CHAPTER 16
In the Forests It’s Good to Be a Pygmy
I’ve had the privilege of traveling with Pygmies in the African rainforest on several different occasions. From my first encounter I felt a bond that went beyond mere respect for the preternatural skills they displayed in the forest. Almost invariably Pygmies have proven to be good company, possessed of an easy sense of humor, and completely devoid of the passive-aggressiveness that all too often characterizes encounters between locals and expatriates in sub-Saharan Africa. When I was in the Ivory Coast, hostility toward whites bubbled just beneath the surface, and in both Francophone and English-speaking Africa, undercurrents of tension and resentment tended to make official and social encounters forced and exhausting—probably for both sides. With Pygmies, however, racial politics never intruded on any encounter.
Mike Fay, the explorer-botanist, has probably spent more time with Pygmies in their element than any other American during the past several years, and he, too, has noticed the absence of resentment. Fay’s opinion is that the Pygmies’ confidence in their forest skills makes it easy for them to approach expatriates on their own terms. Pygmies admire the white people’s ability to navigate the modern economy, Fay once told me, and their attitude is, “You whites are good at certain things that we aren’t good at, and we Pygmies are good at certain things that you aren’t good at.”
The key to their confidence lies in an important qualifying phrase—“in their element.” Their element is the rainforest. Pygmies encountered outside of the rainforest all too often come across as pathetic displaced people displaying all the pathologies of the dislocated, including heavy drinking and the breakdown of family and social structures. In the forest, however, these same people thrive. Fay has seen this many times, and I’ve witnessed it as well.
The intractable problem facing Pygmies is that all the things they excel at take place in a setting that is vanishing by the minute. Pygmy culture endows its people with extraordinary knowledge about the workings of the forest and the habits of its creatures, but those who have acquired these skills from their elders have fewer and fewer places to deploy them.
My first experience with Ba’Aka Pygmies was on my initial forays from Bayanga in the Central African Republic. With Andrea Turkalo and Nick Nichols, I went into the forests around the town with a Ba’Aka Pygmy named Teti and some of his confreres. Andrea relied upon the Pygmies in her research on trying to determine what forest fruits, berries and nuts the gorillas ate, and how their diet overlapped with that of human hunter-gatherers. Pygmies have to be familiar with these foods as a source of nutrition, and they need to know how to recognize seeds embedded in scat in order to know what animals have been passing by and what they have been eating. When we came upon a pile of dung near a tree, Teti casually remarked, “Leopard.” When I asked when it had been there, he replied, “Last night.”
Although Andrea had by then studied 1,100 samples of gorilla dung, her specialized point of view had its drawbacks. On a trail, when we came upon a seed, she would recognize it only when Teti mentioned its name. “I’m more used to seeing these seeds coming out than going in,” she remarked.
Another, more impressive display of Pygmy knowledge came just a few days later. On another of my trips out of Bayanga I went to visit Bai Hoku, a clearing near where gorilla researcher Melissa Remus had set up a research station, again accompanied by Andrea, Nick and Andrea’s Pygmy assistants. Before setting off, Bakombe, one of the Pygmies, spied an assortment of seeds that the researchers had collected and arrayed on top of a stump. He instantly started to identify the trees from which each seed had come and what creatures had eaten it. The assortment was supposed to be limited to fruits consumed by gorillas, but Bakombe picked up one and, speaking Lingala, said that only people ate it. Andrea confirmed that Bakombe was right, and the seed should not have been included.
During our exploratory hikes we got a taste of how the Pygmies used their knowledge of gorillas’ eating habits. Teti pulled some mosabe berries off a branch by the trail to see if they were ripe. If they were, gorillas were more likely to be in the area. Off the trail we came upon the fruit of taebor montannu; one of our trackers picked it up, identified it as gorilla food and gave us its Pygmy name, mogaminza.
While the average Pygmy’s knowledge of the forest dwarfs that of all but the most erudite tropical biologists, and while they respect the forest for its bounty, few have any sense that the rainforest can be depleted or have any particular passion for protecting it. As we hiked we passed a five-foot-thick tree that other Pygmies had cut down to get at a honey-filled hive in its upper branches—about as wasteful a use of the forest as one could imagine. Pygmies don’t see themselves as having the capability of killing off the forest, and at least the Pygmies I met had not yet realized that others might have that power. Throughout the Congo logging opens the forest to poachers, who quickly kill off game, but even though the Pygmies depend on hunting, those I spoke with did not make the connection of the inverse relationship between their livelihood and logging. One, when asked whether logging ruined the forest, shrugged and replied in effect, “We’re just working for the white man.” Another, thinking of the cash that loggers bring, quipped, “We eat money very well.”
