Wild Spirit (26 page)

After breakfast, he received the news with characteristic calm, drove out in the Toyota and towed the Méhari back to the workshop. Eamon was not given to exaggeration, so when we saw him later in the day, his solemn expression and few words left us in no doubt about how close he felt we had come to disaster. ‘You were twelve kilometres out,' he said. ‘You are two very lucky people!'

Twelve kilometres through the forest at night, unarmed and utterly defenceless: it was a feat only for the brave, the foolhardy or the desperate.

Monsieur Bertin pored over the Méhari that afternoon, and by the time we called in, late in the day, he'd found the problem. He leaned on the bonnet and wiped his hands on a greasy rag. ‘Water in the petrol!' It was the handiwork of the
pinnassiers
. Yet again they'd been selling off petrol to villages along the river and topping up the 200-litre drums with muddy river water, and somebody had forgotten to filter the fuel when the Méhari had been filled up. Win and I exchanged glances and quietly groaned. ‘
C'est l'Afrique
,' I muttered, and we drove down to the flat to celebrate our survival.

 

Rodo was on leave in Germany for the whole of July, but we would see him briefly in Libreville on our way out. Doug had taken holidays for a month, too. In their absence, Sam Sims, a senior American geologist, moved into camp as acting director. We took to him immediately. Beneath his ready humour, Sam seemed sensible; he would run a tight ship, and that was what the place needed.

Win's work in the camp was almost over. Every construction project had been completed, and he had more free time than he'd had in a year. One afternoon we drove down to Mayebut just for the pleasure of being out, and so I could take photos of the people.

It was another fine, clear afternoon, with gentle sunlight playing over the thatched mud huts. When we arrived, a group of children were playing at the river's edge, the little ones naked, the older ones splashing about in their clothes. I listened to their laughter as I stood on the riverbank photographing. Then a voice behind me, calling out ‘
Madame! Madame!
', caused me to whirl around. It was one of the teenage boys. He had something to show me that he was excited about. I thought it might be a large beetle on a string, or perhaps a frog or a lizard. Instead, he produced from behind his back a severed gorilla's foot on the end of a piece of rope, and twirled it triumphantly over his head.

I felt the familiar horror, and a knot formed in my stomach. The foot had not begun to putrefy, so I knew the kill was very recent. I took it in both my hands and looked at it closely. The four smaller toes were separated from the big toe by a wide gap – that was how gorillas gripped tree trunks and branches. The foot looked as if it had been hacked off with a machete. It was large enough to have belonged to an adult. Win and I stared at it in silence and sadness. These hunting patterns were never likely to change, laws or no laws. There was nothing to say, and all the joy had gone from the afternoon. I handed the foot back and we drove away.

We were back at Mayebut later that week to meet an incoming pirogue when we discovered the grizzly sequel to
the episode. A massive gorilla's skull, picked clean by ants, lay propped up on the ground against the wall of a hut. Its heavy sagittal crest, like the ridge on a centurion's helmet, projected across the top from front to back. The large eye sockets gaped as empty black holes. The bare nasal bone gave no hint of the unique nose print that had once covered it.

The skull looked too big to have belonged to the same animal whose foot I had held, which suggested that at least two animals had been slain. This was a memory of Mayebut I would rather not have taken away with me, but to these hunters, a gorilla was of no more intrinsic worth than an antelope or a pig. It was all edible meat, and besides, a dead gorilla couldn't raid banana plantations. Even if I lived my life out here, I would never get used to the slaughter.

 

Eamon gave us a farewell party in the guesthouse two nights before we were due to leave. Étienne had picked flowers in our honour and arranged them in a vase at the centre of the table. Carol made pizzas and spaghetti; Michel showed slides of his latest exquisite wildlife photographs; Eamon told jokes; and one of the Canadian drillers played his mouth organ and sang ancient folk songs in the strange nasal patois that we found so hard to follow. I thought, as I moved around the room chatting, that we couldn't have been a more diverse group, plucked from the corners of the earth and thrown together on a mountain in the wilds of Africa. But there was a sense of community that transcended all our differences.

Next morning, I walked up to the warehouse to say goodbye to M'Poko Lucien. We had worked closely together
for a whole year. He had seen me at my most harassed, yet his calm gentleness and honesty had made my days bearable when all around us was in chaos.

He stood at the door of the warehouse in his white hard hat, his eyes sad and his mouth drooping at the corners.

‘When will we see each other again, madame?'

‘I don't know, M'Poko. We are going back to Europe. Perhaps we will not come to Africa again.'

‘Where can I write to you, madame?'

‘As soon as we know where we will live, I will write to you,' I promised. ‘It will be somewhere in London.'

‘It won't be the same without you, madame.'

‘
Merci
,
M'Poko
,' I said. ‘Thank you for everything. You have been kind and gentle and we have worked well together. And now I would like to take your photo.' He stood up straight with his clipboard in hand, looking serious while I took the picture. Then we shook hands and I promised again to write.

‘
Au revoir, madame.
' As I turned to walk back down the hill he had tears in his eyes, and so did I.

 

When the day came to leave – 2 August – we had little luggage. Most of our things had gone with the Kombi.

My other important farewell was to Étienne. Of all the domestic staff, he was the gentlest, the most sober, the most caring. He had been there since the beginning, always quietly working in the background, a calm presence when everything around was in tumult. I shook his hand, thanked him for all his kindness and wished him and his family good luck. He looked distracted during this interchange. As I turned to go, he called after me, ‘Madame, madame, I have
something I want to ask you.' By this time, we were outside the guesthouse. He took me aside behind the privacy of the hedge, and drew something from his trouser pocket.

