Now Marna had grown up in the new South Africa, and she embraced a slightly different take on things than most of her Afrikaner forebears. Her parents’ education and vast farms around Nelspruit still set her apart from the majority of her fellow citizens, but she couldn’t be held responsible for that, could she?
So Marna was an African. More African than Cole was American, she’d dryly pointed out when he tried to protest her claim to that title. His family had only been in the States since the late nineteenth century, when a young Aonghus McBride arrived from Scotland. Aonghus promptly enlisted in the Army and was shipped out west to join the 7th Cavalry’s questionable campaign in defense of the new American frontier.
“The only difference between my white ancestors and yours,” Marna remembered adding, “is that mine were not quite so successful in their efforts to wipe out the natives. A fact I’m quite proud of.”
He took this quite well, she thought. Even though Cole occasionally liked to brag on his cowboy heritage, Marna knew he was a little more nuanced in his understanding of the world than he usually let on. Which was one of things she especially liked about this mysterious American veterinarian who had unexpectedly crashed into her life a few months earlier.
But where was he, anyway? Marna glanced up from her book and out a screened window into the cool darkness. Across the yard, a lone shadow moved across the brightly lit window of the lab. He was still at it.
She sat back in the old recliner and adjusted her mask for what must have been the tenth time in as many minutes. How did people ever get used to wearing these things? Yet another reason she couldn’t have become a vet herself. Of course, that failing grade in organic chemistry didn’t exactly help her chances, so Marna had gone another route and trained as a helicopter pilot in the South African Air Force. Every game farm and wildlife preserve in the country needed its own pilot, and she knew that these sky cowboys worked right alongside their veterinary colleagues. After her commitment to the SAAF was up, Marna landed a dream job just up the road from her parents’ farm in Kruger National Park.
And now here she was in Rwanda, doing just what she always imagined but never really thought would happen. South African National Parks had loaned her along with the helicopter to Rwanda’s fledgling park system back in March. The new president’s recent commitment of tourism training and resources for other countries on their shared continent had raised some eyebrows among those more aware of just how competitive Africa’s safari dollars really were. But when Marna proposed the loan and got initial approval, she flew north before hardly anyone in her organization even knew what was happening.
The helicopter. Those ugly gashes in the fiberglass skin would be tough to explain, if the previously immaculate machine ever made it back down to Kruger. But that was only one of several major concerns competing for attention over the last eighteen hours.
She looked around the makeshift isolation nursery she and the others had set up in one room of the veterinary hospital’s temporary holding facility. The Gorilla Doctors’ headquarters campus wasn’t built to house gorillas for more than a few days, but it seemed to be holding up reasonably well. The three older orphans were moved from Virunga National Park’s more permanent facility during a break in the fighting earlier in the year. They didn’t have the same outdoor spaces to explore here in Musanze, of course, but Marna thought they still seemed pretty pleased with themselves most of the time.
That changed with the sick infant’s arrival earlier in the day. The older orphans could tell that something was up, and they made it clear to everyone that they were not happy about being kept out of the loop. Marna looked down at the tiny creature clinging to a blanket in the crook of her left arm. Her gloved fingers crept up his wooly black back and traced around a perfect little ear, so very human in every way. He was sleeping peacefully now, but she knew he wasn’t out of the woods yet. Even though the baby gorilla had quickly revived with some IV fluids and several good feedings, the discolored rash spreading across his skin told a different story.
“Hey, you still awake in there?”
Cole peered through the screen and watched as Marna shifted slightly and then slowly opened her eyes. The beam from her headlamp shone brightly down at an open book in her lap. An amused smile crept over his lips as the beam began moving across the floor and up the wall to the window, following the sound of his voice.
“Careful, that thing is bright!” he said, bringing a hand to his eyes.
“Oof, sorry about that,” Marna answered groggily, reaching behind her head. The room went dark. “I guess I fell asleep after all.”
“That’s okay,” Cole said. “It’s past midnight, so Innocence should be coming by any minute to take over. How’s our little man?”
“Pretty good, I think. He’s been asleep since the last bottle at ten.”
