Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (56 page)

On another occasion, he paddled upstream as far as Ngbala, a river town some miles above Moloundou. It was during his return from that journey, as I posit, that he stopped at Moloundou and there, in his boat, where it was tied for the night in a shaded cove just below town, had sex with a woman.

She wasn’t his first but she was different from village girls. She was a river trader herself, a Buy ’em–Sell ’em, several years older than he was and considerably more experienced. She traveled up and down the Ngoko and the Sangha, making a living with her wits and her wares and sometimes her body. The Voyager didn’t know her name. Never heard it. She was outgoing and flirtatious, almost pretty. He didn’t think much about pretty. She wore a print dress of bright calico, manufactured, not local raffia. She must have liked him, or at least liked his performance, because she returned to his boat in the shadows the next night and they coupled again, three times. She seemed healthy; she laughed merrily and she was strong. He considered himself lucky that night—lucky to have met her, to have impressed her, to have gotten at no cost what other men paid for. But he wasn’t lucky. He had a small open wound on his penis, barely more than a scratch, where he’d been caught by a thorny vine while stepping ashore from a river bath. No one can know, not even in this imagined scenario, whether the lack of circumcision was crucial to his susceptibility, or the little thorn wound, or neither. He gave the woman some smoked fish. She gave him the virus.

It was no act of malice or irresponsibility on her part. Despite swollen and aching armpits, she had no idea she was carrying it herself.

100

R
iver travel through tropical jungle is uncommonly soothing and hypnotic. You watch the walls of greenery slide by and, unless the channel is narrow enough for tsetse flies to notice your passing and come out from the shores, you suffer almost none of the discomforts. Because the riverbanks represent forest edges, admitting the full blast of sunlight, as closed canopy does not, the vegetation is especially tangled and rife: trees draped with vines, understory impenetrable, thick as an old velvet curtain at the Shubert Theater. It presents an illusion that the forest itself, its interior, might be as dense as a sponge. But to a river traveler that density is immaterial because you have your own open route down the middle. If you’ve walked the forest, which is difficult though not sponge-thick, river journeying is an escape from impediments that feels almost akin to flight.

For a while after leaving Kika, we favored the Congo side, riding a strong channel. Sylvain knew his preferred line. His assistant, a Baka man named Jolo, handled the outboard while Sylvain supervised, signaling directions from the bow. The pirogue was large and steady enough that Max and I could sit on the gunnels. Immediately we passed a small police post on the right bank, a Congolese counterpart to the Cameroonian one at Kika, and fortunately no one flagged us to stop. Every such checkpoint in Congo is an occasion for passport-stamping and minor shakedowns, and you want to avoid them when you can. Then we puttered past a few villages, widely spaced, each just a cluster of wattle-and-daub houses sited on a high bank to escape inundation in wet season. The houses were topped with thatch and surrounded by banana trees, an oil palm or two, children in rag dresses and shorts. The kids stood transfixed as we passed. How many hours to our destination? I asked Sylvain. Depends, he said. Ordinarily he would stop in villages along the way for trading or passengers, delaying long enough to enter Ouesso by darkness so as to escape notice by the immigration police. Not long after that explanation he did stop, guiding us ashore at a village on the Congo bank, to which he delivered a large plastic tarp and from which, on departure, we gained a passenger.

It was my charter but I didn’t mind. She was a young woman carrying two bags, an umbrella, a purse, and a pot of lunch. She wore an orange-and-green dress and a bandana kerchief. I might have guessed if I hadn’t been told: She was a Buy ’em–Sell ’em. Her name was Vivian. She lived down in Ouesso and would be glad for the ride home. She was lively and plump, confident enough to be traveling the river alone, trading in rice, pasta, cooking oil, and other staples. Sylvain liked to give her a lift because she was his sister—a statement of status that could be taken literally or not. She might have been his girlfriend or his cousin. Beyond this, I didn’t learn much from Vivian except that her niche still exists, the Buy ’em–Sell ’em role, offering independent-spirited women a form of autonomy not easily found within village life, or even town life, and that the river still functions as a conduit of economic and social fluidity. Mostly she seemed a charming throwback and, though this might be unfair to her, put me in mind of women that the Voyager might have met almost a century earlier. She was a potential intermediary.

