Last Chance to See (9 page)

This seemed, on the face of it, to be unanswerable, so we left him to try and figure it out for himself while we went to look for some porters to help us with our baggage for the three hour walk up to the warden's but where we were to spend the night. They weren't hard to find. There was a large band of them gathered hopefully round our van and our driver was eager to know how many we needed to carry all our bags. He seemed to emphasise the word `all' rather strongly.

There was a sudden moment of horrible realisation. We had been so keen to clear out of Goma as fast as possible that we had

forgotten
, a major part of our plan, which was to leave the bulk of our gear at a hotel in town. As a result of this oversight we had, more baggage with us than we actually needed to carry up to the gorillas.

A lot more.

As well as basic gorilla-watching kit - jeans, T-shirt, a sort of waterproof thing, a ton of cameras and tins of pears - there was also an immense store of dirty laundry, a suit and shoes for meeting my French publisher in Paris, a dozen computer magazines, a thesaurus, half the collected works of Dickens and a large wooden model of a Komodo dragon. I believe in travelling light, but then I also believe I should give up smoking and shop early for Christmas.

Hiding our considerable embarrassment, we chose a team of porters to carry this little lot up into the Virunga volcanoes for us. They didn't mind. If we were prepared to pay them to carry Dickens and dragons up to the gorillas and back down again then they were perfectly happy to do it. White men have done much worse things in Zaire than that, but maybe not much sillier.

The trek up to the warden's but was strenuous, and involved plenty of stops for sharing our cigarettes and Coca-Cola with the bearers, while they frequently redistributed the bags of Dickens and computer magazines between themselves and experimented with different and novel methods of keeping them on their heads.

For much of the time we were tramping through wet fields of sago, and a foolish but happy thought suddenly occurred to me. We were walking through the only known anagram of my name - which is Sago Mud Salad. I speculated footlingly as to what possible cosmic significance there could be to this and by the time I had finally dismissed the thought, the light was fading and we had arrived at the hut, which was a fairly spartan wooden building, but new and quite well built.

A damp and heavy mist hung over the land, almost obscuring the distant volcano peaks. The evening was unexpectedly cold, and we spent it by the light of hissing Tilley lamps, eating our tinned pears and our single remaining bun, and talking in broken French to our two guides whose names were Murara and Serundori.

These were magnificently smooth characters dressed in military camouflage and black berets who slouched across the table languidly caressing their rifles. They explained that the reason for the get-up was that they were ex-commandos. All guides had to carry rifles, they told us, partly as protection against the wildlife, but more importantly in case they encountered poachers. Murara told us that he had personally shot dead five poachers. He explained with a shrug that there was pas de probleme about it. No bother with inquests or anything like that, he just shot them and went home.

He sat back in his chair and idly fingered the rifle sight while we toyed nervously with our pear halves.

Poaching of one kind or another is, of course, the single most serious threat to the survival of the mountain gorillas but it's hard not to wonder whether declaring open season on human beings is the best plan for solving the problem. We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.

In fact the poaching problem is declining - or at least parts of it are. Four in every five of the gorillas alive in the world's zoos today were originally taken from the wild, but no public zoo would accept a gorilla now, except from another zoo, since it would be a bit difficult to explain where it came from.

However, there is still a demand for them from private collectors, and the unprotected Ugandan part of the Virungas is still a weak link. In September 1988 an infant was captured on the Ugandan side: two adult members of its family were shot dead and the young animal was later sold to Rwandan smugglers by a game warden (now in prison) for about £15,000. This is the most destructive aspect of this sort of poaching - for every young gorilla captured, several other members of its family will probably die trying to protect it.

Worse than those who want to collect gorillas for their private zoos are those who just want to collect bits of gorillas. For many

years
there was a brisk trade in skulls and hands which were sold to tourists and expatriates who mistakenly thought they would look finer on their mantelpieces than they did on the original gorilla. This, thank goodness, is also now declining since a taste for bone-headed brutality is now held to be less of a social grace than formerly.

