Gorillas in the Mist (27 page)

Meantime, she backtracked the Batwa and soon found a bloodstained clearing where several men had slaughtered a duiker and had been butchering it when she happened near the spot. She realized that the Batwa had deliberately flaunted his presence in a successful ploy to draw her off.

By the time Ian and Rwelekana reached her, she was raging. “I want those bastards caught at any cost.”

By then it was early evening and hardly the time to enter the darkening forest in pursuit of a gang of well-armed hunters. But Ian was game, and Rwelekana so cowed by Dian’s fury that he preferred to face the poachers rather than his boss. The two loped off on the poachers’ trail, leaving a fuming Dian to make her way back to camp.

As it turned out, the lateness of the hour worked to the advantage of the pursuers. Thinking themselves safe as darkness fell, the Batwas circled back to a crude hut they had built near Fifth Hill on the saddle between Visoke and Karisimbi. Here they lit a fire, loaded their hashish pipes, and began cooking some of
the antelope meat. Being in a happy mood, they laughed a lot; and as the hashish took effect, some of them began to sing.

Darkness comes swiftly and suddenly in the tropics. So did Ian and Rwelekana as they homed in on the sound of voices and the glint of flames. Screaming like a veritable banshee, Ian leapt out of the dense bush into the center of the poachers’ circle while Rwelekana thrashed noisily about in the underbrush attempting to sound like ten instead of one.

Abandoning most of their belongings, the pygmies dived headlong into the blackness of the surrounding forest with such celerity that neither Ian or Rwelekana managed to catch one. To discourage any thoughts of a counterattack, Ian fired a few pistol shots after them, though aiming high enough to miss.

Having smashed the hut, the victors loaded themselves with the meat of four duikers and a baby bushbuck, three spears, three bows with about thirty arrows, and two hashish pipes. Then they beat a hurried retreat, not without some apprehensive backward glances.

They reached home at about 9:00
P.M
. to find a contrite Dian pacing back and forth by the camp cooking fire, fearful that she had sent them to their deaths. Her relief at seeing them was so great that she gave them both a tongue-lashing for “taking silly risks.”

Most winter days at the tag end of the year were less exciting. As the weather worsened, it became a misery to go anywhere. Torrential rains and stinging hailstorms became the daily norm. Dian typed away at the book and did other paperwork, while Ian squinted down the barrel of his microscope at worms and yet more worms. In mid-December he sallied off the mountain to fetch a Christmas tree as the centerpiece for the “Wog’s Christmas Party;” and thereafter Dian busied herself for days, wrapping innumerable presents for the men and their enormous families.

The party was held on December 23 and was attended by some fifty people ranging from suckling babes to an old crone who,
much to everyone’s merriment, claimed to be Basili’s abandoned wife. Despite a persistent drizzle, the party went on far into the night, with dancing, miming, and singing around a roaring bonfire. Dancing with the best of them, Dian was in her element.

Carried on like crazy … I got a little X but no one noticed. Really had a good time … was very happy…. There have been some rough spots but this year on the whole was pretty good…. I’ve got two or three new students coming in January, and if they are any use, things should look up around here…. I’m working well on my book. The poachers seem to have crawled back into their holes and the gorillas are fine. Digit has become a “big man” now, and you’d be proud of the way he helps Uncle Bert look after the group. So I guess it’s safe to say things look pretty good for 1978.

Dian Fossey was looking into a clouded glass.

S
unday, January 1, 1978, broke warm and sunny. Dian wanted to visit the gorillas, but was preoccupied with the imminent arrival of a
BBC
film unit for the television series
Life on Earth
. The star of the show, David Attenborough, would be on hand, and Dian was anxious that Karisoke make a good impression.

Only Nemeye could be spared from sprucing up the camp. Dian sent him to locate Group 4, which had not been visited since December 28. Happy to avoid the fuss, he set off early, but the animals were missing from their usual haunts on the southwestern slopes of Mt. Visoke. After a search lasting several hours he finally came on their travel trail leading across the saddle toward Mt. Mikeno. At the same time he encountered an obstreperous herd of elephants and prudently turned back.