Make no mistake, though—none of the Pygmies I encountered showed any interest in seeking out opportunities to get regular jobs, settle down and raise the kids in the suburbs. The men loved money, but used it mostly for drink. What’s remarkable is that while a number of Pygmy villagers have been in contact with Bantu villagers and expatriates for generations, periodically earning wages working as poachers, guides and porters, almost without exception the typical trappings associated with development haven’t crossed the boundary between Bantu and Pygmy encampments. To be sure, the Pygmies have been persistently cheated and taken advantage of, but meager compensation does not explain the almost complete absence of modern material goods in the Pygmy villages I visited. Drink does, however, since it can consume a great deal of money and leave no trace except for the ruination of the families involved.
Mike Fay argued back then that, in a perverse way, the exploitation of the Pygmies and their binge drinking actually helped maintain at least part of Pygmy culture, since the only way they could get money was to use their native skills in the forest. Mike noted that they had lived in proximity to Bantu agricultural villages for over a thousand years, and that in all likelihood, the villagers had been exploiting them throughout that time. There had to be some benefit to the Pygmies to continue that relationship, since otherwise they could have easily vanished into the forest. Mike suspected that the lure of the villagers was that they offered access to manioc, bananas, taro and other foods. Since access to such carbohydrates was the biggest problem for Pygmies in the forest, they were locked into a devil’s bargain that required that they stay relatively close to Bantu villages.
Perhaps one reason Pygmies don’t seem interested in the trappings of modern material culture is that they are so good at making things on the spot. On our hike, one of the Pygmies picked up a nut from the ground, split it with a machete, and quickly fashioned a pick that he used to get out the meat. Whenever it started to rain, the Pygmies would almost instantly construct a domelike shelter out of broad leaves, supple branches and vines. Long before Pfizer began marketing Viagra, Pygmies with flagging sex drives were using konssou, a fruit that they described as a “male hospital.” They find the fruit in the forest and trade it with villagers, who sell it to Arabs for a good deal of money.
As we continued our hike, we passed a trophy-sized bongo just off the trail. In other parts of Africa orthodontists from Texas would pay upward of $15,000 to shoot a specimen like this. Teti, who dealt with such white men, asked if we wanted to shoot it. When we demurred, he then offered to get any nearby gorillas to charge us by imitating the call of the females.
Pygmies tend to have strong stomachs. On one of our hikes we passed the rotting carcass of a dead elephant. The smell of decay was overpowering, and a sea of maggots rippled on the exposed innards of the long-dead animal. It takes a long time for a creature as big as an elephant to rot, and I was told of instances where Pygmies had come upon week-old elephant carcasses and then crawled into the infested body cavity and cut through the rotting meat to get to flesh that had not yet begun to spoil. We hastened past the dead animal before any of the Pygmies with us got the idea to do that.
While my journey to the bais of the CAR gave me a taste of Pygmy knowledge of the forest, I was to have an immersion experience nine months later when I joined up with Mike Fay for a trip into the Ndoki. As I noted in Chapter 7, my initial reaction upon hearing about this pristine forest was to resist the urge to visit it, and leave it in obscurity for its own sake. Subsequent to my visit to Bayanga, however, Mike contacted me and informed me that logging concessions were encroaching on the area, and that if something wasn’t done to let the world know what was at stake and arouse public support, concessions would surely be granted in the Ndoki itself.
It did not take me long to set aside my misgivings. If the Ndoki needed to be introduced to the world, I wanted to be the one to do it. Time saw the potential of a first-person account of a visit to this extraordinary place, and I arranged to meet up with Mike Fay in Ouesso in June 1992.
