I threw myself into work. The whole project was gathering such pace that all of us struggled to keep up with the daily demands. I shuttled between the guesthouse, the warehouse, the cas de passage and the économat delivering supplies and keeping track of stocks. In between, I dropped in wherever Win was working, in case he needed me to interpret or translate. But he rarely did: his French had progressed quickly. He knew no formal grammar, but his men had taught him the vocabulary he needed for building. One word at a time, he learned the names of tools, types of timber and building tasks. As construction was underway at several sites, he drove between them in the Kombi.
A special friendship had developed between Win and his head carpenter. Mehendje Bruno was quietly spoken, thoughtful and gifted. I often observed the instinctive rapport they had with each other – the language barrier barely mattered, as they seemed to know each other’s thoughts.
The combinée had streamlined construction work dramatically. It could handle planing, spindle-moulding, and trimming rough timber to required thicknesses. The two smaller machines Win had ordered at the same time – a circular saw for breaking down the bulky 400 © 400 millimetre timber baulks from the sawmills, and a drop saw mounted on a bench for cutting sections of timber to required lengths – enabled the prefabrication of frames for all the new buildings.
Win thrived on the challenge of planning the entire building program, designing all the buildings, including the electrical, plumbing and septic systems, and supervising construction. Determined to avoid accidents, he trained the men in the safe use of the machines, and enjoyed the growing relationship with his team. It was the most demanding role of his life and called on all his skill and experience. And there was enough work to keep him going for a year, so when Doug offered us both a further six-month contract starting in the new year, we didn’t think twice.
Our first issue of the National Geographic magazine arrived in November – the October 1975 issue. We had eagerly awaited its arrival, as we received no newspapers and had few books with us. I tore off the wrapping to find the image of Biruté Galdikas on the cover, walking in the forest of Borneo with a baby orangutan clinging to her left shoulder and an older juvenile on the ground, reaching up to take her hand. She was my age, and we even looked a bit alike, with long brown hair. She was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved sweater, just like I wore on the coldest days.
I sat down and read the entire article on the spot. Some photographs showed baby orangutans playing, like Josie had. Others showed Biruté in dugout canoes on remote tropical rivers. Galdikas had become the third of Louis Leakey’s ‘ape ladies’, dedicated to the study of great apes in the wild. Jane Goodall had been the first, and Dian Fossey had followed soon after. The National Geographic was helping to fund their research. I could barely tear myself away from the article. Biruté was forging a career working in an equatorial forest with great apes. If Josie had not come into our lives, the article would not have resonated with me so strongly. But as I stared long and hard at the photograph of this woman with the two young orangutans, I imagined the wonder and joy of working with great apes every day and earning a living at the same time. I saw it as a noble calling that required immense personal sacrifice, but that would be rewarding beyond anything else I could imagine.
I put the magazine aside and went about my daily tasks, but I couldn’t put thoughts of it out of my mind. I had no academic background that would fit me for such a career and no idea of how I might go about pursuing it, but the seed had been planted. Could I aspire to working with gorillas, and combine my love and reverence for them with an academic career? It seemed like an impossible dream. I was a secretary and I was thirty years old. The chances seemed remote.
Eamon had an endless repertoire of stories. If he wrote them all down, I thought, he could publish a bestseller. Every chance I had, I encouraged him to tell them. They were always larger-than-life tales, and mostly revolved around animals and the way the Gabonese relied on them for food.
One night the conversation turned to elephants, and Eamon remembered one of his stories. ‘I had a Pygmy come to my door one night. Pygmies are great elephant hunters, y’know. They don’t even use a gun. They set a row of sharpened sticks on the track where they know the elephants go. Then when the elephant comes along and treads on the pointed sticks, it injures its foot and goes lame. After that, the Pygmies just come in underneath and stab it in the belly with their long-handled spears. Ever seen one? They’re about six feet long, iron-headed, and boy oh boy, I wouldn’t like to be in their way. Anyhow, this Pygmy came to my door one night. He knew we were having a little trouble feeding our workers, so he said, “Patron, I’ve just killed an elephant. Would you like to buy it?” So I said, “Well now, that depends. Do you have it with you?”’ Eamon’s eyes twinkled as he remembered. He always used humour when dealing with the local people. I’d seen it often, and they loved him for it. I tried to picture the scene – the tall laconic American and the tiny Pygmy – and how the Pygmy would have laughed till he almost cried.
‘Come on,’ I urged. ‘Tell us another one about elephants.’ I had always been drawn to elephants and I longed to see one in the forest, but they were elusive, and I doubted I would ever get my wish.
‘Well, I think you’ll enjoy this one. I was camped out in the forest working with a group of local men and their families. One day we got word that this elephant had been killed down by the river. We were running a bit short of food at the time, so I thought it’d be a good idea to let them have it, so I organised a truck to take them down there. You’ve no idea how these people love to eat elephant – you’ve never seen anything like it. While we were driving down there, they were all singing and calling out, everybody was so excited. When we got there, I just stood back and let them go. I’ve never seen such a sight. As soon as we stopped, they all leapt out and ran at the thing like it was the last meal they were ever going to get. Men and women alike, it didn’t matter. Well, they attacked that thing as if they were mad. Everybody had their own machete and there were arms and legs and knives flying everywhere. When they got through the skin, they just swarmed inside the carcass and started chopping and hacking. They seemed to be in some kind of frenzy and I was sure someone was going to get killed. Anyhow, it all ended peacefully, and everybody got back in the truck with their meat and went home for a big feast. If it happens again, you’ll see.’
