Now she was beginning to hit her stride. Through January third and into the early hours of the fourth, she and Ian drew up battle plans. She described these to Richard Wrangham in England.
“First, I’m paying cash to anyone who can yield information on the whereabouts of his killers. Second, I’m going to make a new set of posters saying ‘Come and Visit Me in Rwanda’ with Digit’s body, headless and handless in as near as possible the same position as the original poster picture. I know it sounds ghoulish, but it might have some effect on the people who buy heads and hands. Third, we will make a thirty-minute documentary entitled Digit in Life and Death. Fourth, we will sell every conservation magazine I can reach the story of Digit with life and death pictures.”
Ian Redmond proposed that they launch an international campaign, fueled by Digit’s death, to raise money with which to hire, outfit, and train antipoacher patrols to take the battle to the enemy.
Dian agonized briefly over the idea, worried because it would be illegal for the Karisoke Research Center to wage such a war. Finally she concluded there was no other choice. Under her aegis these patrols could do what the park guards were paid for but failed to do. They could fight back on behalf of the gorillas, the duikers, and all the other creatures for which the park was supposedly a sanctuary.
Such was the origin of what would come to be known as the Digit Fund. With this beginning, Dian took her first deliberate step into the limbo reserved for those who, with the best of intentions, trespass against the sanctity of duly constituted authority. She embarked upon a course of action that would eventually cleave an unbridgeable abyss between her and much of the scientific community, of which she was a maverick member, as well as between her and those fund-raising conservation organizations that value respectability at any cost.
Ian spent the next morning filming Digit’s corpse. Then he set off for Kigali to collect the BBC party that had just arrived from England. In his absence Dian was visited by the nervous and perspiring park conservateur and some of his armed guards, come on a mission of appeasement. She treated them with such white-hot contempt that they fled the camp.
Although she had no direct evidence as to who had killed her friend, her suspicions amounted to near certainty that the deed had been done by Batwa hunters led by her archantagonist, Munyarukiko. In her mounting frustration and fury she contemplated a retaliatory raid upon his village, which, had it occurred, might well have had disastrous consequences, for by then she was near the limits of her self-control.
The following morning, Dr. Desseaux and a woman lab technician toiled up the trail to camp, responding to an urgent note from Dian requesting an autopsy on what was left of Digit.
Just as we were about to start the autopsy, my woodman, working about fifty feet from my house, began yelling in Swahili, “Poachers! Poachers!” The houseman ran into the cabin screaming the same. The woodman had seen a poacher with bow and arrows just on the fringe of the camp area.
No poachers have dared come near my camp for at least three years! But now they’ve nearly exterminated all of the antelope within the rest of the park and the only place where antelope now flourish is here. If they could get away with killing a gorilla in the study area, why not antelopes at camp?
I yelled to my camp staff to chase the poachers while I grabbed my gun (not legally registered) and ran after them, leaving the two Europeans, who just sat there stunned. I kept running and shooting up in the air to keep him from crossing the main open meadows above camp where he could have disappeared into the forested areas and never have been found. My men, including Vatiri, Nemeye, and Kanyaragana, could then squeeze him up against the slopes of Visoke, which is what they did, and captured him there along with a bloodstained bow and five arrows.
He was a baby-faced little Twa and one of Digit’s killers, as he admitted. Both the front and back of his tattered yellow shirt were sprayed with fountains of Digit’s dried blood. We were a good hour catching him. I’m really proud of my men, and I haven’t run like that myself since I was ten years old!
We brought him back to camp and tied him up, and my Africans began to “question” him while we went on with poor Digit’s autopsy. It was a gruesome business in that the spears and pangas had pierced so many of his organs-lung, heart, spleen, intestines, and stomach. When we finished, we three went inside my cabin for a bit of lunch that nobody felt like eating. While this was being prepared, my Africans were outside with the Twa examining him.
We hadn’t been in five minutes when all hell broke loose and my men began screaming “poacher” again. I thought the original prisoner had escaped and dashed outside, but in actual fact three of his accomplices had crept up to look for him and were seen by my men. By this time the Europeans were almost basket cases. My Africans and I began another chase, but I had to give up, though they followed the tracks for another two hours without result.
I returned to camp to guard the Twa. By this time the Europeans seemed extraordinarily anxious to depart, so I brought the Twa inside and hogtied him to the beams for a lengthy period of questioning. I did nothing terribly illegal, though my men and I examined him very very very thoroughly. I can’t say how difficult it was for me not to kill him when he admitted having been one of Digit’s killers. I asked two of my Africans to spend the night sleeping on each side of him. I could not trust myself alone with that thing.
We “interviewed” him until quite late at night, and during the course of our interrogation we obtained the names of all Digit’s killers. The chief ones were Munyarukiko, Gashabizi, Ntanyungu, Rubanda, and Runyaga, all from Mukingo commune.
What stunned me almost more than anything was the motive for Digit’s death. A Hutu merchant had offered to pay the head poacher, Munyarukiko, the equivalent of twenty dollars to get the head and hands of a silverback. Digit was a young silverback. The Hutu hoped to find a tourist who would pay him much more for the souvenirs. This man has succeeded in obtaining a number of gorilla heads and hands previously to sell to tourists. The Twa prisoner told us he knew where Digit’s head and hands were buried, near Munyarukiko’s house under a clump of bamboo.
