Gorillas in the Mist (30 page)

She was now face-to-face with the cruel realization that not only would contributions made by British well-wishers in the memory of Digit be withheld from her, they were earmarked for projects she considered either nonessential or downright trivial.

Digit has died in vain!

She scrawled the bitter phrase in heavy letters across a page of her diary, and there are stains on the page that may have been left by tears of anger and frustration.

In May the five hundred pounds promised her by the
FPS
almost four months earlier finally reached Karisoke. It did not suffice to cover the patrol expenses she had already incurred since Digit’s death, and she was once again forced to fall back on her own savings in the never-ending battle to keep the poachers at bay.

She may or may not have appreciated a mea culpa from Richard Wrangham received in early June.

“John Burton, Secretary of the
FPS
… assured me that the
FPS
would receive money as a holding station for you, but then later turned around and said that its disposal was entirely the responsibility of
FPS
…. It leaves a very bad taste in the mouth that they didn’t state clearly what would happen to the money once in their hands.”

She certainly did
not
appreciate a second letter from Sandy Harcourt.

“Paul Watkins has got his visa and I arranged at
FPS
yesterday that they would give him five hundred pounds from project funds for his costs in getting to and from Karisoke and for his maintenance while there.”

Harcourt also informed Dian that he and
FPS
vice-president, Dr. Kai Curry-Lindahl, would visit Rwanda that summer “to discuss and report on everything concerned with conservation of the Parc des Volcans.”

Somewhat later Dian wrote to Bettie Crigler: “I have received only five hundred pounds of the sum collected in England. The rest is to be used for huts for ‘guards’ and for air fare for ‘conservationists’ to fly to Rwanda to assure the safety of the gorillas…. An additional five hundred pounds was used—I call it Digit’s blood money—by Sandy Harcourt to send a twenty-one-year-old English boy here after I had asked him not to come…. He was another ‘four-day wonder.’ Has now left for home, but knew he’d been used at the other end since he didn’t want to come here all that badly…. I am more than a little angry. Surely Digit didn’t die to pay the air fare of Englishmen.”

Amy Vedder and Bill Weber, whom Dian soon came to refer to as the V-W couple, were soon followed to Karisoke by another American, a studious-looking youth by the name of David Watts, who was given to wearing granny spectacles and playing the violin.

While Vedder and Watts immersed themselves in gorilla research for their doctoral degrees, Weber was gathering material on socio-ecology for his master’s. Ian Redmond, now the veteran in camp, continued to spend most of his time on antipoaching work.

Ever since Digit’s death, Dian had been apprehensive that another disaster would be visited on the gorillas. In early March
she heard that a Rwandan poacher had been arrested while crossing into Zaire with a captive baby gorilla. According to rumor, the young animal had been confiscated by the Zairean authorities and was being kept at the headquarters of the Parc des Virungas, which abuts on the Parc des Volcans.

Dian alerted her intelligence network and by mid-March had confirmation of the rumor, together with the information that the young gorilla was very sick.

She decided to mount a rescue mission. On March 18, accompanied by the V-Ws, she drove to Gisenyi, close to the Zairean border, where she had many friends, both native and European.

By means that still remain somewhat murky she established contact with an assistant conservateur at the headquarters of the Parc des Virungas in Rumangabo—a young man whose real identity she protected behind the nom de plume of Faustin. Faustin managed to spirit Dian’s party across the border and into the unpleasantly familiar “castle” where Dian had languished during the Tshombe rebellion. Here they were shown a four-year-old juvenile gorilla in a near terminal state of illness and emaciation.

The park people had a problem. They had strong orders from Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire, a thousand miles to the east, to keep it alive at any costs, but when we got there it was nearly dead. I told the worried conservateur if he would let me have it, I would try to save its life and would give it back to them if I succeeded.

