I am fairly hardened when it comes to the suffering of animals. Other more euphemistic terms might be used—I am pragmatic, or unsentimental, or internalizing. But I am hardened, I do not feel as much as I once did. When I was a kid, up through college, all I wanted to do was live alone in the bush with wild animals and study their behavior. Intellectually, nothing was as satisfying, as pure, as the study of their behavior in and of itself, nothing seemed as sacred as to just be with animals for their own sake, and the notion of animals being pained was intolerable. But my interests shifted, behavior for its own sake somehow began to seem insufficient. “Isn’t this behavior miraculous?” became “Isn’t this miraculous, how does it work?” and I became interested in behavior and the brain, and soon I was interested in the brain itself, and soon how its functioning fails. And by the end of the unstable years in the troop, my laboratory work had shifted exclusively to the study of diseases of the brain. Nine months each year I would spend in my lab, doing my experiments, and the suffering that the animals would endure there was appalling. They’d undergo strokes, or repeated epileptic seizures, or other neurodegenerative disorders. This is all to find out how a brain cell dies, and what can be done to prevent it—all to do something for the couple of million people each year who sustain brain damage from stroke or seizure or Alzheimer’s disease. My father was nearly half a century older than I. Once he was an artist, an architect, a dean of a school of architecture, a passionately complex, subtle, difficult man. But he sustained one of those neurodegenerative disorders, and there were times that he could not identify family members, or tell where he was, or experience any of the pleasures of living that require an active, pulsating, inquisitive mind. And when I would sit in the laboratory, there were times where I’d think that there was nothing on earth that I would hesitate to do to learn how a neuron dies and how to bring my father back.
I tried to compensate for my work, but probably not enough. I remained a vegetarian when in America. I would work hard to cut every corner I could in my research, to minimize the numbers of animals, the amount of pain. But there was still dripping, searing amounts of it for them. My first day as a student when I was taught to do brain surgery on a rat, I threw up. Now, I was reaching the stage, as a postdoc, of beginning to train students, sending them off to begin the same process. I’d be horrified when my intuitions about the next step in my research would turn out to be wrong and a hundred animals would have paid for that dead end. I’d have dreams where I was Dr. Mengele—I’d wear a fresh new lab coat, and welcome the animals to their “hotel,” the euphemistic nature of the word being discernible by them despite my Germanic accent. But unlike some Nazis, I was not just following orders, I was often giving them and was my own agent; but I was at war with the infarcts and ischemic cell changes and pan necrosis in my father’s brain, and there was little I would not do to avenge his melting. And I was feeling less and less for the animals.
Thus, each year, I was having more of a need to return to the baboons. Among the dozens of other reasons to be there, it was good to be in a place where I was not cutting up the animals, where I was not killing them. It was good to be in a place where they didn’t live in cages. In a perverse way, it was good to be in a place where they were more likely to kill me than the other way around. As an additional pleasure, I might even indirectly do them some good with my research—find out something about how some sort of environmental stressor disrupts their fertility, makes them more prone to an infectious disease. Small potatoes, but at least some pluses for a change.
One of the baboons died during a darting once. I will not tell who it was or how it happened—that story will wait for the final chapter. He died, and he was one of the ones I really cared about. Should one feel guilty about caring more for some baboons than others? Is one allowed to wish it had been a different animal? He died. Of all things, in my arms, while anesthetized, while in trouble. I tried to revive him. I did CPR, I shoved an endotracheal tube down his throat. I pounded his chest and infused an insane amount of epinephrine into him. And still he wouldn’t breathe. He had actually made a death rattle, and each time I flung myself on his chest, he made a bit of a gargly sound again, and each time it triggered hope and shivers. Finally, I had pummeled and pushed and pounded and cursed until I was exhausted. I would have guessed that trying not to lose someone would be emotionally exhausting; I had no idea that it could be such a physical battle.