Next day I sent down a message to the chef des brigades, Paulin Nkubili, saying we’d caught one of Digit’s killers and that I would not release him to the park guards, who have a way of “losing” their prisoners. Therefore on the seventh, Nkubili climbed to camp, accompanied by three commandos. They repeated the interrogation, but didn’t learn anything my men and I hadn’t already gathered.
Finally I allowed them to take the Twa down to a military security compound, where he is being held awaiting presidential decree as to the extent of his punishment. Nkubili seemed somewhat afraid of me. I can’t imagine why.
I can say that to let the Twa go was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life. It was only in respect to Digit’s memory that the bastard left here untouched.
It now appears that many of the Virunga gorillas have recently been killed off by poachers. The only abundant population remaining consists of my study groups. This could be the beginning of the end of the remaining two hundred or so mountain gorillas. Only if I can elicit enough interest and support can their total decimation be prevented.
Most of this was written well after the event, by which time Dian had somewhat recovered from the initial shock. However, as the first week following the discovery of Digit’s corpse drew to its close, she was not only in a perilous mental state but was again verging on physical collapse. Nevertheless she insisted on leading three of her men on an antipoaching patrol to Nelele Hill, where the survivors of Digit’s family had regrouped. That night she had a temperature of 104°, as well as other symptoms of pneumonia.
Her journal recorded that she was hardly able to get out of bed to greet the five BBC men when they climbed the mountain with Ian Redmond. They had arrived just too late to film the burial of Digit’s corpse in the plot of ground near Dian’s cabin reserved for her gorilla friends.
S
ick as she was, Dian spent long hours in the company of Attenborough and his crew during the following week, assisting in the filming of “her” gorillas in the hope that the ensuing publicity might help to save them from a fate like Digit’s.
On January 11 she was coughing blood but was still able to respond to a new provocation. Ian and the cine crew were filming Group 5 when they encountered an armed park guard escorting four Belgian tourists to see gorillas. A set-to ensued. The guard pushed Ian off the path and prevented the crew from further filming. That evening, by the hissing light of her pressure lantern, Dian ripped off a scathing letter to the conservateur, and an equally vitriolic one to Alain Monfort, the chief Belgian adviser to ORTPN, the Department of Tourism and National Parks. The letters were so inflammatory that even Dian herself suspected she might have overdone it.
Monfort, a senior member of the Belgian Aid to Rwanda project, was the man directly responsible for the scheme to exploit the mountain gorillas as a prime tourist attraction. He had already had a number of brushes with Dian about this touchy business, but had agreed to keep tourists away from the Karisoke study groups, of which Group 5 was one.
The smoldering conflict between Dian and this somewhat officious Belgian ten years her junior now burst into open flame. Monfort decided it was time to teach the “crazy American” a much-needed lesson.
Afraid to tackle her directly, he opted to strike at her through the BBC team. He intended to climb to camp and arrest the crew for being in the park without official permission, having first decoyed Dian off the mountain by demanding that she attend an ORTPN conference at park headquarters on January 14.
Apparently it never crossed his autocratic mind that she might not comply. At noon on the fourteenth he set off up the Karisoke trail, accompanied by six armed park guards. Partway up he was considerably discomfited to meet one of Dian’s camp staff who told him that not only was Nyiramachabelli still at camp, she was in a distinctly foul mood. Fuming, but unwilling to face her in her lair, Monfort ignominiously climbed back down.
Attenborough and his people departed in midafternoon of the sixteenth—Dian’s forty-sixth birthday. A string of porters carried their gear down the long trail to a truck waiting to ferry them to Ruhengeri airport. The old vehicle bounced off down the rough lava roadbed. As it came abreast of the park entrance, a guard tried to flag it down.
Thinking the man was looking for a lift, the driver kept on going, shouting that he was already overloaded. Those riding in the back were appalled to see the guard swing up his rifle and send a bullet whistling close over their heads. The driver floored the accelerator. A few minutes later, traveling at full speed, the truck rounded a curve to find a Land Rover parked squarely across the road. The driver jammed on his brakes and came to a squealing halt.
That bloody useless Belgian had found out from the porters when the BBC team was leaving and laid an ambush for them. When the truck stopped, there was Monfort with armed guards and police, just like a posse in the movies!
Monfort informed the thoroughly frightened truck driver that the bazungas he was carrying were under arrest, suspected of being mercenaries engaged in smuggling arms into Uganda. He then put two policemen aboard the truck and sent the bewildered and apprehensive Englishmen to the Ruhengeri military compound. Here they were ordered out of the vehicle and forced to open all of their cases and submit them to a thorough ransacking.
It is impossible to know how far Monfort might have pushed this exercise in intimidation.
Fortunately someone tipped off the chef des brigades, Paulin Nkubili, a real Rwandan and head of the judiciary for the region. He went to the military camp and demanded to know what was going on. Very meek and mild, M. didn’t mention mercenaries but just said the BBC crew had no papers to enter the park. The chef blasted him for treating visitors that way and told him he’d have to pay the cost of an air charter to Kigali if he made them miss their flight. So M. backed off, but not before he had kept them in the open under armed guard for several hours.
