Gorillas in the Mist (23 page)

In May 1976, Dian returned to Cambridge. Her thesis had been accepted and she now only had to pass an oral examination. Although she had never earned a master’s degree, and even her B.A. in occupational therapy had no bearing on zoology, her study of the mountain gorillas of the Virungas contained such an enormous amount of new information on so many varied aspects of their lives that the examiners were pleased to confirm her doctorate.

At long last she was
Dr
. Fossey.

From Cambridge, Dian traveled to California to take part in a National Geographic Society-sponsored symposium featuring
her self, Dr. Jane Goodall, and the as-yet-undoctored Biruté Galdikas—Leakey’s three primate ladies, or the “trimates” as they were sometimes called. This was a rare treat for the audience but a harrowing experience for Dian, who was suffering from dysentery.

There was the usual obligatory visit to the Prices, after which Dian flew to Washington where she cataloged film and photos for her National Geographic sponsors and brought the Research Committee up-to-date on Karisoke’s operations. She returned to Karisoke late in June with her emotional equilibrium much improved.

Her first concern was for her gorillas. The day after her return, she and Rwelekana made a twelve-kilometer sweep through the highlands, searching—unsuccessfully, she was happy to note—for traps and other evidence of poachers. A week later she trekked across the mountains to Kabara in Zaire (as the Congo was now called) to satisfy herself that all was well with the gorillas in that region.

Several students worked at Karisoke through the summer of 1976, and Dian kept close rein on them. There were confrontations with certain individuals who resented her “interference” in their work, an attitude that exasperated her.

Who gave them their work? Who showed them how to do it? The arrogance of some of these know-it-alls is not to be believed. One little shit from New York with a master’s had the nerve to ask me where I got mine. I told him to call me
DOCTOR
Fossey from now on.

In August she had trouble with a group of French students.

I went to their cabin to tell them their field notes were overdue, and one of the bastards pushed me out the door and down the steps to the ground. I do believe he would have hit me to death if my Africans hadn’t been present. He screamed, “You treat us like monkeys.” I believe he is cracking up. At any rate, I’ll keep my cabin locked until next Wednesday when they leave.

The “student” she liked best during that period was not a student at all. She had found Tim White hitchhiking along the road near Ruhengeri. He was a young Virginian who had been seeing the world on the proverbial shoestring. Finding himself in central Africa, he had gravitated toward the Virungas after hearing about the gorillas. Although he had no academic training, he proved to be an excellent field worker, selflessly devoted to the interests of the gorillas. More than that, he was a genuine handyman, which was something the average Stanford or Cambridge Ph.D. student seldom was. Among other things, he soon had every Aladdin lamp and spirit stove in camp repaired and functioning perfectly.

Dian rarely saw Peter Weiss during the summer of 1976, although she continued to receive regular intelligence reports on Fina’s activities.

Fina seen in Ruhengeri by Guamhogazi with kids, at the Indian store. If she is shopping in town she must be living with Peter.

October 12:
Guamhogazi said Fina was seen in the car with Weiss in the afternoon along with the kids.
BUT
he was seen alone in the car in the
A.M.
and she alone walking on the road beyond the hospital.

Early in October, Kelly Stewart returned to Karisoke to continue her studies. Dian welcomed her back, but there was an element of constraint between them.

I go down to Kelly’s, find she has dyed her hair but is still fat. She started to say, “I’m so happy to see …” then just let it trail off. She had pinned a sketch of a gorilla done by Sandy Harcourt on her wall, and she showed me a fertility charm given to her by his sister, so I guess they will get married when she finishes here. I wish her lots of luck….

On the morning of October 24, Dian unexpectedly received a “passionate letter” from Peter. This was the first she had heard from him in months, and despite her resolution to put him out of mind, she immediately decided to go down the mountain.

He was home when I got there and wanted me at once,
but not ten minutes later the phone rings-a cesarean at the hospital and he is gone for an hour and a half. Then the kids come home-hell. Then we start again and some bastard comes over for a beer and I have to stay in the bedroom-and then dinner. He said little about Fina, just that she’d been there three times for lunch.

