Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine Page A

tourists! I bet they told you they were ex-commandos as well, did they?
    We admitted, rather sheepishly, that they had. Conrad clasped his hand to his brow and shook his head.
    'The only thing about them that's ex-commando,' he said, 'is their uniforms. They buy them off the commandos. The commandos sell them to buy food because they hardly ever get paid. It's all complete nonsense. I heard another great story the other day. A tourist had asked a guide - and this was at Rawindi where there are no gorillas - the tourist asked, "What happens when a gorilla meets a lion?" And instead of answering, "Well, that's a silly question, because lions and gorillas live in completely different areas and would never ever meet," the guide obviously feels obliged to think of some sort of colourful answer. So he says, "What happens is that the gorilla beats the hell out of the lion, then wraps his body in leaves and twigs and then stamps on him." I only heard about it myself because the tourist came to me afterwards and said how fascinated he had been to hear about it. It bothers me when they make up these colourful answers. I wish I could make them understand that if they don't know the answer, or they think the right answer isn't very interesting, it's better to say so rather than just invent absolute nonsense.'
    One thing that was beyond dispute, however, was that when our guides were not inventing stuff or acting out Rambo fantasies, they really knew the forest, and they really knew the gorillas. They had (and Conrad Aveling confirmed all this enthusiastically) themselves 'habituated' two of the gorilla groups for human contact. `Habituating' is a very long, complicated and delicate business, but, briefly, it is the process of contacting a group in the wild, and visiting them every day, if you can find them, over a period of months or even years and training them to accept the presence of human beings, so that they can then be studied and also visited by tourists.
    The length of time it takes to habituate gorillas depends on the dominant silverback. He's the one whose confidence you have to win. In the case of the family group we were visiting it took fully three years. Conrad Aveling spent the first eight months of his time on the project crawling around in the undergrowth with them, but never actually saw them once, though he was often no more than twenty or thirty feet away.
    `One of the problems of habituating in this sort of habitat,' he explained, 'is that it's so thick you can't see each other and what happens is you end up having these sudden confrontations at about three or four metres or less, and you still can't see each other. Everybody's jumping out of their skin. The gorilla's jumping out of his skin, I'm jumping out of mine. It's extremely exciting. You get a real adrenalin rush. A problem with the Bukavu group was that the silverback wouldn't charge. I actually wanted him to, because then, having charged, he would expose himself and then realise that I didn't mean him any harm. But he wouldn't do that, he just kept circling. Usually they do charge, and if they do you have this face-to-face, and you have a moment to understand that neither of you means the other any harm and the gorilla backs off.'
    `But you go into a submissive posture, do you? asked Mark. `You don't confront him??
    'No, I usually don't go into a submissive posture. I'm usually too frightened to move.'
    Once a silverback accepts humans, the rest of the group will quickly fall into line, and, interestingly enough, any other groups in the area will usually become habituated much more quickly. There is hardly ever any trouble provided everybody treats everybody else with respect. The gorillas are perfectly capable of making it clear when they don't wish to be disturbed. There was one occasion on which a gorilla group had had a particularly stressful morning as a result of an encounter with another gorilla group, and the last thing they wanted was to be