Gorillas in the Mist (53 page)

I didn’t want to keep her away from her group, so gave her no encouragement and she climbed a hagenia tree outside my cabin where she rested all day. In the evening we could all hear chest beating up the mountain, and the youngster climbed down and went off to rejoin her father, Nunkie, some one and a half kilometers away. Next day her mom, Simba, found her way back to Nunkie too, so there was this happy reunion.

For a while two others of Nunkie’s females, Pandora and Petula, stayed with Tiger, but then he evidently decided he wasn’t a family man after all and gave them the slip to pursue his lone way again. Petula had left her four-year-old with Nunkie but has lost an eighteen-month-old infant that can’t now be found. These two females are now trying to join up with Group 5!

All of the above sure sounds like a gorilla soap opera. Will Tiger ever find his perfect mate! Are Pandora and Petula really lesbians? Is the King of the Mountain, Nunkie, over the hill?

A month went by.

Gorilla Soap is continuing. Petula split with Pandora and disappeared on the other side of Visoke in search of Nunkie, who by then was back on this side again! Pandora just rejoined him and Simba and his two remaining females yesterday after traveling all over the countryside.

THEN.
Last week Tiger struck the group again, just behind camp, and everything is in chaos once more! This
time Tiger took off with Simba who is his half sister, but her daughter, Jenny, is again missing. Simultaneously another of Nunkie’s females, Fuddle, and her two offspring split off and now are doing the same thing that happened to Pandora-wandering around looking for Nunkie. Nothing like this has ever happened before in all my years in the Virungas and none of it makes sense.

On August 20, Dian added a footnote to this confusing roundelay.

The crazy, unheard-of interaction between Tiger and Nunkie’s Group thankfully seems to be over. Petula is still missing. Our hero, Tiger, ends up with his half sister, Simba, whose daughter, Jenny, finally rejoined Nunkie, whose group is now back together except for two females and the lost baby. But I’m not counting on the story’s being over. Tune in tomorrow, and we’ll see what happens next!

Strange events were taking place even in the staid purlieu of Group
5
.

That Group is having problems too because old Beethoven is allowing his sons Ziz and Pablo to copulate with his oldest female, Effie. And none of the three males seems to be interested in the sexually mature, hot and eager young females Puck, Tuck, Poppy, and Pansy, so they are now doing their thing together and fighting and squabbling like mad. All this is behavior such as I never thought could occur. It is just too humanlike!

Visitors abounded this summer. During the first week in August a dozen scientists attending a world primate conference in Nairobi climbed to Karisoke. They were surprised to discover that the derogatory reports they had been hearing about Dian had been grossly exaggerated. An English primatologist was subsequently heard to say: “Dian Fossey has been the victim of an unconscionable hatchet job.”

On August 17 the arrival of Lady Amanda Aspinall created something of a sensation.

She is twenty-six years old, an extraordinarily beautiful, well-bred girl about my height with the same color hair. She is extremely thin, as I was at her age, and the gorillas just went crazy over her, the older ones particularly, as if they confused her with me many years ago.

On her first night in Rwanda, Amanda ran into a prof from N.Y. traveling with a young male student. The man assured her he was a good friend of mine (I’ve never laid eyes on the creep) and talked her into letting them come up to camp with her. A young Spanish couple glommed on too, and all were adamant about staying the night here.
WOW
, what a scene ensued! Happily one of my trackers showed up with lots of fresh, hot gorilla dung from Nunkie’s Group. So I spread out and examined the nice juicy lobes with great gusto on the dining table in front of my cabin until the freeloaders left in disgust.

Guess who they met coming up, on their way down, Ian Redmond! He was guiding a group of English nature tourists through Rwanda and Zaire but took the day off. What a surprise and delight to see him again in camp! We talked till the wee, wee hours. I do so wish he could be back here to stay. He is the one person with whom I have worked at Karisoke (outside of the Africans) that I fully trust. I can’t stay here all the time, much as I wish. The constant gray skies, altitude, and work are kind of getting to me/my lungs/heart. But Ian had to go down again next day.

