I sneaked back again next morning with Faustin. We drove to Goma, where there was a radio that would reach the capital.
We were given one hour to complete the call. It took fifty minutes to reach the proper person to hear our request; but he said the president of Zaire would have to rule on it, and the reply might come late that afternoon via a series of local radio links. So we went back to park headquarters to wait.
Finally at 4:00 P.M. a garbled message came through giving the President’s permission to take the baby back to camp. For reasons not disclosed, the conservateur wouldn’t let the youngster be taken across the border by car, so Bill and Amy agreed to take it to Karisoke over the mountains, taking turns carrying it in a sling, accompanied by armed Zairean guards.
It was then after 5:00 P.M., when the Rwandan border closed until morning, so I had to sit in the car between the customs posts all night, scared that the Zairean military might come and arrest me. But at dawn I got across to Gisenyi and then back up the mountain where the baby had just arrived.
It is near death, anemic, totally dehydrated, emaciated, diarrheic, blood and mucus in the dung, filled with oozing sores, lice and fleas, with wire scars around its wrists, and-the one thing above all that will likely kill it-his left foot is only a swollen, gangrenous stump with the wire snare that caught it deeply embedded above where the foot should be. I never saw anything like this; the toes we only found today, bent under the foot and embedded in the layers of pus and skin flaps on the sole of what was once the foot.
We’ve had it five days now, giving it twenty-four-hour-a-day care. But yesterday I made the decision the foot has to come off, despite its general physical condition, or it will die for sure. Have asked a leper surgeon, highly qualified, to come to camp to perform this as soon as possible. At least we can get the snare off and, from there, see if it can be saved. I am becoming more and more depressed about the chances of any miracles keeping it going, and the surgery is the last resort. This, on top of Digit, is so frustrating it leaves nothing left to be believed in.
Lolly Prescada, the surgeon referred to, sent an apologetic note to the effect that she could not climb to Karisoke for a day or two, which Dian felt would be too late. This message arrived along with mail from England containing more bad news about the Digit Fund. Combined with other recent events, the effect of these several disappointments was to sink Dian into deep depression.
Pending her arrival, Lolly had recommended giving the sick gorilla a saline solution orally to counteract its dehydration. Late in the evening Dian went to the cabin shared by the V-Ws, in a spare room of which the animal was temporarily housed.
I went down and made Bill and Amy angry. I did make them give the medicine and the baby choked. Later that night got note from Amy saying baby was dying. Artificial respiration. She did-he didn’t. I tried and failed. Amy cried. Terrible. He said I wanted baby to die. I carried body back to my house. I stay awake all night.
Next morning Dian took the corpse to Ruhengeri hospital. An autopsy confirmed a massive gangrene infection in the injured foot, and pneumonia of such long duration that both lungs had become little more than pus-and mucus-filled sacs. The doctors concluded that the animal had been doomed long before it reached Karisoke.
It is not clear whether Dian fully accepted this verdict. There is no doubt but that the episode would haunt her for years to come. There is also no question but that accusations to the effect that she had been the proximate cause of the baby’s death would be used against her by ill-wishers with telling effect. The pain of Digit’s death had been almost unbearable—it had now been agonizingly intensified by her failure to save the kidnapped infant.
In her extremity she could not immediately face returning to Karisoke, so she drove to Gisenyi, hoping to be able to unburden herself to Rosamond Carr. Unfortunately, Rosamond had just left home for a trip to the United States. Although by then it was late in the evening, Dian retraced the rough route to Ruhengeri, then turned southeastward to make the three-hour drive to Kigali.
Although she was aware that Bettie Crigler was also away in the United States, she nevertheless went to the embassy. Here she found a comforter in the ambassador, who gave her food and drink, listened patiently to her outpouring, and provided her with a room and bed. Her gratitude was heartfelt, if somewhat enigmatic.
Everything came true, just as I knew it would.
On April 7 the parents of Debi Hamburger, the young woman who had so wanted to work with Dian, came to Karisoke. They bore her ashes and a bronze memorial plaque. Although their arrival at this particular time might have been expected to produce an unbearable emotional overload on a woman already stressed to the breaking point, it had the opposite effect.