The Ndoki lies in the extreme northwest corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Entering overland from the north would require a long trip through wilderness with little access to water. (On its three other sides, vast swamps protect it.) The easiest entry point involved trekking in from Bomassa, a Pygmy village on the Sangha River. In 1992 there were two ways of getting to Bomassa. The easiest was to travel downriver from Bayanga, but that involved either a cumbersome search by untrustworthy border officials when crossing into Congo from the CAR or an undocumented border crossing. The other way was to fly on one of Congo’s rickety jets up from Brazzaville to Ouesso, and then take a motorized canoe up the Sangha to the staging point. I took the latter route.
Ouesso’s airport served as a mute emblem of the economic schizophrenia of Africa’s resource-based economy. Landing, I noticed at least two half-completed terminal buildings. As it was explained to me, one requirement of the logging concessions was that the companies were obliged to contribute to a public-private partnership to upgrade the airport facilities. They discharged this commitment by building their section of the terminal on at least two separate occasions. Both times, however, the government reneged on its part of the bargain, leaving the city with a series of Potemkin-like facades for a terminal.
Ouesso itself was a dump, a growth of unplanned sprawl encircling what was once a colonial enclave set up to administer the area. Joining me on this trip was Karen Lotz, later the editor of The Parrot’s Lament. The role she assumed for this trip was photographer. Although she had no prior experience, she’s a quicksilver-fast study, and Time ended up using a number of her photographs. On arrival we connected with Mike Fay, and after a night at the run-down but once gracious villa rented by the Wildlife Conservation Society, we took a motorized canoe for the nine-hour ride upriver.
On the way we passed Kabo, the center of operations for Nouvelle Bois Sangha, the logging company whose concession extended over much of the territory south of Bomassa. Mike said that the area on either side of the river was largely devoid of game. Hunters and poachers had been using the logging roads cut by the company as a way of gaining access to the forest. He also told us that there were hundreds of shotguns in the area, and that typically, the Bantu owner of a shotgun would hire a Pygmy, who would then go into the forest and hunt for him.
For Mike the pernicious ecology of logging was that it greatly extended the poacher’s ability to enter the forest. He had done a study that showed that all game tends to be shot within a day’s walk of the nearest road. The many roads built by loggers extend like capillaries into the forest, opening it to hunters, and, in many places, to follow-on colonists who then cut the secondary growth and establish farms. In this sense logging was a crucial first step in the process by which a great forest was destroyed.
Mike was casual in the extreme about his expeditions, and consequently we had gotten a late start out of Ouesso. This meant that we had to pick our way upriver by flashlight for the last several miles of the trip. Because we couldn’t see the sandbars, we ran aground several times. This was not to be the last time we would find ourselves traveling by flashlight.
Bomassa lies about 25 kilometers south and west of the Ndoki River, across which lies the enchanted forest that time forgot. In Bomassa a small, spare set of cabins had already been built in anticipation of ecotourists who might someday visit carefully monitored parts of the forest. Mike Fay and others believed it would be necessary to open a small section of the Ndoki to carefully controlled numbers of tourists in order to help the local economy, whose support would be necessary if a larger, inviolate part of the area was to be preserved. Mike was well aware of the curse of ribbon development, and the last thing he wanted was for Bomassa to become a magnet for migrants. So he and his colleagues took pains to bring in workers on temporary contracts rather than enlarge the settlement.
After we settled into the camp for the night, Mike sent out word to the surrounding Pygmy villages that he was looking to hire trackers and porters. The next morning a group of Pygmies showed up, and if we had been hiring on the basis of first impressions, we would have sent the whole lot packing. Most were dressed in ragged clothes. More to the point, they were all drunk. Since it was morning, I had to assume that their response to the news that work had arrived had been to launch an all-night celebration.
Mike showed not the slightest concern, however, and hired two trackers he’d worked with before, Ndokanda and Joachime, on the spot. He also selected as cook a Bantu named Seraphim, whom he had also used before and who had proved to be reliable and good-natured. Mike then laid out all of our food and camping gear so that he could estimate how many porters we needed to hire. His method was to examine the goods and say, “That’s half a Pygmy; that’s three-quarters,” and so on. Most of us would have counted the backpacks and used that as a base, but I was to learn that there was a purpose to this method.
