Gorillas in the Mist (52 page)

On February 27 Dian had written Stacey Coil: “I know my bank account must be nearly defunct by now…. It is a little spooky running Karisoke on only the traveler’s checks I brought with me from Ithaca and the Digit Fund, but I can manage for a while before I put out a plea to the powers that be.” She had been counting on royalty income from the book to bridge the gap, but sales had not been as large as expected, and she had incurred heavy charges against royalties for additional artwork and extensive changes to the book’s page proofs.

In a letter to Shirley McGreal she noted wryly, “Let’s face it, the book wasn’t that great a seller; but I still have my gold fillings to fall back on. I don’t know whom to ask for money since the Mountain Gorilla Project appears to be soaking up all available contributions from the major funding agencies and the public at large. Most people with whom I have spoken while in America, South Africa, and the U.K. seem to think they are donating to Karisoke when they give to the
MGP.
”

She had not approached the National Geographic.

I don’t think it right to ask N.G. for money when there is actually no behavioral research going on here because no students yet.

This was not the whole story. She was apprehensive about asking the Society for help because she was fearful that the senior officials there had once again turned against her.

What disturbs me tremendously is that von der Becke inferred following his return from America that I am finished with N.G. If this is the case, and I have only the absence of answers to my letters to feel that it might be, I am extremely dejected. Dr. Snider hasn’t written a word to me in ages. That hurts!

This was not paranoia. While her articles in the Society’s magazine and films about her life with the gorillas had served the Society’s purposes very well, she was no longer the stellar attraction she had once been.

Although Dian must have been at least dimly aware of this, she stubbornly refused to realize that Karisoke’s fairy godmother of more than a dozen years was now departing from the scene.

During March and April she kept herself preoccupied with antipoaching work, a training program for park guards, and in trying to establish her Guardians for Gorilla Groups. She made little progress with the latter. Although
ORTPN
’s new director had praised the idea, he would take no steps to implement it. He would not even commission a study to determine its potential. This intransigence was due, in part at least, to the hostility
evidenced toward the plan by those whose vested interests would have been put at risk had Dian’s scheme been approved.

In close cooperation with the Belgian Aid program, conservation organizations were now funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into various divisions of
ORTPN
, which had come to depend upon this source of funds. Laurent Habiyaremye may have been Dian’s good friend and warm supporter when he first took over his new post, but he had quickly found himself influenced by more practical considerations.

Unable to persuade the Rwandan government or any established conservation agency to espouse her plan, Dian was nevertheless encouraged by a few individual supporters. One of these was Joan Travis, a longtime friend of the Digit Fund who wrote: “I would love to know if you have actually started the new regime of assigning a local family to each gorilla group. As I recall, you said that this would require about one hundred dollars a month. If you have embarked on this program, Arnold [her husband] and I would like to become responsible for the support of one such unit.”

Dian was now sending guardian patrols three times a week to each of the several gorilla groups in the study area, and to an additional three fringe groups on the northern slopes of Mt. Visoke.

This was all very well, but the guardians had to be paid and there were too few Joan Travises around. The financial drain on Dian’s resources was assuming the proportions of a hemorrhage.

I am now personally paying the upkeep of Karisoke, its trackers and camp staff, as well as most of the Guardians for Gorilla Groups we have set up, all from the proceeds of the book. But these are now down to very little. I really do not know whom to ask for funding since the camp is essentially conservation-oriented rather than scientifically oriented for the moment.

She wrote Stacey Coil, “I desperately need money and am now having to borrow from everyone.” By early April it looked
as if the bankruptcy Richard Barnes had prematurely predicted for Karisoke might become a reality.

I feel like an abandoned mother of fifty-seven, the number of gorillas now in the study area. To care for them I have to get work or sell something. I could try selling my body, but there wouldn’t be many takers for Fossil Fossey, so I must try something else.