Dian’s problems with ORTPN were not yet at an end. On January 23 she received an urgent cable from Dr. Payne of the National Geographic:
WE ARE GREATLY DISTURBED BY OFFICIAL REPORT RECENT INCIDENT INVOLVING YOURSELF AND POACHERS STOP FULLY UNDERSTAND YOUR POSITION BUT URGE UTMOST RESTRAINT IN VIEW YOUR POSITION AS ALIEN RWANDA TOTALLY DEPENDENT ON GOVERNMENT GOODWILL FOR CONTINUATION YOUR RESEARCH.
This was followed by a worried letter from Frank Crigler, United States ambassador to Rwanda, telling Dian that the U.S. State Department had received a complaint about her “illegal actions in Rwanda.” The source was not identified, but Dian believed she knew who it was. Her suspicions seemed to be confirmed by a letter she received from General Dismas Nsabimana, director of ORTPN:
Mademoiselle,
We sincerely regret the acts of poaching that were directed against the gorilla DIGIT, on December 31, 1977.
You know that park guards have carried the dog, killed by the gorilla, in front of the people in order to try to identify its owner Munyarukiko, a presumed poacher, but he still managed to escape. L’ORTPN was outraged by the poaching of this gorilla, perhaps more than you, for this act constituted a grave injustice against the heritage of Rwanda.
However, that you should have invited an English television crew to make a film about the Park des Volcans, just at the moment when the gorilla had been killed, is not in the spirit of a true collaboration between the Office and yourself.
We know that you had readily allowed the filming of the dead gorilla in order to get the kind of publicity that would discredit Rwanda and Rwandan parks.
Because it apparently didn’t concern you that no one from L’ORTPN authorized these photographers, we have concluded that you asked them immediately after the death of the gorilla, pretending that it was pure coincidence.
The repercussions of the BBC affair took weeks to die away, and the antagonism between Monfort and Dian worsened as he continued to urge Rwandan tourist officials to ever greater exploitation of the park gorillas, and as Dian resisted what she saw as yet another potentially disastrous disruption of the lives of her already beleaguered friends.
Although January had brought personal tragedy to Dian, she remained capable of extraordinary thoughtfulness toward others in distress. During the latter part of 1977, she had come to know the staff of the American embassy and had become especially friendly with Ambassador Crigler’s wife. Bettie Crigler frequently lamented her separation from her youngest son, fourteen-year-old Nacho, who was at boarding school in the United States and who, because the family could not afford it, had been unable to visit his parents over the Christmas holidays. Toward the end of January Bettie’s distress had deepened into despondency, so Dian proceeded in her forthright way to do something about it.
Although, as always, she was short of funds, she wrote to Nacho’s elder brother in the United States, enclosing a check with which to pay the younger lad’s return airfare so that he could spend the Easter break in Kigali with his parents.
When the elder Criglers heard about this magnanimous gesture they were stunned, especially since they knew what Dian herself was enduring at the time.
“Dian,” Bettie Crigler wrote, “I am so overcome by the generosity and kindness of your offer—I’m completely at a loss to know how to express our gratitude at having you for a friend. It’s the most wonderful thing anyone ever offered to do for me in all my life…. Today is my birthday, but no present ever given to me means more than this. At the risk of sounding perhaps corny or trite—if I could have had a sister I would have been lucky to have had you.”
To which Frank Crigler added, “You have got to be one of the craziest, loveliest people I’ve ever met. I was dumbfounded. It was particularly poignant because Bettie had been weeping over not knowing how Nacho would be spending his spring vacation. She was awfully upset and anxious … then the very next day came letters from both Nacho and Jeff, telling the whole story. She was so amazed and
so very grateful to you for your incredible generosity, just as I was.”
The Criglers may have been astounded, but the many other people who over the years had been recipients of similar acts of kindness from Dian would not have been surprised.
On January 28, Dian came down from the mountain for the first time since her return from the United States. “She looked like death warmed over,” wrote one of her Kigali friends. “But she was in fighting trim.”
Two more of Digit’s killers had been captured, and one of Dian’s reasons for coming to Kigali was to exert pressure on the Rwandan authorities to ensure a fitting punishment. She pressed for life imprisonment; they were each sentenced to three to five years.
She also attended a meeting at the American embassy called at the behest of J.P. Harroy, a Belgian who had been governor of Rwanda prior to independence and who still claimed considerable influence in the country. Harroy was a strong supporter of the Belgian plan to exploit the gorillas for the benefit of tourism. Now he took it upon himself to reprimand Dian in front of her own ambassador.
He had the nerve to say that Digit had been killed because of me! If I had to live with that kind of accusation I would put a bullet through my head right now. He said the poachers wanted revenge because I’ve stopped their activities. He is a senile old man! If they had wanted revenge they would have done something long before now, and they would have burned up a cabin or something connected with the camp. Harroy also had the audacity to tell me that it was wrong for me to catch one of Digit’s killers!