African Silences (22 page)

From the west end comes a family group of elephants, a cow and three juveniles, and to the east a female with small calf and a large bull skirted each other. To my astonishment, the large bull has the high shoulders, huge ragged triangular ears, and heavy forward-curving tusks of the bush elephant. Another gathering of perhaps ten animals is far down at the west end of the pan. Directly in front of us, two very small male elephants with disproportionately big tusks are snuffling deep in a mudhole in the pan, which is broken by shallow pools of stagnant water.

I have scarcely focused on this odd pair with my binoculars when I see the faces of two Africans in the trees behind them.
Poachers!
I think, but a moment later I pick up a white face behind binoculars, and then another, observing the same two little elephants. Richard and Jonah, completing their transects through the forest, have been led into the Dzanga Pan from the far side. Just prior to my arrival, they tell me later, one of these feisty little tuskers had actually skirmished with the large savanna bull. Though there are other elephants in the pan, these small males with outsized tusks turn out to be the most intriguing of all the elephants we are to see throughout our journey.

In the near-windlessness, the female with three young has caught our scent and led her small group without hurrying into the forest, as Gustave Doungoubey and his armed men, spotting our Pygmies for the first time, come hurrying across the pan, suspecting poachers. Slaus and I step out into the open, eliciting sheepish grins from our African friends, and soon Jonah and Richard come across the pan
to compare impressions of our first forest elephants, in particular the big “bush elephant” and the two small males.

Just as the forest elephant may follow the river trees into the savanna, and sometimes is observed in open country, the bush elephant penetrates deep into the forest. Richard Carroll had also seen “bush elephants,” assuming that they were fugitives from the ivory trade slaughters to the north, but Jonah thinks it is the savanna genes that have penetrated so far south; this particular animal, in all likelihood, has never seen the open grasslands.

The other elephants, in varying degrees, display the characters of the forest race,
L.a. cyclotis
, in which the highest point of the body is behind the middle of the back, and the head tends to be held lower, so that the small rounded ears on the small head (which make them look like very young bush elephants) do not reach higher than the neck. In
cyclotis
, the tusks tend to be narrow, straight, and pointed straight downward. Presumably the low head and small ears are adaptations for forest travel, but the function of the vertical tusks, like so much else about
cyclotis
, is not yet known. (I speculate that straight tusks might be used for digging tubers, in the way that the walrus uses its straight tusks for digging clams, but Jonah appears unimpressed by this brilliant theory.) Nor is it known why the forest race lacks pronounced sexual dimorphism; in the bush elephant, a big male may be twice the size of an average female.

“I suspect,” Jonah says, “that dimorphism in elephants, as in other polygamous species, is related to male competition for females. In the savannas, which are strongly seasonal, herds aggregate during the rains, females come into estrus fairly synchronously, and bigger males will of course win out. Here in the equatorial forest, the seasons are much less pronounced, and food and water are more evenly spread. Under these conditions, we suspect, female elephant herds are tiny and more evenly distributed, and probably breed all year round. If this is true,
males would also be widely spread, and would not compete so strongly in one place and at one time, so that the advantage of size is less.”

Richard, in his reserved, taciturn way, is discernibly elated by these interesting elephants, seen in the open, at close range. Never before has he had such a look at forest elephants, and this is only the second time he has been able to get photographs. “In Gabon,” he had told me over breakfast, “they are always hidden, sometimes only a few yards away. We can be right on top of one and not know he’s there. And even when we
are
aware of them, we make noise to drive them off, because”—and here he shrugged, as the relentless candor that is one of his likable qualities overtook him—“because, well, I’m
afraid
of them. I’m not prepared to take the risk of approaching strange elephants in the forest, and my fiancée has extracted a promise from me that I will not do so.”

