A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (5 page)

Later, I asked Rosalind why she had discouraged Mtoto.
“You don’t want them to take you for an object of curiosity,” she told me. “You don’t want the children to look at you as someone to play with.” The goal was to be the ghost in their midst, a thing no more interesting than a tree. That way, habituated gorillas might behave more like wild groups.

“But I’ve seen pictures of Dian holding baby gorillas,” I said. “I’ve seen photos of her touching silverbacks.”

Well, yes, all that had happened.

“And those photos, those films, they’re what changed the public’s view of gorillas,” I said. “After that it was ‘gentle giant’ time.”

True enough. But now, Rosalind thought, it was time for another approach. She thought Dian would be in full agreement with her on this.

“But don’t you want to touch them, don’t you want them to touch you?”

“No,” Rosalind said.

“C’mon. I feel it. You’re telling me you don’t? What, do you turn in your membership to the human race when you become a scientist?”

“Okay,” Rosalind said, “I admit, it’s a temptation. A big temptation.”

“So you really did want to hold Mtoto.”

“Of course I did,” Rosalind Aveling said, “God, I wanted to hold her.”

T
he gorillas let you know when you have overstayed your welcome. They let you know with frowns, locomotive coughs, the beginnings of displays. Even so, there was a sense of enormous privilege just sitting with them; privilege felt in their acceptance, no matter what its duration. Once, on the lower slopes of Visoke, one of the volcanoes, a silverback named Ndume woke up from his nap, saw me, and ambled close to the place where I lay. Ponderously, he sat down, yawned, stretched, then reached down to my knee, where he took the
material of my red rain pants between his thumb and forefinger and rolled it back and forth like a knowledgeable garment buyer. Ndume cocked his head to the side. His eyes were soft, golden brown, and he wore that familiar slightly puzzled expressed.

“Gore-Tex,” I wanted to say. Instead, I grunted twice. Ndume returned the DBV. There was some genuine interspecies communication going on, and it felt like a fantasy, like one of those strange wondrous dreams in which you can talk to the animals, to all of creation, and creation itself responds with approval. There was no science involved in this encounter. It was all emotion.

I felt a kind of unspecified glow, something within that was very much like love, and it came to me then that for the past fourteen years Dian Fossey had literally lived in that glow.

M
ost of the gorilla families I met had already been habituated to humans. There was one researcher, Ann Pierce, who kept tabs on the wild groups that ranged near the Zaire border. A visit to those groups was more than a stiff hike: it was an expedition. Once Ann and I, along with a Rwandan tracker, climbed Visoke, an extinct volcano, where we camped at 11,000 feet, on the rim of the crater lake. The next day we were up at dawn, and we trudged through the tangled vegetation down the west side of the mountain, toward Zaire. It took a little more than five hours, and I was exhausted by the time we began finding fresh dung along the gorillas’ trail.

I could smell them then, somewhere across the vegetation-choked flat. Ann fell to her stomach and I crawled along after her. They were about fifty yards away. The trees broke the light, which fell through thick branches in El Greco shafts. I could see dark shapes, like bears, moving slowly through those purely religious shafts, and then the silverback saw us.

He charged perhaps five yards. His roar started at a high register then dropped, as a donkey’s bray will. It was hard to see him through the vegetation, but he was standing, beating his chest, and the slapping thuds seemed impossibly loud. The rest of the family was moving over a small hillock, and the silverback—I assumed he was the silverback—was covering their retreat. He tore a branch from a tree—a branch the size of a fullback’s thigh—and threw it to the ground. He jumped up and down. He hooted at us. I suppose, if I were sitting home watching that display on videotape, it might seem humorous, like a child’s temper tantrum. In the jungle, it was terrifying.

I knew, from reading George Schaller’s pioneering work on gorillas, that a silverback will display and make a bluff charge, but will not attack a man who holds his ground. I knew that intellectually. Intellect does not inform the scream-and-gibber mechanism.

Nevertheless, we held our ground, Ann and I. We did not advance. After five more minutes of display and bluff charges, the supposed silverback turned to follow his family over the hillock.