After a considerable period of deliberation, he concurred, but there was no mistaking his fear of Kinshasa. He told us the gorilla couldn’t be moved until the capital was contacted by radio for authorization. It was too late to do it that day, so in the meantime we were given a guard’s room where I asked Amy to stay with the baby for the night, to hold it and give it the love it so desperately needed. I didn’t dare stay since I was illegally in Zaire and had to drive back across the border before dark.

I sneaked back again next morning with Faustin. We drove to Goma, where there was a radio that would reach the capital.

We were given one hour to complete the call. It took fifty minutes to reach the proper person to hear our request; but he said the president of Zaire would have to rule on it, and the reply might come late that afternoon via a series of local radio links. So we went back to park headquarters to wait.

Finally at 4:00
P.M.
a garbled message came through giving the President’s permission to take the baby back to camp. For reasons not disclosed, the conservateur wouldn’t let the youngster be taken across the border by car, so Bill and Amy agreed to take it to Karisoke over the mountains, taking turns carrying it in a sling, accompanied by armed Zairean guards.

It was then after 5:00
P.M.
, when the Rwandan border closed until morning, so I had to sit in the car between the customs posts all night, scared that the Zairean military might come and arrest me. But at dawn I got across to Gisenyi and then back up the mountain where the baby had just arrived.

It is near death, anemic, totally dehydrated, emaciated, diarrheic, blood and mucus in the dung, filled with oozing sores, lice and fleas, with wire scars around its wrists, and-the one thing above all that will likely kill it-his left foot is only a swollen, gangrenous stump with the wire snare that caught it deeply embedded above where the foot should be. I never saw anything like this; the toes we only found today, bent under the foot and embedded in the layers of pus and skin flaps on the sole of what was once the foot.

We’ve had it five days now, giving it twenty-four-hour-a-day care. But yesterday I made the decision the foot has to come off, despite its general physical condition, or it will die for sure. Have asked a leper surgeon, highly qualified,
to come to camp to perform this as soon as possible. At least we can get the snare off and, from there, see if it can be saved. I am becoming more and more depressed about the chances of any miracles keeping it going, and the surgery is the last resort. This, on top of Digit, is so frustrating it leaves nothing left to be believed in.

Lolly Prescada, the surgeon referred to, sent an apologetic note to the effect that she could not climb to Karisoke for a day or two, which Dian felt would be too late. This message arrived along with mail from England containing more bad news about the Digit Fund. Combined with other recent events, the effect of these several disappointments was to sink Dian into deep depression.

Pending her arrival, Lolly had recommended giving the sick gorilla a saline solution orally to counteract its dehydration. Late in the evening Dian went to the cabin shared by the V-Ws, in a spare room of which the animal was temporarily housed.

I went down and made Bill and Amy angry. I did make them give the medicine and the baby choked. Later that night got note from Amy saying baby was dying. Artificial respiration. She did-he didn’t. I tried and failed. Amy cried. Terrible. He said I wanted baby to die. I carried body back to my house. I stay awake all night.

Next morning Dian took the corpse to Ruhengeri hospital. An autopsy confirmed a massive gangrene infection in the injured foot, and pneumonia of such long duration that both lungs had become little more than pus-and mucus-filled sacs. The doctors concluded that the animal had been doomed long before it reached Karisoke.

It is not clear whether Dian fully accepted this verdict. There is no doubt but that the episode would haunt her for years to come. There is also no question but that accusations to the effect that she had been the proximate cause of the baby’s death would be used against her by ill-wishers with telling effect. The pain of Digit’s death had been almost
unbearable—it had now been agonizingly intensified by her failure to save the kidnapped infant.

In her extremity she could not immediately face returning to Karisoke, so she drove to Gisenyi, hoping to be able to unburden herself to Rosamond Carr. Unfortunately, Rosamond had just left home for a trip to the United States. Although by then it was late in the evening, Dian retraced the rough route to Ruhengeri, then turned southeastward to make the three-hour drive to Kigali.

Although she was aware that Bettie Crigler was also away in the United States, she nevertheless went to the embassy. Here she found a comforter in the ambassador, who gave her food and drink, listened patiently to her outpouring, and provided her with a room and bed. Her gratitude was heartfelt, if somewhat enigmatic.