Unlike Jonah and I, who go about in shorts and sneakers, Richard spends every day out in the forest, and therefore feels he cannot afford our casual attitude toward such jungle afflictions as thorns and biting insects. In this very hot and humid climate (though the forest is much cooler than the clearings), he is fortified by a tight-buttoned and tight-belted dark green khaki field jacket, baggy trousers with large extra pockets, gaiters, and boots, together with a full compliment of canvas bags, canteens, and compasses, bags of dust to test the wind, binoculars, camera, and other useful and less useful accoutrements. Peering out through owlish glasses from beneath his heavy-gauge rain-and-sun hat, he brings to mind old photos of nineteenth-century naturalists, with whom he shares an old-fashioned meticulousness and dedication that is most impressive.

If Drs. Barnes and Western were surprised to see a “pure” bush elephant so deep in the forest, they were positively astonished by the tusk size of the two young males just in front of us, which, to judge from their height—no
more than five feet at the shoulder—are probably about five years old. These creatures answered perfectly the description of the “pygmy elephant,” even to an aggressive nature, displayed when the larger of the two had instigated that brief skirmish with the savanna bull, which was several times its size. But a few minutes later, the same little male had approached a female in the large group at the west end and engaged in unmistakable filial behavior. Thus in an instant he had demonstrated that he was not a mature elephant of pygmy dimensions and outsized tusks but an extraordinarily independent young forest elephant. The reason for that independence may well lie in the complete absence of lion, hyena, and wild dog, the only predators that might attack young elephants of this size in the savanna (the leopard is simply not large enough to bring one down). Freedom from predators permits a very early independence from the mother, and might account for the obstreperous groups of juvenile
cyclotis
that are reported as “pygmy elephants.”

Though an adult male is only eight feet high while his counterpart in the savanna may be well over ten, forest elephants are thought to have a shorter life span than the bush form, and probably reach maturity much faster, tusks and all. “In the bush elephant,” Jonah says, “you
expect
to find big tusks, because the male is so much bigger. But in the forest elephant, without dimorphism, such tusks are striking, even though male tusks grow much faster relative to age.” If this animal and his companion are specimens of “pygmy elephants,” as we suppose, there remains a certain enigma in those tusks, and their precocious development in at least some of young male
cyclotis.

It is encouraging that these elephants are comparatively tame, a sign that they are harassed little if at all—a point to be made in our recommendation of this place as a national reserve. The foresters say that elephants are more plentiful farther south, and that gorilla and bongo,
though difficult to see, are common in the region. What Dr. Western will probably recommend is a park far larger than the proposed reserve, occupying the whole triangle of C.A.R. that lies between Congo and Cameroon, with contiguous reserves or parks in those two countries—the first international forest park, preserving hundreds of square miles of undamaged habitat.

Since we have flashlights, Slaus and I, with Lalieh and Bisambe, decide to remain here until dusk, when we might hope to see bush pig or bongo, or possibly the giant forest hog. Our friends have scarcely disappeared when four more elephants, golden yellow with caked clay from another bathing place, walk out of the deepening evening greens onto the east end of the pan. Soon they are joined by the big gray savanna bull, whose size, color, and configuration make him look like a different species altogether. All five cross over to our side and reenter the forest, and we wonder if we will encounter them on the way back. Another elephant comes and goes. Then, quite suddenly, the Babinga are gesturing.

The vanished five have reappeared at the edge of a grassy swale just to our right. Not catching our scent, they keep on coming, passing too close as they head toward the center of the pan, where they bathe and drink for a little while before the female catches our scent in a subtle shift of wind. She lifts her trunk high, then directs it straight at us like a blunderbuss. Silently, in unhurried hurry, the elephants move out of the pan, and the sand plovers, the green sandpipers from Europe, and some blue-winged, chestnut-colored ducks shift just enough in the wash of mud and water to escape being flattened by the great round feet. I have never before seen this beautiful forest duck (labeled Hartlaub’s duck through no fault of its own), the nest of which has never been located. “Faunistically,” as Jonah says, in uncharacteristic resort to eco-jargon, “the rain forest of the Congo Basin is very little known.”