‘Madame, I think I am very sick.' He handed me a small glass jar full of blood and what looked like body tissue. He was embarrassed, I could see, but his alarm overrode it.

‘I have been passing this, madame, for some time,' and he indicated his bowels. ‘Can you get someone to look at it?' I was stunned. I thought I knew what it meant.

‘Of course I can,' I said. I took the jar from him. ‘Please no,' I prayed silently. ‘Not Étienne, not with seven children.' It hit me like a physical blow. Étienne was only in his late thirties, perhaps forty. I thought back to our first week at Belinga, when I used to quiz him about witchcraft, sorcery and spirit beliefs as he served our evening meals. He would earnestly recount to me examples of sorcerers' powers, and assure me that there were people in Makokou who could perform magical acts like restoring felled trees to life overnight. My affection and respect for Étienne had begun in those very early days, and deepened with time. He could neither read nor write, and to me he seemed as innocent as a child, guileless and without malice, yet he had the gift of caring for others. It seemed to me the most brutal turn of fate. Why couldn't it have happened to one of the wife-beaters in the village? Why this good man?

I looked hard at his anxious face, the furrowed brows, the troubled eyes, and I found no words to comfort him. What could one say to a man who had realised he was dying? I wanted to take his fear away. At that moment, he seemed small and vulnerable. I took a deep breath to still my sadness.

‘Take care of yourself, Étienne,' I said.

‘
Oui, madame
,' he replied solemnly. I stowed the jar safely in my shoulder bag. Sam Sims waited nearby in the Toyota, ready to drive us down to the Djadié crossing, and I turned to take my last look at Belinga, heavy with thoughts of the tragedy that awaited Étienne and his family. This was the day I had both longed for and dreaded for months: on the one hand it brought escape from the madness in the camp; on the other, it meant the end of our time in the forest – the most exhilarating period of my life. Soon we would return to one of the biggest cities in the world.

I tried not to dwell too long on everything we were losing – that would be too painful. But even as I tried to steel myself, I felt something infinitely precious slipping away. I would never be able to look out over that vast forest again, or watch black and white colobus monkeys cavorting on vines at the edge of the clearing. I would never hear again the giant casqued hornbills calling, or watch the touracos feeding on the fruit of the
parasolier
tree. And when we were back in England or Australia, would anyone understand what it was I had left behind? An ache settled in my chest, a longing I knew would always haunt me. The last lesson Belinga taught me was that one could never have the sweet without the bitter. The more one loved, the more one had to lose.

Win climbed in beside Sam and I got into the back seat and wound down the window so I could wave. My last sight of Étienne was of him standing, framed in the doorway of the guesthouse, waving back, still wearing his floral apron.

Kruger had a driver waiting on the other side of the Djadié crossing to take us to Makokou, and the staff at CNRS had invited us for a farewell lunch at the research station. We sat around the long refectory table in the mess with Louise, André, the Michalouds, Hugo and Irene, whom we had met only recently, but who had given us the keys to her Left Bank apartment in Paris to use on our stopover. I had a lump in my throat most of the time. If not for these people, we would never have glimpsed the world of the western lowland gorillas, the bats, the orphaned chimpanzees and the brush-tailed porcupine. I was bursting with the intensity of it, but I didn't know how to tell them.

Our plane was due to leave in the late afternoon. At the airport, Kruger had checked our bags in with Monsieur Loupin, our old friend the storekeeper, in his other role as the Air Gabon agent. For all his hard-headedness, Kruger and I had reached an accommodation. Underneath his tough exterior he had a kindly heart, and I felt sorry for him stuck there in Makokou, every day a battle against the odds.

The dusty terminal was crowded with women, children, baskets of live chickens and rolls of bedding. We stood in the midst of them, waiting for the boarding call. Then out of the crowd appeared the figure of Mehendje Bruno, Win's chief carpenter. He had come down to see us off. Win's face lit up, and I watched the two of them shake hands. Theirs had been a remarkable partnership; together they had done work as fine as any in the world. Bruno had tears in his eyes as he said goodbye. ‘
Au revoir, patron.
'

‘
Au revoir, Bruno. Bonne chance!
'

Just as the call to board sounded, a car pulled up beside the terminal and a group of CNRS staff jumped out, there
to see us off. There was just time to shake hands before we joined the rush for the boarding ladder. We paused on the top step to look back and wave: our last sight was of Kruger, Bruno and the CNRS people standing behind the chain-wire fence, with the red dust of Makokou blowing in their faces.

 

Doug and Gina met us at Libreville airport and drove us to our lodgings in the African quarter to check in, before we went on to their new home at Tahiti for dinner. We talked long into the night, and brought Doug up to date with everything that had happened while they were on leave. Just before we left, I took Doug aside and gave him the glass jar with Étienne's blood in it.

‘I think he has bowel cancer,' I said. ‘Can you make sure this is tested? I promised him I would look after it.'

‘Sure, Nettie. No problem.'

The next day we spent time with Rodo, who was in transit back to Belinga from leave. The three of us felt like a family. Wherever our lives took us in the future, that bond would not change, because it had been forged in hardship and isolation and through love of Josie. We planned a rendezvous in Europe in a year's time, once he'd finished at Belinga.

‘Promise you will write,' I insisted. ‘I want to hear everything that happens.'

He looked sad. ‘It won't be the same without you two up there.' I hoped that Carol and Jim would become his family in the months ahead. He needed people around him who cared.

‘Nothing will be the same for us either,' I answered.
Then we left him and set out for the SOMIFER office, where some final paperwork awaited.