Simba, the female who was carrying Digit’s child, had her baby on the night of the sixth-a bit of badly needed good news. The baby’s name is Mwelu, which in Swahili means Bright and Shining Light. This little bit of Digit was given this name that we had earlier chosen for the American girl, Debi Hamburger, who was due to come up here two years ago, until she was found to have cancer of the breast. Once that was operated on, she was determined to come up last year; but it was too late.
I’d previously told the students that the next baby born would be called Mwelu, in honor of Debi-a super girl. Simba timed her birth rather well so that on the eighth I was able to take the Hamburgers to see Group 4 and listen to Mwelu scream her head off because she was in a nettle patch. Debi’s parents were so happy.
Next day, with Group 5, Debi’s mom and pop were covered with gorillas and their happiness made me ever so happy too. But of course they had to leave. I will hire a plane before the end of the month to scatter Debi’s ashes over the Virungas, as this is what she wanted.
Meanwhile, still brooding over the grim night of the baby gorilla’s death, the V-W couple decided to go to Kigali and tell ambassador Crigler their version of what had happened. “Because he was a very good friend of hers, we thought somebody should know how low she was sinking … we weren’t about to drag her through the mud or anything. We thought … that the best thing to do would be to try to convince her to leave the country.”
Perhaps their stint in the Peace Corps had persuaded them that they were competent to judge a woman like Dian Fossey. Unfortunately, the story—which lost nothing in the telling—reached Monfort and the other Europeans, with the result that within a very brief span of time it gained common and contorted currency. Drunk and incompetent, Dian Fossey had been responsible for a gorilla’s death! The woman who pretended to be the mountain gorillas’ most dedicated champion was hardly better than the poachers she persecuted! Crigler himself wrote off the ugly gossip for what it was, but those who disliked Dian made the most of it.
For some time she was unaware of what was being said about her. She was, in fact, enjoying the only happy weeks the year would bring. On May 8 a dream she had been nurturing through eight long and lonely months became a reality. Dr. Jean Gespar arrived to spend the best part of a month with her at Karisoke.
The interlude with him was not entirely idyllic, but it was close enough. Jean was almost as fascinated by the lives of the gorillas as she was, and the couple spent endless daylight hours with Groups 4 and 5. In the evenings after dinner, which Dian cooked in the little kitchen of her cabin, they walked hand-inhand on the meadow under the looming old volcanoes, listening to the eerie cries of the hyrax and the barking of the bushbucks.
On May 10, Ian Redmond returned to England, having prolonged his stay at Karisoke for three months in order to organize the antipoaching patrol program. He had done incomparably well; but the failure of the Fauna Preservation Society to provide the funds needed to hire and train new men meant that the burden of patrol work had fallen mostly on him and the camp trackers. This had resulted in increasing friction between Dian and the three research students, who were not particularly interested in fighting poaching, but did want the services of the trackers in order to further their own projects.
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Ian’s efforts had been effective in keeping poachers under control in the home territory, but beyond that they did as much as they pleased. On his last patrol, two days before leaving Karisoke, Ian had found and cut some forty snares in the saddle region where Digit had been killed—ominous evidence that the poachers were still ranging in force on the periphery of the study area.
Jean Gespar left Karisoke on May 26, having made it clear to Dian that he considered his visit to have been a pleasant interlude but that the affair was something he did not intend to pursue.
With his departure Dian was alone in a camp whose other white occupants were either neutral or hostile toward her. Surrounded by poachers against whose depredations she could do very little, she was deeply apprehensive about what might happen next.
— 16 —
After Digit’s death the entire responsibility for the security of the Group 4 family settled back on Uncle Bert. Given a few more years, the two cocky young blackback males, Tiger and Beetsme, would have been able to give useful support to their leader, but they were not yet interested in adult duties. To make Uncle Bert’s load even heavier, all three of his mature females were nurturing young. Macho had three-year-old Kweli; Simba was nursing Digit’s daughter, three-month-old Mwelu. Flossie not only had her newly born baby, Frito, but was also rearing her four-year-old son, Titus, while at the same time keeping an eye on Cleo, her seven-year-old daughter. Another young female, eight-year-old Augustus, was the eleventh member of Uncle Bert’s family.
