“Adult female,” Dr. Musamba said. His voice had a matter-of-fact tone that could only come from someone who had seen more than his fair share of tragedy. “Can’t tell which one yet.”
“Poor girl.” Cole crouched down with the other two men. “What the hell happened?”
The body was already covered with flies and beetles, nature’s scavengers quickly finishing off the nutritional recycling job of an efficient jungle ecosystem. What was left of the gorilla was curled up on its stomach in the leafy depression on the soft ground—her final resting spot. One arm was wrapped over the closer side of her head, as if to block out the filtered morning light she would never see again. The female must have made the nest before she died, maybe hoping that a good long sleep would do the trick of letting her live another day.
“Only one way to find out.” Musamba tightened his lips and looked across at Innocence, eyebrows raised.
You know what to do
, the expression clearly said. The Virunga ranger stood up and used the butt of his AK-47 to flip the stiffened corpse over.
An angry mass of flies lifted off and immediately began settling on the three men’s glistening faces and exposed forearms. It wasn’t even worth trying to swat them away. The abdominal cavity had been opened up and most of its contents already eaten by another scavenger, probably some type of forest rat based on the lack of any more obvious trauma. The eyeballs were also gone, and the exposed black skin of her face and chest was chewed up and beginning to rot.
Not a pretty sight.
“So where’s the entrance wound?” he asked, wondering aloud what he knew the others were also thinking. There was no doubt in his mind she’d been wounded and left to die by a gun-toting rebel out for live-action target practice.
“It can be hard to find under the thick coat,” Musamba said. “When Senkwekwe and the others were killed, we had to comb through carefully in order to find each one.”
“The kill shots were obvious enough, though, right?” Cole said. “I mean, weren’t they all hit at pretty close range—almost execution-style?”
“Yes, they all took direct shots to the head and chest, but there were other wounds also. We did not find them all until the necropsies were done.”
Musamba had been one of the first to the scene on that horrific morning. Seven well-known mountain gorillas slaughtered, simply because their presence in the park made it harder for corrupt officials to profit from illegal charcoal and mining operations. The story was big enough to merit an iconic photo on the cover of
National Geographic
—the dead silverback being carried through a cornfield on the edge of the park, his five-hundred and thirty pound body tied to a makeshift bamboo stretcher on the shoulders of no less than fifteen grieving villagers—which was how Cole first heard of it. That photo was the reason Cole even started thinking about mountain gorillas and dreaming of how he might be able to get involved. Fast forward a few years, through two deployments and his PhD coursework, and here he was.
Musamba continued, “Let’s say this girl got hit by a single bullet, lived long enough to clean herself up and allow the wound to contract a little. It’s going to take a careful exam to find what we’re looking for.”
Cole was impressed with his colleague’s assessment. Wildlife medicine involved a lot of forensic pathology, and Antoine Musamba had become the Gorilla Doctors’ resident expert over the last few years. It helped that almost all the gorilla killings had happened in the Congo, so the veterinarians based at the other parks in Rwanda and Uganda had a distinct disadvantage on that front. Not that they minded, of course. Even the most natural pathologists among them never looked forward to an autopsy of a gorilla they knew personally, though it often meant unlocking the mysteries of how they could better protect these vulnerable animals in the future.
They all paused to listen to an extended exchange of gunfire. When the last echo faded, Innocence looked up at the two veterinarians with an impatient look on his face. “Time for a careful exam is something you do not have, my friends. Those guns are getting closer, and we must not be caught here so far from the helicopter.”
“He’s right,” Cole said, opening the backpack. “Let’s glove and mask up for a quick once-over and then—”
“Wait,” Musamba interrupted. “There’s something else over here.”
Cole jumped to his feet. They’d been so focused on the discovery, no one had done even a superficial assessment of their surroundings. Now he could see that the Congolese veterinarian was walking towards what looked like another dead gorilla. Its massive black form was about ten yards away, partially shielded from where the others were standing by a thick cluster of prehistoric-looking ferns.
“Oh, no,” Musamba said, pointing at the body. “Can you see the left front limb there?”
Innocence and Bonny were right behind him.
“It’s Rugendo.”