The visit had been less than satisfactory, and when Dian gloomily returned to Karisoke the next day, she learned that Cindy had tried to follow her to Ruhengeri, with near-disastrous results.

She ran down the road after the combi, and two wogs, full of pombe, both poachers, came out of a bar and stoned her. They hit her and Semitoa, who was trying to catch her. My watchman caught her as she was fleeing from the wogs and brought her back to camp. No bones broken, but she was badly bruised. Nemeye said I should charge them, so I did.

One of the two men who had stoned the dog served two months in jail for his offense. The other could not be found.

Nearly two months later a group of park guards arrived at Karisoke with a prisoner in tow. He was identified to Dian as being the second man in the Cindy stoning incident.

He had been hiding in Zaire, they said. He was drunk. I played “let’s stone Cindy” and nearly knocked him out.

Dian’s helpful hitchhiker, Tim White, left Karisoke early in December to continue his world travels. It was a sad day for Dian. However, his replacement had already arrived. This was Ian Redmond, a fair-haired, boyish young Englishman who would prove to be everything Tim White had been and more. Dian considered him the finest student ever to set foot in the park, although this opinion may have rested more on his devotion to the welfare of the animals than on his academic prowess.

Her initial impression of Ian Redmond was, however, anything but favorable.

November 7:
Ian character arrives at 7:30 or so wearing shorts and no shoes-crazy. For sure this kid is not going to work out.

November 8:
Redmond kid still hasn’t fixed breakfast by 9:30-wants to do cine and stills and everything else he can think of. A real mess. He got from England to Mombasa on £9! That’s impossible!

Although she thought him feckless, she could not help liking him. She began referring to him half derisively, half affectionately, as “the boy,” “the kid,” sometimes “the child.”

In a continuing effort to patch things up with Dian, Peter Weiss invited her to spend Christmas with him and the children. Ever hopeful, she descended the mountain.

Peter gave me a tape recorder and seemed very proud of it. We have champagne and cake for dinner-not much else…. We have breakfast alone and then he goes out to fiddle with car. I am so bored. I work on slides.

Very good fillet for lunch and then he naps. I return to slides and in comes Fina. I was scared-she didn’t talk to me. I gathered up slides and returned to the bedroom. We waited for her to leave.

In evening we start game of Master Mind and I win. We play more after dinner and he loses all.

On Boxing Day she returned, dispirited, to Karisoke, convinced at last that no possibility of a life with Peter Weiss existed. Since this was the case, she continued to make the best of what she had.

Climb up mountain cold and wet. Change clothes and fix Christmas for the two kids, who were feeling sorry for selves. Ian brought me a mobile he’d made out of tin can lids, and Kelly gave me some neat sketches. I gave them each a pile of stuff. It was really pleasant, and I cooked a good dinner for a change, and we all had some fun while the hail banged down on the roof like fury. They didn’t leave until long after midnight. I couldn’t sleep and feel so tired of it all.

Next day in
P.M.
Kelly said the boy told her he had never had a nicer Christmas and never gotten so many presents.

C
hristmas 1976 at Karisoke had been relatively pleasant. Dian’s friendship with Kelly had regained some of its warmth, and she was becoming fond of Ian, who was developing into a gorilla enthusiast after her own heart. The African staff was functioning well; the poachers seemed to have been at least temporarily subdued; and the gorillas were free of undue interference from mankind.

However, not all was sweetness and light. Dian’s health was worsening and she found it increasingly difficult to join the gorillas on their rain-chilled daily rounds. Trapped more and more in her cabin by an ailing body, she was also bogged down in the never-ending demands of scientific record-keeping and of preparing the monthly reports to her sponsors in the United States, upon whom the survival of Karisoke depended. An avalanche of paper was becoming the bane of her existence. Now that she had her Ph.D., she was also under increasing pressure to publish her scientific findings. And she was making her first tentative attempt to write a popular book about her life with the gorillas.

