The Ragged Edge of the World (19 page)

That night I bought Geoff dinner at the Lake Tanganyika restaurant, a spacious legacy of colonial days now run by a Belgian couple. Geoff began telling stories about encounters with chimps and orangutans during his zookeeper days. I just sat and listened.

He began by saying that he remained taken with the chimps' rampant intelligence. Whatever he was doing at the house, they would try to imitate. Once when Ali, the little female, was throwing a tantrum, Geoff decided to distract her by digging a hole in the sandbox in the backyard. Soon Ali came over and peered at what he was doing. Then she pulled his hand out and peered in the hole. She sniffed his fingers, but he just kept scooping sand. After a few more seconds, she started digging her own hole, right next to his. Then, said Geoff, a minute later, the dog came over. After looking at both of them, he started digging, too.

Geoff said that the difference between chimps and orangutans was that a chimp would try to grab your keys every time you walked past, while an orang would make an attempt only if it was certain that it would succeed. Usually, Geoff could get the keys back simply by asking. From Geoff's perspective, orangutans were also the best liars in the zoo world. At the Topeka Zoo an orangutan named Jonathan would steal something, keys or the like, and then when a keeper called for him to return the items, he would first act surprised that he was being addressed and then offer a stick or something else he had picked up, all the while concealing the keys with his foot or other hand.

The females sometimes used a different strategy for getting what they wanted. When one of the female orangutans at the Topeka Zoo got fat, it fell to Geoff to deliver her new, reduced rations. At first she decided that Geoff was trying to starve her and would greet him with threats and tantrums. When this had no effect, she suddenly started to present to Geoff sexually whenever he appeared.

One story Geoff told stayed in my mind. He said that every orangutan keeper had heard the zoo legend of a male orangutan at the Omaha Zoo that repeatedly escaped from his cage. In Geoff's version, the keepers notified the police only to discover that the orangutan had been picking the lock with a piece of wire he secreted in his cheek. The orangutan got caught only because he neglected to relock the door after escaping.

Geoff got a couple of the details of that account wrong, but its essence was spot on. While it did not fit into the article I was writing for
National Geographic,
some part of my unconscious must have recognized it as important because I never forgot it. As noted in the introduction, there is a phenomenon in psychology in which important events remain fresh in memory until you have written them down. Whatever the phenomenon, it wasn't until a few years later that the significance of the story finally fell into place.

Over the years I've written a great deal about animal intelligence, including a few books and many articles. When I was reporting on the experiments to teach chimps sign language, I doggedly kept up as experimenters and critics pursued a joyless trench warfare in which each assertion about evidence of a higher mental ability in an ape or dolphin would be dismissed as flawed, usually because there was a possibility that the experimenters were cueing the correct answer, or because the answer was ambiguous and subject to overinterpretation.

By the mid-'90s I had had enough of this debate. It had been easier to end the Cold War and defeat communism than it was to get scientists to agree on what a juvenile chimp named Washoe meant when she combined the signs for “water” and “bird” when she saw a swan on a pond. (In fact, that debate remained unresolved when Washoe died at the age of forty-two in 2007.) Then, in the late 1990s, I woke up one morning thinking about Geoff Creswell's story once again, it finally dawned on me: Here was an ape who was demonstrating a suite of higher mental abilities—reverse engineering, innovation, deception—regardless of the motivations of his keepers. Maybe animals did their best thinking when it served their purposes and not those of a scientist, whose audience was his or her peers and not the animals themselves.

Out of this “aha” moment came my book
The Parrot's Lament
(1999) and its sequel,
The Octopus and the Orangutan
(2002). I mention those books here only because they may be the most enduring results of that trip to Africa, and yet the conversation that eventually prompted me to pursue that line of thought had very little to do with the purpose that brought me to Bujumbura.

Before heading off to Kigali, I had breakfast with Mimi Brian, a sunny, competent woman attached to the American embassy who had taken it upon herself to facilitate Jane Goodall's efforts to help chimpanzees. After making arrangements to ensure that I connected with Jane when she arrived, I headed off to the airport to try to get on a flight for the short hop to Kigali.