When the rain returned, Max and I and Sylvain and Vivian hunkered beneath our tarp, heads down but peeking out, while Jolo the Baka stolidly motored us on. We passed a solitary fisherman in his canoe, pulling a net. We passed another village from which children stared. Then the rain died again and the storm breeze fell off; the gentle chop disappeared, leaving the river as flat and brown as a cooled café au lait. Mangroves reached out from the banks like groping octopuses. I noticed a few egrets but no kingfishers. In midafternoon we approached the confluence with the Sangha. Along the left bank, the land fell gradually lower and then tapered, sinking away into the water. The Sangha River gripped us, swung us around, and I turned to watch that southeastern wedge of Cameroon recede to a vanishing point.

The air warmed slightly with an upstream breeze. We passed a large, wooded island. We passed a man standing upright in his dugout, paddling carefully. And then in the distance ahead, through haze, I saw white buildings. White buildings meant bricks and whitewash and governmental presence in something larger than a village: Ouesso.

Within half an hour we landed at the Ouesso waterfront, with its concrete ramp and wall, where an officer from the immigration police and a gaggle of tip-hungry, scuttering porters awaited. Stepping ashore, we had reentered the Republic of the Congo. We completed the immigration formalities in French and then Max dealt with the bag-grabbing porters in Lingala. Sylvain and Jolo and Vivian melted away. Max was a shier, less forceful fellow than Neville but conscientious and earnest, and now it was his turn to be my fixer. He made some inquiries here along the waterfront and soon had good news: that the big boat, the cargo-and-passenger barge known as
le bateau
, would be departing tomorrow for Brazzaville, many miles and days further downriver. I wanted us to be on it.

We found a hotel, Max and I, and in the morning walked to the Ouesso market, which was centered in a squat, pagoda-shaped building of red brick just blocks from the river. The pagoda was big and stylish and old, with a concrete floor and a circular hall beneath three tiers of corrugated metal roof, dating back at least to colonial times. The market had far outgrown it, sprawling into a warren of wood-frame stalls and counters with narrow lanes between, covering much of a city block. Business was brisk.

A study of bushmeat traffic in and around Ouesso, done in the mid-1990s by two expat researchers and a Congolese assistant, had found about 12,600 pounds of wild harvest passing through this market each week. That total included only mammals, not fish or crocodiles. Duikers accounted for much of it and primates were second, though most of the primate meat was monkey, not ape. Eighteen gorillas and four chimps were butchered and sold during the four-month study. The carcasses arrived by truck and by dugout canoe. As the biggest town in northern Congo, with no beef cattle to be seen, Ouesso was draining large critters out of the forest for many miles around.

Max and I snooped up and down the market aisles, stepping around mud holes, dodging low metal roofs, browsing as we had done in Moloundou. Because this was Ouesso, the merchandise was far more abundant and diverse: bolts of colorful cloth, athletic bags, linens, kerosene lanterns, African Barbie dolls, hair falls, DVDs, flashlights, umbrellas, thermoses, peanut butter in bulk, powdered fufu in piles, mushrooms in buckets, dried shrimp, wild fruits from the forest, freshly fried beignets, blocks of bouillon, salt by the scoop, blocks of soap, medicines, bins of beans, pineapples and safety pins and potatoes. On one counter a woman hacked at live catfish with a machete. Just across from her, another woman offered a selection of dead monkeys. The monkey seller was a large middle-aged lady, her hair in cornrows, wearing a brown butcher’s apron over her paisley dress. Genial and direct, she slapped a smoked monkey down proudly in front of me and named her price. Its face was tiny and contorted, its eyes closed, its lips dried back to reveal a deathly smile of teeth. Split up the belly and splayed flat, it was roughly the size and shape of a hubcap.
Six mille francs
, she said. Beside the first monkey she tossed down another, in case I was particular.
Six mille
for that one too. She was talking in CFA, the weak Central African currency. Her six thousand francs amounted to US $13, and was negotiable, but I passed. She also had a smoked porcupine, five duikers, and another simian, this one so freshly killed that its fur was still glossy and I could recognize it as a greater spot-nosed monkey. That’s a premium item, Max said, it’ll go fast. Nearby, gobbets of smoked pork from a red river hog were priced at three thousand francs per kilo. All these animals could be hunted legally (though not with snares) and traded openly in Congo. There was no sign of apes. If you want chimpanzee or gorilla meat in Ouesso it can still be had, no doubt, but you’ve got to make private arrangements.