In some parts of Africa gorillas are still killed for food, though not in the Virunga volcanoes - at least, not deliberately. The problem is that many other animals are, and gorillas very frequently get caught in traps set for bushbuck or duiker. A young female gorilla called Jozi, for example, caught her hand in a wire antelope snare and eventually died of septicaemia in August 1988. So to protect the gorillas, anti-poaching patrols are still necessary.

There were two other people sharing our but that evening. They were a couple of German students whose names I appear now to have forgotten, but since they were indistinguishable from all the other German students we had encountered from time to time on our trips I will simply call them Helmut and Kurt.

Helmut and Kurt were young, fair-haired, vigorous, incredibly well equipped, and much better than us at virtually everything. We saw very little of them during the early part of the evening because they were very busy preparing their meal. This involved constructing some kind of brick oven outside, and then doing a lot of coming and going with bowls of boiling water, stopwatches, penknives and dismembered bits of the local wildlife. Eventually they sat and ate their feast in front of us with grim efficiency and an insulting refusal to make any disparaging glances at all in the direction of our tinned pear halves.

Then they said they were going to bed for the night, only they weren't going to sleep in the but because they had a tent with them, which was much better. It was a German tent. They nodded us a curt good night and left.

In bed that night, after I had lain awake for a while worrying about Murara and Serundori's casual propensity for shooting people, I turned to worrying instead about Helmut and Kurt. If they were going to be like that, then I just wished they hadn't actually been German. It was too easy. Too obvious. It was like coming across an Irishman who actually was stupid, a mother-in-law who actually was fat, or an American businessman who actually did have a middle initial and smoke a cigar. You feel as if you are unwillingly performing in a music-hall sketch and wishing you could rewrite the script. If Helmut and Kurt had been Brazilian or Chinese or Latvian or anything else at all, they could then have behaved in exactly the same way and it would have been surprising and intriguing and, more to the point from my perspective, much easier to write about. Writers should not be in the business of propping up stereotypes. I wondered what to do about it, decided that they could simply be Latvians if I wanted, and then at last drifted off peacefully to worrying about my boots.

Mark had told me before we went to bed that when I woke up the first thing I had to remember was to turn my boots upsidedown and shake them.

I asked him why.

`Scorpions,' he replied, `Good night.'

Early in the morning Murara and Serundori were waiting at the but door fondling their rifles and machetes, and wearing meaningful glints in their eyes that we weren't at all certain we liked. However, they had good news for us. Since gorillas tend not to make their personal arrangements to suit the convenience of visiting collateral relatives, they were sometimes to be found up to eight hours' trek away from the warden's hut. Today, however, the news was that they were only about an hour's distance from us, so we would have an easy day of it. We gathered together our gorilla-watching gear, carefully leaving behind the dragon, the Dickens and also our flash guns, on the assumption that these were all things that would, to differing degrees, upset the gorillas, said good morning to Helmut and Kurt, who were joining us for the expedition, and set off together in search of

the
gorillas. Ahead of us through the misty morning light reared the hump of Mikeno volcano.

The forest we plunged into was thick and wet and I complained about this to Mark.

He explained that gorillas like to live in 'montane' rain forest, or cloud forest. It was over 3,000 metres above sea-level, above the cloud level, and always damp. Water drips off the trees the whole time.

`It's not at all like lowland primary rain forest,' said Mark, `more like secondary rain forest, which is what you get when primary forest is burnt or cut down and then starts to regenerate.'

`I thought that the whole problem with rain forest was that it wouldn't grow again when you cut it down,' I said.

`You won't get primary rain forest again, of course. Well, you might get something similar over hundreds or thousands of years, we don't know. Certainly all of the original wildlife will have been lost for good. But what grows in the short term is secondary rain forest, which is far less rich and complex.