He was lying on his back when I gave up. I was sweating and hyperventilating, and I lay down on my back, with my head on his stomach, as if I were a child again with my father. I thought that if he had ticks, they would be all over me soon, but I did not move. I thought that I should dissect him, add his skull to my collection, but I did not move. Instead, I held his stiffening hand, and I must have slept a bit. I awoke to find a group of Masai mamas from one of the other villages, on their way to collect firewood, staring in frightened fascination. They pointed at my face and pantomimed tears on my cheeks. In Swahili, I said, “He is dead,” and that seemed to do nothing to decrease their wonder or fear. It did not seem to explain anything to them, and they ran off.
In my sleep, I had decided. I carried him to a spot under a favorite tree, and dug a hole for him there. I would not leave him for the hyenas. The Masai do that with their dead. And with their dying. For a while, teaching American school kids that such things happened in certain cultures, and might even make a certain sense, would guarantee that abuse would be heaped upon you by some Southern senator, branding you as a cultural relativist or a secular humanist. It does make sense for some cultures, but it is still sad and creepy. Laurence of the Hyenas discovered a dead Masai child, perhaps two years old, abandoned near the hyenas once. She was wrapped in an old cloak, and her head was resting on a drinking gourd. In case she became thirsty in the afterlife? More likely because it was feared that the gourd had become contaminated with whatever illness she had.
I would not leave him for the hyenas, and dug instead. It was punishing work that left me with great respect for grave diggers and grave robbers. I thought the labor would cleanse me, but it just exhausted me. I would stop and rest on him some more, caress his head. The Masai women returned with their firewood and stood awestruck at the sight of me digging a grave for a baboon. They began to approach closer, but I shouted and gesticulated like some madman, and they fled.
The hole was done. I cradled him and placed him in. I arranged a circle of olives and figs, his main foods, around him, and thought, This is not because I believe in an afterlife, this is to confuse any paleontologists who dig him up. Then I sang Russian folksongs from my youth and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, and covered him with dirt and covered the mound with acacia thorns to deter the hyenas, and I went and slept in my tent until the next day.
So that was how my first baboon died in my hands. In the coming months, because of the problem whose story I am not yet ready to tell, I returned to that tree again and again to bury more. But that was the first time. When the coming disaster swept over me, it reminded me viscerally of what I already knew, why, despite my childhood desire to be a primatologist and live in the field, I had retreated from that and spent only a quarter of my time out there. It was just too hard and too depressing. I had my hands quite full enough already trying not very successfully to keep individual brain cells from dying. It was too much to try just as unsuccessfully to save whole species and ecosystems. Every primatologist I know is losing that battle, whether their animals are being done in by habitat destruction or conflict with farmers or poaching or novel human disease or shit-brained government officials bent on harassment and maliciousness. The full-time primatologists I know always remind me of stories I read of Ishi, the last member of a particular Indian tribe, a person whose mother tongue was a dead language. Or they make me think of someone whose unlikely job would be to collect snowflakes, to rush into a warm room and observe the unique pattern under a microscope before it melts and is never seen again. Always a losing battle, and all very sad, and quite a bit too much for me, thank you.
So it was at the end of the unstable years, just after Nathanial had abdicated his alphaness, that I went to where the snowflakes are the rarest and nearest to melting, that I visited Fossey’s gorillas and Fossey’s grave.
Oh, what new can I say about Dian Fossey? She’s been enshrined in the movies, featured in books; there will no doubt be posthumous Dim Fossey exercise videos. She was clearly the stuff of legend. She was a large, imposing, awkward woman who looked not one bit like Sigourney Weaver. By chance, the mother of a member of my lab went to high school with Fossey. The mother related that she was already dimcult, withdrawn, marked. The lab member once brought in the yearbook. At age seventeen, Fossey had the hunted, ostracized, unhappy look of the high school weirdo destined to become either a reclusive field biologist or a serial murderer. At a relatively late age, she fell in love with the idea of Africa and of the mountain gorilla—the largest and last-discovered of any of the apes, studied in the field only once, cloaked in legend and misconception. Without any formal training, she decided to go to Africa and live with them. She encountered Louis Leakey, the famed paleontologist and sponsor of female primatologists, convinced him to send her to the Mountains of the Moon to study gorillas for a short stretch, and stayed on for decades. She immersed herself utterly in the gorillas, broke all the objective rules about not touching them, not interacting with them, and managed to observe astounding things about their behavior. In the process, she became more reclusive, more difficult, drove away possible collaborators and colleagues, isolated herself. She did little science of note beyond observing amazing things by sheer dint of her persistence, was openly contemptuous of most scientists doing fieldwork, and clearly wanted little more than to be a gorilla herself.
