Gorillas in the Mist (56 page)

April was crammed with incident. The final contract with Universal Studios for a movie to be based on
Gorillas in the Mist
arrived, was signed, and sent on its way.

Dian received an invitation from a New Zealand advertising company.

They want me to do a TV commercial for American Express of, you’ve got it, Fossey sitting with a lapful of gorillas, saying, “and don’t leave home without one.” I think I’ll pass on this assignment.

Another invitation arrived; this one from the Morris Animal Foundation of Los Angeles, asking Dian to speak at the foundation’s annual meeting at Universal City, California, in mid-June, then attend a primate medical seminar in San Diego. Since the foundation would pay all expenses, Dian decided to take advantage of the opportunity. Tongue in cheek, she wrote to her agent in New York, “What a chance! Could go to Disneyland! Visit the Universal lot!! Got to be the dream of a lifetime.”

Next she heard that paperback rights to
Gorillas in the Mist
had been bought by Penguin, which intended to publish in June, and that the book had already been translated into French, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, and Dutch.

To top it all came the news that the Humane Society of New York was awarding her its special medal in recognition of her work with the gorillas.

April in Rwanda had produced some of the worst weather in recent years. That month it rained or hailed at Karisoke on twenty-nine out of thirty days, with a total precipitation of almost fifteen inches! When it was not raining—and often when it was—the mountains and the forests were shrouded in black fog.

On May 1 the sun came out. Next day the poachers, who had been rained out of the forests, returned to the attack.

Vatiri’s patrol, consisting of himself, Munyanchosa, and Sekaryongo, found the fresh footprints of four Batwa poachers along the Suza River. It was then late in the day, but they followed the tracks across the boundary between Zaire and Rwanda until it began to get dark and they had to return to camp.

Vatiri concluded the poachers hadn’t made any kills yet, so would remain on the mountain. He also thought they might be interested in gorillas, so I felt a special effort was needed. I split the available men into two patrols, Vatiri and Munyanchosa in one and Sekaryongo and Nemeye in the other, both patrols armed with pistols.

They left camp at 7:30
A.M.
While circling Five Hills, they found the fresh trail of one man climbing up the Suza ravine. Vatiri, the senior tracker, sent Nemeye and Sekaryongo to follow this one while he and his partner went off to search for other tracks.

Nemeye and Sekaryongo carefully followed the lone trail above the 4th Hill and across the Rugasa River. Continuing cautiously into Zaire, they smelled smoke and guessed there was a poacher’s
ikiboogi
close by. They split up and
closed in on it, pistols in hand, but the poacher saw or heard them coming and, clutching his panga and his bow, fled into a creekbed covered over with vegetation. Sekaryongo opened fire but missed. They were then all madly running down the gully, and Nemeye shouted not to shoot again for fear someone would be killed.

At this point the poacher must have thought he would be killed, and stopped. When the trackers reached him, they were amazed to find it was Sebahutu-the most notorious poacher left in the Virungas, who had never before been captured in the forests because he could run like an antelope, hide like a mole, and was as aggressive as a tiger if cornered. Sebahutu had also been reported dead a few months ago, but that had been just a ruse.

The patrol brought him back to the
ikiboogi
and tied up his hands and ankles so he couldn’t run while they packed up his stuff: a salt sack filled with red potatoes, corn, and beans, which showed he expected to be in the forest several days. At this time he offered my men five thousand Rwandan francs apiece if they would let him go and as many elephant tusks as they could carry. He said it was useless to take him back to the Ruhengeri prison because of his “connections” there and in the park headquarters. According to Nemeye, he wasn’t worried because he said he was in the park to do a job for some of the “big men.” I doubt that “job” was getting ivory. Probably it was to set up an attempt to get a young gorilla.

