I sat on the black sand atop Karisimbi, endured the dive-bomb attack of a huge African raven, and thought about the last two hundred wild mountain gorillas alive in the world.
Photographer Nick Nichols and I had been in the central equatorial African country of Rwanda too long, and on the last few
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days of our visit, we decided to climb Mount Karisimbi. We had been studying the habits of the mountain gorilla for nearly a month, and my thoughts about the animal, and its chances for survival, were bleak, claustrophobic, frigid. There was about them the faint sound of laughter, muffled by falling snow.
Rwanda's Volcano National Park is the last refuge of an estimated two hundred mountain gorillas. They live on the jungled slopes of the Virungas, between about seven thousand and eleven thousand feet, where they feed on the writhing vegetable riot that erupts out of rich volcanic soil.
The gorillas weren't all that difficult to find: A family of six or ten animals moving on all fours through a dense, wet meadow of nettles, or a thick stand of bamboo, makes a wide and easily identifiable trail. The family group is led by a dominant male, called a silverback because of the wide patch of gray across his back, a silver saddle that denotes sexual maturity. Immature males, blackbacks, will quickly develop a silver saddle when they are forced to lead a family after the premature death of a reigning silverback. One thinks of men who have had "greatness thrust upon them," of presidents who are said to "grow into the office."
In the month I had spent with them, I had learned the simple rules one adheres to when approaching a family of browsing gorillas. Staying low signifies lack of aggressive intent. Smile. Gorilla faces read like human faces, and a smile is a friendly gesture. Just don't show your teeth. This is impolite at best; at worst, it signals a desire to attack. And don't stare. A direct, unwavering stare is a sign of aggression, as it is for both dogs and men.
There is a proper distance to keep, but it varies with the individual gorilla, and the circumstances, so that sometimes fifty yards is too close, and sometimes the gorilla will allow you to move within arm's reach.
These are mere matters of etiquette, not to mention self-protection, and they are applicable to any number of situations in human society. Take your typical barroom fight. Here's a big, nasty Hell's Angel minding his own business and sitting on a low stool over in the corner. A man with peaceful intentions would not signal them by hulking over to this guy, by standing inches away,
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by frowning down on the man with gritted teeth, by staring at him for minutes on end.
Do something like this to the Hell's Angel and he's likely to nail your head to the floor and tap-dance on your face. Do it to a mountain gorilla, and he'll charge.
Mrithi is the silverback presiding over the family known as group 13. From the summit of Karisimbi, I could see across to the lower slopes of Sabino, where I first met him. It was down there, below the mossy grass, the eerie lobelia forest, the senecios, even below the nettle fields and hygenia meadows, all the way down into the bamboo forest. Mrithi's path had been plain enough: The closely spaced bamboo stalks, ten and fifteen feet high, had been smashed to the ground along a sort of trail. The gorillas had peeled the stalks to get at the white pulp inside. The trail was littered with these peelings, which looked like discarded sandwich wrappers.
Mrithi was sitting in a small clearing. We approached on our bellies and announced our presence with a double-belch vocalization, a double clearing of the throat that passes for a polite "hello" among mountain gorillas. We followed the rules, but he regarded us with some suspicion. His face was shiny, almost iridescent in its blackness. He was frowning slightly: a look I can best describe as tolerant annoyance. There were creases above the heavy ridge of his brow, and the corners of his mouth were turned down, like a child's drawing of an unhappy person.
He stood for a moment on his short bowed legs, but we lay motionless, avoiding his stare. His chest was massive, and the long black hair on his huge arms looked rich, regal, like mink or sable. He stared at us for a minute or two, then sat back down and scratched his head. (George Schaller, in his pioneering work on the mountain gorilla twenty years ago, noticed a lot of this head scratching. Schaller supposed that the gorilla was pondering his options—fight or flee—and thought that the head scratching was a sign of indecision, just as it is with humans.)
Mrithi pounded his chest with his cupped palms, and he stared at us in a challenging manner, but the display was halfhearted,
and entirely unintimidating. We lay still and silent as stone. Mrithi peeled a bit of bamboo, keeping a wary eye on us.