I met her once, as an undergrad at Harvard, in the mid-1970s. My scientific interests had not yet shifted from gorillas to baboons, and gorillas still resonated emotionally with me in an extraordinary way; during the intermittent periods of depression that plagued me, I was dreaming more about gorillas than about humans. Thus, it was not surprising that Fossey was one of the humans I most admired. On my wall, I kept a poem that Adrienne Rich had written about her. I thought I would swoon with pleasure at meeting her.
Fossey was at the university against her will. Despite her contempt for science and rejection of how most primatologists went about their work, she still knew more about gorillas than anyone, and other primatologists were interested. Her funding sources basically had to force her to act like a proper citizen of the scientific community—to finally finish her thesis, publish some of her information in scholarly journals, give a lecture or two. She was in Cambridge on one of those forced excursions, resentful and sullen. It was an evening seminar in the living room of the senior primatology professor, and it was jammed. Quickly, one had the sickened, guilt voyeuristic sense of watching a bear forced to perform in some medieval circus. She sat with her knees drawn up to her chest and then suddenly burst out, pacing back and forth in front of the room, bent so that her hands hung near her knees. She mostly talked to herself, in a monotone, and nearly yelled at people when they asked questions. Once, she did yell. One professor had his young kid sitting on his lap, the kid making occasional four-year-old sounds, and suddenly Fossey stopped, pointed, and said, “Child, shut thy mouth or I will shut it for you.” She rambled about her gorillas, showed that she was unaware of and disinterested in most of the questions that dominated the field, and was a bit incoherent.
I was mesmerized and more than a little bit horrified. Afterward, I went up to her and asked the question I had been preparing since I was ten—could I go to Rwanda as her research assistant and devote my life to the gorillas? She scowled at me and said yes, told me to write to her. She was allowed to escape shortly after that, I returned to my dorm in a transcendent euphoria and sent her that letter by midnight. Which she never answered. I later learned that this was her standard way of dealing with the acolytes and petitioners who would engulf her when forced into the public; say yes to anything, tell them to write, never answer.
Thus, my sole meeting with Fossey. Soon after that, her difficulties and difficultness began their attraction that was to finish her. In the rain forests of Rwanda, since time immemorial, were Batwa tribesmen, hunter-gatherers who lived by catching forest bucks with snares. Inevitably, a gorilla would step on a snare now and then and be trapped. Gangrene, death. The best evidence indicates that these first deaths were accidental. Fossey freaked. She began to fight the tribesmen, destroying their snares, their source of food. And they began to fight back. Things escalated, and soon they were killing her gorillas intentionally, dumping their decapitated bodies on the paths to her cabin, high up in the volcanoes, while she, in turn, kidnapped those tribesmen’s children.
Ultimately, some of those killers were poachers of the worst sort, killing gorillas to sell as souvenirs, but some were just tribesmen living as they had always done. Some of the gorilla killings were savage and intentional, but some were accidents. Undeniably, a more stable, rational person would have dealt with the situation in a less inflammatory way, but a more stable, rational one would never have been there to witness what was happening.
