguises. The idea was to terrorize the herders and poachers into mending their ways. It was from such comparatively innocent actions that Dian later gained a reputation for “dabbling in witchcraft.”

She knew about sorcery as it was practiced locally and respected its power over the native people. Walter Baumgartel had regaled her with many a story about the sometimes-fatal effects of curses and other forms of black magic, as had Rosamond Carr and Alyette de Munck. Dian had already fired one camp worker for stealing a lock of her hair, which, she noted contemptuously, “the silly fool intended to use on me as a love potion.” She was not at all worried, but could not tolerate the lack of respect the act implied.

On another occasion she was asked for a loan by one of her camp staff so that he could pay a sorcerer to lift an evil spell cast on him by an irate poacher. She at first refused, but acquiesced when she noted an alarming deterioration in the man’s health. She was not sure, she told a friend, but she thought she might have saved his life.

On January 20, 1972, Bob Campbell returned to Karisoke after an absence of forty-two days, carefully counted by Dian and during which she had made many improvements to his cabin.

Bob comes back at last about 5:30-he is very happy to see me and shows it more than ever. We unpack in his cabin and he tells me about that woman J—. I’m really defeated by this. It is as though half of me has died. He comes over for dinner. Afterward very clamorous.

They took up their romance, but Dian no longer believed that Bob was being straight with her. Her fears seemed to be confirmed when she opened a letter at the Ruhengeri post office one afternoon while the two of them were in town for
supplies. It was from a mutual friend who knew nothing of the personal relationship between them. The gist of it was that Campbell had let it be known that he would soon be leaving Karisoke. When Dian taxed him with this, he did not deny it.

Dian was silent during the six-hour trip back to Karisoke, but felt she was very near a nervous breakdown.
Never have I known such sorrow, she noted in her journal
.

That night they sat silently in her cabin in the soft light of the kerosene lamp until Bob could stand no more. “Well,” he said, “I guess I might as well pack and get out. Is that what you want me to do?”

Dian met his glance but was too miserable to risk an answer.

“I suppose I had it all coming,” he continued bleakly. “I deserve to have everything catch up with me. I told you you’d hate me someday.”

However, the prospect of parting with Bob Campbell was too painful for Dian to bear, and so as they had always done in the past, they avoided the problem by making love.

It was a transient solution. Night after night through the next two months they would return from tiring days spent tracking, observing, and photographing the gorillas, to engage in interminable, soul-searching talks that ended either in fierce arguments, lovemaking, or both. And nothing was resolved.

In late March, when Bob left Karisoke for another two-week break in Nairobi, Dian told him tenderly how much she loved him. “Then trust me a little more,” he begged, and his eyes filled with tears.

As she watched him descend the mountain behind his porters, her heart was filled with hurt and anger. The evening was so long and lonely that she escaped with a sleeping pill.

When Bob was three days overdue returning, panic welled up in her. She stood outside her cabin for hours, looking down the porters’ trail for any sign of his return. She watched and listened and grew even more alarmed.

Two days later he walked into the meadow and she was ecstatic. But the seeds of mistrust had taken root and Dian no longer believed that he would leave his wife for her. Although they remained together physically, it was a time of mounting sadness and distress for both.

Eventually it became unendurable. On May 29, 1972, Bob Campbell left Karisoke for the last time. It was a harrowing departure.

“I love you, Dian-I just don’t know how to say it.” Bob told me this today while he was crying, crying, crying. I told him I wanted him to be happy and he hid his head and cried and cried.

Two days later:

I began drinking early and thus by afternoon was finished. Gave poor little Nemeye undeserved hell about some tents. Fell into bed at last after writing some terrible letters and cables to him, but they won’t be sent. God, I hope someone comes up here soon.

No one came, and rather than seek solace with friends down the mountain, she stubbornly remained at camp. For the next two months she was overwhelmed by despair, often drinking her days away. She left much of the monitoring of the gorilla groups to her chief trackers, Nemeye and Rwelekana. The only real work she accomplished was to strip and redecorate Bob Campbell’s cabin. It was not until mid-July, when she had completed this task, that her mood began to improve and she once again immersed herself in her work. As in the past, contact with the gorillas proved to be the best of all therapies.

July 12:
I go out in
A.M.
to find Group 4 in Amok’s area, but Uncle Bert seems upset and, although not seeing us, gives loud warning. Anyway, I left Nemeye behind and joined the group for a while before they took off into a ravine and up a steep slope I couldn’t climb. Watched them feed, then let them go. Returned to camp briefly, then on to Group 5, which Nemeye had found on second
hill in saddle. Had very nice short but close contact with them. Home tired. A bongo, a rare antelope, at night near my window gave two barks. Heard Uncle Bert chest beat around 10:30-sounded high up the mountain. Will visit him again tomorrow.

July 13:
Saw a hyrax briefly at 8:40
A.M.
Had a fabulous contact with Group 4. I tried an experiment-showing the animals a mirror-and it really succeeded, with Simba and others ever so curious. I was thrilled beyond words by the way they gathered and stared into it as ladies will. Uncle Bert and the young blackback, Digit, watched, then walked away as if such foolishness bored them.

Have been teaching Kanyaragana how to cook American, and tonight he did a grilled cheese sandwich covered with jello! Where have I gone wrong?

