African Silences (24 page)

One day we join Richard and Karen in a walk of ten kilometers through the forest, led by an old Ba-kota hunter named Bilombi. Though popularly supposed not to be a Pygmy, Bilombi is so small that much of the day is spent ducking under vines that the old tracker does not slash aside because he himself passes easily beneath them. This is not a
failure of courtesy but of spatial apprehension, for he is an amiable old man. For a Bantu, he seems very easy in the forest, and familiar with all the nuts and fruits consumed by forest inhabitants, including man. One fruit the size and color of an orange comes from a liana called
mbolo,
which also produces a white sticky resin sometimes used in rubber manufacture. The
mbolo
climbs hundreds of feet to the top of some great tree in the canopy, where its bright fruits are consumed by monkeys. “Monkey candy,” Bilombi says. Another small fruit, the
atanga,
is shiny purple-blue, and Bilombi stops to gather up a pocketful, which he wraps carefully for his family in the wide thin leaves that characterize the light-starved plants of the forest floor. “Everybody eats it!” Bilombi exclaims, with an utterly open smile of delight, as if in approval of all life. Then he says, “If you wait here, all the antelope will come!”

Bilombi is referring to the small forest duikers, but the sitatunga is also here, deep in the marshes, and so is the bongo of the elegant lyrate horn. Crossing a marshy stream, Bilombi points out the print of a larger antelope, which he says has been made by a sitatunga. Jonah shakes his head—“not long enough.” And a swift green snake with a red belly which shoots from the leaf litter into a log Bilombi calls a mamba, though it is not. Probably Bilombi is mistaken in much of the information that he offers us, and tends to err on the side of what his white companions wish to see, but all the same his eye is sharp and his bushcraft expert. And so we learn about native medicines such as this tree sap which, when boiled, will deal with urinary mischief in all women, and this peculiar paste with thin white fibers, created somehow by a tortoise eating mushrooms; he draws our attention to a strangely swaying bush where a departing mandrill has not eluded his keen eye. At one place he whacks free a three-foot section of rattan that he calls “water liana,” from one end of which, miraculously, a small but steady stream of pure good water flows into one’s
mouth. At another, the old man stops short and commences a weird nasal honking, used by the forest hunters to call duiker, and sure enough, a small blue duiker, large-eyed and delicate-limbed, hurries in across the narrow shafts of sun before whirling to flee with a great thump and scatter.

Today we are recording all elephant sign seen in each kilometer of our walk, footprints and scrape marks on trees as well as droppings, which Karen, compiling her “dungdensity data,” is very good at assessing as to age. Most of the droppings found today are old ones and well scattered, scarcely more than a round dark shadow of soft soil. “There are a lot of bush pig here,” says Richard, “and they do a hell of a lot of rooting in this
tembo
dung. For that reason, our dung-density data”—and here he gives Karen an affectionate, sardonic glance—“may depend more on the density of bush pig than it does on the density of
tembo.
” (Richard’s use of the Swahili word for elephant, an echo of his days in Ruaha Park, is respectful and not an affectation; a man with fewer affectations would be hard to find.)

That elephants were here last month is borne out by the droppings, but there is no question that they are scarce here. “Soils and plants determine where an elephant
can
live,” Richard says, as we pause to inspect the remains of a cooking fire near a stream where people have been fishing, “and man determines where an elephant
does
live.” Elephant scarcity at Makokou is attributable to scarce fodder as well as to the occasional hunters from the Makokou settlement who make camp in these glades. (The men go hunting while the women fish the slow, dark forest brooks by constructing rough mud-and-log dams, braced with upright sticks, braced in their turn by long Y-sticks planted at an angle.)

Of all the countries in the Congo Basin, Gabon is thought to be the most intact, with the highest percentage of undisturbed forest and the least disrupted wildlife populations. Even so, wildlife seems scarce compared to the
plentiful life in the savanna. “I’m not a forest man,” Jonah says later, “but it seems to me that the available food produced here is much less than the food produced in the savanna, even if the mass is counted that is far out of reach of the elephants, up in the canopy. And much of the food that
is
within their reach is unpalatable, having developed secondary compounds—bad-tasting chemicals not related to the plant’s growth—to keep elephants and other creatures from eating it. Richard is unwilling to give out premature figures, but from what I’ve seen, both here and in C.A.R., he’s getting about one-point-five droppings per kilometer of walking, which—allowing time for decomposition—works out to a rough count of one elephant going by each month.

“I doubt if this will improve very much anywhere in the equatorial forest, whether the region is occupied by man or not. According to Ian Parker’s figure of five elephants per square kilometer, there should have been two thousand animals in that area we investigated at Bayanga, which includes the high-density concentration around Dzanga Pan as well as a number of smaller pans and watercourses. I very much doubt if there were two hundred altogether, and the average across the Congo Basin must be far less. Perhaps there were more originally, but I don’t think forest elephant numbers were ever as high as people wished to think.”

It is here near the equator that we thought a pure population of
cyclotis
would be found. We were mistaken. A young male shot yesterday by local authorities as an alleged crop raider was immediately butchered and eaten by the people, but enough was left to determine that it was a hybrid, with bush tusks extending well forward, and round, small cyclotiform ears.

