Gorillas in the Mist (42 page)

But Karisoke remained very much with her. During her visit to Washington on March 23, Fulton Brylawski summoned a meeting of the Board of the Digit Fund Inc. in his offices. It was attended not only by the three directors—Dian, Brylawski, and Dr. Snider—but by Melvin M. Payne, Chairman of the Board of the National Geographic Society, and by Secretary-Treasurer Robinson McIlvaine.

Dian reported on the use she had made of the fund’s money in training, equipping, and paying antipoacher patrols, and on their accomplishments— “four thousand traps destroyed in a single year.” With regret she told her board that the patrols had been suspended since mid-March because in her absence nobody at camp was willing to supervise and organize them.

Then it was the secretary-treasurer’s turn. According to the minutes of the meeting:

“Mr. McIlvaine proposed that the board consider a dissolution of the Digit Fund Inc. as a separate entity, to allow it to be merged into the activities of the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation.”

He ran headlong into trouble. The tractable Dian Fossey he had known in other days was not at that meeting. In her place was a woman who refused to countenance such a merger and who proclaimed in no uncertain terms that the Digit Fund would continue in existence until the last poacher had been driven from the Virungas. She finished with a ringing repetition of her battle cry— “I will
not allow
Digit to have died in vain!”

It was the august Melvin Payne who oiled the troubled waters with the suggestion that a decision be postponed for a year, “upon the understanding that if at that time there was still a consensus for the continuation of the Fund as a separate entity, Mr. McIlvaine might feel compelled to withdraw from an active role in managing the affairs of the Fund.” The meeting was adjourned.

Meanwhile trouble was brewing in Rwanda. The V-W couple had befriended Peter Veit and through him had sounded out Perlmeter about returning to camp and reoccupying their old cabin. Politely but firmly Perlmeter rejected this attempted infiltration. But then, a few days later, von der Becke, who had become friendly with Perlmeter, confided in him that Sandy Harcourt still planned to come to Karisoke and not only had the funding support of the National Geographic Society, but had been told by Benda-Lema that he could return whenever he wished.

The three young men at Karisoke were shaken by the news. None believed he would last very long under Harcourt. So Perlmeter wrote Harcourt a carefully worded letter pointing out that Karisoke was
not
currently being funded by the National Geographic but by Dian herself, and that the center could accommodate no additional researchers. He concluded bravely: “I feel it is my responsibility as on-site director to discourage any attempts by you and your wife to return to the center during the upcoming year.”

Harcourt did not reply. However, he informed the V-W couple that he would soon be arriving in Kigali. When this news reached Stuart, he began to panic. On March 27 he wrote to Dian:

“Harcourt is coming in April—
no doubt to visit camp to see what the situation is. What
is
the status of the camp, Dian? If National Geo gives him money and authority, what course of action do I have to take to prevent his coming and taking charge? You were counting on his pride preventing his coming, but that doesn’t seem to be deterring him in the least!”

No longer isolated on an equatorial mountain, Dian could now fight back more effectively. She appealed directly to the mandarins at the National Geographic Society for support, pointing out that she had fulfilled the conditions demanded of her and asking that the long-deferred maintenance grant that she had been promised be released to the Karisoke Research Center immediately. Perhaps feeling some compunction, the Society agreed to do this. Furthermore, Dian was told that
Harcourt’s grant would be withheld, pending clarification of the situation.

This seemed like victory, but if Dian thought she had checkmated Sandy Harcourt, she greatly underestimated his tenacity. She would also have had to overlook the fact that he was still the first choice of those who wanted her replaced or, depending on how one looked at it, supplanted, at Karisoke.

On April
II
, Stuart Perlmeter wrote again:

“This afternoon I was called upon by Mr. Sandy Harcourt, who proceeded to inform me in his customary style that he was coming to Karisoke whether I like it or not.” Harcourt informed Perlmeter that he had authorization from
ORTPN
and grant money from the Guggenheim Foundation to support both Kelly and himself. “I knew at that point I was dealing with a very ambitious man who was intent on taking this place over as soon as possible.”