Instead of putting on a backpack and adjusting the straps, for instance, the Pygmies would pick up a pack and then tie it to other packages, the whole of which would be exquisitely balanced. By using this method, they could carry staggering amounts of weight, especially given their diminutive size. The BaNgombe and BaNbengele Pygmies are taller (just under five feet) than most other Pygmies, but still tiny compared to us. The only one who carried just one backpack was the unfortunate given the job of carrying a single 132-pound backpack. During this repacking, we discovered another casualty of Mike’s que sera, sera attitude toward jungle treks: We’d left our recently purchased supply of eggs (which last long and efficiently supply nutrients), chocolate and batteries back in Ouesso. We could get by without the food, but the batteries turned out to be an important oversight.
On Sunday morning at 7:30 Mike sent the Pygmies off toward the Ndoki. Ndokanda had gone with Mike into the Ndoki a few years earlier and knew the way to the first camp on this side of the river. It was 15 miles to the crossing point of the Ndoki River, and a good deal of the trek consisted of making one’s way through swampy quicksand. With an early start, Mike entertained hopes that we could make it to the crossing point in one day, rather than stopping at a former research site called Djeke. Our hopes were dashed, however, when we set off an hour later and found our men drinking in a Pygmy village just a few hundred meters up the trail from Bomassa. Mike had to threaten to hire new porters to roust the crew, and then made a theatrical show of storming off, with Karen and me following.
By one o’clock we made it to Djeke camp, which had been established by Masazumi Mitani and Suehisa Kuroda in 1987. These legendary Japanese field researchers had been the first to explore the Ndoki, and just those few years earlier it had taken several days to get from Bomassa to the river crossing. Since then the researchers had cut a rudimentary trail and also driven posts into the quicksand so that it was possible to pick your way through the swamps by feeling for the sticks with your toes and thus get to the river’s edge without sinking to your thighs with every step.
Two hours later the Pygmies finally showed up. Mike figured that they had purposely stalled so that it would be impossible to get to our destination by nightfall. We had a pleasant dinner of soup, salami and cookies, and as Karen and I settled in to sleep in the tent at about 8:00, I began to wonder whether Kuroda, who had described traveling in the Ndoki as “very, very difficult,” had intentionally overstated the hardships.
Just as I was drifting off to sleep, I felt something on my hand. I flicked it off, only to feel something else crawl on me. Whatever it was that I had flicked didn’t like it, and decided to bite me. I woke Karen, who thought I must be having a nightmare, but a second later I heard a strangled cry from her. Suddenly bugs began dropping on us from every direction. I scrambled to find the flashlight, and when I finally got it on, the light revealed that our tent was filled with ants—by now to a depth of several inches. By slapping at them, it seems, we have released some signal for the other ants to attack, and suddenly we were being bitten by hundreds of them at once. We raced out of the tent, stumbling over roots and a massive column of ants, tearing off our ant-infested clothes as we frantically looked for the river—my reasoning being that we could hold our breaths longer than the ants could. As we ran, more ants dropped on us from the trees.
We finally found the stream and, not really caring what might be in it, jumped in, keeping only our noses above water. This did the trick. Eventually we emerged and, shaking out our clothes, got dressed and tried to rouse Mike. He sleepily appeared at the front of his tent and, the soul of sympathy, noted that driver ants could kill a tethered goat. He went back to sleep, but the Pygmies, who had by now also awakened, were clearly amused by the entertaining spectacle of our frantic dash. The ants unaccountably didn’t seem to be interested in them.
I got hold of two simple hammocks we’d brought along and set them up in the nearby forest, away from the ants’ path. In doing so I drove a spiky vine clear through my thumb, releasing a gusher of blood to entice God knows what other predators that might be hanging around. Then it started to rain. When the weather cleared, I heard a leopard cough. So much for our first day.
The next morning we begin crossing the swamps that guard the Ndoki. At one point I missed a post and sank in the muck to my chest before I managed to grab a root. As we moved through the swamps we began to approach the maze of oxbows and secondary channels of the Ndoki River.
The river itself is unnavigable. Channels become swamps become dead ends; fallen trees and branches are everywhere. Kuroda and Mitani had found a relatively narrow spot where they could cross the deepest part of the water in a small pirogue. We headed there and spent the next couple of hours ferrying ourselves and our bags across.
It was while out on the river that I finally realized how close to paradise our hike had brought us. The day was bright and dry, and soft breezes carried fragrant pollens. The water was absolutely pure. The only sounds were the rustlings of animals and insects. Mike had described the crossing into the Ndoki as a trip back to the Pleistocene, a time before humanity began reshaping the planet to its short-term needs. He was right, and it was the best feeling in the world.
