The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Forest (11 page)

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 had been 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 (instant manioc paste, just add water and stir for half an hour with a stick) 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 thirteen dollars, 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 its species:
Cercopithecus nictitans
, the 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.

17

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 to go 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 had 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, a youngish adult, 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 Pygmies might fill
him
with purple spear holes. Assuming they could summon the audacity to murder a Bantu. 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.

He shaved the tusks free of tissue, then rubbed them with sandy mud and rinsed them white in the stream. Held in his hands, each one seemed huge. Bounteous. Maybe fifteen kilos. He had never experienced such an armload of wealth. He could only handle one at a time. He examined each in turn, passing his hand down the smooth white curve to the point. Then he gathered up both and staggered back to his canoe, crouching and dodging through the vines, and dropped them into the bilge with his few fish. Untied the boat quickly, caught the current, headed downstream. Having rounded one bend, he began to ease, his heart slowing back to normal.

What had just happened?
He had stumbled upon half a fortune and stolen it, that’s what. Claimed it, rather. Now what?

Back at his camp, the Voyager cached the tusks hastily beneath leaves and branches in a recess beside a fallen tree. Midway through the first night he woke, suddenly aware that his hiding place was inadequate, stupidly so, and he waited out the darkness impatiently. At daylight he rose, scraped away the coals and embers and ash from his campfire—his hearth site of several years’ custom—and dug a pit on that spot, cracking through the layer of baked earth with his machete, slapping deep slices into the clay beneath. He went down four feet. He shaped a deep, narrow slot. He wrapped the two tusks in
ngoungou
leaves for protection and nestled them at the bottom of the trench. Then he refilled it, leveled the ground carefully, spread the old ashes back where they’d been, replaced the charred logs, and lit a new fire. Now his treasure was safe, maybe, for a while. And he could think about what to do.

There were no easy answers. There was opportunity and there was risk. He was not a man who hunted elephant, and everyone who knew him knew that. He was not supposed to have tusks. If he took them to Moloundou the agents of the French concessionaires, greedy for ivory, leaching it from the forest by all manner of compulsion and threat, would simply impound them. He might even be punished. Others would try to steal them, or to trade for them while cheating him of their value. He thought through the scenarios. He wasn’t a cunning man but he was tough and stubborn.

Six months passed. He continued to live as before: fishing the river, drying fish at his camp, spending his days alone, making infrequent stops at Ngbala or Moloundou for trading. There was one man in Moloundou, a merchant, not a local Bantu and not a concessionaire’s agent but a half-Portuguese outsider with connections, notoriously clever, known
to deal discreetly in elephant meat and ivory. One day during a transaction over fish, salt, and fufu, the Voyager asked this merchant about the price for tusks.
It was just a question!
The merchant looked at him slyly and mentioned a number. The number seemed high but not very high, and the Voyager’s face may have flickered with disappointment. He said nothing more.

Two nights later, the Voyager returned from upriver and found his camp wrecked. The half-Portuguese merchant had spoken with someone, and that someone had gone straight to rob him.

His hut had been ripped apart, his drying racks broken. His few possessions—his second net, some tin pots, a camp knife, a shirt, his raffia mat, and the rest—had been scattered disdainfully. His little tin box had been broken open and the fishhooks and tobacco dumped out. Dried fish lay on the ground, willfully trodden upon. There were signs of digging here and there—beside the fallen log, in the floor of his hut, a couple other places too. Desultory, petulant searching. The Voyager’s campfire had been scattered, logs and ashes kicked away. His breath caught when he saw that. But the dirt beneath the ashes hadn’t been disturbed. They hadn’t found what they had come for.

So he turned his mind toward Ouesso. He waited out the night in his ruined camp, beside a fire burning low, with his machete in hand. At dawn he excavated his tusks and, leaving them leaf-wrapped and dirty, without pausing to savor their cool precious weight, put them into his canoe. He covered the tusks with dried fish, of which he had plenty, and smoked fish, of which he had just a bit, then covered the fish with more ngoungou leaves in neat bundles, as though he were taking them to market. Ngoungou leaves had their value as wrapping, but it was minimal; a pathetic, countryman’s product, and therefore plausible. Atop the leaves he placed his mat. He pushed off, paddled out, and let himself be
swung downriver on the Ngoko, putting Moloundou behind him. He paddled steadily for hours, reached the Sangha, turned downstream there, and continued straight to Ouesso.

Half a mile below the town, he found an eddy and pulled his boat up into the forest. There was no landing, no trail, no camp, no sign of human presence—which was good. Next day he concealed the canoe beneath leafy branches and bushwhacked northwest until he struck the outer lanes of Ouesso. He walked straight to the market by following other people. He had never seen such a concentration of humans and, once he was amid the crowd, his heart began thumping as it had when he stood over the dead elephant. But no one hurt him; no one even looked at him twice, despite the fact that his clothes were shabby and he carried a machete. He saw other men in dirty clothes, a few, and one or two of them carried machetes also. He began to relax.

The market, sheltered in a huge round building with a metal roof, was wondrous. You could buy meat, you could buy fish, you could buy colorful clothing and dried manioc and vegetables and fishnets and things he had never seen. The Voyager had no money of any sort, not francs, not brass rods, but he wandered among the goods as though he might want something. He admired the duikers and the monkeys. He picked up a gorilla hand, while the seller woman watched him closely, and set it back down. The people spoke Lingala. He exchanged a few words with a man selling fish. The Voyager was more cautious than he had been in Moloundou. Do you buy smoked fish if I have some? he asked. Maybe, when I see it, the man said. The Voyager took note of another man nearby, behind a plank table upon which sat large chunks of elephant meat, smoky and gray. A man who sold elephant meat might also deal in ivory. The Voyager memorized that man’s face but didn’t speak with him. He would do it tomorrow.

He walked back out of town and into the forest, satisfied by his
judicious preliminary excursion, and when he emerged through the undergrowth to his riverbank hiding spot, he was horrified to see the cut branches cast aside and someone bent over his boat. Horrified and enraged: at himself for his redoubled stupidity, at the world, and especially at the man coveting his tusks. The Voyager raised his machete, ran forward, and struck before the interloper had half turned around, splitting the man’s skull like a dry coconut. That made a sickening, fateful sound. The man fell hard. Where his head had broken open, pink brains showed and blood surged around the pinkness, then stopped.