Perlmeter concluded that if Harcourt
did
return to Karisoke, he would have no alternative but to leave, even though, “if I leave I’ll be giving in to what Harcourt is hoping for and ushering in a new dynasty.”

This letter did not reach Dian until late in April, which, until then, had been a good month for her. She had given free rein to her deep-rooted domestic instincts, and the apartment was becoming a home. It became uniquely hers when her crates and cases arrived from Washington, and the walls could be hung with African mattings, spears, carvings, and gorilla portraits, giving this otherwise sterile cubicle in a concrete cliff at least an illusion of the ambience of Africa.

During this period she delivered two well-received public lectures and settled into her office at the Langmuir Laboratory. Anita McClellan, a pretty young woman with a strong romantic bent, arrived, bearing an edited copy of Dian’s manuscript. Although the two had previously known each other only through correspondence, they discovered during the next four days that they could become boon companions.

Upon receiving Perlmeter’s
cri de coeur
, Dian dispatched a cable reassuring him that Harcourt and the Mountain Gorilla Project interlopers could and would be kept at bay. To make sure that he stood firm, she proposed to return to Karisoke for a brief visit in July, at which time she would undertake to clear the air with
ORTPN
.

Ten days later another letter from Perlmeter reached her. Its contents were devastating. Paulin Nkubili— “Uncle Billy” —the one Rwandan official she trusted implicitly and who had been her shield through the years, had been accused of involvement in a coup against the president and would probably be executed. Perlmeter then told Dian that he could no longer endure the pressures of Karisoke: “I’ve loved the work up to this point, but I’m afraid if I don’t leave soon I will no longer be able to perform the job I was assigned to do…. Since you are planning to return in July, would it be possible for you to find an interested student who would like to take over the position until you return permanently…. I am serious about a replacement, Dian. I don’t know how much longer I can survive at Karisoke.”

This letter effectively shattered Dian’s fragile sense of wellbeing.

A horrid, horrid day. Bad letter from Stuart. Harcourt will never give up. I don’t know what to do.

Perlmeter’s threatened defection was not the only circumstance fueling a feeling of defeat and depression. She now heard that the National Geographic grant to Harcourt and Kelly was “only on hold” and that a growing number of prominent primatologists were convinced that Harcourt would do a better job of running the center than she had done because:

“He is a more objective and a better-trained scientist.” Despite her long experience in the field and her Cambridge Ph.D., Dian realized that she was still an amateur in the eyes of the scientific establishment.

Throughout May and early June new blows continued to descend upon her. The discovery that she was not the only woman in Glenn’s life temporarily turned what she had called her “rhapsody in Ithaca” into an emotional cacophony.

On May 13 she was told by a prominent neurologist that the damage to her spine was probably irreversible and that she should prepare herself for the likelihood of becoming a paraplegic. She was still suffering from emphysema and undiagnosed thoracic pains. The internal infection (having to do with her kidneys), which she had so optimistically believed defeated, returned to plague her. To further compound her bodily ailments, she had missed several menstrual periods and was afraid she might be pregnant.

The fates gave her no respite. On May 19, McIlvaine abruptly resigned from the Digit Fund Inc., leaving her with the problem of finding someone to sort out the financial tangle between that fund and the AWLF/Digit Fund. Mercifully, the doughty Dr. Shirley McGreal of the International Primate Protection League volunteered her services.

During these weeks Dian’s depression deepened. Night after night she lay awake thinking about Karisoke and yearning for it.

It is my creation. Twelve years of my life! How can I lose it now? What
RIGHT
have they to take it away from me just because I wasn’t born with a Ph.D. in my mouth? It will be the end of the gorillas if they win.

Cindy and Kima began to haunt her too. Not only did she find herself missing them with almost unbearable intensity, but their photographic images by her bed seemed to be accusing her of abandoning them. The gorilla portraits on her walls stared down at her reproachfully.

I’m having horrid, horrid dreams that they will all be killed and it is my fault, my fault, my fault…. I can’t even look their pictures in the eye.