“You know I’m still the new guy around here,” Cole said, jogging over to the second gorilla’s final nest. “How in the world do you recognize him already?”
“Rugendo is the only silverback we’ve known to lose an entire hand to a hunter’s snare and recover to do just fine,” Musamba explained. “We intervened about two years ago, removing the necrotic tissue and shooting him up with long-acting ceftiofur. He was head of a family of twelve. That must be one of his females back there.”
The silverback was resting on his right side, and Cole did his best to ignore the deathly stench as he crouched down to look at the stump of a limb. The hand and wrist were missing, but the gorilla’s long dark hair had grown over the area, covering up any sign of the old wounds.
“Looks like this guy Rugendo knew he was going to die, just like the female. You two agree?”
“Yes,” Innocence answered. “I can see he made a proper nest here. He must have been sick for some time, you know. Gorillas are not messy creatures, and he did not take care of his toilet properly.”
That’s a generous way of putting it.
Rugendo probably weighed in at somewhere near four-hundred pounds, and the amount of jungle vegetation required to provide the calories for his active lifestyle contained an awful lot of fiber. Trackers often used the nest droppings to determine how recently a gorilla was in the area, and they were also studied by scientists doing population and disease surveys.
Cole stood up and pulled the radio off his belt. “McBride to Big Bird, do you copy?”
“Is that what you’re calling my pretty lady now?” Marna’s voice came through clearly this time. “Yes, I can hear you fine. Where are you guys?”
“Just about half a kilometer from you,” Cole answered. He heard an edge in Marna’s voice that wasn’t normally there. “We’ve found two dead gorillas. Not sure what did it yet, but we’re about to get our hands on them and find out.”
“Seriously? Shit.” She paused. “Hey, our man Proper here is pretty sure we’ve got some fighters headed this way. Can you hear them much where you are?”
So that explains it.
Cole knew Marna wasn’t one to get worried unless the threat was real, and if Proper Kambale thought the threat was real, then it most definitely was. “Alright, well sit tight and we’ll get back there as soon as we can. Keep us posted if anything changes. Out here.”
“So much for a thorough necropsy.”
Cole was disappointed. Even though he hated that these two beautiful creatures were dead, he still wanted to take advantage of the situation by doing some comprehensive sampling for the emerging infectious disease study. Time was running short for his data collection, and he wasn’t about to miss out on a rare opportunity like this one.
“What do you guys think we have time for?”
Musamba had already slid an N95 respirator mask over his face and was pulling on a latex glove.
“No sense taking unnecessary risks just because we’re in a hurry.” He snapped the second one tight and knelt down over the silverback’s putrid body.
“Two gorillas,” Cole said, “and both had time to find a place to die.”
“Probably not trauma, then.” Musamba was moving his gloved hands through the silverback’s long coarse hair. “Though that would have been the easier explanation. Why must these tragedies always happen on my watch?”
Cole followed his example with the mask and gloves, and they examined the carcass together while Innocence and Bonny stood guard a few yards away. “Looks like he’s a couple of days fresher than the female.”
“Yes, most of his soft tissues are still intact. No evidence of obvious bleeding here, either.”
“That’s good,” Cole said. “I’ve got to admit, I was getting a little worried that we had walked right into an Ebola outbreak.” Ebola virus was one of the top infectious killers of wild gorillas in central Africa, but it often caused vomiting, diarrhea, and sometimes even visible hemorrhage from bodily openings. “That would have been more obvious by now, though, I assume?”
“Probably, yes,” Musamba said. “If Rugendo had died from Ebola he would not have this normal pile of stool produced in the days before death.”
Cole watched him running gloved fingers over the gorilla’s left foot, then caught his breath as he saw what had grabbed the other vet’s attention. “That’s not something you see every day.”
The thick black skin was covered in raised bumps, mostly round and somewhat flattened on top, which had not been obvious from a distance but were easy to see now. Several of them had burst open in what looked like scabby ulcers, but others still had a head of yellow-white pus visible just under the dimpled surface.
“Look at this, his hand and face have the same lesions,” Musamba said, moving his own hands up the silverback’s immense body. “No, it wasn’t Ebola or even our rebel friends that killed Rugendo. Probably some kind of virus—maybe monkeypox. Don’t you think?”