Although she loathed the idea, her only real hope rested in intensifying her activities as promoter and saleswoman for the mountain gorillas. “It is truly like being some kind of a hooker,” she had once remarked. Perhaps so, but there was no help for it. She decided to return to the United States in May to scout for funds.

The timing of Watts’s arrival had been fortuitous. A week after he climbed to Karisoke, Dian came down with yet another bout of pneumonia. As usual she aimed to cure herself but, by April 10, had become so sick she was lapsing into unconsciousness. At this point David sent for a litter and had her carried down the mountain to Ruhengeri Hospital. There she remained until April 20, by which time she was sufficiently recovered to return to camp to greet the first of the new students, a young Englishman from the University of Bristol named Michael Catsis.

Still too weak to attempt anything strenuous, Dian mooched about in and near her cabin for the next several days. She was hatching a new project—a book about the human and animal history of the Virungas to be based on interviews with the elders of the native population. Acceptance of her declining health, combined with the need to earn a living for her dependents, had reactivated the writer’s itch that had been with her on and off since childhood.

She was wasting no time feeling sorry for herself, as she makes clear in a letter to Shirley McGreal written in early May:

“I am
not
, as you suggest, ‘killing myself by neglect.’ In 1963 a lung specialist in Louisville warned me that it would
be suicidal to climb to Kabara on that first memorable safari to Africa. He subsequently died of lung cancer! At any rate, I take extremely good care of myself in full realization that I live at ten thousand feet in a rain forest, and in a cabin whose fireplaces smoke more than I. I take vitamin pills, have bought a small oxygen machine, eat a couple of bananas a day to avoid potassium deficiency, and thrive on potatoes and eggs (my main diet because of budget problems). In other words, I spoil myself. My only regrets are that I cannot go to the gorillas on a daily basis anymore, but Karisoke trackers and research students can and do. As long as I can function to train guards and new Africans in duties related to the
active
conservation of gorillas and other inhabitants of the Virungas, then I happily exist.”

She was not entirely separated from the gorillas. They occasionally came close enough so that she could reach them. On April 2 she and Group 5 had their first visit together since January.

They were quite near camp, but it is ever so cold and rainy. Virtually all we did was exchange grunts of empathetic misery, though young Tuck managed to swipe my three-hundred-dollar altimeter, so tonight it sits in the rain, and hopefully tomorrow a tracker will find it. But Tuck was so funny. I thought I had everything portable hidden in my pockets and my knapsack, but she managed to spy a bit of the string connected to the altimeter just protruding from my knapsack. Zoooom! In a flash she grabbed it and ran to old Beethoven, a couple of yards away, all the time twirling it around and around on the end of the string like a deadly missile. It frightened the @#$%&* blue cheese out of the old man! He screamed as this alien object was whirled around his head and hurriedly moved off. Tuck then directed a “just try and get it” look at me. I hope I gave her my cold-it is a green/red one, and not much fun.

It was this cold, exacerbated by the day in the rain, that turned into pneumonia; but for Dian this was a small price to pay for a few hours of communion with the mountain kings.

L
ess than three months after her return from England, Dian was on the road—or in the air—again. Leaving Kigali on May 14, she retraced the now tediously familiar route via Brussels to New York, then went on to Louisville for a brief visit with members of the Henry family, but chiefly to check on the state of her personal finances. It was with no great surprise that she found her current account overdrawn.

My savings, which aren’t exactly Rockefeller-type, are mostly from Uncle Bert’s legacy and are my old-age pension. I guess I’m old enough to start drawing on them now. Not that there is any choice.

During the next ten days she shuttled back and forth between New York and Washington, attempting to regain the support of the National Geographic Society. Although she was treated kindly by old friends such as Dr. Snider, it was painfully apparent that the Society had no intention of taking her back into the fold.