In the dry season, when rocks emerge and its water is a clear dark tannin brown, the Ivindo reflects the huge paletrunked
trees of the gallery forest, the flowering lianas and fire red of the new leaves. It is very beautiful, especially among the rapids and rock islands down the river, where collared pratincoles and the exquisite white-throated blue swallows are the common birds. We see no crocodiles. A few years ago, a French hide trader gave rifles to the Ba-kota, who killed every crocodile in the Ivindo on his behalf, and the same pattern was repeated almost everywhere throughout Gabon, which has almost no crocodiles left. The rifles are still here and the Ba-kota still hunt the river in their delicate pirogues, with the result that the monkeys have withdrawn from the gallery forest where they are ordinarily most easily seen.

Away from the river, monkeys are still common; we see the talapoin, smallest of all African species, hurrying along low limbs from one tree into another, and the white-nosed guenon, making a wild twirling leap forty feet down onto the understory, and DeBrazza’s monkey, a handsome creature that we saw earlier at Garamba, in Zaire, at the east end of its broken range. All three are of the great guenon tribe, the cercopithecines, which extends all the way across Africa, from the mona monkey in Senegal to the blue or Sykes’s monkey of East Africa. (It also includes the vervet or green monkey, only known source of virus-free polio vaccine, and also the carrier of the viral source of the very dangerous “green monkey disease,” which is a close relative of the AIDS virus.) Some authorities—Dr. Western is one—regard the cercopithecines as mere geographic races of one great superspecies, despite their differences of size and color and their striking varieties of whiskers and beards.

Jonah’s opinion would surely be anathema to Dr. Jean-Pierre Gauthier, a friendly and expansive primatologist who has worked out of this research station for many years. Even at breakfast, Dr. Gauthier is given to comical gorilla imitations, and also the fascinating coughs, moans, and
long-distance shouts of the great guenon tribe that is his specialty. Sounds of aggression or warning may be shared by different species, he says, but the cries, the hooting of the males, the gathering calls and murmurings that keep the troop together in its travels through the forest, are so specific to each species that it is impossible for a juvenile of one species to successfully imitate the vocalizations of another. In fact, vocalization patterns in the five guenon species he has studied are directly related to the evolution of the various cercopithecine types.

Perhaps increasingly with the coming of man, forest monkeys have acquired new defenses, and many species in this brash and noisy group are largely silent. Others, such as DeBrazza’s, are largely terrestrial, and when threatened, simply leap out of the trees (where they might be shot) and scamper off. The little talapoin may roost in low branches over water, and even a female carrying an infant will dive off the branch and swim away beneath the surface, a tactic that may have evolved first to frustrate the leopard. All such defenses demonstrate how difficult it is to capture these intelligent and wary creatures. Many hundreds of hours, Dr. Gauthier says, are ordinarily devoted to every monkey darted or trapped and fitted out with a radio collar for further study.

Dr. Gauthier, who lives in Paris, has returned to Gabon to investigate what he believes to be a new cercopithecine species. It was first described in 1985 by British primatologist Mike Harrison from the Région des Abeilles (Bee Country), about one hundred miles south of Makokou, where the strange monkey, known locally as
mbaya,
was first seen slung over a hunter’s shoulder. The
mbaya
is most closely related to L’Hoest’s monkey, and is said to be the wariest of a very wary lot, though this trait may be less significant in its avoidance of discovery than its limited range in a remote and largely uninhabited forest.

The rain-forest communities are the oldest on earth, with hundreds of insect species specific to each of the many species of its trees. Almost half of the earth’s living things, many as yet undiscovered, live in this green world that is shrinking fast to a small patch on the earth’s surface. Man has already destroyed half of the rain forests, which disappear at an ever-increasing speed, and a mostly unknown flora and fauna disappear with them.

Therefore, at every opportunity, we explore the forest, and often I go out alone, for walking in solitude through the dim glades, immersed in silence, one learns a lot that cannot be taught in any other way. The canopy of huge trees is closed, so that even at midday its atmosphere is cool and dark, too dark—too
mysterious,
it almost seems—for photographs. The forest silence is impermeable, entirely undisturbed by the soft bell notes of hidden birds, the tick of descending leaves and twigs or soft thump of falling fruit, or even the far caterwaul of monkeys. From far above come the unearthly squawks of great blue turacos, hopping and clambering along the highest limbs like
Archaeopteryx.

Increasingly uneasy in one’s own intrusion, moving ever more quietly so as not to wake things, one grows aware of immense harmony. The dust of the world spins in cathedral light in the long sun shafts falling from on high. The light touches a brilliant bird feather, an armored beetle, a mighty bean pod husk, silky and red, or hard and shiny as carved wood. The silent processions of the army ants, in their myriad species and deadly strength, glisten in dark ribbons on the forest floor; the taut webs of jungle spiders shine and vanish. High overhead, a bright orange
mbolo
fruit swells with sun in a chink of blue sky like a clerestory. But this underworld is brown and green, and green is the color of the stifled air.

Man hunts in this forest, and few creatures are still left—monkeys, mandrills, squirrels, duikers, tree hyrax, several pangolins—to sustain the leopard whose scat I found yesterday near a forest pool. The scat was too old to attract butterflies, which lose all caution and are easily caught when feeding on the protein in carnivore dung. Like a beautiful lotus growing out of mud was the strange blossom of elusive life that we came upon one day on the forest path, cobalt and red and black and forest green. The blossom opens as the butterflies palpitate, drawing their life, their very color from their reeking feast. And they are hurrying, for in a climate that permits ceaseless reproduction, certain butterflies may begin and end their days in a single month.