“Nice. Just sit tight for a minute while I get geared up. I want to take another look at him before I head back to the lab.”
Cole stepped back from the window, brushing against the glossy leaves of the mango tree that provided such welcome shade during the day. He took a deep breath of the cool mountain air. At over six thousand feet in elevation, Musanze enjoyed some of the nicest weather in Rwanda.
And wow, had it been a long day. Even though a part of him felt exhausted, his mind wouldn’t stop racing. There was no way he could get to sleep anytime soon, not with the biggest discovery of his brief scientific career still cooking in the darkened lab across the yard and working its evil magic in that tiny gorilla sleeping in Marna’s arms.
Still, he’s a lucky little guy
. Not just for the choice real estate the infant was currently enjoying, although that was hard to beat. How had Innocence even spotted him, a barely perceptible movement beneath his dead mother? Cole was sure he wouldn’t have been so observant, only moments before their frenzied run back to the helicopter. He pictured that final sprint across the clearing. Who in the world would be so stupid as to actually fire on them? Was it really just some desperate rebels looking for ransom money?
The insistent tug of competing priorities was hard to ignore. Focus on the science first, knowing what it might mean for his own professional advancement? Or direct more attention and resources to the actual gorilla deaths and the violence his team had narrowly escaped on the ground?
He pulled thin white Tyvek coveralls over his clothes and topped the outfit off with a mask and gloves. Now that he’d gotten the preliminary lab results, they really couldn’t mess around with any more human exposures, cute as this little orphan was.
“You look exhausted,” Marna said. The genuine concern in her voice filled Cole with a quiet warmth. “Are you really going to keep working in that lab all night?”
“Probably. I’ve gone through one whole set of real-time cycles but I want to repeat everything before I sound any false alarms.”
“So does that mean you found something?” Marna carefully handed him the still sleeping gorilla and switched her headlamp back on.
“Yeah, it looks like a definite match for monkeypox. I’ve gotten clear positive reactions for the two most commonly used genes on my PCR assays.”
“Slow down, you lost me there.”
“Sorry, polymerase chain reaction. It’s kind of the bread and butter of molecular diagnostics right now—basically lets me look through those tissue samples from the dead gorillas for a specific sequence of a virus or bacteria’s DNA—and allows for much quicker answers than we could otherwise get in a place like this.”
“So how do you know you can really trust the answers this fancy machine is spitting out?”
“Good question, and sometimes we don’t,” he said. “But in this case I’m pretty confident. The genetic sequences of both the viral proteins I targeted are supposed to be one hundred percent specific to monkeypox, which helps rule out the possibility of any of the virus’s nasty cousins.”
“Like smallpox, you mean? I can’t help but think about those awful pictures in my parents’ old
National Geographic
magazines. The lumps and bumps completely covering those poor little kids’ bodies look a lot like these ones.”
“Yes, that would be a surprise. But fortunately not one our generation has to worry about. Even though it could infect other animals in lab experiments, smallpox only lived naturally in the human population. That’s what made its eradication possible to begin with.”
Marna slowly moved her headlamp’s beam across the little gorilla’s skeletal arms. “I could only hear bits and pieces of your conversation with Dr. Musamba on our trip back this morning. You said monkeypox is actually a rodent virus?”
“Yep. It was first discovered in lab monkeys back in the ‘50s, so that’s where it got the name.”
Cole parted the baby gorilla’s thick hair and gently ran a finger over the diffuse spotted rash. It was already worse than when they found him earlier in the day. The gorilla was awake now and moved around in his hands with surprising strength.
“Since then,” he continued, “people like me tromping around in central Africa found out that in reality the virus spends most of its time hanging out in a few species of squirrels. Every few years it makes these crazy jumps into humans and other primates, but we haven’t really figured out why that happens or how we can predict and prevent it.”
Although Cole’s hands were still moving across his patient’s little body, his eyes had unconsciously moved several inches higher to rest momentarily on the appealing curves of Marna’s scrub top.
She lifted her head with a smile. “Ah, I get it. Predict like PREDICT, the program you’re funded by, right?”