Fossey, in a turnaround, became extroverted. She ran around the world lecturing about the killings of her animals and demanding help. Her gorillas were about to be finished, the last of them—the mountain gorilla is one of the rarest, most endangered of beasts on earth, and her population of a few hundred was one of the last. She opened the field site to students, collaborators—so long as they would fight the gorilla killers. Before long, there was a split in the conservation community. Some said, Yes, let’s pour money in there, but not to her. She is too inflammatory, too provocative, as long as she is there, there will be revenge killings. Get her out of there, and pour money into the dirt-poor Rwandan game park service to get some rangers up there, armed, to make the place a real wildlife preserve. And the other half said, Give her money, give her guns, if there are going to be any gorillas surviving, it will be because of her, who else cares? The former group prevailed. Money poured into the Digit Fund, named for her most beloved animal, whose butchered body was left for her to find. A real, functioning, protective park service was established, enough interest was generated to start gorilla-watching tourism that has continued to fund the park and the local economy. The gorillas started to do better, perhaps increasing in numbers. And Fossey was sent away. Some sort of visiting adjunct professorship was rigged up for her at Cornell, where, by most reports, she sank into depression and alcoholism.
The final chapter was set. Against everyone’s pleading, she returned to Rwanda and her gorillas. She fought with the poachers and the tribesmen, fought with the rangers who led the tourists that she loathed, fought with the agricultural tribesmen whose slash-and-burning was decimating the remnants of the rain forest, fought with the government. Her health was destroyed by drinking and chain-smoking and emphysema, trying to live in humid, high-altitude conditions. She could barely walk, had to be carried up to her cabin. Where she was murdered one night. The government lamely and unconvincingly blamed an American grad student and condemned him to death in absentia after making sure he had left the country, and everyone felt sure it was poachers or government rangers. The funeral service was held near her cabin, a week after Christmas, and was conducted by a missionary who said, “Last week the world did honor to a long-ago event that changed its history—the coming of the Lord to earth. We see at our feet here a parable of that magnificent condescension—Dian Fossey, born to a home of comfort and privilege that she left by her own choice to live among a race faced with extinction.… And if you think that the distance Christ had to come to take the likeness of Man is not so great as that from man to gorilla, then you don’t know men. Or gorillas. Or God.” And, as per her wish, she was buried in the graveyard of her slain gorillas, next to Digit.
It was six months after her murder that I visited the gorillas. I had tried to hitchhike to Rwanda years before and got nowhere. Now, I had finally passed that maturational stage when you can no longer afford the time to travel great distances by hitching, but cannot yet afford the money for something faster. I flew with two friends into Kigali, the capital, and we headed out toward the gorillas. There was a different feel from Kenya in many ways. For one thing, everyone was speaking French and was named Jean-Dominique and Boniface, which seemed oddly disconcerting to me. Another difference was the brutally dichotomized tribal tension, in contrast to the chaotic and shifting tribal alliances of Kenya. Here, nearly everyone was either of the Hutu or Tutsi tribe, and I could just smell the animosity, which was destined to explode a few years later into a genocide of the latter tribe by the former on a scale that would take the world’s breath away, had anyone cared to notice it. And another key difference was a staggering population density, the highest on earth. Endless hills with endless terraces and endless farms to feed the dirt-poor country, people jammed in, every inch under cultivation, up to the very west, the very last edge of the country. There, forming the border between Zaire to the west and Rwanda and Uganda to the east, are the Ruwenzoris, the famed Mountains of the Moon, which continue here to the south as the Virungas, a ribbon of mammoth volcanoes between Zaire and Rwanda, rising up to more than 15,000 feet, rugged, jutting, one after another after another, snow on top spilling into the Congo, wild rain forest below. And because they are too steep for even the desperate farmers to try to squeeze food out of, on the saddles and slopes survive the last mountain gorillas on earth.
We had the typical hassles with the park officials, who had lost the reservations I had made more than a year before to see the gorillas, but who located them for a price. We splurged and stayed in the only real hotel in Ruhengeri, the town at the entrance to the park. It was a ramshackle old jobbie, dripping with colonial nostalgia. Parquet floors and old prints everywhere of Notre Dame, and a five-course meal with things like asparagus au gratin. We slept fitfully, feeling the volcanoes hovering over us, and were agitatedly ready by dawn.