“Let’s go,” Ann Pierce said. “We’ve disturbed them enough for today.”

I thought about Dian Fossey during the seven-hour walk back to our camp overlooking the crater lake. She had read Schaller; she knew that gorillas could be habituated to the presence of humans, that a silverback would not attack if she held her ground. But what courage it must have taken, what incredible courage, to stand firm in the face of so many silverback charges.

Late that afternoon, about halfway back up Visoke, a cold rain began to fall. The temperature stood at about 45 degrees. I was sweating heavily inside my rain jacket so that every time I stopped to rest the chill began working at me until, shivering uncontrollably, I began walking again. We had come through fields of waist-high nettles, acres of them it seemed, and my hands stung from their touch. They felt as if they were on fire.

All this, I thought, for a five-minute encounter. Dian
Fossey had started with wild groups and just such encounters: twelve hours of hard walking for five minutes of rejection. Never mind Fossey’s courage: the physical aspects of the woman’s achievement, her stamina and commitment, amazed me.

I
f anyone on earth had earned the right to speak for the mountain gorillas of Rwanda, it was Dian Fossey. In 1978, an unimaginable tragedy brought her work again to the attention of the world. The silverback Digit was attacked and killed by poachers. Dian had known the animal since he was two and half: a “playful little ball of disorganized black fluff,” was how she described him then, “from which protruded two buttonlike velvet brown eyes full of mischief and curiosity.” In a report written for the
International Primate Protection League Newsletter
, Dian, working from evidence found at the death scene, described what must have happened. Digit was not the dominant male of the group. He was a peripheral silverback, charged with the responsibility of “assisting the dominant male in the protection of the more defenseless members of their group.

“It was in this service that Digit was killed by poachers on December 31, 1977. On that day, Digit took five mortal spear wounds into his own body, held off six poachers and their dogs, allowing the entire family group to flee four kilometers away to safety. Digit’s last lonely battle was a valiant and courageous one in which he managed to kill one of the poachers’ dogs before dying. I cannot allow myself to think of his anguish, his pain, and the total comprehension he suffered of knowing what humans were doing to him.”

Could anyone really understand the horror of Digit’s murder? Dian suggested the
Newsletter
run photos of the death scene, ghastly black-and-white pictures of Digit slumped against a tree, decapitated. Where his hands should have been, there were bloody stumps. One could only compare this horror with film of the living Digit: scenes of the
nearly mature gorilla and Fossey together; of Digit examining her notebook and pen with that endearing, slightly puzzled expression; of Digit rolling over to sleep by Dian’s side. “That was the nature of Digit,” Dian wrote, “gentle, inquisitive, trusting.”

The tragedy played on Dian’s mind. It affected her work, her relationship with the animals she loved. “I am still allowed to share their proximity,” she wrote, “but it is an honor and gift that I feel I no longer deserve.”

In the wake of Digit’s death, Dian established the Digit Fund, a charitable organization dedicated to the protection of mountain gorillas. She was joined in this effort by the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation (now called the African Wildlife Foundation).

The association lasted a year, then AWF pulled out. No one wanted to say that they disagreed with Dian’s confrontational style, her strategy of intimidation, her lack of tact and diplomacy. “That would be wrong,” Diana McMeekin, deputy director of the AWF, says, “and what’s more, it’s unfair to Dian.” McMeekin said that AWF set up its own charity “because we felt that all the gorillas needed protection. Dian was concerned, quite rightly I think, about protecting her research groups. We wanted to establish a program that would deal with mountain gorilla conservation overall.”

AWF joined with a consortium of the Rwandan Office of Tourism and National Parks, the Fauna Preservation Society, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Peoples Trust for Endangered Species to sponsor the Mountain Gorilla Project. There were several successful fund drives. Dian felt that the Project, and specifically AWF, was taking money that should have gone into her work, that “Digit’s blood money” was being used for an ineffective and potentially dangerous program.