Another of the now-dreaded letters from Perlmeter arrived in late June. Dian spent a few minutes nostalgically examining
the colorful array of Rwandan stamps—delaying the moment when she would have to face news of more disasters at Karisoke. What actually awaited her inside the pale blue airmail envelope was worse than anything she might have anticipated.

“Kima’s death took us all by surprise,” Perlmeter wrote. “I’ve rewritten this letter three times and a hundred times in my head but can’t seem to find the right words.”

He did his best. He described the events of June 4 when he awoke to find Kima almost comatose in her box in Dian’s cabin, where he now slept. After he, John Fowler, and Kanyaragana had tried everything they knew to rouse her, they wrapped her in a blanket and carried her down to Ruhengeri hospital. Unfortunately Dr. Vimont was on holiday and they could find nobody willing to spend time on a monkey. “The last person we asked happened to be Dr. Weiss, who just about threw us out of the place…. It was only after Jean-Pierre told us who he was that we realized our mistake.”

By then Kima was beyond recall. The three men brought her body back to camp and buried it next day, “just past the large hagenia tree in front of your cabin. John is carving a small plaque with Kima’s name on it. I don’t think anything I can say will help at a time like this. Kima led a good life and chased more porters than there are stars in the heavens and gave you more comfort and love than probably any other creature you know. Please, Dian, hang in there and keep your head up.”

Dian tells us little of how this tragedy affected her, other than, “Received news of Kima’s death and went bonkers.” Glenn abandoned his work and spent the next two days comforting her, and the solace he brought was sufficient to carry her through the worst of her mourning.

It was not so much that Kima had given Dian, as Perlmeter wrote, “more love than any other creature you know”—it was that Kima had been the recipient and repository for the outpourings of a woman’s love that could find no other certain channel. Yet Kima was no mere child-surrogate, as some have
said. She was a being whose needs kept Dian’s capacity to love alive through years of disappointments with her own species. Her grief at Kima’s loss was intense and long-lived but not so long-lived as the guilt she felt at having left Kima behind at Karisoke.

Karisoke had now become a frail vessel at the center of a maelstrom generated by agencies of three national governments and such powerful organizations as the Fauna Preservation Society, the World Wildlife Fund, the National Geographic Society, and the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation.

It was painfully clear to Dian that the center could not continue to exist as the ad hoc structure she had originally created. If it was to endure, it would have to be provided with a power base of its own. Early in 1980 she had conceived of something she called an “oversight committee.” This was to be a board of directors recruited from among prestigious primatologists and conservationists in the United States and abroad, who would form an impregnable defensive phalanx to protect the future of Karisoke.

Somewhat to her surprise, even some of those whom she knew to be among her antagonists applauded the idea. By the end of May 1980, sixteen influential men and women had agreed to serve as members of the Board of Scientific Directors of the Karisoke Research Institute. The first meeting was called in Ithaca for June 26 to discuss policy and organization—and to select a field director to run the center in Dian’s absence.

Dian felt confident that her personal choice, Dr. Hal Bauer, would be accepted. But less than two weeks before the meeting, Dian received a confidential telephone call during which she was told that Harcourt had
already been selected
as the new director of Karisoke and would be attending the Ithaca meeting to discuss terms. No alternative would be considered. Unless she accepted Harcourt, there would be no further financial support for Karisoke, and the imprimatur of the scientific establishment would be withdrawn.

Without Harcourt, Karisoke Research Center would not be permitted to survive.

Coming hard on the heels of so many afflictions, this ultimatum was a vicious blow. Yet, in all fairness, many of those involved sincerely believed they were acting in Dian’s best interests. As one participant, who does not care to be identified, explained:

“She was a very sick woman. The life she had led and the terrible physical disabilities had worn her down. They had also seriously affected her judgment. All that she had built at Karisoke was in danger of falling down because of her fixation about poachers. That would have been a terrible loss to science. The only hope was to get her out of it. Not just for a few months, but permanently. In order to save her, we had to out-maneuver her. I don’t think anybody liked it, but it had to be done. She was such a great fighter, you know.”