Gorillas in the Mist (59 page)

August 18:
Just last week Peanuts’s Group split in half
because the two silverbacks, Peanuts and Beetsme, simply could not share Nunkie’s two females-Augustus and Papoose-so now Augustus is with Peanuts and Papoose with Beetsme. The younger animals are fairly evenly distributed between the two subgroups, which are now some four kilometers apart. At the moment I hardly know what to expect next. Don’t know how we are going to follow all this, since only one gorilla student is now at camp, but it is really important that we do so.

August 30:
Since Charles Darwin’s death, his group of six females and their youngsters are scattered all about Visoke’s slopes. The Mt. G. P. people cannot keep up with them, so it is up to us to try. My Africans can track a rabbit’s breath in a hailstorm, but I would give my soul to be ten people and twenty years younger.

September 5:
Peanuts and Beetsme have joined forces, then split again, and now three of Nunkie’s survivors that were with them are missing somewhere on the northwestern slopes of Visoke and in the distant saddle areas. My trackers are working their guts out trying to keep up with these two groups.

September 12:
Peanuts’s Group has been made into Peanut Butter because Beetsme took everyone away from Peanuts except for the crippled blackback Ahab, who loyally hung on with the poor, deprived silverback. I just can’t keep up with all these constant changes.

September 15:
This is where it hits. Beethoven, the grand old silverback leader of Group 5, has disappeared and must be presumed dead. I’m heartsick about it. We have done little but search for his body but to no avail. At least his group remains under protection of his powerful sil-verback son, Ziz, who is the hugest silverback I’ve ever seen. He is having a bit of a struggle keeping the eleven sexually mature females he’s got now from tearing one another’s hair out.

October 8:
Still have not found Beethoven’s body; but as I shall never lose the memories of the old man, I can endure the loss of his body. Group 5 recently lost Poppy during an interaction with the Suza Group, yet gained old Flossie, originally from Group 4. It makes one dizzy with never-ending changes. Peanuts and Beetsme continue swapping partners and Nunkie’s offspring, on the occasions when they come together in the far western saddle area. Charles Darwin’s survivors are still all over, and about half seem to have disappeared to the eastward. Tiger and Peanuts, who might have taken them over, are miles away. All the gorillas now seem to be in the wrong places at the wrong times.

Bewildered by all this erratic behavior, Dian was harboring uncomfortable speculations.

Something has gone really wrong. Not only are the members of the groups switching back and forth, some of them leaderless, there is no kind of pattern to their ranging. Groups are wandering where they never went before, and bad interactions are more and more frequent. This just stirs up the pot and leads to more interactions as groups flee all over the mountains bumping into each other. I can’t think what is the matter, unless it is the result of too many human contacts combined with too many poachers.

Poachers were certainly a major factor that autumn. Although they generally steered clear of the Karisoke study area, they were numerous and aggressive everywhere else in the park. Digit Fund patrols fought back vigorously.

On September 15 my people caught another poacher setting traps in the park-number three for this year. They took him down for the usual interview with the park authorities before he was supposed to have been taken to Ruhengeri prison. However, instead of prison, the park authorities, under orders from the director of
ORTPN
, fined him two hundred dollars and released him. Just like old times. There is not much doubt who gets the money.

On October 12 a Digit Fund-sponsored patrol captured three more poachers, their dog, and twenty-six traps. They took the poachers to park headquarters on the thirteenth, but I fear that they too will simply be allowed to pay a fine to
ORTPN
and then be released. I pray for the day
ORTPN
comprehends that pocketing profits will not stop poaching or gorilla killing.

Some such comprehension should have dawned on
ORTPN
’s director at the end of October when a bloody little battle erupted between the poachers, who now felt they were operating under “pay-as-you-play permits,” and a detachment of police outside the control of the park authorities.