The weather next day remained so lovely that Dian could not stay in camp. Having dispatched Ian and Nemeye to locate Uncle Bert’s errant family, she set out nominally to look for poachers’ traps, but actually to revel in the welcome heat of a blazing sun and to enjoy the rich smells and sounds of the steaming forest.

Lithe and limber as a duiker, Nemeye led Ian at a brisk pace toward the saddle. A mile from camp they crossed the unmarked border into Zaire. An hour later the two men came across a wide swath of crushed and flattened vegetation sprayed with liquid
dung, testifying to the headlong flight of a dozen or more gorillas. Telling Nemeye to stay put, Ian backtracked to see if he could find out what had frightened them. A hundred yards along the flight trail he entered a little glade and almost stumbled over the crushed body of a native dog.

A few paces beyond loomed a black and shapeless mound hazed with an aura of blowflies—the huge corpse of a gorilla, mutilated almost beyond recognition. The head was missing and the arms terminated in blood-encrusted stumps from which shattered slivers of bone protruded. Belly and chest had been deeply ripped and gashed. Everywhere the once-sleek black hair was matted and spiked with coagulated blood and fouled with body fluids.

Shortly before noon Dian was making her way back to camp after what had amounted to a languid stroll under the hagenia trees. With shirt unbuttoned and hair swinging loose, she was delighting in the warmth, in birdsong, and in the feeling that strength was returning to her body.

She had reached the camp meadow when she saw Ian jogging along the trail toward her, Nemeye following well behind. She paused and waited. As Ian came to her, he blurted out, “Oh, God, Dian! I hate to tell you this. Digit’s been murdered.”

There are times when one cannot accept facts for fear of shattering one’s being. As I listened to Ian’s terrible words, all of Digit’s life since my first meeting with him as a playful little ball of black fluff ten years earlier, poured through my mind. From that dreadful moment on, I came to live within an insulated part of myself.

During the final two days of December, Group 4 had been chivied by six poachers and their dogs away from the relative safety of the Visoke slopes, onto the saddle and into Zaire where there would be small likelihood of anyone’s interfering with what was intended. There, on December 31, the exhausted and terrified animals had been brought to bay.

True to his task as the rearguard defender of the family, Digit had charged to cover the retreat of the rest—to be met by a phalanx of men with upraised spears. During the melee that followed, Digit killed one of the dogs but was himself speared to death. The effect on Dian of Digit’s killing was catastrophic. No previous experience, not even her own botched abortion, had ever dealt her so savage a blow or imposed worse mental anguish. And no other conceivable disaster could have fired her to such a pitch of passion as did this bloody butchery.

At first she managed to keep her grief and fury moderately in check. While several of the men were bringing Digit’s body back to camp lashed to a bamboo carrying pole, Dian was writing letters. One was to Major General Juvenal Habyarimana, president of the Republic of Rwanda. Considering the circumstances, it is remarkable for its control:

“You have had the kindness to show interest in the gorillas of the Parc des Volcans…. I’m sure you remember the gorilla who took my notebook and pen in the National Geographic movie and then returned them to me very gently before rolling over and going to sleep at my side. That same gorilla, named Digit, is also pictured on a big poster for Rwandan tourism saying ‘Come and see me in Rwanda.’ … On December 31, Digit was speared to death by Rwandan poachers. They killed him, then cut off his head and hands and fled with them…. These killers are all of the Commune of Mukingo…. I would like to ask that they receive full punishment for their crimes…. I would have given my life to have saved Digit’s life, but it is too late for that now.”

Writing to Dr. Snider at the National Geographic she was less restrained. “Poachers have never before dared attack any of my working groups, and I am now wondering if this is the beginning of the end … for if they get away with this killing, how much longer are the others going to last? I feel … that probably most of the gorillas on the other mountains, barring Mikeno, have been killed off by now for heads and hands…. I can assure you I’ve done nothing illegal in retribution for Digit’s death,
but I am not allowing myself to think about how he must have suffered…. My plan of action is to publicize the affair as strongly and graphically as possible to every conservation society I can reach to ask them to apply pressure onto the Rwanda government to threaten to cut the vast amounts of money coming in to the Parc des Volcans for guards and a conservateur who do
NOT
work at protection of the park—that work is done by this camp—and to put pressure on the government to enforce extreme penalties for poachers—either prolonged imprisonment or death, and to allow guards to kill poachers within the park.”