Didn’t look like she had noticed his straying eyes, Cole saw with embarrassed relief. Why did he always find himself in these awkward situations? Late nights with attractive colleagues were recipes for disaster. Fun disaster, sure, but not what he was really looking for right now.
“Exactly. My doctoral research here is part of USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats program, and PREDICT is a branch of that whole initiative. Basically, the U.S. government has given a nice pot of money to a bunch of groups like the Gorilla Doctors so they can study the emergence of new infectious diseases in geographic hot spots around the world. It just happens that many of these diseases jump out of high-risk wildlife like some of the ones we’ve been working with here.”
Was she really so interested in research funding mechanisms? Her eyes hadn’t left his own through that whole long-winded explanation. Or was she actually onto him and just wanted to see how long he would hold her gaze? Well, he wasn’t going to be the one to look away.
A noise at the door interrupted his plotting.
“Oh, you’re both here now?” Innocence’s resonant voice broke the hushed silence of the moment. “How is this little baby of ours?” He finished adjusting his mask as he crossed the room.
“Seems to be pretty stable. Still eating well and just the slightest fever,” Cole said. “But unfortunately my tests confirmed our suspicions of monkeypox, so you’re going to need to put on some coveralls before you take over.”
“Cole, my friend.” The exasperation was clear in this native Congolese’s accented voice. “You know I have lived in these forests and worked with these animals my whole life without any Tyvek to protect me.”
Cole smiled. The park ranger had a point. But he was the doctor and protector of the public health here, much as he hated bossing people around.
“Innocence, you
are
my friend and that is why I don’t want any more responsibility for getting you sick.”
Marna turned to look at him quizzically. “Any
more
responsibility?”
Cole contorted his face in exaggerated embarrassment. “I may have burst one of these lesions right in Innocence’s face back on Mount Mikeno this morning. He was very generous to forgive me, but I just hope he’s not incubating the virus even now because of my clumsiness.”
“I am fine,” Innocence said.
He took one final look at his adopted charge now struggling to gain a higher perch on Cole’s shoulder and turned back toward the door.
“And you are right, I accepted your apology. So please, say nothing more about it.”
Tiny white flowers liberally adorned the unassuming green vines climbing along the plastered walls outside the building. Marna had always loved the strong dark scent of jasmine. She took a deep breath, filling her mouth and lungs with the cool night air.
“Can’t you just taste it?” she asked Cole in a hushed whisper. They stood at the window looking in on Innocence’s preparations for a night with the orphaned gorilla.
“What, the flowers?”
“Yeah, take a mouthful of air and hold it a few seconds. Think of it like wine-tasting. Swirl it around. Now, do you taste it?”
She watched Cole deliberately follow her instructions. He was doing it again, holding her eyes in that grip of focused attention. From any other guy, she would have known, no question, the desire of possession behind that intense look. With Cole, though, she was confused. He’d let three months go by without moving on from these occasional intimate stares. They’d even gotten tipsy together a few times, but nothing. Just a casual goodnight, and then back the next morning to the friendly banter of daily life and work.
Cole released the air and smiled. “That’s nice, you’re right. I’ve never thought about tasting scents like that.”
He turned back to the window and Marna stepped in beside him. Not quite on purpose, she let her bare elbow brush and then rest again Cole’s forearm. He didn’t move. It was silly, especially with everything else going on, but there was something intensely comforting about this simple human contact.
They stood there, watching as the Virguna park ranger finished piling old blankets in a far corner of the room. The constant refrain of low hums and grunts came drifting through the screen to them—yet another way he put his tiny charge at ease. She might need to get some lessons on this mysterious mountain gorilla language if she was going to stay on as a foster parent. Innocence knelt down and then stretched out in the nest of blankets, cuddling the infant in one arm while resting his scarred cheek on the other. She kept meaning to ask Cole about the scar. All she knew was that it happened at the same time he and Proper’s parents were killed. How could a child who had witnessed such horror mature into the kind and gentle man she now watched soothing this sick baby gorilla to sleep?