I didn’t say so, but people hacking at an elephant carcass with machetes was a sight I never wanted to witness. ‘Are there many about now?’ I asked instead. I had often heard talk of the piles of elephant droppings out on the tracks.
‘Oh, they’re about. Not a lot of them, but they’re certainly around. I saw one the other day when we were cutting an access road to one of the drill sites, and I’ve often seen its tracks in that area.’
Jacques had told me that the elephants in Gabon were pygmy elephants. They had evolved to be much smaller than the elephants of the savannas so they could travel more easily through the forest. Their tusks had a pinkish tinge. I knew that they also moved through low-lying areas close to the river, as people at Mayebut had told Rodo their plantations near Camp Six had been ripped up and trampled.
Eamon strode into the guesthouse one afternoon and presented me with four wiry black hairs about five centimetres long.
‘There,’ he said, ‘if you ever get close to an elephant, you’ll be able to get these too!’ His whimsical smile played around his mouth. ‘I didn’t pluck them out myself, mind you. They were clinging to the bark of a tree where the elephant had been scratching itself.’
I ran my fingers along the fibrous strands and smelt them, trying to picture the elephant scratching. ‘They’re beautiful,’ I said. ‘I’ll treasure them. Thank you.’ I carried them carefully back to the flat and stuck them into my diary.
Though elephants remained elusive, we never knew from one moment to the next what wildlife we would see, what rare animal might be brought in, dead or alive. With the return of the wet season, game animals had moved back to the forest around camp, promising more fresh meat for the workers and their families. The men spent much of their spare time out hunting and trapping. They often shot duiker – the small antelopes that were plentiful – and the monkeys that provided easy pickings as they moved along open branches.
One day, Étienne pulled up at the guesthouse on his bicycle, with bloodstains all down his shirt and a smile that split his face. I’d never seen him look so proud. I raced outside to see what he’d taken.
He had a carcass trussed up on the carrier, and I watched as he untied it and laid it out on the ground. It had the head of a leopard and a sleek feline body, and was large enough to bring down a small antelope. I’d never seen an animal like this before. It was smaller than a leopard but bigger than a civet, and its coat was a dusky cream with muted spots.
‘Lui, il est trop méchant!’ he told me – it was vicious and dangerous.
‘C’est quoi, Étienne?’
‘C’est un chat-tigre, madame!’ A tiger cat. He’d caught it in a wire snare – the wound showed clearly on its right front leg. I thought how beautiful it was, and how sad that it had become prey because, according to Étienne, tiger cats were quite rare. But I pretended to be enthusiastic so as not to spoil Étienne’s moment of triumph. For him, it was a prestigious kill, and would provide abundant meat for his large family.
‘I want to take your photo with it,’ I said. He looked embarrassed, but called Bernard from the kitchen to help him hold it up.
‘Thank you for showing me,’ I said, as I snapped the picture. I realised he had brought it up to show us because he knew we would be interested. He strapped the carcass back on the bicycle and rode down to the village with his rifle slung across his back.
When I consulted our wildlife atlas, I found no mention of tiger cats in the equatorial forests of Africa. The atlas depicted a much smaller animal, the African golden cat, but its body shape and size were quite different from that of the animal we had seen. Positive identification of Étienne’s tiger cat would remain a mystery that I hoped one day to solve (though I never have).
November also brought our first experience of a traditional Gabonese celebration.
‘We’ve been invited to a coming-out-of-mourning party down at Mayebut tonight,’ Rodo announced one day. ‘Moagno Bernard’s son is giving it. When someone dies, there’s a mourning period of three to twelve months. After that, they hold a party.’ Moagno Bernard was one of Rodo’s workers.
‘Terrific!’ I said. ‘That sounds like fun.’
Win, Rodo and I left after dinner, armed with folding chairs, pullovers, torches, cameras and insect repellent. It was the first time in months we had driven in the forest at night. Clumps of black cloud scudded across a bright moon, driven before a strong wind. A storm was gathering in the distance: rolls of thunder ricocheted over the forest, and the wind tossed the leaves by the roadside.
Win drove slowly, alert for any wildlife ahead. In the glare of the headlights, pairs of large red eyes stared at us from the undergrowth, but their bodies were invisible.
‘They’re probably bushbabies,’ Win said. When we stopped level with them and shone the torch, they panicked and scrambled up the nearest tree trunk to the safety of the canopy. Bushbabies were small, brown, furry tree-climbers with huge forward-facing eyes. They were classified as archaic prosimians, an ancient life form which preceded the evolution of monkeys.
