Gorillas in the Mist (18 page)

No one who has spent time in the company of wild mountain gorillas can escape the recognition of kinship, but Dian took that for granted. The essential words in this revealing passage are
softness, tranquillity
, and
trust
, three elements so painfully lacking in many of her relationships with her own species.

Gorillas were far from being her only animal friends. Her pet rooster, Dezi, enjoyed the company of an ever-growing harem of hens protected from the stewing pot by Dian’s tender sensibilities. And she fretted endlessly if either Charles or Yvonne—two ravens whom she fed on food scraps—failed to appear at mealtime. She even watched affectionately as mice scurried across her cabin floor during the quiet evenings.
Mice mating tonight-two up and boxing in middle of floor-really comical.
She lavished affection on her dog, Cindy, and her monkey, Kima. In 1969, while stopping for gas at a village filling station, she had been approached by a “shifty-eyed” man who offered to sell her the mysterious contents of a straw basket for the equivalent of about thirty dollars. Dian seized the basket, removed the lid, and found the disheveled little monkey Kima huddled at the bottom. Placing the basket firmly on the seat beside her, she started her Land Rover and drove off—after intimidating the unhappy salesman with a ferocious diatribe on the illegality and immorality of catching monkeys.

Against the advice of friends, including Louis Leakey and Rosamond Carr, both of whom had owned monkeys and knew what a handful they could be, she decided to adopt the two-year-old female. She curbed Kima’s destructive tendencies to some extent by providing her with stuffed toys that she first made out of socks and later purchased ready-made in the United States. Nevertheless, Kima periodically wrought havoc in the camp. Although amply provided with bamboo shoots, fruits, and vegetables, the monkey developed a passion for human
food, including beer, and after that no one’s dinner or pombe was ever safe.

Kima was allowed to roam the camp during the day, terrifying visitors—particularly African ones—whom she would attack, screaming and biting. She frequently bit Dian’s hands when being brought unwillingly indoors for the night. Occasionally the bites were serious—one of them severed a muscle at the base of Dian’s index finger. That particular wound remained painful for weeks, but Dian never held it against Kima. At night or in bad weather, the monkey had the run of the cabin and frequently slept with her mistress. Dian tolerated her destructive binges, apparently feeling they were a penalty to be paid for having domesticated the animal in the first place.

Cindy had come to Dian as a pup in the summer of 1968, a gift from European friends “down below”—as she referred to the world beyond the volcanoes. This was the dog Dian had yearned for and been denied all through her childhood. Of all her animal friends, the big brown boxer became the most beloved.

When Cindy was about nine months old, she ambled down the porters’ trail one day while Dian was off somewhere with the gorillas, and disappeared. When Dian returned to camp, wet and weary, to be told by her staff that Cindy was missing and had probably been stolen, she was transformed into an avenging fury. Whipped by Dian’s tongue, the trackers traced the dog along the trail until its pawprints merged with and disappeared amongst the bare footprints of a group of men. She had evidently been seized and carried off by cattle herders or by poachers. Dian thereupon devised a desperate stratagem to recover her. Together with her men, Dian rounded up several dozen Tutsi cattle and corralled them near her cabin. She then instructed her trackers to shout the message through the forest that she would shoot a cow for every day that Cindy remained missing.

Near morning the unfortunate Tutsi herder whose cattle Dian was holding hostage timidly ventured to the edge of the camp
clearing to report that the dog had been located in the
ikibooga
, or hunting camp, of a group of poachers led by a Twa named Munyarukiko. This was the same man who had captured Coco and Pucker after slaughtering most of the gorillas in their group.

The
ikibooga
was too far away from Karisoke for Dian to reach quickly, considering the state of her lungs, so she armed her camp staff with Halloween masks and firecrackers and sent them off. Hours later they returned with the dog. They laughed uproariously as they told a vastly relieved Dian of the poachers’ terror-stricken flight in the face of their masked and explosive attack. The cattle were returned to their owners; the camp staff was rewarded; and life at Karisoke settled down.

