Gorillas in the Mist (31 page)

A
fter Digit’s death the entire responsibility for the security of the Group 4 family settled back on Uncle Bert. Given a few more years, the two cocky young blackback males, Tiger and Beetsme, would have been able to give useful support to their leader, but they were not yet interested in adult duties. To make Uncle Bert’s load even heavier, all three of his mature females were nurturing young. Macho had three-year-old Kweli; Simba was nursing Digit’s daughter, three-month-old Mwelu. Flossie not only had her newly born baby, Frito, but was also rearing her four-year-old son, Titus, while at the same time keeping an eye on Cleo, her seven-year-old daughter. Another young female, eight-year-old Augustus, was the eleventh member of Uncle Bert’s family.

On July 18 a large “fringe group” of gorillas from the northern slopes of Visoke intruded into Uncle Bert’s home territory and a violent confrontation took place. Without Digit’s support, and with so many females and younger animals to encumber him, Uncle Bert elected to yield ground. He withdrew along the saddle into Zaire. When David Watts caught up with the group at noon next day, he found the animals contentedly relaxing in their day nests in a sunlit glade not far from where Digit had been killed.

Poachers were again ranging freely through this region far removed from Karisoke, and when Watts reported the move to Dian, she was deeply alarmed. During the next few days she debated with herself whether or not to try to herd Group 4 back to the relatively secure slopes of Visoke. However, the turmoil this would have entailed for the gorillas made her hesitant. In the end, she concluded that so long as Watts could be with them during most of the daylight hours, they would be safe enough until they decided to return to Visoke of their own volition.

A week later, at ten-thirty on the morning of July 24, Dian was sitting at her typewriter when there came a hesitant knock on her door. Since everyone in camp had good reason to know how deeply she resented being interrupted when at work, she supposed the intruder to be a tourist, more and more of whom were invading Karisoke uninvited and unannounced. She ignored the knock. When it came again and yet again, she sprang up impatiently and flung the door wide.

David Watts stood before her, his face running with sweat.

One glance told Dian that another disaster had overtaken the gorillas.

“Poachers!”
It was a statement, not a question.

Watts took hold of the doorjamb to steady himself.

“Uncle Bert’s been shot—and his head cut off.”

Half an hour later Nemeye was trotting swiftly down the mountain with a somewhat incoherent note from Dian to Bill Weber, who was “below,” where he had taken to spending much of his time:

“Bill—David just came back from Group 4 with terrible news—please brace yourself for it. Uncle Bert has been killed by poachers.

“Poor David found no sign of the rest of the Group. I’m afraid they’ve all been killed without Uncle Bert. David’s gone out with Vatiri, Rwelekana, and Mukera now to find them. Uncle Bert was probably killed this morning, meaning that Munyarukiko and the other poachers haven’t yet gotten to
Mukingo or wherever it is they hide out after a killing. I gave David the guns, but of first importance now is whether or not any of the group remain alive and if we can help them.

“I am asking you to come up with Nemeye to do a roving patrol to Karisimbi to attempt to capture Munyarukiko, Gashabizi, and Runyagu.

“I am not sure of what I can do that is most functionally right now except kill…. I would like to fly to Kigali and insist on a commando unit for the takeover of Mukingo and then use the soldiers for patrol. I must see President Habyarimana. No more placation or lack of action. Will need people to safeguard anything that possibly remains of Group 4.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Dian knew well enough what she was going to do about the gorilla killers, if she could catch them—but did not know what to do about herself, how to absorb and survive the grief that welled within.

Armed with pistols, Watts and the three Africans returned to the saddle. Uncle Bert’s body lay where it had fallen with a bullet through the heart. The old silverback’s head had been hacked off and was missing. His right side had been ripped open, doubtless for the gall bladder, but his hands were intact. The body was still warm, indicating that Watts must have surprised the poachers at their grisly work.

Cautiously, with pistols cocked, the four men searched the surrounding hagenia woods and nettle patches. They found no other members of Group 4, but a trail of crushed vegetation showed that the survivors had fled back toward Visoke’s slopes. The search party tracked the gorillas for an hour, until halted by a tremendous outburst of shrieks and chest thumping some way ahead.

