Gorillas in the Mist by Farley Mowat
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!
This information drew a cry of bitter outrage from Dian to ambassador Crigler:
“Frank, it is very similar to the case of Coco and Pucker from Karisimbi, who were ordered for capture by the Cologne zoo, and the conservateur at that time killed off two groups to ensure that the babies were given. The entire affair begins and ends in the same way—someone had proposed money for a youngster’s capture.”
Worse was to follow. A few days later Dian learned from a knowledgeable friend in Kigali that the selection of one of her groups as the source of a young gorilla had been no accident.
Reports circulating in Kigali had reached the Zairean authorities to the effect that Dian had been personally responsible for the death of the infant gorilla that had been placed in her care in March.
“You see, Dian,” it was explained to her, “either Zaire had a buyer for that baby, or what is more likely, it was intended as a present for the zoo of some important foreign government. If, as it appears, they believed you killed it, it would probably seem only right to them to replace it with one of ‘yours.’“
Now, indeed, the iron was biting deep into her soul.
At this juncture she received a letter from Sandy Harcourt on the impressive new letterhead of the Mountain Gorilla Project—Project Coordinator: Dr. A. Harcourt, Ph.D. In it he again pressed her to cooperate with Rwandan park authorities in the best interests of the mountain gorillas.
Dian saw red.
If they had only sent me the money people in England gave for the Digit Fund, I would have hired enough patrols to drive the poachers off the mountain months ago. Uncle Bert and Macho died because of that! Digit did die in vain!
Just two days after Uncle Bert and Macho were killed and Kweli wounded, the promised delegation from the Fauna Preservation Society arrived in Rwanda to determine how best to protect the mountain gorillas. It consisted of Harcourt, Dr. Kai Curry-Lindahl, vice-president of the FPS, and Brian Jackman, a reporter from the London Sunday Times. In her book Dian described what ensued.
Their long-planned visit had been greatly anticipated by park officials who were to receive additional financial assistance, equipment, and supplies from the consortium of gorilla-preservation agencies that had sprung up following Digit’s much-publicized killing. The conservationists were met at Kigali airport by the park director, his assistants, and a Belgian aide [Monfort]. Immediately, of course, they were informed of the latest gorilla slaughters. The reporter was able to telephone his story to London, datelined Kigali.
The [FPS] team spent two more days in Kigali before going on to Ruhengeri, where I encountered them while organizing legally conducted village searches for poachers. I was muddy, hungry, and more depressed than I had ever been at any point of the eleven-year research…. The reporter nimbly jumped out, tape recorder in hand, wanting an on-the-spot interview about the happenings of the past few days. My mind flashed back to the long deliberation between Ian Redmond and myself the night … following the killing of Digit. Since Digit’s killing had proved so profitable to the Rwandan park officials, could there possibly be a connection between the first tragedy and the latest timely slaughters? …
The next day … the European conservation mission left Rwanda. From an article subsequently published in a British conservation journal, I read that the group had been extremely gratified at the timeliness of their visit, the financial assistance they had given and pledged to the Park des Volcans, and the wide attention that the reporter’s news-breaking articles had received from a sympathetic public.*
This was a measured account written after a considerable lapse of time. In a letter shortly after the incident, Dian was much less circumspect. Although she expected to be labeled paranoid for her views, she was convinced that the timing of the second raid on Group 4 had been planned to coincide with the arrival of the FPS delegation, in order to further stimulate the flow of funds into the hands of park officials. Her opinions of the Mountain Gorilla Project were hardly polite. Suffice it to say that she did not show a high regard for the “conservation mission;” and her comments as to the value of the methods proposed to protect the gorillas and to ensure their ongoing survival are worthy of a Marine sergeant. When there was need, Dian Fossey could command a vocabulary to make a strong man pale.
Once returned to Karisoke, Dian began putting her life together
The focus of her life had already been narrowed by the tragedies of Digit and the Zairean gorilla baby. With the loss of Uncle Bert and Macho, she began directing almost the whole of her energies to defending and preserving what remained of the Virunga gorilla population. Everything else seemed relatively unimportant. The accumulation of scientific data now seemed irrelevant to her. Even the writing of her book became a distraction.
On August 4 she wrote to her lawyer in Washington, Fulton Brylawski:
“With no silverback to lead them, the prospects of Group 4 are relatively nil as they have only ten-year-old Tiger and one older female, Flossie, who’ve been trying to lead and protect them. So far they’ve rejected the attempts of another group to split them up and yesterday were fleeing from the advances of what appeared to be a lone silverback. Such interactions are bound to cause serious injuries. I also feel poachers will strike again, knowing the group is now without a leader.
“The entire situation is almost too much to bear. Ever since Digit’s death I’ve been continuing, on a small basis, regular poacher patrols, especially with Ian Redmond, who excelled at same. He had to go home in May but has just cabled that he will get back here some way soon so we can escalate the patrols. We must catch or kill Munyarukiko. It is as though all our efforts over the years have been wasted with these new deaths.”
One of the canards circulated about Dian is that she was an alcoholic. In truth she enjoyed a drink, preferably Scotch. The testimony of people who knew her best, including her doctors, shows she was neither a drunk nor an alcoholic. She drank to excess upon occasion, but as an anodyne for acute physical distress or when severely depressed.
Following the deaths of Uncle Bert and Macho, she drank more heavily than usual. Suffering from chronic emphysema and sciatica, debilitated by the strain of living at a high altitude, plagued by a severe calcium deficiency, insomnia, and other ailments, she was also enduring the brutal loss of several of her closest animal friends and the prospect of the total dissolution of her favorite gorilla family. Also weighing heavily upon her was the belief that she had been and was being betrayed by some of the whites at Karisoke and that her cause was being perverted by ambitious and self-serving individuals and organizations in Rwanda and abroad. The wonder is that, in this extremity, she did not seek oblivion in alcohol.