D
ian was emerging from the depths of her despair into one of the sunniest, most productive periods of her life. With her academic credentials well on the way to being secured, and with regular help provided by some of the students from Cambridge and elsewhere who were eager to work at Karisoke, Dian was able to devote much more of her time to doing what she loved best—being with her gorillas.

In 1972 there were ninety-six gorillas in or on the fringes of the study area, living in eight family groups. While students and the staff of trackers kept tabs on the others, Dian spent much of her time with Group 4, which had accepted her presence so completely that she had virtually become an adopted member of the family.

This was the group to which the poachers had led her on her first day at Karisoke. At that time it consisted of fourteen members led by an aged silverback whom she named Whinny because of his strange, horselike cries. When Whinny died in 1968, Dian and a group of porters tied his body to bamboo poles and transported it to the hospital in Ruhengeri, where an autopsy was performed. The patriarch, whom she estimated to have been about thirty years of age, had been suffering from at least three potentially fatal ailments: peritonitis; an infection
of the skull lining that may have been meningitis; and advanced deterioration of the lungs, which had accounted for his distinctive “whinny.”

There were two younger silverbacks in the group, Uncle Bert and Amok, but it was to Uncle Bert that the mantle of leadership fell. His half brother, Amok, seemed to Dian to be suffering from some sort of chronic ailment, which caused him to behave unpredictably. He became a lonely outcast on the fringe of the group, until one day he disappeared.

Uncle Bert, affectionately so called for the well-to-do uncle who had sometimes come to Dian’s financial rescue during her younger days, did in fact have a distinctly avuncular nature and was often to be found frolicking with the group’s youngsters. Dian named the eldest blackback, or nonmature male, Digit, because he had a twisted, broken finger. She estimated his age at five when she first encountered him in 1967. In 1972 he was still young enough to join in the acrobatic play of the youngsters but was beginning to accept some responsibility for protecting the family.

Of the group’s two senior females, the cantankerous Old Goat seemed the natural matriarch. Mrs. X, another older female, was in less robust physical health and grew progressively weaker after Whinny’s death, until she too vanished.

In this, the fifth year of her study, Dian watched the group change and evolve through three deaths, three births, and the emigration of three young females. In the detailed recording and interpretation of such inter-and intra-group changes over long periods lay the unique value of Dian’s study. But, as she was well aware, it would not be possible to claim that the social relationships of the mountain gorillas were really understood until the animals had been observed through several generations.

Dian was often mobbed by the youngsters of Group 4, who treated her almost as one of themselves. Digit in particular seemed to welcome her presence. On such occasions note-taking would be forgotten and Dian would revel in the pure joy of
being accepted. She groomed her friends and allowed them to groom her. She dozed with them in the sun. She tickled the infants and exchanged commiserative belches with the older females. These intimate contacts she described as “just too thrilling for words,” and she was often moved to tears by them.

Dian with her beloved Digit. Such close-quarters observation came only after years of patient effort in habituating the gorillas to humans.

I received the impression that Digit really looked forward to the daily contacts with Karisoke’s observers as a source of entertainment…. He seemed pleased whenever I brought strangers along and would completely ignore me to investigate any newcomers by smelling or lightly touching their clothing and hair. If I was alone, he often invited play by flopping over onto his back, waving stumpy legs in the air, and looking at me smilingly as if to say, “How can you resist me?” At such times, I fear, my scientific detachment dissolved.
*

As Digit matured and grew more serious, the bond between them remained.

Contacting Group 4 one cold, rainy day, Dian resisted the urge to join Digit, who was huddled against the downpour
about thirty feet away from the other animals. She did not want to intrude upon his growing independence, so leaving him to his solitude, she settled herself several yards from the main cluster of humped forms that were scarcely visible in the heavy mist. After a few minutes she felt an arm around her shoulders and looked up into Digit’s warm, gentle brown eyes. He stood pensively gazing down at her before patting her head then settling down by her side.

I laid my head on Digit’s lap, a position that provided welcome warmth as well as an ideal vantage point from which to observe his neck injury. The wound was no longer draining but had left a deep scar surrounded by numerous seams spidering out in all directions along his neck.

Slowly I took out my camera to take a picture of the scar. It was too close to focus on. About half an hour later the drizzle let up, and without warning Digit stretched back his head and yawned widely. Quickly I snapped the shutter. The resultant photograph shows my gentle Digit as a King Kong monster because his wide-mouthed yawn displayed his massive canines in a most impressive manner.

Digit’s neck wound had been sustained during a violent encounter between Group 4 and Group 8. Digit, now acting as his group’s self-appointed peripheral sentry, was the first to face the intruders and fought to hold them off. The wound he received as a result became deeply infected, and as his health deteriorated, he became more and more withdrawn until Dian feared he might be going the way of Amok. Happily, he proved her wrong.

The depth of Dian’s affinity for the gorillas was largely incomprehensible to others, nor could she easily articulate it. Sometimes she came close.

I heard a noise in the foliage by my side and looked directly into the beautifully trusting face of Macho, who stood gazing up at me. She had left her group to come to me. On perceiving the softness, tranquillity, and trust conveyed by Macho’s eyes, I was overwhelmed by the
extraordinary depth of our rapport. The poignancy of her gift will never diminish.
*