On July 18 a large “fringe group” of gorillas from the northern slopes of Visoke intruded into Uncle Bert’s home territory and a violent confrontation took place. Without Digit’s support, and with so many females and younger animals to encumber him, Uncle Bert elected to yield ground. He withdrew along the saddle into Zaire. When David Watts caught up with the group at noon next day, he found the animals contentedly relaxing in their day nests in a sunlit glade not far from where Digit had been killed.
Poachers were again ranging freely through this region far removed from Karisoke, and when Watts reported the move to Dian, she was deeply alarmed. During the next few days she debated with herself whether or not to try to herd Group 4 back to the relatively secure slopes of Visoke. However, the turmoil this would have entailed for the gorillas made her hesitant. In the end, she concluded that so long as Watts could be with them during most of the daylight hours, they would be safe enough until they decided to return to Visoke of their own volition.
A week later, at ten-thirty on the morning of July 24, Dian was sitting at her typewriter when there came a hesitant knock on her door. Since everyone in camp had good reason to know how deeply she resented being interrupted when at work, she supposed the intruder to be a tourist, more and more of whom were invading Karisoke uninvited and unannounced. She ignored the knock. When it came again and yet again, she sprang up impatiently and flung the door wide.
David Watts stood before her, his face running with sweat.
One glance told Dian that another disaster had overtaken the gorillas.
“Poachers!” It was a statement, not a question.
Watts took hold of the doorjamb to steady himself.
“Uncle Bert’s been shot—and his head cut off.”
Half an hour later Nemeye was trotting swiftly down the mountain with a somewhat incoherent note from Dian to Bill Weber, who was “below,” where he had taken to spending much of his time:
“Bill—David just came back from Group 4 with terrible news—please brace yourself for it. Uncle Bert has been killed by poachers.
“Poor David found no sign of the rest of the Group. I’m afraid they’ve all been killed without Uncle Bert. David’s gone out with Vatiri, Rwelekana, and Mukera now to find them. Uncle Bert was probably killed this morning, meaning that Munyarukiko and the other poachers haven’t yet gotten to Mukingo or wherever it is they hide out after a killing. I gave David the guns, but of first importance now is whether or not any of the group remain alive and if we can help them.
“I am asking you to come up with Nemeye to do a roving patrol to Karisimbi to attempt to capture Munyarukiko, Gashabizi, and Runyagu.
“I am not sure of what I can do that is most functionally right now except kill…. I would like to fly to Kigali and insist on a commando unit for the takeover of Mukingo and then use the soldiers for patrol. I must see President Habyarimana. No more placation or lack of action. Will need people to safeguard anything that possibly remains of Group 4.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Dian knew well enough what she was going to do about the gorilla killers, if she could catch them—but did not know what to do about herself, how to absorb and survive the grief that welled within.
Armed with pistols, Watts and the three Africans returned to the saddle. Uncle Bert’s body lay where it had fallen with a bullet through the heart. The old silverback’s head had been hacked off and was missing. His right side had been ripped open, doubtless for the gall bladder, but his hands were intact. The body was still warm, indicating that Watts must have surprised the poachers at their grisly work.
Cautiously, with pistols cocked, the four men searched the surrounding hagenia woods and nettle patches. They found no other members of Group 4, but a trail of crushed vegetation showed that the survivors had fled back toward Visoke’s slopes. The search party tracked the gorillas for an hour, until halted by a tremendous outburst of shrieks and chest thumping some way ahead.
The fleeing survivors of Group 4 had collided with the fringe group that had dispossessed them a few days earlier. There was pandemonium as three alien silverbacks charged into the panic-stricken fugitives.
Group 4 might well have disintegrated then and there had it not been for David Watts, who led his party to the rescue. The sudden appearance of human beings sent the fringe group off in screaming flight, leaving the now frantically overwrought members of Group 4 to settle down as best they might. Afraid to press on and afraid to turn back, the frightened animals gathered around the nearest approximation of a leader remaining to them—ten-year-old Tiger.