Airline schedules in this part of Africa seemed to be closely guarded secrets, released to pilots but not to airline officials, ticket agents, or, God forbid, passengers. My first flight to Rwanda was canceled, but then rumors began circulating about a flight the next morning. That would give me a day to talk with Diane Doran and catch up on doings at Karisoke during the fighting. (Paul Kagame, now president of Rwanda, had launched his first invasion of the country the year before.) No one, however, would admit that this flight existed—not the ticket agents, airport personnel or anyone. At the airport Mimi and I managed to contact the control tower (only in Africa!), and the guy who answered assured us that the flight was coming in and returning to Kigali.

When I arrived in Rwanda, Kigali was a ghost town. There were no taxis, only a few vehicles of any kind on the streets, and an eight o'clock curfew, after which you were likely to get shot. This was probably why, when I finally did reach Diane Doran, she instantly proposed that we drive back down to Bujumbura. I agreed, somewhat reluctantly, since I was not looking forward to six hours in a vehicle. On the other hand, there was no chance of getting to Karisoke, which had been evacuated. I realized that three hours in Kigali was enough for me, since there was no way to get around and, to all appearances, no one to see.

Ordinarily, the evacuation of a research station like Karisoke would have been fatal for the unprotected animals, but I had reason to be hopeful. Before coming to Africa, I had met with some of the rebel leaders in Washington, D.C. They had solicited the meeting, and what was extraordinary was that they were reaching out to let a journalist know that they planned to take every precaution to protect the gorillas at Karisoke. A variety of motives prompted the Rwandan Patriotic Front to reach out in this way: Karisoke was among Rwanda's biggest earners of foreign exchange, and the rebels knew that they would need this cash cow once they took over. They also needed support from the West, and public support would be more likely if they were viewed as protectors rather than destroyers of the world's last remaining population of mountain gorillas.

Talk is cheap, though; what was extraordinary was that they kept their word. As documented by Bill Webber and Amy Vetter of the Wildlife Conservation Society, the gorillas survived not only this civil war but also the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which killed 800,000 of Paul Kagame's fellow Tutsis. The Karisoke gorillas have endured through all upheavals since.

As I drove back to Bujumbura with Diane, I told her of my conversation with the rebel leadership back in Washington, and she confirmed that at that point (March 1991) things were going fine, even though rebels were all around the area of Karisoke. Diane had brought along a graduate student who told a hilarious story about the problems a female field researcher faced in keeping a proper distance from her scientific subjects if one of said subjects developed a crush on said researcher. In Martha's case a young male gorilla decided that Martha was really hot, and showed as much by rolling around near her and occasionally dragging her for short distances. Somehow she let the gorilla know that the relationship wasn't going to work out, and he seemed to accept this.

For the rest of the ride we spoke about Diane's research on the ontology of motor behavior and how different great apes move—particularly how chimps first use palmigrade motion before they learn to walk on their knuckles, and how this indicates that knuckle-walking might be a late-developing behavior in the great apes, one that occurred after the split with humans.
Australopithecus afarensis
lived very close in time to the split of hominids from the rest of the great apes 5 million years ago, and there is no evidence that this little fellow knuckle-walked (though, more recently, some paleontologists have argued that other hominids did). Diane related these developments to the environments, feeding strategies and social structures of the apes. I found the subject fascinating, and the time flew.

Back in Bujumbura, after leaving Diane, I reconnected with everybody. Jane (whom I knew from previous encounters) had arrived by then. Geoff and I picked up Jane and took her to see “Herself,” as she witheringly referred to the American ambassador, and then headed over to visit a gold trader who had a chimp that was getting too big to handle. The six-year-old female, Cheetah, was best friends with a gigantic Rottweiler guard dog, Simba. I don't think I have ever seen two creatures have a better time playing with each other. Cheetah charged in and grabbed Simba's foot, while Simba play-bit any part of Cheetah he could get hold of. Throughout their tussling Cheetah was practically helpless with laughter, and it seemed to me that Simba was doing the dog equivalent of laughing himself.