Especially galling to Dian was the Mountain Gorilla Project’s policy of developing tourism. The idea that tourists could be brought into the park to view habituated groups of gorillas seemed hazardous to her. Reproductive cycles could be disrupted by the stress such visits would
cause. Diseases could be passed to the gorillas. The whole concept was emotionally unacceptable: gorillas should be granted their privacy, she told a friend. They should be left alone. Their world should be pristine, not soiled with clicking cameras, with loud and curious louts, with people who had no knowledge or respect for these animals she loved. In an article published in the April 1981
National Geographic
she listed the “tourist presence” among the factors that would lead to the demise of the mountain gorilla.

M
ountain gorilla conservation is a multifaceted problem. Poachers have killed gorillas for their skulls and hands, but this has always been rare. Perhaps more threatening to the population as a whole is the potential trade in baby mountain gorillas for private collections and zoos.

The gorillas you see in zoos are lowland gorillas. A recent survey out of Gabon suggests there are as many as thirty thousand surviving lowland gorillas. A bridge group, the eastern lowland gorilla resembles the mountain gorilla but is actually a separate race. The mountain gorilla—with only a few hundred individuals surviving—would be a prize animal for any zoo in the world. Some zoos—a very few—are unscrupulous.

To obtain a baby mountain gorilla, poachers would have to kill the silverback and the mother. In November 1982, this is precisely what happened. A wave of poaching struck the Virungas. In widely separate incidents, ten gorillas were killed. No hands or heads were taken. Officials at AWF feared that a contract had been put out for a baby gorilla. Suspicion centered on private collectors from the Mideast. Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that a European zoo had purchased a baby mountain gorilla. (In fact, the animal turned out to be an eastern lowland gorilla.)

The zoo denied any complicity in the otherwise inexplicable wave of poaching. The gorilla hadn’t come from Rwanda or Zaire, the zoo pointed out, but from a neighboring
country. It seems that a kindly traveling missionary had found an orphaned baby gorilla. Well, of course the missionary had his good work to do and couldn’t spend his life caring for a gorilla, but he did want it to have a good home. This religious individual had simply given the gorilla to the zoo, a gift that would benefit everyone. And since the animal was given as a gift, there was no paper trail to follow and no way to check the story out.

Many people involved in gorilla conservation found the tale of the kindly missionary tough to swallow.

The most dangerous poaching activity in the Virungas, however, involves the trapping of duiker, a small antelope about the size and color of an Irish setter. Wire snares are positioned along game trails, and gorillas often blunder into the antelope traps, catching a hand or foot in the wire. They are generally able to extricate themselves, but the wounds fester in the dampness of the jungle, they become infected, gangrene sets in, animals die. Some lose limbs. Ndume, my favorite silverback—the gorilla with a Gore-Tex fetish—lost a hand in a duiker trap.

Over the years, Dian and her trackers removed literally thousands of wire snares from the park and specifically from the area around Karisoke. In 1980, park guards, working under Mountain Gorilla Project coordinator Jean Pierre van der Becke, were working to remove snares from the more remote areas of the park.

P
oaching is a well-publicized and emotional issue, but the clearest danger to the mountain gorilla is the destruction of its habitat. In 1979, a Mountain Gorilla Project worker named Bill Weber took a survey of the people living on farms below the park. The majority seemed to see Volcano Park as a white man’s playground. They thought the land should be turned over to more farms.

To understand Rwandans’ hunger for land it is necessary to know a bit about the history of the country. The aboriginal
people were the Twa, a pygmy people who lived as hunters and gatherers in the great expanse of forest that Rwanda once was. Then came the Tutsi, a race of giants, the tallest people on the face of the earth, who cleared some land for grazing purposes. Finally, the Hutu came out of the north. An agricultural people, the Hutu set about feverishly clearing the land.

Today, the Hutu farming ethic informs the fabric of Rwandan society. When I flew into Rwanda, my seatmate seemed staggered at the contrast between the jungle of Zaire and the bare, rolling hills of Rwanda. “These people hate trees,” he said. More to the point, these people need to eat. Rwanda is the poorest sub-Sahara country in Africa. About the size of Delaware, Rwanda has a population of 4.7 million people; 95 percent of those people are subsistence farmers who eke out a living on farms that average a mere two acres apiece.