During early January 1977, she had a visit from Barbara and Richard Wrangham, friends from her Cambridge days. When the Wranghams left on January 12, Dian accompanied them to
Kigali, nominally as an act of courtesy but in fact as an excuse for an unheralded and hopeful visit to Peter. It was an ill-omened venture. Torrential rains had turned the roads into wallows, and having mired her car a mile outside of Ruhengeri, Dian appeared at Peter’s door soaked and covered with red mud.

To her relief there was no sign of Fina. Although Peter took her in and somewhat reluctantly made love to her, it was a passive gesture devoid of real affection. Nevertheless, Dian tried to evade the obvious conclusion.

I guess he was bothered at trying to hide his deceit with Fina, or perhaps he was feeling guilty, which I can understand.

Early next morning she slogged her way back up the greasy trail to Karisoke, wrestling with the onset of another attack of pneumonia. Dosing herself with antibiotics, she crawled into bed but could not sleep. All night long she lay listening to the rain beating on the cabin roof, thinking about Peter. Was he really lost to her for good? She would not yet believe that this was so. With the morning she decided that the matter had to be resolved. Once more she descended the mountain. Realizing that she was ill, Basili offered to accompany her to the car park but was brusquely refused and told to go about his business.

Peter had just returned home from the hospital when Dian burst in upon him, full of angry accusations alternating with pathetic demands for reassurance. Goaded beyond endurance, Weiss admitted that he had indeed been sleeping with Fina—the last occasion only four days earlier.

He couldn’t lie to me when I asked him directly. Now I’m sure she must be pregnant again and that he will marry her.

“Do you really love her, Peter?” Dian pleaded, putting all to the test.

“I love many people,” was his cold response.

Alternating between concern for her and self-justifying anger, Weiss poured her a drink of rum and put her to bed. It
was not the bed of reconciliation. Dian swallowed three sleeping pills and finally slept.

He left the house at an early hour and Dian awakened to the bleak certainty that she had once more been cast out from the solace and sanctuary of a human heart.

I lay on his bed for a long time and cried and cried. I held Sophie in my arms, but I knew I had lost her too.

Leaving Peter Weiss’s house for the last time, Dian fled to Rosamond Carr. By the time she had bounced her combi over the rock-strewn track to the plantation, she was so ill she had to be helped from the vehicle by Sembrugari, Rosamond’s headman.

As she had done so often, Rosamond took Dian in and comforted her.

She was so nice to me. She made me a lovely lunch, gave me a hot bath, a brief dinner and put me to bed, for sleep.

Despite Rosamond’s remonstrances, Dian insisted on returning to camp a few days later, to be cared for by her “wogs” until the pneumonia had run its course.

While Ian, Kelly, and the trackers continued to slog through the saturated forests and nettle patches, collecting infinitesimal facts to add to the scientific chronicle of gorilla lore, Dian fought her way back to a semblance of normality.

On January 24 she and Nemeye set off in pelting rain to visit Group 4 on Honeyman Hill. Dian’s scientific notes for this day are so sparse it seems obvious that her real motive was not the requirements of science but the needs of self. Through five long hours she crouched in the sodden vegetation communing with living beings who she knew would not reject her.

Uncle Bert was so super-he rested next to me in his day nest and all of them stayed close by. Little Kweli, Uncle Bert’s year-old baby, came and sat on my foot while his mother, Macho, groomed herself, eyeing me once in a while to make sure I was doing a good job as a baby-sitter.

Late in the day a singularly heavy downpour roared through the clearing where the band was feeding. Visibility had dropped
to almost nothing when out of the murk Dian’s favorite, Digit, appeared. He stood erect for several seconds, staring down at her recumbent form while the rain streamed off his gleaming pelt. Then, with what must have seemed to her like a calculated gesture of empathy, he pulled up a stalk of wild celery, stripped away the tough outer leaves with one strong hand, dropped the peeled stalk close to her feet, and slipped away into the gathering gloom.

Although the poaching lull continued throughout February, its end had been foreshadowed in late January when Seregera, a guide-turned-poacher who had worked for her in the early years and whom she had fired in 1972, was released from a spell in prison. Seregera not only considered the Karisoke study area his own personal hunting ground, but his resentment of the camp and all it stood for guaranteed that he would return to plague it.