Now she was beginning to hit her stride. Through January third and into the early hours of the fourth, she and Ian drew up battle plans. She described these to Richard Wrangham in England.

“First, I’m paying cash to anyone who can yield information on the whereabouts of his killers. Second, I’m going to make a new set of posters saying ‘Come and Visit Me in Rwanda’ with Digit’s body, headless and handless in as near as possible the same position as the original poster picture. I know it sounds ghoulish, but it might have some effect on the people who buy heads and hands. Third, we will make a thirty-minute documentary entitled
Digit in Life and Death
. Fourth, we will sell every conservation magazine I can reach the story of Digit with life and death pictures.”

Ian Redmond proposed that they launch an international campaign, fueled by Digit’s death, to raise money with which to hire, outfit, and train antipoacher patrols to take the battle to the enemy.

Dian agonized briefly over the idea, worried because it would be illegal for the Karisoke Research Center to wage such a war. Finally she concluded there was no other choice. Under her aegis these patrols could do what the park guards were paid for but failed to do. They could fight back on behalf of the gorillas, the duikers, and all the other creatures for which the park was supposedly a sanctuary.

Such was the origin of what would come to be known as the Digit Fund. With this beginning, Dian took her first deliberate step into the limbo reserved for those who, with the best of intentions, trespass against the sanctity of duly constituted authority. She embarked upon a course of action that would eventually cleave an unbridgeable abyss between her and much of the scientific community, of which she was a maverick member, as well as between her and those fund-raising conservation organizations that value respectability at any cost.

Ian spent the next morning filming Digit’s corpse. Then he set off for Kigali to collect the
BBC
party that had just arrived from England. In his absence Dian was visited by the nervous and perspiring park conservateur and some of his armed guards, come on a mission of appeasement. She treated them with such white-hot contempt that they fled the camp.

Although she had no direct evidence as to who had killed her friend, her suspicions amounted to near certainty that the deed had been done by Batwa hunters led by her archantagonist, Munyarukiko. In her mounting frustration and fury she contemplated a retaliatory raid upon his village, which, had it occurred, might well have had disastrous consequences, for by then she was near the limits of her self-control.

The following morning, Dr. Desseaux and a woman lab technician toiled up the trail to camp, responding to an urgent note from Dian requesting an autopsy on what was left of Digit.

Just as we were about to start the autopsy, my woodman, working about fifty feet from my house, began yelling in Swahili, “Poachers! Poachers!” The houseman ran into the cabin screaming the same. The woodman had seen a poacher with bow and arrows just on the fringe of the camp area.

No poachers have dared come near my camp for at least three years! But now they’ve nearly exterminated all of the antelope within the rest of the park and the only place where antelope now flourish is here. If they could get away with killing a gorilla in the study area, why not antelopes at camp?

I yelled to my camp staff to chase the poachers while I grabbed my gun (not legally registered) and ran after them, leaving the two Europeans, who just sat there stunned. I kept running and shooting up in the air to keep him from crossing the main open meadows above camp where he could have disappeared into the forested areas and never have been found. My men, including Vatiri, Nemeye, and Kanyaragana, could then squeeze him up against the slopes of Visoke, which is what they did, and captured him there along with a bloodstained bow and five arrows.

He was a baby-faced little Twa and one of Digit’s killers, as he admitted. Both the front and back of his tattered yellow shirt were sprayed with fountains of Digit’s dried blood. We were a good hour catching him. I’m really proud of my men, and I haven’t run like that myself since I was ten years old!

We brought him back to camp and tied him up, and my Africans began to “question” him while we went on with poor Digit’s autopsy. It was a gruesome business in that the spears and pangas had pierced so many of his organs-lung, heart, spleen, intestines, and stomach. When we finished, we three went inside my cabin for a bit of lunch that nobody felt like eating. While this was being prepared, my Africans were outside with the Twa examining him.