The first I heard about it was October 30 when
MGP
radioed to ask if I was missing any gorillas from the study groups. When I said no, I was reluctantly told they had a two-year-old male infant that had just died from a “blood clot in the heart.” They said it probably came from Uganda.

I immediately sent the only two trackers then at camp to check on the fringe groups northwest of Visoke outside our area. But they ran into five armed poachers and had to flee for their lives and hide out in the forest for hours, not getting back to camp until 10:00
P.M.
Wow, was I frightened for them!

My men only got the true story of the capture for me later. A gang of six poachers, all Rwandans, attacked a gorilla group between Mt. Sabyinyo and Mt. Muhabura, in part of the park supposedly patrolled by park guards under Mt. Gorilla Project. At least three, and perhaps more, adult gorillas were apparently shot to get the baby. The poachers then got out of the park safely, but ran into a
sécurité
force who challenged them. There was a gun-fight. One poacher was killed, one badly wounded, and the others captured. The baby was apparently injured. It was taken to park headquarters where it just died. I do so wish captured infants would be brought straightaway up
here for the sake of altitude, food, around-the-clock care, and
quietness
.

Although all four men who were put into prison were
known
poachers, they were allowed freedom after only two weeks,
because they were caught outside the park
, it was said. Nothing said about how much they paid for their release. Isn’t that sickening?

On October 7, Dian again visited Kigali to renew her visa. With some hesitancy, for she did not know if he would even remember meeting her on the day of the fete, she telephoned the
secrétaire-général
of Immigration.

Well, par for the course. Much to my sorrow, Mr. Nduwayezu, the secretary-general, was out of town. So also was Mr. Habiyaremye, or at least that is what his office told me. It took three days before Mr. Etienne Nyangezi, the second-in-command for
ORTPN
, overcame what I reckon was fear to write out my authorization for another
two
months only to stay in this country.

Returning to camp, she was delighted and somewhat awed to receive a letter from one of the grand old men of the science of ethology, Dr. Niko Tinbergen, professor emeritus at Oxford University. He had read her book and been so impressed that he sent her a four-page, handwritten letter of congratulations together with some cogent ruminations on behavioral studies.

“Tremendously honored and impressed,” Dian responded in an even lengthier reply, in which she talked of times long past—a subject she normally shunned.

“I learned to avert my face and abase myself to the gorillas from working with autistic children and adults, whom I found I could best reach by hiding my face, assuming an obsequious posture, and feigning interest in stuffed toys or live pets. Such ‘neglect’ never failed to elicit responses from patients suffering from severe withdrawal, but all wanting inside themselves to make contact without knowing how. It meant, I think, that I posed no sort of threat and therefore was safe to approach.

“You don’t have to read on, but this is now so vivid in my mind. John, twenty-six years old, was a brilliant student in his final months of veterinary training when he was bitten by a diseased dog. The disease turned John into a limping, drooling, howling, peeing vegetable. After he had been stricken for months, his parents asked me to visit him at their home. I made the mistake of the usual face-to-face, yak-yak approach, which only made him howl louder and urinate more frequently. I then tried just going to his room, ignoring him, and sitting in a corner playing with a kitten. Within two days he was nudging me for attention, but I wouldn’t give him any until he used the urinal. This he did on the third day and thereafter whenever I was with him and even when alone. I made the kitten the common point of contact between us, directing my attention to him through it, and he did the same. After two months he no longer howled. After three months he began to speak to me, simply, and one day even opened the door for me and got my coat from the cupboard. This was his first ’shared’ action in over a year. I wish I could end the story on a happy note, but John’s father had a heart attack and the family had to put John into a home too distant for me to visit, where he quickly reverted and died of a seizure several weeks later. I cannot forget him.

“I don’t quite know why I’ve told you this story, except that the incident has recently come strongly back to memory, and also because I am of the conviction that one can’t work well with disturbed children or even adults without having worked with animals and, perhaps, vice versa.

