Gorillas in the Mist by Farley Mowat
Then the bloody director, Habiyaremye, got up and delivered an hour-and-a-half speech in Kinyarwandan-which was about 94½ minutes too long. I thought even the president was going to go to sleep. My men told me it was mainly concerned with the great profits of gorilla tourism and how much money that had brought into the country. Toward the end the director made presentations of two cardboard plaques for the greatest contributions to the Parc des Volcans since Independence. They both went to the Belgian heads of two travel bureaus.
After all was over I got a lift on the muddy, glucky road to Ruhengeri to snatch a very late lunch at the Muhavura Hotel. While I waited for it, out of the blue comes Benda-Lema, who now manages a bank in Kigali. He came running over to my table and seemed absolutely incensed because there had been no mention of me. He said he had been sitting right behind the president and claimed the president gave the director hell for ignoring Karisoke and my work there. Benda-Lema really seem so aggravated about it that he made me cry, just because I guess I was feeling kind of sorry for myself. Also because I hadn’t gotten along too well with him while he was director, yet here he was taking my side. I was just so grateful for his going out of his way to express his feelings to me.
Benda-Lema then went back to a group of swanky officials in fancy uniforms, and I started in on my cold french fries and tough pork chop, to be interrupted a few minutes later by one of the swanky ones. This one asked in English, “Dr. Fossey, what did you think of today’s affair?” Well, I didn’t know who he was but decided to get some things off my chest. My basic complaint was that there had been absolutely no mention of the work done by the patrols to control poachers. Then I yakked about theoretical versus active conservation. He asked me to come outside so he could take my picture! Turned out he was the head reporter for Rwanda’s weekly newspaper, Kinyamateku. Wow! Now I either get thrown out of the country for sure, or else something good will come of it.
I went back to my now-frigid, greasy french fries-I was famished—when another “bigwig” African in military uniform came into the dining room, looked about, then came straight over and sat down at my table. He introduced himself in French as the secrétaire-général in charge of immigration in the president’s office. He asked what problems I had been having in obtaining visas. I nearly passed out with surprise! But I told him in my horrid French, as best I could, about the two-month visas doled out by the ORTPN director and how hard even they were to get. He gave me his card and told me to call him when I next came in for a visa. He ended by saying about the director, “What does he think you are, a tourist?”
By then I had to cut the frites out of the grease with a knife, but they tasted like elixir. We’ll see. This may have been the most useful lunch I’ve ever had. On the other hand, sometimes these people get carried away by the mood of a festive day but forget everything the moment they’ve passed their beer.
One added note. As I climbed back to camp that night, I heard the hyrax calling and the barks of the bushbuck and duiker. They are voices I hear every night, but I realized that they were still here because I was here to help protect them. Nothing in the way of awards from the ORTPN director could have meant as much to me as that knowledge.
Next day I talked to my men. All fifteen of them (nine staff and six members of the Digit patrols) had been at the fete-specially dressed in uniforms I had made for them, with K.R.C. on the jacket pockets; and when there was no mention of them or me or Karisoke or the work they had done, they were badly disappointed. Now I told them the rewards for us had to come from seeing and hearing the wealth of wildlife existing around us in the park. If it had not been for all our efforts over the past eighteen years, I don’t think there would have been much left. I think it made them feel a little better.
A few days later, Dian heard a rumor that Habiyaremye was on his way out. Although she knew better than to give much credence to Kigali gossip, the simple fact that such things were being said about him made her feel somewhat less threatened.
I had Mukera put the kerosene cans back in storage. But I still keep my matches handy.
August saw much coming and going at Karisoke. At the beginning of the month David Watts’s replacement arrived. He was a six-foot, shambling, blond, bushy-bearded doctorate student whose first application to work at Karisoke had been rejected by Dian three years earlier. Now, with only one other researcher in camp, Joseph Munyaneza, a young Rwandan entomologist, she was glad to get him, although during his first few weeks she had her doubts.
Wayne McGuire from Oklahoma University arrived at noon today with four park guards as porters and settled into Watts’s cabin without saying a word to me. By 6:30 P.M. he hadn’t yet come up to my cabin even to say hello, although I had sent an invitation to come for dinner. This is really weird, but maybe not so weird. I know he has been in correspondence with the V-W couple, von der Becke, and Watts, who saw him last winter in the States. Gwehandagoza tells me he was met at Kigali airport by Bill Weber, who drove him to Bill and Amy’s house, where he stayed overnight and met Watts and the other MGP people. I don’t believe I’m truly paranoid, but it sure makes you think.
Vatiri came by with his patrol while I waited for the new boy. They had found fresh poacher tracks (two Twa, two Hutu-Vatiri can tell so much from a track I’m surprised he didn’t know their names) following one of the fringe groups. We rapped together about tomorrow’s work, then went outside to find an entire herd of bush-bucks behind my cabin: two yearlings, two two-year-olds, two adult females, and the magnificent old buck I call Prime II, who is so old he can just barely walk/wobble. I was deeply touched to see him again as I thought he had long since been taken by poachers. The sight of him will forever remain etched in my memory, long after the wretched memories of “me-itis” students are gone.