We hiked up with park rangers, the men who find the gorilla groups each day for the eighteen tourists allowed in to see the three groups on display. The rangers were silent men who moved with smooth, frictionless gestures. Throughout the week I spent there, I noticed this in all the rangers who spent time around the gorillas—the need to glide silently and slowly around them.
We set off through the farm fields, already angled steeply where they weren’t terraced, weaving our way through huts and rows of corn and kids fairly oblivious to us. At the end, a wall of bamboo and a slight forest path through it. In, winding higher up, steep unstable slopes. Bamboo everywhere, moss-covered hagenia trees that have always looked silly to me unless they are shrouded in mist. Higher, onto a saddle of one of the volcanoes, a view of forest ahead of us, a small lake, fields of bushes. Onward, the rangers macheteing a way through fields of stinging nettles. Clouds and mist and chills and heat, somehow all simultaneously. Sweating and shivering. Sliding down a deep ravine, clambering the way back up the other side, more nettles, more bamboo. A few hours had passed and yet the rangers continued their silent, coordinated movement. One would examine some broken bamboo shoots, another would sniff the flattened grass around there. Gorillas, but from yesterday, they concluded.
Another hour. Misty rain, but somehow warmer. More nettles. Something resembling a real path and a flattened clump of grass to the left of it. Large, fibrous, shredded turds in the middle, the type you would expect from a pro football player gone vegetarian. The gorillas. Fresh, last night’s nest.
Pushing ahead, tired and excited and impatient. Down another ravine, and one of the rangers hears a murmur up the other side. We stop, silent, willing to invent the sound to convince ourselves that they are close, and suddenly, we hear the unmistakable murmur, deep, throaty, slow-motion, paternal. We rush/tiptoe up the other side and, on top of the ridge, I see my first wild mountain gorillas.
It was a group of perhaps a dozen. A prime-aged male—a silverback. Some females with infants, a few lurking younger males, some adolescents. The silverback played with the kids. The mothers fed, lumbering about with the infants carried dorsal. The two young males spent most of an hour wrestling, rolling around with each other, mouthing each other in restrained bites. They’d pant as they rolled and tickled each other, get exhausted from the excitement, and have to retreat to their separate corners to catch their breaths. Refreshed, one would pound its chest and they’d launch themselves at each other again. At one point, both ambled over to sit next to me and stare, one leaning in so close that the rangers forced me to lean back. They had a comforting, musty, damp smell to them, like opening a trunk from the mildewed corners of a cellar that contains forgotten beloved objects.
I had a flood of thoughts and feelings. At the first sight, I thought, Now my eyes will well up with tears, but I was too intent on watching for that to happen. I wondered what my social rank would be if I had wound up a mountain gorilla. I was mesmerized by their eyes; their faces seemed less emotionally expressive than those of chimps or even baboons, but their eyes, you wanted to go swimming in. I tried not to make eye contact, not only because it’s bad field technique and discomforts primates, but because the act would make me want to confess to unlikely crimes. I found myself with the barely controllable urge to scream, or to gibber dangerously among them, or to rudely kiss one, so that they would stomp me to death then and there and stop my suspense. I thought, They are far less socially interactive than baboons, they’re kind of boring in fact—thank god I didn’t come to study them, I’d be a fourteenth-year grad student by now. And at the same time, I thought I never wanted to budge from my spot.
That night, sleeping in my tent on the mountain’s slopes, I had a dream that summarized my feelings far better than I could when awake. It was a dream so tender, so ludicrously sentimental, so full of beliefs that I do not have when awake, that I still marvel at it. I dreamt that a certain brand of theology turned out to be true. I dreamt that God and angels and seraphs and devils all existed, in a very literal way, each with potential strengths and frailties much like our own. And I dreamt that the rain forests of the Mountains of the Moon were where god placed the occasional angel born with Down’s syndrome.