Two days later, while Richard continues with his transects, Jonah and I return to Dzanga Pan, arriving at two in the afternoon so as to be ready when the elephants come in; we are interested especially in large-tusked “pygmies.” The day is hot, the pan dead still: I watch a sun bird, a green shiny lizard, and a pair of chortling gray parrots catching the sun in their red tails. (This species is the loquacious favorite of caged-parrot fanciers and therefore threatened in the wild.) Not until midafternoon does the first group of elephants appear, looming suddenly out of deep green shadows in the forest wall across the pan, lifting their trunks to sniff the air, swinging a forefoot several inches above the ground, ears uncoiling, thin tails switching, in the constant “flowing” of the elephant, even a calm one. “The first ones in are always suspicious,” Jonah whispers.

This first group, which appear to be almost “pure”
cyclotis
, is scared away by two Babinga hunters who emerge from the forest to the southwest with big leaf-wrapped packets of fresh meat and whack a tree hard with a panga to clear out the elephants before crossing the pan. Twenty-two elephant come in once they are gone—mostly hybrids, with pronounced bush characters such as bulging brow, long back, and sharp-cornered ears. The sole young male is smaller than our “pygmy elephants” and lacks their heavy tusk development, yet he is even more independent in behavior, coming into the pan early, all by himself, traveling the length of it past other groups, and departing the pan, still entirely on his own, in another direction. “On the savannas,” Jonah says, astounded, “elephants are eight years old before they leave their mothers. That one can’t be more than three! In the savanna he wouldn’t last one day!”

The forest west of the Sangha River is entirely roadless, stretching away across an unmarked boundary into Cameroon. Perhaps for want of firsthand knowledge, blacks and
whites agree that the gorilla is most plentiful in that region, which is dense and treacherous, so Gustave says, and ridden with swamps aswarm with crocodiles. Its only inhabitants are Pygmies, but no local will accompany us, since they say that these Pygmies, who come in from Cameroon, are
“très méchant.”
(Cameroon is the westernmost territory of the Pygmies, who are thought to number about two hundred thousand altogether. The largest group—about twenty-five thousand—and the one most culturally intact, are the Mbuti, whom we shall meet in the Ituri Forest of Zaire.) International boundaries are of no concern to Pygmies anywhere, but possibly the Sangha River is a natural barrier between Pygmy nations. Or perhaps, being people of the forest, they are afraid to cross such a broad water at the mercy of the Yanga fishermen, who stand in the stern of their pirogues to paddle their narrow leaflike craft up and down the currents in the shadow of the gallery trees.

Under the circumstances, Jonah and I will set off on a gorilla hunt alone. Since the pirogues are too delicate and leaky to carry two big passengers, Slaus Sterculec offers to take us across the Sangha in his riverboat, a decommissioned metal landing craft from World War II. Soon we are rounding the broad sandbars that appear in midriver in the rainy season and crossing the heavy current to a break in the forest wall where elephants come occasionally to water.

Slaus is concerned that without a tracker we may lose ourselves in the dense forest, and on the far side he conscripts a young Yanga fisherman, Aliende, who agrees to guide us. Heading inland, Aliende skirts a broad and grassy marsh, perhaps an ancient oxbow of the river, and arrives at an overgrown, treacherous swamp perhaps a hundred yards across, all tussocks and tangled undergrowth, rotten footing and hidden holes, into which we sink well above the knee. On the far side, the rain forest has been much modified to their own advantage by the elephants, to judge not only from plentiful droppings but the numerous small
clearings with abundant second growth that provides them fodder. This browse is also very useful to gorilla and the big forest antelope called the bongo, and before long we come upon gorilla sign—beds, feeding areas, old droppings. (There are thought to be several thousand gorilla in this southwestern forest of C.A.R.) Continuing westward perhaps two miles more, we find fresh green droppings and a sweet whiff in the air left behind from the night before. But the gorilla, who rarely shows himself until he wishes to have a look at his observers, remains hidden in the rank and heavy cover.