“Can’t say I’ve ever seen a case myself, but that’s definitely how I would expect it to look.” Cole traced his fingers through the hair of the gorilla’s broad back. “The skin feels pretty normal through here, though. Would that be a typical distribution?”
“Yes, monkeypox lesions are usually focused around the face and extremities, just like smallpox used to be.”
“That’s right, and chicken pox stays around the torso more. I can still remember those itchy sores all over my chest, but the worst were the ones my little eight-year old arms couldn’t reach in the middle of my back.”
Cole thought of his littlest brother and sister, not yet born when the rest of his family suffered through those couple of weeks of
Varicella
infection. They were the only ones of his siblings who got immunity the easy way, after the chicken pox vaccine was finally approved.
“Okay, give me two minutes to take a couple samples of these lesions.” Cole slid a new scalpel blade onto the slightly rusted handle in his other hand. “Then we’ll get out of here.”
“Here, this should be a good spot,” Musamba said, pointing at a pus-filled lump on the bare underside of Rugendo’s swollen forearm. It was still intact—hadn’t had time to open up while the gorilla was still alive.
Cole lowered the scalpel blade towards the skin for the initial incision.
“Alrighty, cover your eyes just in case we’ve got any pressure in there.”
His warning was a split second too late. A tiny geyser of pus just missed Cole’s face and hit Innocence Kambale right at the corner of the mouth.
“
Zoba
!” The ranger jumped back, and Bonny whined, looking at Cole suspiciously.
Good thing I don’t understand Lingala
. He hadn’t even realized Innocence was there, leaning in behind them, when he started cutting.
“Oh, man, did I get you?” He hoped his genuine concern was clear.
“I am fine.” Innocence was not wearing a mask. “Did not expect it to jump out at me like that. Next time, some more warning maybe?”
Cole knew he wouldn’t have been able to regain his own composure so quickly had their roles been reversed. But like most African guides and park rangers who spent their lives working with foreigners, Innocence had developed an incredible level of patience with his
wazungu
. Some criticized it as leftover colonial subservience, but it also meant job security.
Musamba tore open an alcohol wipe and reached it toward the younger man’s scarred face. “Just a small spot, I think. You didn’t feel anything inside your mouth?”
“No, I will be fine,” Innocence said. He let out Bonny’s lead and she immediately plunged ahead into the brush. “I will make a quick circle to see if there are any others.”
“Let’s hope he
will
be fine,” Cole said under his breath, watching Innocence lift his weapon and disappear behind the bloodhound. “I’ll feel horrible if he comes down with something from that.”
“Don’t worry too much. Doesn’t look like it got on his mucous membranes, and these guys who grew up in the forest have incredible immune systems anyway.” Musamba circled another lesion on the gorilla’s arm with one finger. “Here’s a good one. Just leave a wider margin so you don’t burst the lesion this time.”
Cole carved a perfect elliptical pattern around the lump—just like removing a little skin tumor from an old golden retriever. He realized he was unconsciously allowing himself room for a tension-free closure, momentarily forgetting that this patient was way too far gone to be worrying about proper wound healing.
“Could you hand me a rat tooth forceps?” he asked. “Need to elevate this bit of skin so I can see what I’m doing when I cut it away from the underlying tissue.”
Musamba tore open one end of a small paper sterile pack from his bag and folded back the ends, allowing Cole to reach in for the forceps. Using the forceps in his left hand and the scalpel in his right, the veterinarian lifted the free piece of skin and smoothly cut through its subcutaneous roots.
“Well, let’s see what that can tell us,” he said, dropping the dime-sized sample into the sterile cup Musamba had opened for him.
“Why don’t you get a couple more while we have everything opened up. Maybe this one next to his eye, and another on his foot?”
“Sure, just give me a second.” Cole felt his hands remembering their old familiarity with these surgical tools and quickly added two more skin biopsies to the sample cup. As he twisted the lid securely in place, he couldn’t help but imagine the headline on tomorrow’s
ProMED
e-mail alert, “Possible Monkeypox Outbreak Among Congo’s Mountain Gorillas.” Maybe it would even make CNN?