When I first wrote about the Ndoki, my reporting that people had not been in the area had been greeted with widespread skepticism. Indeed, one of my Time colleagues insisted that Pygmies had taken him through the region some years earlier. When I brought this up with Mike Fay, he said that the man must have been confused about where he’d been, because the Pygmies were terrified of the place, and there was no evidence that they had ever ventured in before Kuroda entered the forest in 1987.
The neighboring Pygmies had no songs or stories about the region, and if they had actually ever been in the Ndoki, Mike argued, that would not be the case. The night before we crossed, Mike said the Pygmies had been talking about going into the area inhabited by Mokeli Mbembe—a monster of Pygmy lore that lives in the open areas. Mike suspected that the creature was actually a black rhino, an animal that Pygmies would not otherwise have encountered in the forest. (Years later Richard Carroll of the World Wildlife Fund confirmed this when he showed a rhino footprint to a group of Pygmies, who identified it as the track of Mokeli Mbembe.)
The physical barriers of the Ndoki also created a practical impediment for the Pygmies. Killing animals there would have been the easiest hunting any Pygmy had ever done, but getting the carcasses out would have been all but impossible. The river could not be crossed without a pirogue, and even if the resourceful Pygmies could have solved that problem, carrying the meat across miles of swamp would have presented a formidable challenge. The combination of superstition, physical barriers, and the availability of ample game outside the Ndoki protected the place for at least several hundred years.
The most dramatic evidence of the absence of humans, however, was the behavior of the local animals themselves. Once we crossed the river and began hiking toward Mbeli Bai, where we were to spend the night, we began to encounter animals, glorious numbers of them. When we came across a troop of red colobus monkeys they jumped a bit upon seeing us, but made no effort to flee. The same thing happened when we saw gray-cheeked mangabeys. Our first gorilla bellowed and did a false charge, but then, instead of moving off, he simply stopped and stared at us. All of these creatures would have fled immediately had we encountered them just 20 miles away. Their lack of fear was a poignant indication that they knew nothing about humans.
One of my concerns about this expedition had been that, even though my trip had been motivated by a genuine desire to help save this forest, I might inadvertently contribute to its destruction. The most obvious way this might happen would be by demystifying the region for the Pygmies. As game disappeared from the surrounding forest, the temptation of healthy, well-fed animals that took no fright at the presence of hunters might prove irresistible for them, Mokeli Mbembe or not.
So far, with one exception, that hasn’t been the case. The one exception is somewhat surprising, because the man who brought a group of Pygmies into the Ndoki on a hunting expedition was not a local bush meat entrepreneur or trophy hunter, but Louis Sarno, a supposedly enlightened expatriate and the great champion of Pygmy culture. Apparently, at one point when game was scarce, Sarno went with a group into the Ndoki from the north (the one place where it is not girded by swamps). When the depredations were discovered, however, Sarno was chastened and has not taken Pygmies into the forest since.
In years prior to our expedition, Mike Fay himself had thought it acceptable to hunt in the Ndoki for scientific purposes. His argument was that it was not possible to carry enough food for an extended expedition through the forest and that the trivial amount of game that would be hunted would have no impact on the ecosystem. Mike is a passionate guy, and he was scornful of the naïveté of bleeding hearts who were absolutist about hunting.
When he shared his thoughts on the subject, my reaction was that he might be right in practical terms, but wrong in all other ways. Here was an opportunity to see animals as though humans were not on the planet. Why change that by showing them that we were killers? Surviving animals, at least the smarter ones, would quickly learn to run away from humans when they were hunted, which would mean that subsequent researchers would not have the advantage of studying naïve creatures.
More to the point, I argued that it would make it even more difficult to convince the Pygmies that hunting in the Ndoki was improper if they saw that it was permissible when they accompanied white researchers. And, although I did not say this to Mike, I simply felt that it was just wrong to introduce hunting into one of the only places on earth where animals were safe from guns, traps and poisons. I guess that made me a bleeding heart.
By the time I went into the forest with Mike, however, he, too, had decided that the Ndoki should be kept safe from hunting, even if done by researchers for the most noble reasons. I don’t know who convinced him, but it wasn’t me.