The fleeing survivors of Group 4 had collided with the fringe group that had dispossessed them a few days earlier. There was pandemonium as three alien silverbacks charged into the panic-stricken fugitives.

Group 4 might well have disintegrated then and there had it not been for David Watts, who led his party to the rescue. The sudden appearance of human beings sent the fringe group off in screaming flight, leaving the now frantically overwrought members of Group 4 to settle down as best they might. Afraid to press on and afraid to turn back, the frightened animals gathered around the nearest approximation of a leader remaining to them—ten-year-old Tiger.

Peering through the foliage, Watts anxiously counted the survivors. Only Uncle Bert and his premier mate, Macho, seemed to be missing. Macho’s young son, Kweli, was present, but whining pitifully. When Watts got back to camp with his report, he and Dian concluded hopefully that Macho had been swept away with the fringe group.

It was now early afternoon. Bill Weber had not yet appeared and Dian would wait no longer.

All the horror and shock of Digit’s murder had returned and I felt I was going to go mad.

Only violent action could bring relief. Raging, she went down the mountain to the office of Paulin Nkubili— “Uncle Billy,” as she called him to herself—the one Rwandan official she felt she could count on to assist with what she had in mind.

Nkubili did not disappoint her. Outraged himself by what had happened, he agreed to stage a raid on Munyarukiko’s village. He summoned a platoon of commandos from the military camp, and at dusk Dian and the well-armed force carried out an assault on the Batwa village. It was a scene of great confusion, yells of fear and fleeing people—a scene comparable perhaps to what had ensued when Group 4’s survivors had been assaulted by the fringe group.

The soldiers found and confiscated a quantity of spears, bows and arrows, and hashish pipes, but did not find Munyarukiko, who, it was later learned, had fled into Zaire. However, they did discover his boon companion, Gashabizi, huddling under a bed. Terrified by the presence of that avenging Valkyrie, the
Lone Woman of the Forests, no less than by Nkubili and the commandos, the man confessed his complicity in Digit’s death and to having taken part in this latest atrocity as well.

Gashabizi’s capture made that long night worthwhile. Maybe it was best that Munyarukiko wasn’t there. I might have killed him myself. Uncle Billy asked if we had done enough, but I said “No!” He just looked at me and nodded.

Next morning she accompanied the soldiers and Nkubili in a raid on the village where another notorious poacher, Sebahutu, lived with his seven wives and families.

We caught him outside his compound as he tried to flee. Then we found his jacket, sodden with blood, and a blood-sticky spear and panga that one of his wives tried to hide from us.

Sebahutu, it was revealed, had fired the shot that killed Uncle Bert.

Exhausted physically and emotionally, Dian slowly drove her Volkswagen combi back to the foot of the mountain. Before she could begin the long climb to camp, a porter intercepted her with a message from Amy Vedder:

“We hate to have to tell you this. Macho is dead. Vatiri found her body only a hundred feet from Uncle Bert’s. Both the bodies are now back at camp. She was also shot. Her side was slashed open, but they did not take her head….”

The passions this note aroused were so intense that nowhere, not in her journal nor in her letters, was Dian able to commit them to paper at the time, but in her book, written many years later, she tells us something of how she felt.

Dazed, disbelieving, I drove back to Ruhengeri thinking of the day Macho had walked up to my side to gaze into my face with her wide, trusting eyes, and the tenderness she had always lavished on Kweli. How would the three-year-old survive without his mother or father?