She spent hours on the telephone trying to interest other potential sponsors in funding Karisoke. Receiving an absolute rebuff from the Leakey Foundation, she tried a number of private donors to good causes, but found that those inclined to support gorilla conservation were mostly committed to the Mountain Gorilla Project or its parent organizations.

At the end of May she retreated to Ithaca to spend a few days pondering her lack of success as a fund-raiser. Her gloom was not much lightened when she learned that Biruté Galdikas had recently received a grant of
$60,000
from the Earth Watch Society and that one of the members of the oil-fed Getty family was supporting Jane Goodall’s work to the tune of $250,000.

Although rejected by the conservation establishment, Dian was becoming a heroine to rank-and-file activists in the conservation movement. These were mostly people who had very little surplus income, but they gave what they could. By the time she left Ithaca she had the satisfaction of knowing that there was at least enough money in the Digit Fund to cover the costs of antipoaching patrols and her gorilla guardian program for the immediate future.

Her next stop was Chicago, where she worked for ten days on the
Wild Kingdom
gorilla film, thereby earning enough “to pay camp costs and the men’s salaries for two months at least.”

While in Chicago she consulted a doctor about a new and disquieting ailment. The doctor diagnosed a heart disorder, probably due to stress. He gave her a prescription and recommended that she rest and take life easy for at least six weeks. He particularly enjoined her not to travel and to avoid high altitudes!

He might as well have told me just to stop breathing and be done with it. I thanked him nicely and settled his bill, which would have paid for a solid month of anti-poacher patrols. Well, if my heart is as tough as my old lungs, I guess I’ll make it.

Next day she was en route back to Karisoke.

Not long after her return she wrote to Warren Garst:

“I have never known this camp to function better, without friction, etc. Twice a week I send detailed reports on the patrol and guardian work to the director of
ORTPN
and to the park conservateur. Their appreciation of same is
real
. Have two good assistants in the form of David Watts, who is far happier this time since the V-W couple aren’t here, and the young English
boy, Mike Catsis, who works very well and speaks perfect French. In the next month or so three more people are expected—general researcher, botanist-artist, and veterinarian. Karisoke is going to
POP
with output!”

To Joan and Arnold Travis, who continued to fund one of the Guardian Groups, she reported: “Things continue well at camp, though I am still paying for its upkeep out of my pocket and everything connected with patrol work out of the Digit Fund. So far this year (end of June) we have cut 1
, 101
traps and caught two poachers. The patrols are running seven days a week. We are covering fringe groups, but not as often as I like since most are so far away from Karisoke. We are now guarding eighty-four gorillas, nearly half of all there are in the whole of the Virungas…. I was going to send you some cute little dung dollops from infants in the fringe groups as ‘baptism/adoption’ gifts but thought better of it.

“The director of
ORTPN
really liked the adoption idea at first. He was so excited and happy that something new was going to be done, but the Belgian head of the Mt. Gorilla Project did not like it. That killed the scheme for the entirety of the mountains, but not for us up here. We have taken the heartland of the volcanoes to protect. I’ll say this, all is most effective, as traps are getting harder and harder to find and poachers are running scared.”

Although Karisoke’s human society was in equilibrium, the same was not true of the gorillas. This summer witnessed some extraordinary disruptions of their social structure.

Tiger had been wandering like a lost soul since leaving Peanuts’s bachelor group. Recently he started to shadow Nunkie’s Group. On June 21 there was one hell of an interaction. Nobody saw it, but Nemeye heard it from a kilometer or two away. Said it sounded like a war. I think he was too scared to go over and see what was happening.

Tiger succeeded somehow in splitting Nunkie’s group apart. Nunkie’s six females and their offspring were
scattered all over Visoke. On the twenty-seventh one of my trackers found Jenny, a three-year-old female, wandering and whimpering all alone in the forest. When she saw him she came right to him and climbed into his arms before he knew what was happening. She wouldn’t let go so he headed back to camp. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this guy outside my cabin uncomfortably being hugged by the youngster.