Our trip downriver on the bateau suffered complications and delays so that, four days later, Max and I were back in Ouesso. Revisiting the market, we passed again through the pagoda, down the narrow aisles between stalls, along the counters piled with catfish and monkeys and duikers, smoked and fresh. This time I noticed a wheelbarrow full of smallish crocodiles and saw one croc being whacked apart on a plank. You could locate the meat section from anywhere in the market maze, I realized, by that sound—the steady
thunk
-
thunk!
of machetes. And then we came again to the brown-aproned lady, who remembered me. “You’ve returned,” she said in French. “Why don’t you buy something?” This time she plunked down a little duiker, more as a challenge than as an offering:
Are you a shopper or a voyeur?
I prefer chicken, I said lamely. Or smoked fish. Unsurprised by the pusillanimity of the white man, she smiled and shrugged. Then, as a flyer, I said: But if you had
chimpanzee . . 
. She ignored me.

Or
elephant
, Max added. Now she laughed noncommittally and turned back to her real customers.

101

T
he idea of Ouesso and its market served as a crucial enticement to get the Voyager, as I imagine him, on his way. That’s where the wildcat notion of his wildcat journey began: Ouesso. He hadn’t intended on going farther. A trip down to Ouesso and back (he
had
meant to come back, though life unfolded otherwise) would be ambitious and risky enough. But even before the idea of Ouesso, there was the dizzying happenstance of the tusks. If it was Ouesso that pulled him, it was the tusks that pushed him.

He had never gone looking for ivory. It came by accident. One day he was upriver on the Ngoko, working his net at the mouth of a feeder stream that drained from the Congo side. It was dry season—near the end of the long dry season, early March. The river was low and slow and warm, which was why he thought the freshening flow of the feeder stream might attract fish. As it happened, not many. The catch there scarcely repaid his effort. So in midafternoon he decided to walk inland, back-following this little stream into the forest, looking for pools where small fish might be trapped and vulnerable. He fought his way along the mud banks for almost half a mile, through the thorn vines, over the cobble of roots, finding few pools and no fish. It was frustrating but not surprising. He paused for breath, dipped up a handful of water to drink, and frowned ahead, deciding whether to continue. That’s when he noticed a large gray mound in the stream bottom about forty yards on. To you or to me it would have looked like a granite boulder. But there are no granite boulders in northern Congo or southeastern Cameroon, and the Voyager had never seen one. He knew immediately what it was: an elephant. His heartbeat surged and his first instinct was to run.

Instead he stared. His legs didn’t go. He lingered, unsure why. He sensed terror in the scene somewhere, but the terror wasn’t his. Then he realized what seemed wrong—the elephant was down, and not in a position that might suggest sleep. Its face lay smashed into the mud, its trunk sideways, its hip canted up. He approached carefully. He noticed the purplish red holes along its lower sides and belly. Protruding from one of those holes was a Baka spear. He could see the awful way the beast had collapsed down over its left shoulder, its front leg on that side bent out at a ruinous angle. By the time he had crept within ten yards, he knew that it was dead.

A sizable male, middle-aged, with good ivory. Left to die alone in a stream bottom and rot. Quickly the Voyager made some deductions. Probably it had been killed by a hunting party of Baka men—but not quite killed, just mortally wounded. It had broken away, escaped, and to do that, presumably, it would have had to kill one or two of the Baka who surrounded it. The others must have lost heart for the chase. Maybe this had occurred on the north side of the river. Maybe the elephant, wounded and desperate, had swum across. But if the Baka took up the trail, got themselves over here, and reappeared now—that could be bad for him. Finding the Voyager with their costly trophy, the Baka might fill
him
with purple spear holes. So he worked fast. He whaled into the elephant’s face with his machete, hacking through flesh and gristle, opening an ugly maw that no longer looked elephantine but like something else, something exploded and ogrish, and within half an hour he had twisted both tusks free. They surrendered with ripping noises, like any tooth drawn from its jaw.