Everything came true, just as I knew it would.

On April 7 the parents of Debi Hamburger, the young woman who had so wanted to work with Dian, came to Karisoke. They bore her ashes and a bronze memorial plaque. Although their arrival at this particular time might have been expected to produce an unbearable emotional overload on a woman already stressed to the breaking point, it had the opposite effect.

Simba, the female who was carrying Digit’s child, had her baby on the night of the sixth-a bit of badly needed good news. The baby’s name is Mwelu, which in Swahili means Bright and Shining Light. This little bit of Digit was given this name that we had earlier chosen for the American girl, Debi Hamburger, who was due to come up here two years ago, until she was found to have cancer of the breast. Once that was operated on, she was determined to come up last year; but it was too late.

I’d previously told the students that the next baby born would be called Mwelu, in honor of Debi-a super girl. Simba timed her birth rather well so that on the eighth I
was able to take the Hamburgers to see Group 4 and listen to Mwelu scream her head off because she was in a nettle patch. Debi’s parents were so happy.

Next day, with Group 5, Debi’s mom and pop were covered with gorillas and their happiness made me ever so happy too. But of course they had to leave. I will hire a plane before the end of the month to scatter Debi’s ashes over the Virungas, as this is what she wanted.

Meanwhile, still brooding over the grim night of the baby gorilla’s death, the V-W couple decided to go to Kigali and tell ambassador Crigler their version of what had happened. “Because he was a very good friend of hers, we thought somebody should know how low she was sinking … we weren’t about to drag her through the mud or anything. We thought … that the best thing to do would be to try to convince her to leave the country.”

Perhaps their stint in the Peace Corps had persuaded them that they were competent to judge a woman like Dian Fossey. Unfortunately, the story—which lost nothing in the telling—reached Monfort and the other Europeans, with the result that within a very brief span of time it gained common and contorted currency. Drunk and incompetent, Dian Fossey had been responsible for a gorilla’s death! The woman who pretended to be the mountain gorillas’ most dedicated champion was hardly better than the poachers she persecuted! Crigler himself wrote off the ugly gossip for what it was, but those who disliked Dian made the most of it.

For some time she was unaware of what was being said about her. She was, in fact, enjoying the only happy weeks the year would bring. On May 8 a dream she had been nurturing through eight long and lonely months became a reality. Dr. Jean Gespar arrived to spend the best part of a month with her at Karisoke.

The interlude with him was not entirely idyllic, but it was close enough. Jean was almost as fascinated by the lives of the gorillas as she was, and the couple spent endless daylight hours with Groups 4 and 5. In the evenings after dinner, which Dian
cooked in the little kitchen of her cabin, they walked hand-inhand on the meadow under the looming old volcanoes, listening to the eerie cries of the hyrax and the barking of the bushbucks.

On May 10, Ian Redmond returned to England, having prolonged his stay at Karisoke for three months in order to organize the antipoaching patrol program. He had done incomparably well; but the failure of the Fauna Preservation Society to provide the funds needed to hire and train new men meant that the burden of patrol work had fallen mostly on him and the camp trackers. This had resulted in increasing friction between Dian and the three research students, who were not particularly interested in fighting poaching, but did want the services of the trackers in order to further their own projects.

Ian’s efforts had been effective in keeping poachers under control in the home territory, but beyond that they did as much as they pleased. On his last patrol, two days before leaving Karisoke, Ian had found and cut some forty snares in the saddle region where Digit had been killed—ominous evidence that the poachers were still ranging in force on the periphery of the study area.

Jean Gespar left Karisoke on May 26, having made it clear to Dian that he considered his visit to have been a pleasant interlude but that the affair was something he did not intend to pursue.

With his departure Dian was alone in a camp whose other white occupants were either neutral or hostile toward her. Surrounded by poachers against whose depredations she could do very little, she was deeply apprehensive about what might happen next.