My friends left the next day. I stayed another week, going back to the gorillas repeatedly. It was heaven, but with each day, I felt more depressed. The gorillas were wondrous, but the weight of what was gone, removed, unmentioned, unanswered, irrevocable, became heavier. I felt it in the park headquarters, where the posters on the park’s history made more mention of nineteenth-century Belgian colonials than of Fossey. With the rangers, who would say, Yes, we knew Fossey, and then change the subject. With the gorillas, where you would watch a mother hold her child and nibble at bamboo, and all the while hear the farmers, their chickens, the school kids, 200 yards down the slope, where the slash-and-burning had finally stopped. On the miles and miles of empty rain forest paths aching with no more gorillas. And finally, from atop the nearly 15,000-foot Mt. Karisimbi, the highest point in the range, where I climbed to peer down and discover that the massive, endless, magisterial, mythic Virungas were nearly gone, a tiny narrow ribbon of forest engulfed by the infinity of terraces spreading from Rwanda to Uganda. It almost seemed like a domestic conspiracy on the part of the farms—an endless world packed with farmers trying to eke out a living, a world with no room for rain forests or the moon’s mountains, a conspiracy to forget them altogether. It was as if just behind a 7-Eleven store in some innocuous Iowa farm town there was a mist-shrouded 15,000-foot mound on top of which was a book listing the dates of birth and death of every person who will ever live, and no one seemed to notice that the mound was there.
It was on top of that mountain that the week finally got to me and I had a night of African paranoia. You weren’t allowed to hike alone in the range. Instead, a ranger had to be hired as a guide. Hauling to the top of the highest volcano around was clearly not their idea of fun, and the most junior of the rangers was given the task. From previous days of hanging around the rangers, I had noticed him and already had a dislike for him; even the other rangers seemed to ostracize him. He was a sullen, sloe-eyed kid, with a face like a mask and a tense air of violence about him. He mostly sat off on the side of the camp and seemed to get into a lot of monosyllabic arguments when he did interact. I wasn’t crazy about heading off with him, and from what little I could read of him, the feeling was mutual.
As we started hiking, my dislike for my guide began to build. I could elicit nothing more than grunts out of him, as I tried in French, Swahili, English, my twenty words of Kirwanda. I slipped and fell on a wet rock at one point, and he laughed; it had a sneering, dismissive whine to it. Once, he flung stones at grazing forest bucks, probably both to hurt them and to deprive me of the view.
My dislike simmered, and his of me seemed to be doing the same. Somehow, these mutual feelings evolved, wordlessly, into competition, a childish angry race. We began to hike faster, moving more relentlessly, until we were racing up the mountain, seeing who would first ask to rest. We pushed harder and harder, through the rain forest, montane forest, patchy woodland, open moor-land where we sank to our knees in mud, to stark open rock with patches of frost, from 7,000 to 14,000 feet in a few hours. The air got thinner, I felt an edge of altitude sickness, my vision got blurry, my chest throbbed. He climbed these mountains for a living, and I had the heavier pack, but sheer anger let me keep pace with him. “Fatigué?” he would ask in French, and I would gasp, “Non.”Once, he spoke his longest pronouncement: “Je pense tu es fatigué. Tu es mzee [Swahili for an old man]. “I nearly sprinted after him, hoping to kill him. At one triumphant point, I got ahead for a minute, and was able to whisper the same breathless “Fatigu?”to him, while he gasped, “Non.”
There was not even a hint of the mythic camaraderie that enemies are said to feel for each other in a tough battle. He was a stupid, cruel kid who threw rocks at animals in Rwanda’s last rain forest, and I wanted to prove something to him, although I was not sure what.