“Thank you for asking about my current work. It continues with the blessings of the highest powers in this land (president and staff), but I have problems with the bureaucrats of the tourist and park department who eye my camp and the gorilla study groups as justifiably theirs. They are backed by a small group of whites salaried by the Mountain Gorilla Project all wanting my camp. Well, they’ll have it over my dead body, if then.”

Dian was still having trouble coming to terms with Wayne
McGuire, the only white person now sharing Karisoke with her. Her feelings about him were ambivalent.

To Anita McClellan she wrote, “Wayne is really nice, but he can get lost between my cabin and his. He gets lost in the forest nearly once a week. He doesn’t know how to turn on his pressure lamp, make a fire, sort out his clean from his dirty clothing, boil potatoes. Like I say, he is basically very very nice and polite, which is a relief, but no way I’m going to be his big mama. Hopefully, eventually, he’ll understand that my diaper-changing days are over…. My Africans do not like him because they have had to search for him three nights, overnight, in the rain!”

And to Stacey Coil: “I just don’t know if the McGuire boy is going to be able to stick it. Like I say, he truly is a nice, good person but so disorganized it is frightening. You can’t walk into his cabin because of the clutter…. I’m really worried about him. Otherwise we get along fine.”

October’s visitors included some surprises—reporters and photographers from all three of Rwanda’s newspapers. This was the first time any of the local press had visited Karisoke or shown an interest in Dian’s work. For whatever reason, this long neglect was now made good. To her somewhat smug delight, Dian and Karisoke now became positive news in Rwanda.

All three papers have run big spreads about camp, our work, and the men and myself. It is all in Kinyarwandan of course, but my men have translated everything and they are
FANTASTIC
articles. We’ve been nominated, so it says, for special awards, like medals, from the president. The biggest article, two full pages in a twelve-page newspaper, makes me sound like the second coming and did everything but tell the director of
ORTPN
to resign. Maybe I am bragging, but I am so happy for my men, who are just floating and expecting the president to drop in by helicopter any day. Everywhere they go in Ruhengeri they wear their uniforms and are treated like heroes. Isn’t that great?

In a letter to one of the reporters, she wrote, “How in the world can I ever thank you for your kindness, your heart, and your sense of integrity, of
umurava?
I have boxes and boxes of press clippings from all over the world,
BUT
never, never, has one meant as much to me as yours. Well, I got all teary with joy and gratitude and the men all laughed at me. We did an impromptu dance and have been going around with big smiles plastered on our faces ever since…. You have made us all so happy. It is the kind of happiness that lasts forever, for your words seemed to come from your heart and have therefore settled in our hearts.”

In mid-October, only a few days after Dian assembled her group of doctors and veterinarians for the first time to begin inquiring into the recent silverback deaths, something very disturbing happened. Her two gray parrots abruptly sickened without evidencing the symptoms of any disease recognizable to her veterinarian friends. When one of them ventured the opinion that the birds might have been poisoned, Dian vehemently rejected the possibility. But next day she threw out the supply of food she had been giving them. And after feeding for a few days on a new stock brought up from Ruhengeri, both birds made a seemingly miraculous recovery.

Dian did not record her reaction to this incident except in a single, tight-lipped comment.

It was extremely frightening.

What followed on the night of October 27 was infinitely more so. Dian wrote her journal entry for this date while in a state of extreme agitation. The words sprawl all over the page.

As was so often the case, she had been unable to get to sleep and so, just before midnight, decided to step outside and enjoy the rare delight of moonlight gleaming on the peaks of Karisimbi and Mikeno. She was thunderstruck to find the wooden image of a puff adder on her doorstep.

This thing carved by someone
TODAY.
First indication of
SUMU
was parrots nearly dead, flipped on cage floor…. I have hidden it and will say nothing about it.

She was as good as her word. There is not the slightest mention of this fearsome discovery in any of her correspondence or other writings, and she evidently said nothing to Wayne, to her men, or to anyone else, not even Rosamond Carr.