A few kilometres from Mayebut, another pair of eyes appeared in the tall grass by the road, hanging in the darkness like two amber orbs. As Win braked hard, a large sleek leopard moved into view and stopped just metres away. In all probability it had smelt us through the open window. It stood quite still, sniffing the air. Unlike the one that had visited our annexe, this leopard was in prime condition, its powerful, muscular body lithe and relaxed. It remained still for less than a minute, then ambled across the road, paused to look back at us, moved into the thick vegetation and disappeared.
This was what I loved most about being in the forest – you never knew what you would see each time you went out. But I wondered about the implications of the leopard’s presence for the people of Mayebut. In the forest, human settlements always attracted animals in search of food – elephants trampled vegetable gardens, gorillas raided banana plantations, leopards hunted for meat. Humans and animals competed for survival.
At Mayebut, the huts loomed as dark shapes in the clearing, faintly outlined in the moonlight. The giant triangular leaves of taro plants growing beside the huts shone like silver. A dog barked petulantly in the background, and the muffled sound of voices issued from one of the huts. Nearby, a group of old men sat huddled around a dingy hurricane lamp on the ground, their grave faces outlined in its glow.
There was no sign of a party. We climbed out and picked our way over ditches and around mud puddles until we found Moagno Bernard.
‘What’s happening, Moagno?’ Rodo asked. ‘Has the party been postponed?’
‘Non, patron. We’re waiting for the women to return with the tom-toms.’
Half an hour later, the first group of women emerged from the forest, carrying a metre-high wooden drum slung between them. It had been carved from a tree trunk into a tapered shape; antelope skin covered the top and trailed raggedly around the edge. A series of timber wedges, held in place with liana, allowed the drummer to adjust the tension.
The second and third drums arrived soon after – one a smaller version of the first, the other a slit drum made from a thick section of tree trunk and played with two sticks.
A crowd had just begun to assemble in the open when lightning cracked and flashed overhead and rain began to pound on the rusty tin roofs. Everyone rushed for the shelter of an open-sided pavilion in the middle of the clearing and huddled together inside it, with children laughing and squealing, dogs barking and babies crying as the rain grew heavier.
I breathed in the sweetness of the wet earth and watched the flashes of lightning illuminate the forest, feeling the people’s excitement and anticipation all around me. In that moment I felt utterly at home, and I contemplated for the first time the magnitude of the change in me since we had come to Belinga. Some time in the past five months, the person I had previously been had disappeared and someone else had taken her place. Layers of my new identity were being added each day. I was being remade.
After the storm we moved outside again. People arranged themselves around three sides of a square facing inwards, and the musicians took up their position on the fourth side. Two other musicians joined the three drummers – a woman with rattles made from old gas canisters filled with pebbles, and a man with a length of iron pipe and a heavy wooden baton. A woman swept the dancing ground with a leaf broom and placed a lighted hurricane lamp in the centre.
I jumped, startled, as the band suddenly erupted into life. The two tom-toms throbbed in complex cross-rhythms, the stone rattles swished, and the iron pipe clanged. Underneath them, the slit drum boomed out deep visceral sounds that I could feel as well as hear – they reverberated through my abdomen.
A woman moved to the middle of the square and began shuffling slowly in a circle, throwing invocations to the crowd, who responded in a throaty chorus of guttural sounds. Then the other women rose to join her. They formed a circle, moving one behind the other, shuffling in a pattern of three steps and a pause. At the same time, they sang what sounded like a chant. Some had babies strapped to their backs. Abruptly – as if in mid-phrase – the music and dance ceased. As a singer myself, I couldn’t work out how everyone knew the precise moment to stop.
The music began again with a more insistent rhythm. Several women emerged from a hut brandishing white monkey-tail fly-switches, and joined the others to form a new circle, facing inwards. They all bowed from the waist, then one at a time moved to the centre, twirling their fly-switches in the air and pivoting on the spot. Without warning, one of them singled me out, urging me to join in. I leapt up and joined the moving circle, shuffling sideways, waving my arms in the air and shouting. Then it was my turn to do a solo. Someone thrust a fly-switch into my hand and thirty female voices cried out, ‘Allez, Madamo!’ (Madamo was a more familiar form of address indicating they felt comfortable with me.)
My love of dancing took over. I moved to the centre and whirled in a tight circle, brandishing the switch over my head in time to the clapping and singing. Win and Rodo looked on grinning. I had whirled back to the circle and handed on the switch, completely transported by the rhythms, when the music abruptly ceased on the offbeat, leaving me flailing my arms and legs while everyone else dissolved in laughter, cheering. I felt my cheeks burning with embarrassment, but the women were gracious. One by one they came over, shook my hand, and said ‘Merci, madame!’
The celebration continued long into the night. While the women danced, the men looked on. Rivulets of sweat streamed down the drummers’ bodies. Their eyes were tightly closed, and I had the impression they would not have heard if anyone had spoken to them. Mary Kingsley would have heard sounds like this a century ago, I thought.
We took leave of our hosts around 2 am and drove back up the mountain with the vibrations of the slit drum still resonating in our ears. I wondered what my family would think if they could have seen me dancing by the light of the hurricane lamp in this tiny village, deep in the African wilderness. Could they understand anything of my life now? I doubted it.