`Primary rain forest is an incredibly complex system, but when you're actually standing in it it looks half empty. In its mature state you get a very high, thick canopy of leaves, because of all the trees competing with each other to get at the sunlight. But since little light penetrates this canopy there will tend to be very little vegetation at ground level. Instead you get an ecological system which is the most complex of any on earth, and it's all designed to disseminate the energy which the trees have absorbed from the sun throughout the whole forest.

'Cloud forest, like this, is much simpler. The trees are much lower and more spaced out so there is plenty of ground cover vegetation as well, all of which the gorillas like very much because it means they can hide. And there's plenty of food within arm's reach.'

For us, however, all the thick, wet vegetation made the forest hard work to fight through. Murara and Serundori swung their machetes so casually through the almost impenetrable under growth that it took me a while to begin to see that there was more to it than just vague hacking.

Machetes are a very specific shape, a little like the silhouette of a banana with a fattened end. Every part of the blade has a slightly different curve or angle of cut to the line of movement, and a different weight behind, it as well. It was fascinating to watch the instinctive ways in which, from one slash to another, the guides would adapt their stroke to the exact type of vegetation they were trying to cut through - one moment it would be a thick branch, another moment it would be banks of nettles and another moment tangled hanging vines. It was like a very casual game of tennis played by highly skilled players.

Not only was the forest thick, it was also cold, wet and full of large black ants which bit all of us except for Helmut and Kurt who were wearing special ant-proof socks which they had brought with them from Latvia.

We complimented them on their foresight and they shrugged and said it was nothing. Latvians were always well prepared. They looked at our recording equipment and said that they were surprised that we thought it was adequate. They had much better tape recorders than that in Latvia. We said that that might very well be so, but that we were very happy with it and the BBC seemed to think it was fine for the job. Helmut (or was it Kurt?) explained that they had much better broadcasting corporations in Latvia.

The outbreak of outright hostilities was happily averted at this moment by a signal from our guides to keep quiet. We were near the gorillas.

'But of course,' said Kurt, with a slight smile playing along his thin Latvian lips, as if he'd known all the while that this was exactly where the gorillas would be.

But it wasn't a gorilla itself that had attracted our guides' attention, it was a gorilla's bed. By the side of the track along which we were walking there was a large depression in the undergrowth where a gorilla had been sleeping for the night.

Plant stems had been pulled down and folded under to keep the gorilla off the ground which was cold and damp at night.

One of the characteristics that laymen find most odd about zoologists is their insatiable enthusiasm for animal droppings. I can understand, of course, that the droppings yield a great deal of information about the habits and diets of the animals concerned, but nothing quite explains the sheer glee that the actual objects seem to inspire.

A sharp yelp of joy told me that Mark had found some. He dropped to his knees and started to fire off his Nikon at a small pile of gorilla dung.

'It's in the nest,' he explained once he had finished, 'which is very interesting, you see. The mountain gorillas, the ones that live here, actually defecate in their nests because it's too cold to get up at night. The western lowland gorillas, on the other hand, don't. They live in a warmer climate, so getting up in the middle of the night is less of a problem. Also, the western lowland gorillas live on a diet of fruit which is another incentive for not shitting in their nests.'

`I see,' I said.

Helmut started to say something, which I like to think was probably something about having far superior types of gorilla dung in Latvia, but I interrupted him because I suddenly had one of those strange, uncanny feelings that I was being watched by a truck.

We kept very quiet and looked very carefully around us. There was nothing we could see near us, nothing, in the trees above us, nothing peering furtively from the bushes. It was a moment or two before we saw anything at all, but then at last a slight movement caught our eyes. About thirty yards away down the track we were following, standing in plain view, was something so big that we hadn't even noticed it. It was a mountain gorilla, or perhaps I should say a gorilla mountain, standing propped up on its front knuckles so that it assumed the shape of a large and muscular sloping ridge tent.