The patrol brought him back to camp, and I kept him in my living room, tied up of course, for twenty-four hours. Much like a man confronting a deathbed confession, he willingly (I didn’t touch him) gave us over sixty poachers’ names, and locations where they enter the forest; the names of those with guns; makes of same; where they obtain them; and where they hide them. Then he gave names and locations of dealers and middlemen
that make a living off selling trophies such as elephant tusks and feet, gorilla skulls, hands, and feet and infants, and antelope and buffalo meat. Then Sebahutu came up with the names and descriptions of whites and Pakistanis who deal with the middlemen exporting the above trophies out of Rwanda.

The wealth of information was mind-boggling. If the government will truly cooperate, this capture will put the biggest dent in poaching within the Virungas ever known. Already it has set the park department and its guards on their ears-raids have been started everywhere by the judiciary in previously “secret” places. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Unlikely as it might appear to Dian’s critics, Sebahutu’s confession seems to have been voluntary. Dian insisted that no force was used, and this was confirmed by Sebahutu himself in the course of an interview with Mark Condiotti, the one employee of the Mountain Gorilla Project Dian trusted. She sent Sebahutu down the mountain to the custody of the military, accompanied by a note from her to Condiotti: “I sure hope they don’t mistreat Sebahutu after all this information he has so decently given.” Mark responded the following day, “I felt you had been gentle with Sebahutu and he told me you were nice to him. So you need have no worries about any false rumors about you coming from
M.G.P.
or the park conservateur.” To which Dian replied, “Am glad to hear that I haven’t yet been accused of beating or castrating him, etc., etc. I actually became quite fond of the little fellow—he didn’t have to open his mouth, but he sure did!”

The simplest explanation for Sebahutu’s loquaciousness is that he feared the Lone Woman of the Forest would otherwise kill him for his many crimes against the gorillas. Perhaps the “law” would not have harmed him; but Dian was outside the law—and incorruptible. In any case she found herself in possession of a mother lode of information, some of it dynamite.

There are names on the list that could mean big trouble if released. If there
was
a plan to capture mountain gorilla infants for Spain, it surely won’t happen now.

The sunny weather that had welcomed May proved short-lived. Ebony clouds again obscured the volcanoes, and Dian wrote to a friend in California, “Aren’t you bored with sun nearly every day? Tell me, what
is
sun? What does it
look
like? What does it
feel
like? I keep telling myself this place can’t be worse than Ithaca in winter, but after nearly three months of almost daily rain and fog, I just don’t know.”

Peter Clay knew. He left camp for good on May 20, although not without regret. In a moving farewell letter to Dian he wrote:

“There is a very real sense here of the world being created anew each day. That creation seems a miracle, so close and so stirring in its beauty. Perhaps it is the clouds moving silently through this ancient forest, the cool mist seeming to caress us. It has felt like a return to Eden, and to a kind of innocence, to spend these few months here. Though I know my species is despoiling this fragile earth and is tragically estranged from nature, here it feels not so. The gentle duikers and bushbuck, the strange little hyrax, and most of all, the gorillas seem to have forgiven man’s shortsighted abuse of the earth.”

The weather was not the only depressing factor in Dian’s life at this time. Her lungs were again “hurting like hell,” and she was out of money. In late May she wrote to Ambassador Blane:

“I am nearly broke and would like to borrow 100,000
RWF
from the American embassy or anyone else who is willing to trust me for same and would be more than happy to pay a reasonable rate of interest. I’m expected in America on June 6, at which time I can collect more funds. In the meantime I must leave money for camp expenses during my absence. I hope this request doesn’t seem outlandish. I make it in desperation!”

Blane responded by lending her the required sum from his own pocket.

On May 21, Karisoke was visited by Barry Schlachter, a reporter from the Associated Press, fresh from interviewing employees of the Mountain Gorilla Project and sources in Kigali about Dian Fossey. His feature story was representative of her treatment in the press at this period in her life:

“The visitors slogged on foot for about an hour and a half through sometimes thigh-deep mud and clumps of stinging nettles to reach Fossey’s settlement in the ghostly beautiful rain forest…. Fossey has emphysema. She chain smokes the local Impala-brand cigarettes. She takes small steps, pausing for raspy breaths of air, while leading visitors to the gorilla cemetery…. She teaches the apes to fear blacks, but not whites, because most of the poachers are Africans. She admits the practice could be branded as racist.