A year later Cindy was again stolen by the incorrigible Munyarukiko and his band. This time she was rescued by the father of the same Tutsi herder who had located her after the first dognapping. In returning her, this tall, dignified old man earned a healthy cash reward and Dian’s undying gratitude, which would one day be translated into a job for his son at Karisoke.

Dian had to wait until February 1972 to even the score with Munyarukiko, but when the opportunity came, she savored it to the full.

Come home from Group 5 and find park guards here with Munyarukiko. Really pleased! It took four of them to catch him. Even then he escaped while the guards were talking to me and made a run for it, but they caught him again and brought him back. I spit on him and hit him, and then we went through the magic routine, this time with tear gas added. Then we tied him up with chains in the men’s cabin.

In the morning Dian accompanied Munyarukiko’s armed escort down the mountain to the office of the prefect of police in Ruhengeri, where he was locked up. A few days later he was sentenced to two years in prison for poaching. Dian gave each of the four park guards twenty-five dollars, a small fortune for them and no trivial amount for her either, but she looked upon it as an investment in improved park patrols.

Dian had no tolerance for those who abused animals.

When I was working on the ranch in Montana, there was a real jerk hunter type who delighted in snaring ground squirrels alive. He would then hang them kicking and wiggling from a fence and practice shooting them with his big game rifle. When I told him to stop, he simply laughed and told me where to go. He was practicing for the hunting season when he would go after deer and anything else that moved. Well, somebody must have poured some mud in his rifle because one day,
blooey
, it blew up in his hands and the shock broke his nose. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy!

On a visit to Ruhengeri, Dian and a student were driving along the crowded, dusty main street when they saw a man beating a sick and half-starved Alsatian. Almost before the combi could be stopped, Dian shot out the door and across the road to the rescue. The dog’s tormentor fled, but Dian learned from bystanders that the dog belonged to an American woman married to an African. She lifted the animal into the back of her combi and drove to the woman’s house, there to inform her through clenched teeth that, like it or not, the dog was going to Karisoke to be looked after until it regained its health. The owner, who was considerably shorter than Dian, wordlessly acquiesced, although she later gathered enough courage to telephone Dian’s hotel to accuse her of stealing the animal.

At Karisoke a grumbling student was assigned to construct a chicken wire dog-run and, under Dian’s supervision, nursed the animal back to health. It was eventually returned to its owner with stern instructions for its future care and a warning that it would be removed for good if it was again mistreated.

Dian continued to view most of the students coming to work at Karisoke with a jaundiced eye. She especially disliked their book-bound softness and their youthful preoccupation with self, which she called “me-itis.” She may also have envied them their youth and lack of responsibilities.

I’ve just returned from a visit to Kabara. I had to set up six nasty little census workers there some four days ago, so I didn’t get to really enjoy, remember, and breathe the spot with all of its beauty until today, when I came back through the saddle with just one porter…. Changing nappies for six kids at Kabara took most of the joy out of the four days.

Of a dozen or more students from universities in Britain and the United States who worked at Karisoke between 1970 and 1974, no more than four met with her approval. These were the ones who, in Dian’s view, placed the interests of the gorillas above their own. They showed their worth by adopting Dian’s own Spartan attitude toward the discomforts of their surroundings: by being willing to risk life and limb in the continuing battle against poachers and herders, by unflagging devotion to the task of locating and observing the animals no matter what the weather, and, most of all, by treating the gorillas with respect, recognizing that these superb creatures were according them a great privilege by tolerating the human presence.

One student stood out among that small handful of worthies: a Cambridge undergraduate named Sandy Harcourt. He had first approached Dian after an informal slide show she had given at Cambridge, asking if there was any chance to work for her at Karisoke. His academic credentials were impressive and she liked his lean, hawkish good looks. She agreed to hire him for three months in the summer of 1971 to help with the census. With her encouragement he returned the following year to begin a behavioral study of gorillas for his Ph.D.

Dian saw little of Sandy Harcourt during his three-month census stint since he spent most of that time in remote bush camps. However, when he returned to begin work on his Ph.D. study in June of 1972, just days after Dian’s final break with Bob Campbell, she put him in the cabin the photographer had vacated and which she was painstakingly redecorating.