What she sought instead was the solace and support of friends like Rosamond Carr; the Criglers; a French Canadian girl, Noella de Walque; Dr. Lolly Prescada and several other women living in Rwanda; together with a score or more of intimates abroad whom she could only reach by letter.
She could count few men among her close confidants, which is perhaps not surprising since most male primatologists thought of her as a competitor; male professionals in the conservation business saw her as an interloper; and male bureaucrats generally viewed her as a mischief-maker. She impinged too heavily on male preserves to be acceptable to many men other than in sexual terms. Nevertheless, and it was a measure of her enduring naïveté, she continued to place a remarkably uncritical degree of trust in any man who showed sympathy for her or who professed to an understanding of her problems.
One of the very few men to prove worthy of her trust was Ian Redmond.
He was in England working toward his master’s degree when he heard of the new slaughter. No matter. He abandoned his own plans and began scratching for funds to get him back to camp.
In the meantime, relationships between the four whites at Karisoke were steadily deteriorating, with Dian and the V-W couple pitted against each other while David Watts attempted to remain aloof.
Dian took what comfort she could from the companionship of Kima and Cindy, and from the visits of the bushbucks, duikers, giant rats, and birds. She was reluctant to seek human companionship below, for fear the poachers would strike again if she abandoned her vigil on the mountain even for a day or two.
The poachers had doomed Group 4. Deprived of any males old enough and experienced enough to take over the leadership, that family was fast disintegrating. On August 15 the young blackback, Beetsme, killed Flossie’s and Uncle Bert’s two-month-old baby, Frito, doubtless because by so doing he could expect to bring Flossie back into estrus and available for mating. However, a week after the infanticide, Flossie and her remaining daughter, Cleo, accompanied by the young female, Augustus, fled from Beetsme’s advances to take refuge with Nunkie’s Group.
Dian’s anguish at the collapse of the family was intensified when she realized that Kweli, the intended victim of the kidnappers, was not recovering from his wound. Although Tiger tried to be mother and father to the orphan, protecting him from the increasingly aggressive Beetsme, and even sharing his night nest with the youngster, Kweli became ever more lethargic. Torn between the choice of leaving him to nature or trying to capture him for treatment, Dian reluctantly concluded that she could not intervene.
Decided not to use dart gun, first because our old tranquilizer drugs are probably ineffective, second because would have to dart Tiger and probably Beetsme too, and even if this worked, the trauma would split the group into fragments.
Dian’s apprehension over possible reprisals by the poachers or their sponsors may not have been unfounded. On September 3, several unseen men circled Karisoke, keeping to the cover of the woods while screaming obscenities. Dian responded by firing a pistol into the forest. Three days later Gwehandagoza, who had been trying to obtain more evidence against the park conservateur, told Dian he believed someone was trying to poison him.
Two days after that the tracker Semitoa staggered back to camp suffering from a broken nose and concussion. He said he had been ambushed and forced to leap into one of the dangerous chasms that radiate from Visoke’s peak. With her usual solicitude, Dian nursed him night and day.
Codeine-ice packs; iodine and medicinal spray, blankets, etc.-moved him to bed in my cabin at 10:20; codeine at 2:00 A.M. after soup and coke-sweating now. By 3:00 P.M. next day temperature finally normal.
Although she had been able to contribute only a small sum from her nearly exhausted resources toward Ian Redmond’s airfare, friends in Kigali raised two hundred and fifty dollars and Ian himself did the rest. On September 10 he briskly climbed the familiar trail, returning to the scattering of green-clad cabins in Karisoke’s meadow. Reinforcements had arrived.
Dian was overjoyed.
Ian’s return was super! Unlike the current students, who hadn’t shown the slightest interest in patrols, Ian knew that work at this camp involves far more than daily recordings of one’s own data and that there is an obligation to the security of the gorillas as well.
With his arrival active patrols were resumed at once. After 120 hours on 15 patrols, 362 traps had been found and cut down, and three trapped duikers released unharmed. Most of the traps and snares were in Zaire on the western side of Visoke and in the saddle terrain where the killings had taken place. But Rwandan and Zairean poachers were equally responsible for setting them.
Ian and one of the trackers succeeded in capturing a specially active trap setter and brought him back to camp. I think he would have sold his soul to escape the “sorcery” he was exposed to in my cabin, in the form of plastic Halloween skulls that rattle when shaken, rubber snakes and masks, whispers coming from all directions, and lastly, most virulent of all, American sumu—slimy jelly stuff you can buy at any local drugstore in America in a variety of colors. It sure was effective. This man talked for almost two hours about the poaching business, naming many of them and providing us with invaluable information.
The patrols did not always have things their own way. On October 15, Ian Redmond and Vatiri set off to do a sweep on the northwestern slopes of Visoke through the home territory of a gorilla family known as Group 13.
This is an area of narrow ridges
After a while things became quiet and Ian was standing up to take a look around when three spearheads came bouncing into view, held vertically against the sky.
He immediately ducked, but as fate would have it, the poachers elected to climb onto the top of the knoll where they could look right down on the bazunga and Vatiri.
Ian was unarmed but immediately jumped to his feet and found himself eyeball to eyeball with the middleman of three spear-carrying poachers. Those on either side promptly fled, but the middleman dropped his panga, and using both hands on the spear shaft, tried to stab Ian to the heart before fleeing himself.