forest floor, and called to Anyasi. He pursued it, fired, and then I saw a fine male ‘peacock’ rise with noisy wingbeats and escape.”) With Lee Lyon, Deschryver had hoped to film the peacock, but since her death he has lost heart for this project. However, our keen interest seems to reawaken his own; he agrees to join our party in the search. In Deschryver’s opinion the best place to start is the region of the mine camp at Obaye. He will fly us there early on Friday and stay over until Sunday or Monday, when I must return with him to Bukavu and go to Rome. Meanwhile, we shall visit Kahuzi-Biega and spend two days—we hope—with the gorillas.
Kahuzi-Biega is in the mountains twenty miles above Bukavu, and at seven in the morning a taxi was found with enough fuel to take us up there, though not back; the driver planned to coast down all the way. Before departing, he stopped to borrow the spare tire that is shared by Bukavu’s old taxi fleet, and a good thing, too, as he had a flat not fifteen minutes out of town. Since his car had no jack, we found some villagers to help us hoist the taxi into the air while the tire was changed. Afterward we proceeded without incident uphill through the plantations, until the
Hagenia
trees appeared that marked the beginning of the montane forest.
Since arriving in Bukavu three days ago, we have not seen a single tourist and had hoped to have the gorillas to ourselves. But as luck would have it, two carloads of Belgian visitors turn up right behind us at the village of Bashi Bantu people by the park entrance. We have permission to camp here overnight, and the head warden, or
conservateur assistant
, has promised us our own guide for tomorrow, but today only one guide is available, and so all visitors must stay together. These six people who are to be
nos copains de safari
intend to take with them a very large brown-and-yellow plastic ice chest full of lunch. Rather than lug it up the mountain by its handles, the unfortunate African assigned to it steps into the bushes and with his panga cuts some strips of flexible green bark for “bush rope”; with this he rigs himself a tumpline in order to carry the big chest on his back.
Disgruntled, we walk through the Bashi village and follow a path cross-country on the mountain. Though still early, the day is hot and humid. Our little band, following the three small Batwa trackers—
les pisteurs
—pushes through tangles of coarse bracken, elephant grass, cane, and lianas between the tall trees and the overgrown plantations.Since there is little forage in unbroken forest, the gorillas are drawn to the abandoned fields of the Bantu peoples’ shifting cultivation, where the sun encourages a variety of leafy growth, and are often found too close to the villages for their own good. The trackers descend into swampy streams and up again into the forest, investigating the paths made by the apes and the freshness of their droppings; since gorillas are entirely vegetarian and must eat vast amounts by way of fuel, the droppings are abundant, large, and rather greenish, with a mild sweet smell.
In midmorning there comes a sound of cracking limbs from a tree copse on the far side of a gully; the small
pisteurs
are pointing with their pangas. But one of our
gaie bande
, a silver-haired man who looked flushed even before he started, has not kept up; he is back there doubled up over a log, suffering heart flutters, attended not by his own party but by Forbes-Watson. “I thought I had a corpse on my hands,” said Alec later; he was unable to persuade the man to remove the cameras that were dragging down his neck. Meanwhile, I am warning his compatriots about nettles, about the sharp spear points made by panga cuts on saplings, about false steps, mud slides, safari ants—
“Ngaji!”
The first gorilla is a large dark shape high in a tree, a mass of stillness that imagines itself unseen. Then, near the ground, a wild black face leans back into the
Kahuzi-Biega is in the mountains twenty miles above Bukavu, and at seven in the morning a taxi was found with enough fuel to take us up there, though not back; the driver planned to coast down all the way. Before departing, he stopped to borrow the spare tire that is shared by Bukavu’s old taxi fleet, and a good thing, too, as he had a flat not fifteen minutes out of town. Since his car had no jack, we found some villagers to help us hoist the taxi into the air while the tire was changed. Afterward we proceeded without incident uphill through the plantations, until the
Hagenia
trees appeared that marked the beginning of the montane forest.
Since arriving in Bukavu three days ago, we have not seen a single tourist and had hoped to have the gorillas to ourselves. But as luck would have it, two carloads of Belgian visitors turn up right behind us at the village of Bashi Bantu people by the park entrance. We have permission to camp here overnight, and the head warden, or
conservateur assistant
, has promised us our own guide for tomorrow, but today only one guide is available, and so all visitors must stay together. These six people who are to be
nos copains de safari
intend to take with them a very large brown-and-yellow plastic ice chest full of lunch. Rather than lug it up the mountain by its handles, the unfortunate African assigned to it steps into the bushes and with his panga cuts some strips of flexible green bark for “bush rope”; with this he rigs himself a tumpline in order to carry the big chest on his back.
Disgruntled, we walk through the Bashi village and follow a path cross-country on the mountain. Though still early, the day is hot and humid. Our little band, following the three small Batwa trackers—
les pisteurs
—pushes through tangles of coarse bracken, elephant grass, cane, and lianas between the tall trees and the overgrown plantations.Since there is little forage in unbroken forest, the gorillas are drawn to the abandoned fields of the Bantu peoples’ shifting cultivation, where the sun encourages a variety of leafy growth, and are often found too close to the villages for their own good. The trackers descend into swampy streams and up again into the forest, investigating the paths made by the apes and the freshness of their droppings; since gorillas are entirely vegetarian and must eat vast amounts by way of fuel, the droppings are abundant, large, and rather greenish, with a mild sweet smell.
In midmorning there comes a sound of cracking limbs from a tree copse on the far side of a gully; the small
pisteurs
are pointing with their pangas. But one of our
gaie bande
, a silver-haired man who looked flushed even before he started, has not kept up; he is back there doubled up over a log, suffering heart flutters, attended not by his own party but by Forbes-Watson. “I thought I had a corpse on my hands,” said Alec later; he was unable to persuade the man to remove the cameras that were dragging down his neck. Meanwhile, I am warning his compatriots about nettles, about the sharp spear points made by panga cuts on saplings, about false steps, mud slides, safari ants—
“Ngaji!”
The first gorilla is a large dark shape high in a tree, a mass of stillness that imagines itself unseen. Then, near the ground, a wild black face leans back into the
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