“She has been known to spray-paint a four-letter word on an errant cow that wandered into the preserve. She once was accused of kidnapping a poacher’s child to swap for a captured baby gorilla….

“The habituation of gorillas has led to a money-making tourist industry in Rwanda, says Laurent Habiyaremye, forty-eight, director of parks and tourism. About sixteen percent of the national revenue comes from tourism, three fourths of that directly traced to gorilla-viewing activities, he says.

“The Rwandan park director credits Dian Fossey for making that possible and has a lot of praise for her.

“‘If my office could grant her sainthood, it would,’ he says.

“Despite his high regard for Fossey, Habiyaremye flatly denies an allegation in her book that a ranking park official here conspired in the killing of a gorilla named Kweli. He also attacked her policy of teaching gorillas to fear blacks, but not whites…. ‘It is scandalous. She makes a mistake because gorillas live in a country of blacks.’

“‘I have no friends,’ the tall Californian says with no hint of regret. ‘The more that you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people.’“

The dichotomy evident in Habiyaremye’s comments is significant. As to the paragraph about Dian’s being friendless, this particular oversimplification proved damaging. It was, and still is, widely used by her detractors as confirmation that Dian Fossey despised her own species and had little concern for human beings. As a self-confessed misanthrope, she therefore deserved little sympathy or support from her own kind.

A week after Schlachter’s visit, and just four days before she was scheduled to leave for the United States, came bad news.

On the twenty-eighth my trackers Celestin and Rwelekana got a message through to me on the park radio that they had found Nunkie dead on the slopes of Karisimbi where he had been living with his group of fourteen females and young. The trackers had sent the message to me via a park guard, but my radio went out and I couldn’t get details. For most of that horrid day I thought that fine old gentleman had been killed by poachers.

When the trackers finally got back to camp, they said he had died of natural causes. It was something to be grateful for, that at least he had not been murdered. I had his body brought back to camp and Dr. Bertrand climbed and we did an autopsy. Although the findings are not yet conclusive, it would seem that intestinal parasites, coupled with lung disease, were highly contributive to his death.

One of the deep-rooted causes for Dian’s distaste for tourism in the park was the disturbing possibility that the gorillas might contract human diseases from the visitors. In the latter part of 1978 she had been infuriated to discover that one of the Karisoke researchers was in the habit of defecating while with gorillas and permitting the animals to smell and even eat the feces. Ian Redmond’s studies had shown how prone these great apes were to parasitic infestations, and she feared that exposure to parasites contracted from Westerners, against which the animals would have evolved no defenses, might prove disastrous to them.

With this in mind she decided to take samples of the contents of Nunkie’s intestines with her to the United States for expert analysis.

We buried Nunkie, that good old man, in the cemetery near my cabin, but the problems are only now beginning.

A gorilla group cannot remain an integral unit without a silverback leader. Nunkie’s females and offspring spent several days bewilderingly circling around the site where his body had lain, not feeding, not knowing what to do. The death occurred seven kilometers from their normal range on Mt. Visoke. So we are now in the process of trying to “herd” them back here, where the lone silverback, Tiger, seems the perfect candidate to take over the group’s leadership.

The herding process is proving far more difficult than expected as the females want to return to the death site in search of Nunkie, seeming not to grasp the concept of Nunkie’s death. So far we’ve been able to keep them together and move them roughly four kilometers in this direction, but each day we become more apprehensive for fear they will just disintegrate all over the Virungas.

Well, it took a week, but eventually Nunkie’s ten offspring and four females reached Visoke, where they totally relaxed for the first time since his death. Tiger moved in as I had hoped and was able to get Fuddle, who willingly went with him as she was the only female in the group with regular cyclicity. The other females and young fled from Tiger’s further advances and went so far that they ran into Group 5, when Ziz acquired yet another mate, a second Nunkie female, Pandora.