Peering through the foliage, Watts anxiously counted the survivors. Only Uncle Bert and his premier mate, Macho, seemed to be missing. Macho’s young son, Kweli, was present, but whining pitifully. When Watts got back to camp with his report, he and Dian concluded hopefully that Macho had been swept away with the fringe group.
It was now early afternoon. Bill Weber had not yet appeared and Dian would wait no longer.
All the horror and shock of Digit’s murder had returned and I felt I was going to go mad.
Only violent action could bring relief. Raging, she went down the mountain to the office of Paulin Nkubili— “Uncle Billy,” as she called him to herself—the one Rwandan official she felt she could count on to assist with what she had in mind.
Nkubili did not disappoint her. Outraged himself by what had happened, he agreed to stage a raid on Munyarukiko’s village. He summoned a platoon of commandos from the military camp, and at dusk Dian and the well-armed force carried out an assault on the Batwa village. It was a scene of great confusion, yells of fear and fleeing people—a scene comparable perhaps to what had ensued when Group 4’s survivors had been assaulted by the fringe group.
The soldiers found and confiscated a quantity of spears, bows and arrows, and hashish pipes, but did not find Munyarukiko, who, it was later learned, had fled into Zaire. However, they did discover his boon companion, Gashabizi, huddling under a bed. Terrified by the presence of that avenging Valkyrie, the Lone Woman of the Forests, no less than by Nkubili and the commandos, the man confessed his complicity in Digit’s death and to having taken part in this latest atrocity as well.
Gashabizi’s capture made that long night worthwhile. Maybe it was best that Munyarukiko wasn’t there. I might have killed him myself. Uncle Billy asked if we had done enough, but I said “No!” He just looked at me and nodded.
Next morning she accom
panied the soldiers and Nkubili in a raid on the village where another notorious poacher, Sebahutu, lived with his seven wives and families.
We caught him outside his compound as he tried to flee. Then we found his jacket, sodden with blood, and a blood-sticky spear and panga that one of his wives tried to hide from us.
Sebahutu, it was revealed, had fired the shot that killed Uncle Bert.
Exhausted physically and emotionally, Dian slowly drove her Volkswagen combi back to the foot of the mountain. Before she could begin the long climb to camp, a porter intercepted her with a message from Amy Vedder:
“We hate to have to tell you this. Macho is dead. Vatiri found her body only a hundred feet from Uncle Bert’s. Both the bodies are now back at camp. She was also shot. Her side was slashed open, but they did not take her head….”
The passions this note aroused were so intense that nowhere, not in her journal nor in her letters, was Dian able to commit them to paper at the time, but in her book, written many years later, she tells us something of how she felt.
Dazed, disbelieving, I drove back to Ruhengeri thinking of the day Macho had walked up to my side to gaze into my face with her wide, trusting eyes, and the tenderness she had always lavished on Kweli. How would the three-year-old survive without his mother or father?
Nkubili’s reaction upon hearing of yet another killing was intense anger. He immediately planned a third patrol and ordered all suspected poachers brought in for questioning. The next day I drove my combi filled with armed soldiers and a police inspector to a village adjacent to the Parc des Volcans. I parked out of sight of the village and the soldiers poured from the car. Carrying their guns high over their heads and moving as if they were marines making a beach landing, the men quickly surrounded the marketplace to confine several hundred people inside the square…. One Hutu man wouldn’t stay in the hut where we told him to go. Urgently he pleaded in Kinyarwandan to stay out while I replied in Swahili for him to return inside, neither of us understanding what the other was saying. After several minutes, with as much dignity as he could muster, he walked about a dozen yards away, turned his back and tended to the call of nature to the delighted cheers of the nearby people…. From the market we hurried to a nearby, secreted little Twa village where three of the smallest Twas I’ve seen yet were captured. One was Gashabizi’s brother-in-law and has a long poaching record. We then went to a distant settlement to capture Munyarububga, whom the military were particularly pleased to capture as he had escaped from them several times in the past. Munyarububga was an evil man whose situation was not helped by the fact that he’d been drinking heavily. I could feel his eyes boring into the back of my head as we drove back to the Ruhengeri prison … these were some of the five surprise raids made that day on villages around the park. The raids resulted in the capture of fourteen poachers, all of whom were detained in the Ruhengeri prison to await trial.*