We reached our goal, a corrugated metal shelter near the rim of the crater, just as an ice storm let loose. We lay in there, gasping, as the storm closed in and pounded on the metal. And there we stayed, from midafternoon until the next morning. We ate a bit, rice and French bread, but everything tends to taste sickening at that altitude. Your eyes throb, your balls throb, your head hurts constantly, your chest aches with each breath, everything is straining. At that altitude, my resting heart rate is usually about 110, which means you wake from presumably relaxing sleep already feeling like you’ve been climbing stairs.
We lay on the wooden floor, as far away from each other as the small shelter would allow. I tried to play recorder, but didn’t have the breath; instead, I mostly thought about gorillas. He muttered to himself and scraped his name, Bonaventre, into the metal with his machete, all the while smoking in our closed hut at 14,000 feet, even after I asked him to stop.
So the hours passed, until sometime around nightfall, as I still lay there with my eyeballs throbbing 110 times a minute, it occurred to me for the first time to become afraid. Not only was Fossey murdered just six months before on this mountain, not only was it probably not the American student who did it, not only was it probably a government person, not only probably a ranger (I had now decided), not only was it probably this kid with the very same machete he was now holding, but tonight was almost certainly my night to get it. This may now sound facetious or exaggerated or farcical or just paranoid, but I was suddenly terribly frightened. I was alone on some volcano in a Central African country where I didn’t know a soul, shut in this hut in the middle of an ice storm with a ranger, and I felt sure now the rangers had killed Fossey. As I reviewed the day, the week, my every word and action now seemed to have sealed my doom, to have convinced the watching rangers that I must be killed.
I was genuinely frightened, near to panic. I desperately wanted to escape. I struggled to control my breathing, thought to cry Out for help. I lay awake most of the night, with my pocketknife opened at my side, and truly thought I was going to die. The ranger, meanwhile, spent the night talking in his sleep—mutterings, and harsh muffled barks.
At dawn, I felt foolish and angry and relieved, and felt I had been lucky this time. We struggled up the ice-coated rocks and were at the summit by 7:00. He sat, looked impatient, and kicked at rocks. I looked out over Rwanda, Uganda, Zaire, and tried to imagine that it was once all rain forest full with gorillas. He clearly wanted us to head down immediately; I could have stayed there forever. He was saved from that fate, as the clouds rolled in, obscuring all view and forcing us down.
If the goal of yesterday’s race was to give the other a heart attack, today’s was to get the other to break his leg. We ran down, silently; leaping down rocks, twisting and changing directions on the wet steep path. He presumably was in a rush to finish this job and return to sitting sullenly at the ranger station. I was in a rush to be away from this mountain and my sleepless night there, to be rid of this murderer.
We ran down the ice-covered rocks. We ran through the near frozen mud fields of the moorland down past the groves of trees and the rain forest and past the bamboo. And as we came to the saddle of the mountain, coming down a different path than we had taken up yesterday, the ranger slowed down. He didn’t seem tired, and I couldn’t imagine he was slowing out of concern for me. He suddenly seemed cautious, even uncomfortable. It was the nearest I could detect to an emotion on his face.
The forest had opened a bit, there were longer views, and a beautiful stream running alongside our path. We were walking slowly now, the ground was level. We crossed the stream on a log. Another minute walking, and the grove of trees near us parted. And then, with no warning, we were standing in front of Fossey’s cabin.
It was plain, small, boarded. A Rwandan flag was flying over it. I walked over toward it, and the ranger motioned me away. I walked closer, and this silent kid told me in French, in Swahili, even in broken but understandable English, that it was not allowed. I walked past the cabin, and for the moment before he forced me away, I stood at the graves of Fossey and the other primates.
Fossey, Fossey, you cranky difficult strong-arming self-destructive misanthrope, mediocre scientist, deceiver of earnest college students, probable cause of more deaths of the gorillas than if you had never set foot in Rwanda, Fossey, you pain-in-the-ass saint, I do not believe in prayers or souls, but I will pray for your soul, I will remember you for all of my days, in gratitude for that moment by the graves when all I felt was the pure, cleansing sadness of returning home and finding nothing but ghosts.