We crawled a bit closer. His odor was strong, like burnt rubber and vinegar, though not so unpleasant as that sounds. The great animal seemed almost to sigh, as if in resignation, and we took the sigh as an invitation. We crept closer still.
Mrithi ignored us for some time. He seemed ready for his afternoon nap, and the ten members of his family gathered about. Mrithi fell onto his back and yawned elaborately. Mtoto, a three-year-old female no bigger than a collie pup, crawled up onto his absurd potbelly and yanked at the equally absurd goateelike growth under his chin. The two frolicked, lazily. They glanced over in our direction frequently, smiling slightly, and I had the impression that they had passed beyond resignation and into acceptance, that there was, somewhere in the frolic, a desire to entertain.
Eventually, Mrithi led his family deeper into the bamboo. We followed for a time, but Mrithi was clearly getting tired of us. When he pounded the flat of his palms on the ground several times, we took it as a sign that we had overstayed our welcome.
It was on another visit that Mrithi charged me. I had gone into the bamboo with some researchers. Mtoto had caught her hand in a poacher's antelope trap, and it was necessary to assess the extent of her injuries. We had been aggressively impolite, overstaying our reluctant welcome an hour or so, and Mrithi came at me faster than I could run. But the first thing the experts tell you about such a situation is, "Don't run," "Never run." Anyone who has ever been walking along the sidewalk on a strange street and had some dog come snarling out of a yard knows the principle. Stop. Face the animal. Run and you'll be bitten. So it is with gorillas, and I discovered that holding one's ground in the face of a charge is, for one simple reason, a good deal easier than it sounds. A mature mountain gorilla can weigh up to 425 pounds and stand almost six feet tall. A charging gorilla will bare finger-sized fangs, scream, topple small trees.
Mrithi was charging with a bearlike four-legged gallop. I lay there, holding my ground—Nick suggested that I was paralyzed
with fear—and the big silverback stopped about five yards away. He turned abruptly, and strode into the darkness of the bamboo. A week later, another gorilla, Brutus by name, screamed and charged one of the researchers. The scream was awesome, high-pitched at first, then dropping down into a lower register and reverberating off the surrounding hills. The researcher held his ground—my experience suggests he was probably paralyzed with fear—and Brutus stopped, as all mountain gorillas will stop when a man holds his ground. For whatever reason.
When Nick and I set up camp on the lower slopes of Sabino, near the small village of Karendage, I began to identify strongly with the gorillas. Instantly, or so it seemed, hundreds of people burst out of the earth and gathered to watch us set up our tent.
We had been learning some Swahili, but everyone in Karendagi spoke Kinya-rwandan. We could not communicate, apart from shrugs and other friendly gestures. The Rwandans were both fascinated and polite. They kept their distance—about two feet— and smiled in various reassuring manners.
We regarded the smiling horde with what amounted to tolerant annoyance.
"How long do you think they're going to stand there, staring?" Nick asked.
"I don't know. There's no television. . . ."
Time passed. After about half an hour, we became accustomed to the presence of the others. The Rwandans were not threatening, only honestly inquisitive. I began to worry that we were a dull show.
The desire to entertain lasted perhaps an hour and a half. I cooked some dinner. "Freeze-dried lasagne," I said importantly, and I prepared it with extravagant magician's gestures. Dinner was a big hit, and the urge to entertain drove me to ludicrous lengths. I sang. I told knock-knock jokes in English. I knelt on one knee and diagrammed football plays in the black muddy soil. People stared, smiled uncertainly. They seemed puzzled, contemplative. I imagine they thought much the same thing I thought as I watched Mrithi: that this strange creature was very different from myself, and yet, disturbingly, very similar.
Our mood—Nick's and mine—went through a subtle transformation. We were exhausted, tired of entertaining, tired of being watched. And still the Rwandans stood there, smiling and staring. We sat in the tent. People knelt to peer inside. It was seven at night, and neither of us would be able to sleep for several hours.