Short, wiry, and given to rolling his sleeves up above his elbows to display his sinewy arms, Harcourt possessed classic,
angular Anglo-Saxon features. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, he had the intensity of a young Battle of Britain pilot. He was twenty years Dian’s junior, and she found him endearing. Before many months had passed, he was signing his notes to her “All my love, Sandy,” and her replies began, “My dearest Sandy.”

Dian’s journal reveals the tenderness she felt for him.

We went down the mountain to Ruhengeri for some shopping errands and on the way back ran into some Tutsi herders and their cattle. Sandy took out after them like a tiger, and a Tutsi youngster got so scared he ran to me for shelter. When Sandy got back to camp he was crying and yelling with anger and frustration at finding cows on the trail where Group 6 was this morning. I gave him a strong gin and tonic and he apologized for losing control. Poor boy, I feel so sorry for him, but he must learn to live with it. A week ago we were out to Group 5 and I was so tired by the time we found them. Had a horrid coughing fit, but Sandy was so sweet and gentle with me. He is a joy to have at camp.

In November, Dian left Karisoke in the care of Sandy Harcourt and another highly regarded Cambridge student, Ric Elliott, while she flew to the United States to assist in editing the National Geographic film shot by Bob Campbell and Alan Root. From Washington she would fly on to Cambridge for another three-month stint at university.

Parting from Sandy was not easy.

I had cooked a farewell breakfast, which turned out all burnt and horrid. He sat there without eating, very quiet, then just broke up. He said he didn’t know how he was going to stay on without me and grabbed me so hard he left a huge bruise on one arm. We were both in tears when I went down the mountain.

Harcourt was determined to earn Dian’s admiration, and to this end he devoted himself almost fanatically to fighting poaching and to driving the Tutsi cattle off the mountain.

Harcourt had been looking for Group 5, which had taken
to ambling about in the farmers’ fields near the foot of the mountain. Harcourt was uneasy that they came “so close to the wogs.” Believing that the massacre of the gorilla group during Goodall’s time at Karisoke had been intended as retaliation for Goodall’s antipoaching activities, Harcourt feared similar vengeance might be visited on Group 5, because he had now shot several poachers’ dogs and a cow. He told Dian that he regretted the shootings but that he’d become so angry at the poachers that “all I remember not to do is actually shoot a person.”

When he told her of having beaten a Tutsi, she was very concerned; however, he justified his actions because the man had tried to “brain” him. If the police investigated him, he would be able to plead self-defense.

On her return to Karisoke, Dian and the students continued the campaign of harassment against the herders. Early in July 1973, she and Sandy and Ric Elliott went on a cattle raid. Much of the day was spent rounding up cows scattered over the rugged, heavily forested terrain. Finally, the herd was driven down the trail to the shambas below, where it stampeded through fields of potatoes and peas. The Hutu farmers were justifiably incensed and swarmed angrily around the exhausted trio of whites. A shoving match developed between Sandy and some of the men; then one of the farmers grabbed Ric Elliott and tried to tie him up. With the situation threatening to get completely out of hand, Dian pulled her gun and covered their retreat up the mountain.

She seemed to be winning the battle against the herders, but the severe measures she sometimes felt compelled to take sickened and depressed her.

Near the end of August the study area was inundated with cattle in what seems to have been a final concerted effort by the Tutsi to reassert their ancestral claims to the region. Dian and her students reacted with a ferocity that won the war—but the resultant shooting spree left a score of cattle dead and dying and Dian in the depths of self-disgust.

I hate myself for doing this. The poor cows just won’t die, won’t die. I can’t stand seeing this. I climbed to Thermos Ridge to get away. The fog swirled in and then rain, rain, and more rain. I lay on the grassy ridge in a break in the fog and looked down on camp and wondered why I bothered. In another couple of years or so I’ll be dead, and the cabins will probably end up rusty skeletons when the wogs get through with them. One Ph.D. and a lot of rot will come out of the study-that’s about it!