During this first day in the Ndoki, Karen and I had a vivid demonstration of the difference between Pygmies and all other peoples in the forest. We were hiking in a couple of different groups, and, for a time, Karen and I separated from the main group accompanied by our one porter, who was Bantu. He billed himself as a tracker and had spent a good deal of time in the forest, since he was married to a Pygmy woman and lived in a Pygmy village. We were not unduly concerned about being separated, because at that point we were generally following the river. Within fifteen minutes of parting company from the Pygmies, however, we were lost, and it was quite clear that our tracker was guessing where we should go. Eventually, one of the other Pygmies tracked us down and showed us the way. When I asked him how he knew where he was going, he pointed out a broken leaf along the trail. Amid this ocean of green, it was like picking out a particular grain of sand on a beach.
After we set up camp for the night, the Pygmies became somewhat withdrawn. Mike sat down to talk with them after dinner to see what was wrong and discovered that they didn’t want to go any farther. I almost laughed, since I had never expected to be living out the cliché of every B movie about exploration—“At one point the porters refused to go on!” It turned out that they were afraid of this forest not only because of Mokeli Mbembe. The word ndoki means “sorcerer” in Lingala, and the Pygmies, peerless masters of the forest, were reluctant to find out whether their fears were justified. With the help of Ndokanda, who had accompanied him on a trip into the Ndoki some years earlier, Mike was able to convince the rest that their fears were unwarranted. I had mixed feelings about this victory. Without the Pygmies it would have been exceedingly difficult to continue, but if they overcame their fear, the forest’s security would rest on human vigilance alone—a far more porous defense than religious terror.
Ndokanda had an interesting history. He was born across the Sangha River in Cameroon, and by turns had worked for a coffee plantation, for a logging concession and as an elephant poacher before Mike Fay hired him to help stop poaching. As we hiked it was Ndokanda who led the way. When I asked him how Ndokanda knew where to go, Mike replied, “He’s probably following our tracks from 1990” (two years earlier). Little did he know then how true that statement was.
The next day we set off into what Mike jokingly called “the unknown.” The Pygmies now became reluctant to take the lead. Given the loads they were carrying, it was an entirely reasonable position, since taking the lead also meant hacking a path with a machete. It promised to be an arduous hike, since we would have to leave the broad elephant trails and bushwhack through dense brush. Our goal—and Mike’s ostensible reason for this expedition—was to find a clearing that he and Ndokanda had come across during an expedition two years earlier. Poring over satellite maps, Mike picked a path that would take us through uncharted forest. I’d brought along some good cigars, and I offered Ndokanda one if he was willing to cut the trail.
“You bet!” he said in Lingala, but after just forty minutes of work, he sat down. Mike, getting impatient, made a show of taking the machete, in part to goad the Pygmies. As we headed off he remarked, “The one thing Pygmies can’t stand is for a white guy to lead in the forest.”
We made our way on a zigzag path, trying to head south and east. Wherever we could we took advantage of elephant trails, which tended to hew to a north-south/east-west grid. Unfortunately, we did not find many east-west trails and Mike finally said, “We’ve got to head east!” and began hacking through the tree-falls and brush with a vengeance. At some points we were literally tunneling through the underbrush. By 3:30 I was parched beyond all measure. It was unclear whether we would find any water by nightfall, and we were facing the prospect of spending the night dangerously dehydrated. The Pygmies were nowhere to be seen.
As our thirst approached the unbearable, I heard Mike say, “Aha!” He’d spotted a thick vine, and after he hacked off a section at just the right spot, pure water began spurting into his mouth. I grabbed his machete and sliced at the plant called Sissus danclydgia, but managed to taste only a few remaining drops.
Here’s what happened next (taken from
The Parrot’s Lament):
As the sun sinks and it appears that we will spend a dry and desperate night, we finally hit sandy soil—a good sign. Soon we find elephant footprints filled with water. It looks pure, and I drink greedily. Fay’s hand is so tired from hours of hacking with the machete that he cannot open the water bottle I have just filled.
Just before dark, Ndokanda comes motoring by us. Not bothering to stop, he yells at Fay in Sangho, his Pygmy language, “You fool, I know this place. Right ahead there is plenty of water.” Ndokanda is right, of course, and we are left openmouthed, wondering what enabled him to recall this tiny part of a vast forest from a brief foray with Fay years earlier.