There were other arrivals. On August 3 a wealthy young American couple, Evelyn Gallardos and David Root, came to Karisoke to spend two weeks photographing gorillas and other animals, not for profit or for science, but for pleasure. They were the first manifestation of a new project of Dian’s—one about which she was somewhat embarrassed. In order to pay the bills to keep Karisoke running, she had reluctantly decided to accept paying guests, well-paying guests, from amongst the rich dilettantes in the United States who had been everywhere and done everything—except visit gorillas in Rwanda. That this would be a form of tourism, and therefore an exploitation of the gorillas, was something of which she was uncomfortably aware. She rationalized it as best she could.
There will never be more than four people here at one time, and visiting the gorillas will be bottom priority to ongoing research studies by students. Control of everything done will be superstrict. I don’t like this, but if Karisoke is going to continue to save mountain gorillas, it has to be, because I cannot continue to support it on what is left of my savings.
The arrival of the first of the new “visitors” coincided with the final departure of Carole Le Jeune. The shy, quiet little Belgian flower painter had become Dian’s closest confidante in Rwanda. Her loss was a heavy one.
In mid-August, Dian made a crucial decision concerning her own future.
She had asked an agent in the United States to arrange a lecture tour, and the agent had reported that one could be booked for November and December. The timings were such that, for the first time in decades, Dian would have been able to spend a Christmas season in Louisville. The prospect delighted her.
It would be so great to have a few days in that good old sun, which I miss more than anything else as I get older and crankier and my bones get sorer. But it can’t be. I can’t leave camp with the ORTPN director and the Mountain Gorilla Gang still hanging over it like vultures. Carole is gone, and Wayne McGuire, who has turned out to be a nice enough young man, is so woolly he gets lost going to the can. I may get one or two students at the end of the year but can’t count on it. Well, I’ll just have to postpone the tour until spring-if they still want me then.
Several parties of French doctors
The suspicions with which Dian had been wrestling since Nunkie’s death, and had been reluctant to accept, were intensified when the WCC’s veterinary specialist concluded that “with the large numbers of visitors who are now taken into close proximity with the gorilla groups, the potential for the transmission of human diseases is very great.”
Despite the implications for herself and her own work, Dian was almost ready to grasp the nettle. She felt increasingly impelled to do so when, at the end of August, Beethoven—the staunch old patriarch of Group 5—disappeared. First Nunkie, then Charles Darwin, and now Beethoven …
I don’t know what is going on. Maybe poachers aren’t the worst thing to happen to the gorillas. Perhaps WE are…. ORTPN and the Mountain Gorilla Gang will go out of their minds if this infection of gorillas through human contacts is true. The whole of the Virungas would have to be quarantined. Tourism would be dead and so would Karisoke … but someone will have to get at the truth of what is happening.
Fully aware of the violent repercussions that would follow any action seriously threatening the gorilla tourist business, Dian agonized over what to do through long days and sleepless nights.
Last night I went to the graves again. It was black as coal and I could only dimly see the markers. I stood beside Digit a long time still not knowing what to do, but Digit knew, and Uncle Bert and all the others.
She had made up her mind.
In mid-September she wrote to Evelyn Gallardos:
“Phillipe Bertrand, the Ruhengeri Hospital surgeon who did the autopsy on Nunkie in June, as well as on the newest silver-back victim, told me this weekend that Jean-Pierre von der Becke and Mark Condiotti, both of the Mountain Gorilla Project, asked him NOT to give me any photos or information about the autopsy on Charles Darwin. As a proper scientist Phillipe was appalled; as a personal friend he was quite angry.”
Phillipe Bertrand was one of the few local people with whom Dian felt she could safely discuss her growing certainty that gorillas were dying of diseases contracted from human beings. When she found him sympathetic and indeed already half-convinced, she took the plunge. She proposed they form a team to investigate the matter. Very circumspectly they recruited a second medical doctor and two veterinarians. All were either French or Belgian, and none had close links with, or any great affection for, the Mountain Gorilla Project or ORTPN.
Whether from reasons of prudence or due to subsequent loss, nothing of record can be found to reveal what this group attempted or accomplished. One thing is certain. If the nature of the inquiry reached those concerned with gorilla tourism, it would have been recognized by those who profited from it as a serious threat to that activity.
All summer long, Dian had been bothered by a general sense of unease about the gorillas. Something strange and unsettling appeared to be disturbing the lives of the lords of the volcanoes, putting them into an extraordinary state of flux. They were becoming, as she said, hiva-hiva—Swahili for all mixed up. Her notes and comments from August through October reveal the perplexity she felt.
August 1: Nunkie’s females are scattered everywhere in different groups-Tiger only took Fuddle; Pandora is with Group 5, and Papoose and Augustus plus seven youngsters are with Peanuts’s all-male Group, but they keep shifting like a crazy game of musical chairs.
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
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.