Before leaving, Ian mentioned that the faggy prof and friend, and the Spaniards, were calling me every name in the book on their way down the trail and even he wasn’t able to calm them down.

Dian and Ian were amused by the incident, but it would turn out to be no laughing matter.

The first week of September was memorable for two events.

Dian acquired a pair of gray parrots—a gift from one of her pilot friends. Although they could never fill the gap left in her
life by the deaths of Cindy and Kima, they provided some focus for her affection and brought some animal vitality into her lonely cabin.

On September 3 the park’s assistant conservateur, Jean Burgeri, climbed to camp to tell her that the infamous poacher Sebahutu, the killer of Uncle Bert, with whom she had been waging war for a decade and more, was dead.

He was killed by a buffalo last week!!! Burgeri only learned about this when all of Sebahutu’s many wives and children, dressed in mourning, went past park headquarters yesterday, and the yelling was so loud he came out to ask what had happened. The story is that the death occurred in Uganda. Now only Gashabizi remains of the six principal poachers, and then Digit, Uncle Bert, Macho, and Kweli will have been avenged.

Sebahutu had been freed from prison far short of completing a five-year sentence, after paying a fine that was, in effect, a bribe. This was common practice, and it enraged Dian on two counts. In the first place, it allowed poachers to return to their nefarious trade. In the second place, “in order to pay the fines and bribes, poachers and their partners in crime work twice as hard in the forest killing more and more animals to make up the money.” There was nothing she could do about this, but she could and did celebrate Sebahutu’s demise with a party that included everyone in camp.

Alas, as had once been the case with Munyarukiko, the report of Sebahutu’s death was false, undoubtedly contrived to delude the authorities, and perhaps Dian as well.

On September 9 she descended the mountain for the first time since her return from the United States in mid-June. She did not go because she wanted to, but because her visa, which was now being issued for only three months at a time, was running out. Climbing up or down the porters’ trail had become such an ordeal that she would not undertake it even to please such a close friend as Rosamond Carr. If the weather was
good—not pouring rain or hissing hail—she could manage to slither down the steep track in a couple of hours, but in bad weather it might now take her as long as four hours to scrabble back up to Karisoke, and that only with the help of the strong arms of her porters.

She found a disturbing change in the atmosphere at
ORTPN
’s headquarters. Her “good friend” Laurent Habiyaremye had become invisible. When she persisted, she was told by an underling that she was wasting her time; the director was angry at her, because of her treatment of the tourists who had climbed to Karisoke with Lady Aspinall, and did not wish to see her.

Worse was to follow. When she applied for her new visa, she was brusquely informed that would take several days.

A visit to the American embassy did nothing to resolve the difficulty or to ease her mind. There she was told that
ORTPN
was displeased with her and was intent on making difficulties. Dian arrived at a familiar conclusion.

Same old story. Mt. Gorilla has got around this director too. They are in, Fossey out.

She still had a string to her bow—a Rwandan friend was able to take her request for a visa direct “to the number 2 man in Foreign Affairs. My visa was ready next day.”

Dian had planned a second journey to the United States in 1984 to raise money from a lecture tour, but for unexplained reasons no engagements were ever booked. Meanwhile she had committed herself to travel to San Diego to receive the Joseph Wood Krutch Medal from the Humane Society of the United States, in recognition of her work with the gorillas. She had also intended to visit her mother, whom she believed to be dying. When the lecture schedule failed to materialize, she decided to go anyway.

For once she did not worry about the security of Karisoke during her absence. Her fortress on the mountain was now well manned. In addition to David Watts, Mike Catsis, and Carole Le Jeune (who had returned to continue her plant portraits), the
troops had been augmented by Jan Rafert, a young gorilla keeper from the Brookfield Zoo, and by an Australian veterinarian.

They are all
ACTIVE
conservationists, and I don’t believe any of them would go over to the
MGP
as has happened in the past.