The astonishment was, in fact, mutual, as the Pygmies could scarcely believe that white guys could even come close to finding this place. Later, Ndokanda, impressed by Mike’s orienteering, offered a condescending and paternalistic compliment: “You are coming along pretty good.”
That night I gave the Pygmies one of my precious trove of cigars. Sharing the communal wealth, they passed it around. Despite Mike’s warnings that it was not something to be inhaled, each took a deep draw, causing the ash to increase visibly as the cigar passed from man to man. They must have had lungs of leather, since none of them so much as coughed, although one of the group remarked with approval, “That’s strong!”
Five minutes later, when they had extracted the last toke (from a cigar that should have lasted forty minutes), Mike asked them whether it would be a good idea to build a road through the forest. He did this for my benefit, to make a point. They became visibly excited at this question, and I could see the scales falling from their eyes as though they’d finally figured out why we were really in the forest.
Samori, one of the most accomplished trackers, was the first to speak up. “Yes, build a road,” he said. “It will mean lots of money.” Rising to this potential opportunity, he went on, “We’ll build it for you. We’ll set up camp at Mbeli Bai [right in the middle of the park]; we’ll bring our women, and we’ll work until 2 p.m.” (Apparently this was considered a reasonable workday in Pygmy culture.)
As Ndokanda launched into a long explanation of where he would put the road, another tracker, Joachime, jumped in: “Make it straight,” he said, “not that zigzag path you took today.”
Samori then piped up, still pursuing his original line of thought. “If you pay us well,” he said with the subtly double-edged words of a true negotiator, “the work will go well.” Having spent many hours trying to convince the Pygmies of the evils that follow roads, Mike gave me a long-suffering look.
The conversation then turned to elephants. “Good or bad?” we asked the Pygmies. Ndokanda, the former elephant poacher, answered unequivocally. “Good,” he said. “This is their village, their real city.” He was exactly right. Their grid of paths connected various feeding spots, plazas for socializing, and even health facilities. They used the mud baths, for instance, to get minerals, but also to remove ticks.
When I asked them which was the smartest animal, Somari was the quickest with an answer: “Chimps,” he said, echoing what I had earlier heard from Bakombe in the Central African Republic, “because they can kill gorillas.” He said they fought all the time. Ndokanda was skeptical, noting that he had never seen such a thing, but Somari insisted that he had witnessed a chimp smashing a gorilla with a stick. Ndokanda arched an eyebrow and, according to Mike, asked in Sangho, “Oh, really?”
For what happened in the days following, let me again quote from
The Parrot’s Lament: After a couple of days exploring the area, we set off deeper into the forest. Trips with Fay are a bit like a treasure hunt—if you consider the half-eaten remains of a fruit discarded by a gorilla to be treasure. Fay enthusiastically sampled these fruits, and I tried the juicy kernels of a Myrianthus arboreus. This may have been the moment I picked up a mysterious gastrointestinal disorder that took a couple of years of consultations with tropical medicine experts and rainforest healers to cure. Or perhaps I got the bug from the partially eaten Treculia africanus, a fruit eaten by Pygmies, gorillas and chimps, and which, I discovered, tastes a little like peanut.
During these walks we would occasionally stop and ask the Pygmies to call duikers. They do this by holding the bridge of their nose and making a loud braying sound in imitation of the sounds made by these small deer-like animals when giving birth. Other duikers come running when they hear the sound, which makes hunting easy for the Pygmies. Hunting, however, is not our purpose. Among the other creatures attracted by the braying sound are chimpanzees that see this as an opportunity to do some hunting of their own and catch a duiker at a vulnerable moment.
Stopping intermittently to make the calls we attracted several unusual animals, including the rare yellow-backed duiker, an animal whose dull golden patch on its back supposedly gave rise to the myth of the Golden Fleece. Then, pausing for a rest, we hit pay dirt. Fay, Karen Lotz and I were ahead of the rest of the group of Pygmies along with Ndokanda. Ndokanda hunkered down and made the call. This time a group of large animals came crashing toward us, and for a moment I felt the shiver of being hunted.