Suddenly—unconsciously, I think—Nick screamed. It was a thirty-second howl of frustration, a plea for privacy, and though it lacked the authority of a roar from Brutus, the intent was precisely the same.
A cold wind sprang up on Karisimbi, and in the sudden chill I found myself thinking that it wouldn't do to identify too strongly with the mountain gorilla.
Sometime in the distant past it is possible that a creature that was to become the gorilla shared the forest with a creature that would become man. As the equatorial forest began to shrink, the forebears of man moved out of the forest, onto the broad plains and savannahs, or so one theory has it.
Food was not plentiful on the plains, and the new creature was forced to hunt animals larger and more powerful than itself. Survival was a process of constant adaptation. Language was essential to the hunt, as was cooperation, and the invention of tools.
The gorilla stayed in the forest, where it reigned unchallenged up until the beginning of the last century. Food was everywhere —mountain gorillas consume some seventy-five different plants— and there was no need for language, for the invention of tools.
It's not that the gorilla is incapable of doing these things: Gorillas in captivity have been seen using tools, using a stick to bring a bit of food into their cage, for instance. And at Stanford, a lowland gorilla named Koko has been taught to use sign language. She knows six hundred words, invents some of her own, and can construct coherent sentences.
Twenty years ago, George Schaller wondered whether the life the gorilla chose, the provident life of the forest, was not an "evolutionary dead-end." I put this question to Sandy Harcourt, the director of the Karisoke Research Center, which stands in the shadow of Karisimbi, on the slopes of the dormant volcano called Visoke. "No," Sandy said, "the gorilla is not an evolutionary
dead-end. The animal is perfectly adapted to the forest." True enough, but now it is the forest that is endangered.
Rwanda is a nation of subsistence farmers. There are over 5 million of them in a country the size of Maryland. If the rate of population increase remains constant, the population will double shortly after the year 2000. And there is simply no more land. Already some Rwandans are going hungry. The people who cut down the forests of Rwanda in order to survive are now looking to the forty-six-square-mile Volcano National Park for more land.
The government is committed to the park. It understands well enough that the decimation of the remaining forest will destroy the Virunga watershed and cause drought below. It knows that the gorillas can be habituated to the presence of man, and that they are a potential source of badly needed tourist revenue.
Still, the press for more land is going to be almost irresistible in the next few decades. "The gorilla will survive," Sandy Harcourt said, "if we just leave his habitat alone." Twenty years ago there were just about twice as many gorillas in Volcano National Park as there are today. The world lost half of them when half the park was turned over to cultivation about twelve years ago. It's a very simple equation.
The gorilla cannot, or will not, adapt to a life other than that of the forest. Other animals adapt: Coyotes manage to survive in Los Angeles; lions learn to herd their prey into newly constructed fences in Africa's game parks; and the people who live in the villages below Volcano National Park know how their fathers' fathers died on Karasimbi half a century ago, and that tragedy will never be repeated.
It was very cold atop Karasimbi. I thought of Mrithi and Mtoto, of Brutus and Beethoven, of the forty or so individual mountain gorillas I had met in the last month. The wind shrieked and howled among black twisted boulders, and I heard in it the soft sound of laughter, muffled by falling snow.
If the mountain gorilla survives, it may very well be due to the Mountain Gorilla Project. This organization provides funds for training park guards and pays for antipoaching patrols. The proj-
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ect feels education is its most important goal. Workers go out to the villages and schools around the Virungas, where they stress the importance of the forest watershed. The project also takes paying customers out to observe one of three habituated gorilla groups. This money goes to the Rwandan Office of National Parks and is funneled back into such activities as antipoaching training. Last year, for the first time in its history, the park made a small profit, and the government—one supposes—began to look more favorably on the idea of preserving the gorilla, if only as a source of badly needed revenue.
The international organizations that fund the Mountain Gorilla Project are the Flora and Fauna Preservation Society, the People's Trust for Endangered Species, the World Wildlife Fund, and, in the United States, the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, which accepts donations at 1717 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20056.