That evening I brought Diane and Martha along to meet Jane but was surprised when she gave them a noticeably frosty reception. Mimi extended a sincere invitation for the women to join us for dinner, but noticing the awkwardness, I begged off and took Diane and Martha out for a meal. Later Jane compounded my confusion by telling me how much she liked Diane and Martha. Mimi, who also noticed the frosty reception, speculated that Jane might have been a bit put out because Karisoke's own charisma as a fabled mountain gorilla sanctuary somewhat distracted the focus from Jane's beloved Gombe.

On Saturday Jane, Mimi, Mimi's mother and I drove down south to catch a small boat to Gombe. Lake Tanganyika is huge, blue, pellucid and very, very deep. The trip was beautiful but disturbing. What thirty-five years earlier had been almost entirely forested with what is called miombo woodland was now almost entirely cleared. Gombe itself was an oasis, an island of the California-like mixture of forest and grasslands that once characterized the lakeside before all the cutting and clearing. Still, the air was fresh as fresh can be, and I felt exhilarated the next morning when we went out to search for chimps. I climbed an acacia tree to look out over the green valleys and saw pure water everywhere—a striking contrast to the rot and dankness of the rainforest. Lying in the branches, I watched weather systems form over the lake as evaporation and convection conspired with the mountains of Zaire to compose huge thunderstorms that were in turn dwarfed by the size of the lake.

When we finally saw the chimps, they were off in the distance, arrayed in a field of grass surrounded by protea trees. Jane pointed out a peak to the left where, thirty-one years earlier, she had enjoyed the sublime exhilaration of her first close encounter with chimps. Four months after arriving, she had found her life's work. Later she told me that she thought up the the title of her famous book
In the Shadow of Man
(1971) while driving across Uganda with her husband, Hugo. When it came to her, she gave a shriek. Alarmed, Hugo said, “What's the matter?”

“I've got the title!” she responded. Once she had the title, Jane told me, she knew that she could write the book.

Chimps are indeed in the shadow of man. There are only a few isolated and doomed populations of chimps between Gombe and the 400 or so hanging on in Mohale, the Japanese-run research area in the south.

When we caught up to part of the Gombe group, they were all in an mbolo tree. There, scattered through the branches, were chimps whose names I had known for more than a decade—Goblin, Everett, Faustino, Prof. Goblin had been top dog for nine years, but now had a low yet special status because he was best friends with Wilkie, the current top-ranking male. When chimps from the next valley sounded alarm calls, the big males responded with a furious, balletic display to show that they were ready for war. Oddly this was the time of the buildup toward the ground war in Kuwait, after weeks of preparatory bombing. Jane had been following events in the Mideast closely and had been talking of little else.

When we moved off, the chimps swung past Jane almost in a procession, and then we followed. Mimi led her mother back down the hill, while Jane, the tracker and I headed off through dense undergrowth to keep up with the little folks knuckle-walking ahead. Jane had a little trouble getting through the thickets and remarked that it now took her two weeks to get back into shape, and that she never had two weeks in Gombe. No excuse was necessary, since at fifty-seven she was clearly in remarkable shape. Later Mimi noted that Jane had little tolerance for people with self-indulgent weaknesses like gluttony or drinking, and I understood a bit better why she might have felt obliged to explain her struggles with the underbrush.

There was one extraordinary moment in the dense brush. Prof, whom Jane had known since he was born twenty years earlier, had been feeding on a vine while we watched from a spot on the ground nearby. When he decided to leave, he walked directly past Jane's shoulder and paused for quite a few seconds. I thought he was waiting for Jane to groom him. Jane just sat quietly, and after a moment he moved on. She explained that she did not think that he wanted to be groomed, but was rather acknowledging her return to Gombe. Whatever the reason, it sent a tingle down my spine. This moment of recognition with mutual respect seemed so perfectly right to me, just the way it should be between apes and humans.