That feeling vanished as soon as a very large band of chimpanzees appeared from the brush and saw us. They stopped dead in their tracks. Bloodlust gave way to astonishment. It was quite clear that they were seeing something they had never seen before. They began stamping their feet, shaking their arms, calling to one another and, occasionally, throwing branches at us. Little ones ventured bravely toward us, only to be pulled back by their protective moms. In the branches above us, a very old chimp with completely white hair gazed down on us slack-jawed with amazement. I wonder whether the other chimps would later turn to him for an explanation of these otherworldly visitors.
As many as 25 animals screamed at us from all sides as we maintained a studied, casual stance, minimizing jerky movements. Each time we made a move, a new round of calls erupted among the chimps, but they never showed signs of fleeing, and they never attacked. Wild chimps do not react this way to humans in any other part of the African rain forest. For more than two hours, the mesmerized chimps hovered around us, drawing to within a few arm lengths.
Later Mike Fay called this the signal wildlife experience of his fourteen years in Africa. (I’m sure his subsequent adventures eclipsed this moment.) For me it was the experience of a lifetime. For the chimps surrounding us, seeing humans amounted to an ape version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The ruckus they raised began with threats and distress calls, but some of them seemed to let out the hoots that chimps use to greet one another. I would like to think that at least some of these chimps were welcoming us apelike aliens into their forest.
With every encounter I became further convinced that this forest, empty of humans, is not devoid of intelligence of various sorts. There is the accumulated knowledge of the elephant civilization that gives this forest its distinctive flavor. There are the chimp bands whose members scheme and forge alliances for their own advancement, who make and use tools to get food, and who cooperate with one another when hunting or in conflict with other bands. There are the gorilla families dominated by silverbacks, who must be alert to treachery in their harems and plotting by ambitious young males. There is some measure of awareness in the leopards, who must learn a host of different skills in stalking and killing in their never-ending search for prey.
At some point during these forays I picked up one of the innumerable diseases lurking in the rainforest. It felt as though every bone in my body was broken. Most likely it was dengue fever, though Mike said that it might be any number of what he called “deadly tick diseases.” Over the years Mike has come down with so many illnesses that he’s rather blasé about anything that doesn’t immediately do you in. Since we were more than 30 miles from even the most rudimentary medical help, and since we had no idea whether this disease was going to get better or worse, we decided to try to hike out rather than wait here.
The first day we got back to Mbeli Bai, which was the starting point of our venture into “the unknown.” I stumbled along, somehow keeping up. The next morning, June 1, we set out at 7:30, once again a little later than we’d planned. Along the 10-kilometer path that led to the Japanese research camp, we came across five different groups of gorillas. In all we encountered fifteen groups of gorillas during the course of our hikes, as well as buffalo, several species of duikers, forest pigs, chimps, many different monkeys and innumerable birds, not to mention pests like ticks, ants and foot worms (which burrow into you and wriggle their way around until they figure out that you are not an elephant, whereupon they die and rot, leaving behind a nasty infection), as well as the nameless microbe that inflicted misery on me.
We stopped at the Japanese camp, where the lone researcher, Aobe, kindly offered us honeycomb, and then continued our long march. At 1:00 we made it to the edge of the Ndoki River and poled across. By 2:00 we emerged from the swamp, and by 3:40 we were at the camp by the Djeke River where Karen and I had earlier been attacked by ants. Only Seraphim and Joachime kept up with us. Every breath was killing me because of the heart attack/pulled muscle/dengue fever/deadly tick disease, but I didn’t dare ask to slow down, because I wanted to get to Bomassa that night.
After a brief stop at the camp, we raced out at 4:15, trying to extract every bit of daylight. Since we had left the batteries behind, we made do with a succession of failing flashlights once the light began to fade at 6:15. By 7:15 we’d groped our way to Wali. During the last few hundred yards of our trek, our only source of light was one of those pencil lights you use to read maps, and finally that failed, too. By this point, though, Mike knew the trail by heart, and we made it to Bomassa in another forty minutes. As we arrived in camp, Mike noted that these nighttime returns (apparently he had had many) were sure to inflame suspicions that he was an ivory trafficker. We’d covered over 30 kilometers that day.
I recovered fairly quickly, but never did get a definitive diagnosis of what it was I had had (and I brought other ailments back with me from the forest as well). It certainly had the symptoms of dengue fever. Or perhaps it fell into the category of Mike Fay’s “deadly tick diseases.” In any event, this sickness was a very small price to pay for a glimpse of Eden.