21.

A simple sleeping bag on a cot bed set beneath flapping canvas provided me with possibly the best sleep of my life that night. I didn’t dream, just shut down as if under a spell and awoke ten hours later in daylight. Everyone else was already up, drinking sweetened tea out of tin mugs on benches set around the cooking fire in the clearing beyond our tents. I joined them and Patience handed me a cup. Marcel and Xander were talking together in French, while Amelia listened in. Xander is fluent in about six languages, and Amelia’s general cleverness extends to French too, but I’m shamefully hopeless in anything other than English, so I had no idea what they were talking about. It seemed Xander was telling a joke or funny anecdote, because when he finished the big guide burst out laughing and cuffed him on the shoulder. A second later the penny dropped for Amelia, and she burst out laughing as well. Her laugh is loud and infections: Patience was grinning and I found myself smiling, too. It struck me that whereas the mission Caleb, Innocent and I had undertaken to locate the poachers, survive a night in the forest, escape snares and find our way home had served only to put more prickly distance between my cousin and me, Xander, Amelia, Patience and Marcel had obviously bonded on their return trip through the forest.

Though I’d slept well and felt rested, Innocent appeared tired that morning. His smile was still in place, but it was thinner, more brittle, and his face was tinged grey. After the pickup dropped us at the start point for the trek, he paused us, his singsong voice forced, for ‘gorilla briefing’.

‘What’s there to brief?’ said Caleb. ‘Surely it’s the same as for the chimpanzees.’

‘Yes and no,’ Innocent muttered. He’d had enough of Caleb now for sure. With a sigh he told us that according to the rangers, the troop of gorillas we’d be visiting had spent the night some four hours’ hike away, most of it uphill. The bulk of the walking would be easy enough, on existing paths, but the last stretch would be slow-going. When we found the gorillas we’d have one hour maximum in their presence. We weren’t to approach within thirty feet of them, though they might come closer to us once we’d stopped. It was important that we keep quiet and still and avoid direct eye contact.

‘Why’s that?’ asked Xander.

‘It’s confrontational,’ said Amelia.

‘They’re very peaceful creatures,’ Innocent said. ‘But like any of us they don’t like to be threatened.’

‘Pretty obvious,’ said Caleb. ‘Shall we get on with it?’

As Innocent had predicted, the walking was fine to begin with, but we were all subdued. Xander did his best to lighten the mood by teeing up questions for Amelia to answer (a silverback gorilla weighs about 200 kilograms, stands ***

1.8 metres tall, and has an arm-span of two metres; they construct a new nest of flattened branches and leaves each night as they move around their territory in search of plants to eat and are one of the only primates to sleep on the ground; there are fewer than one thousand mountain gorillas living in the wild, though that’s an improvement on twenty years ago, and so on) but impressive as her mental factsheet was, it couldn’t lift the heavy presence of Caleb. He wasn’t outwardly angry, in fact he barely spoke, but everything about him put the rest of us, except Amelia possibly, on edge.

The fact of him, buzz-cut hair, stupid lime-green boots, brand-new machete and all, up front with his head down, pulsing with discontent, was maddening. Look at where we were and what we were doing: hiking through one of the most stunning landscapes on earth in search of one of the rarest and most impressive animals alive. How could he sour that experience? I forced myself to ignore him and take in the detail of the day.

It was cooler, but no less humid, as we climbed, and the clouds boiled up above us, unleashing lush curtains of rain that turned the path to mud. As we made our way higher into the mountains the glossy greenery of ferns and bamboo and gallium vines pressed in. Among them was something that managed to sting me through my trousers. Not knowing what it was made my heart race. Amelia put me at ease by saying, ‘Ow!’ almost immediately after I’d been stung. When I told her something had also bitten me, she laughed and said, ‘The chances of two spider bites or snake strikes in ten seconds is infinitesimal. So it was a plant. I’ve not read about any deadly stinging vegetation in the jungle. Therefore we’ve probably just brushed against a pumped-up sort of nettle. We can relax.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. It came out more sarcastic than I meant. The truth was that the sting hurt, which made it hard for me not to think of what worse dangers might be lurking just out of sight.