Nkubili’s reaction upon hearing of yet another killing was intense anger. He immediately planned a third patrol
and ordered
all
suspected poachers brought in for questioning. The next day I drove my combi filled with armed soldiers and a police inspector to a village adjacent to the Parc des Volcans. I parked out of sight of the village and the soldiers poured from the car. Carrying their guns high over their heads and moving as if they were marines making a beach landing, the men quickly surrounded the marketplace to confine several hundred people inside the square…. One Hutu man wouldn’t stay in the hut where we told him to go. Urgently he pleaded in Kinyarwandan to stay out while I replied in Swahili for him to return inside, neither of us understanding what the other was saying. After several minutes, with as much dignity as he could muster, he walked about a dozen yards away, turned his back and tended to the call of nature to the delighted cheers of the nearby people…. From the market we hurried to a nearby, secreted little Twa village where three of the smallest Twas I’ve seen yet were captured. One was Gashabizi’s brother-in-law and has a long poaching record. We then went to a distant settlement to capture Munyarububga, whom the military were particularly pleased to capture as he had escaped from them several times in the past. Munyarububga was an evil man whose situation was not helped by the fact that he’d been drinking heavily. I could feel his eyes boring into the back of my head as we drove back to the Ruhengeri prison … these were some of the five surprise raids made that day on villages around the park. The raids resulted in the capture of fourteen poachers, all of whom were detained in the Ruhengeri prison to await trial.
*

Any sense of satisfaction Dian may have felt at the conclusion of these raids, and any belief she may have held that all the principal perpetrators of Uncle Bert’s and Macho’s slaughters would soon be apprehended, were of short duration.

After the final raid, as she was driving toward Ruhengeri accompanied by Gwehandagoza, six captured poachers, some soldiers and policemen, she overtook the park conservateur walking along the road. Dian offered him a lift to park headquarters. He climbed into the combi, where he burst into an incomprehensible tirade in Kinyarwandan.

After she had let him off, with no more thanks than an angry glare, she asked Gwehandagoza what he had been saying.

The conservateur had told the officials with me not to continue the pursuit of poachers because the killings had occurred in Zaire and were not, he stressed, the concern of the Rwandans.

He also told them that he was then returning from Gisenyi where he had gone to take “protective” custody of a young gorilla. He was angry because something had gone wrong and the baby gorilla wasn’t delivered to him, and he gave the impression I was involved in this.

Until late that night Dian mulled over her dark memories of 1969 when the young gorillas Pucker and Coco had been captured on the orders of an earlier conservateur. The black conviction was forming that the deaths of Uncle Bert and Macho had been part of a new zoo kidnap plot.

As soon as it was light next morning, she sent the trackers out to determine if Kweli was still with Group 4.

Although the animals were too disturbed to tolerate a close approach, binoculars revealed that Kweli was with the group-but seemed to have lost the use of his right arm.

Dian was able to piece together the story of what had happened to Group 4.

The latest news is tragic beyond belief. On July 24, Uncle Bert, the majestic silverback, was killed by a bullet in his heart. The sixteen/seventeen-year-old female, Macho, mother of three-year-old infant, Kweli, was shot and killed in the same raid by a bullet that went through her right arm, directly through her heart, smashing the ribs and exiting
from her body. Her son, Kweli, was wounded through the right upper arm, probably by the same bullet, but he lives.

By tracking we found that the poachers had spent the night in the park in a distant area of Mt. Karisimbi before descending into the saddle area of Zaire where Group 4 had been for several days. They met the Group in what was evidently a planned event shortly after they’d arisen from the night nests, chased them for roughly ninety meters, and first killed Macho, who was probably carrying Kweli.

Trail evidence suggests Uncle Bert was fleeing in the lead of the Group as he had when Digit was killed, trying to lead them back to the safety of the mountain slopes. When Macho was shot, he turned back in an attempt to go to her assistance and was shot head-on.

Although the poachers took Uncle Bert’s head, they were really after Kweli. They would probably have got him if Uncle Bert had not come back and given his life for him so he had time to escape with the others. The conservateur knew there would be killings the day
before
they occurred, and he went off to collect Kweli, not known to him by name of course, the morning of the killings.

Any remaining doubts Dian might have had that the double murder had been part of another attempted kidnapping were dissipated when a friend who worked as an adviser to the conservateur of the Zairean Parc des Virungas visited her soon afterward at Karisoke. He had seen a letter from the Rwandan conservateur to his opposite number in Zaire that expressly stated that two gorillas “from one of Fossey’s groups” had been killed so that an infant could be captured. The Rwandan conservateur regretted that the attempt had failed!