She departed at the beginning of October, flying first to Ithaca where she spent two weeks with Stacey Coil and accountant Rane Randolph clearing up a backlog of Digit Fund paperwork, then on to California to find that reports of her mother’s state of health were greatly exaggerated. Nevertheless it was a gloomy visit, during which Kitty Price dwelt mournfully on her desire to be buried in Piedmont, California. Perhaps not wanting her daughter to feel left out, as it were, she announced that she was giving Dian a plot she owned in a cemetery in Fresno.

Dian’s sight had been failing for some time, so she consulted an eye specialist in San Francisco. He found a growth over the left cornea and recommended surgery. With some hesitation Dian concurred, and an operation was scheduled for October 20; but when she found that the procedure would entail several days in the hospital with her eyes bandaged, she canceled it.

On October 27 she was presented with the Joseph Wood Krutch Medal at the Humane Society’s annual convention in San Diego. She was deeply moved by the experience, the more so since this was the first such honor she had ever received. Mavericks and medals do not often go together.

Then it was back across North America for a few days with old friends in Louisville, and on to Brussels and Kigali—but
not
on to Karisoke. Dian had to make a slight detour first.

In early September she had received a cable from her agent.

The Dutch publishers of the book will pay for me to go to Holland for three days, November 5-8. After long self-debate I decided to take the offer though the travel arrangements are mind-boggling. I’ll be bringing back mountains of stuff from the States, mostly for my Africans,
but there is no way this overweight can be worked without costing me a fortune I haven’t got if I come home via Amsterdam. So I will have to first fly to Kigali, stash all the baggage, get a night’s sleep, then turn around and go right back across the African continent, the bloody ocean, and end up in Amsterdam. My God, I really dread it! One jet lag will never catch up with the one before it!

It wasn’t
quite
that bad; Dian did manage two nights and a day in Kigali.

Arrived in Amsterdam at
6:00 A.M
. on the morning of November 7 and was told that I had to meet Prince Bernhardt at his palace at 11
:00 A.M
. Panic! It was about one and a half hours from Amsterdam to the palace at Geitz, so I primped and ironed like mad and set off finally with two charming male escorts, feeling like Cinderella but looking more like her stepsister. The prince is actually quite nice and casual. I had been told it was to be a morning tea affair, but I was the only one who stuck to the tea (how about that!), with the prince on sherry and his male secretary on Scotch. We spent forty-five minutes talking about gorillas, and he claimed to have read the book since he wrote a brief foreword to the Dutch edition. In it he claims that the
WNF
(the Dutch branch of the World Wildlife Fund) has helped my work considerably-well, there we go again.

Dian was also taken to Burgers Zoological Gardens in Arnhem to see a group of seven young adult lowland gorillas that had been collected in West Africa for the zoo trade by an animal dealer with headquarters in the Republic of Cameroon. Unfortunately for him, Shirley McGreal’s International Primate Protection League got wind of the captures and raised such an international stink that the Cameroon government intervened. McGreal, backed by Fossey and others, wanted the animals kept in Africa and reintroduced to the wilds. They were overruled by the prestigious International Union for the Conservation of
Nature, which arranged to have them shipped to Holland. The sight of the Cameroon Seven, as they had become known, confined in a sunless indoor enclosure, infuriated Dian. On her return to Karisoke she wrote to the director general of the I
.U.C.N
.

“Please keep in mind … that a gorilla is its own owner. Albeit the ‘Cameroon Seven’ may be the nominal property of the I
.U.C.N.
, it has sold its soul by their exportation…. I would detest being in the position of the person who signed the release papers for the ‘Cameroon Seven’ to go to Holland, thereby robbing them of their natural heritage, probably forever.

“It is certainly not for me to judge the decisions of the I
.U.C.N.
However, I will ask you to weigh your consciences as to what you are currently doing or avoiding doing toward the active conservation of an endangered species.”

This was not the sort of action calculated to endear Dian to the conservation establishment, but by now she had come to consider that a lost cause in any case.