The Impenetrable Forest Read online

  White stripes on the blacktop marked our passage over the equator, and we continued south to Masaka, a city destroyed once by the war to oust Amin, and again when Musevini was battling to overthrow the Obote regime. Our road skirted the edge of the ruined town and took us west, farther from Lake Victoria, where green faded quickly from the landscape. We passed through a dry rangeland of scrubby thorn trees and sun-scorched grass. Occasionally a roadside market interrupted the miles of bleak earth and umber dust—tiny wooden stalls piled high with bright red tomatoes, purple onions, bananas, papaya, and pineapple, as if the produce itself had stripped all color from the surrounding fields.

  Twice Liz had to brake hard and swerve to avoid cows on the road, the huge Ankole breed with horns five feet from tip to tip. Skinny herd boys in ragged T-shirts and paper hats shouted and drove the cows away with long switches, still managing to stare in our direction, mouthing “muzungu” as we sped past. We stopped for lunch in Mbarara, a fast-growing city near Musevini’s homeland, and drove on toward the far southwestern tip of the country. Near Kabale the road began climbing into the Kigezi highlands, a rugged terrain of steep, sculptured hillsides ringed with cultivation. Terraced fields contoured to every knoll like wrinkles, as if a stone had dropped on the top of each hill and the hedgerows were tiny waves descending.

  “Roll up your window,” Liz told me. “We need carrots.”

  I smiled and complied as if this made perfect sense.

  Around the next curve, she slowed the car and pulled off at a small market stall. Suddenly, a crowd of shouting men and children surged up from the ditch, running toward us with armloads of fresh produce. They surrounded the vehicle instantly, waving vegetables and pleading with us to buy, buy, buy. The crush forced one man’s face flat against my window, but he still managed to scream, “Free for you,” gesticulating with a large cabbage.

  “Only carrots! Karoti!” we answered, and I inched the window open. Carrots were instantly squeezed through the crack, showering down onto my lap by the dozens.

  “No! Just…want some…hey!” Hands forced the window down another notch, and a sudden torrent of vegetables rained in: cabbages, cauliflower, squash, eggplant, and sweet potatoes, all bouncing off the dashboard and rolling across the floor. Slapping hands away, I managed to close the window, while Liz sorted a few carrots out from the medley. We paid the proper salesman, and the others collected their unpurchased items with looks of sullen betrayal. Then another car pulled in behind us, and they dashed off in a mob, shouting and waving their wares anew. Only one vendor remained by the window, a forlorn-looking boy of seven or eight with two wispy bundles of spinach. “What about…. greens?”

  Impulse shopping. We took a bundle of greens and hit the road.

  In 1993, Kabale was a sleepy town. A civil war in neighboring Rwanda kept the border closed, and trade in the region had dwindled to nothing. Bicycles outnumbered cars fifty to one on the long, tree-shaded main street, and shuttered storefronts harkened back to a more prosperous time. We spent a night there before heading west again for the final, eighty-mile trek to the forest.

  The pavement ended half a mile outside of town, and we bounced onto a rough track of reddish dirt and gravel. The car rattled and shook, slamming over potholes and patches of bare rock like a carnival ride for masochists. After half an hour, it got noticeably worse.

  “They’ve been working on the road,” Liz explained with a shout. “This used to be really bad.”

  I could only nod as we clattered along and the road stretched out before us, a serpentine, red dust ribbon climbing and descending the rugged landscape. Outside the park itself, most native woodlands in the area had long since been cleared for agriculture, but stands of eucalyptus dotted the hillsides, and we passed through the Mufuga Forest Reserve, a large plantation of Caribbean pines.

  “We won’t really see the park until we get to Buhoma,” Liz told me apologetically. “The road circles all the way around the forest, just out of sight.”

  This was not a problem. After months of a lifestyle that combined the Peace Corps bureaucracy with a new understanding of the African sense of time, waiting had become habitual, and a few more hours was child’s play. And once my body adjusted to the road’s constant kidney punches, I began to enjoy the verdant landscapes flashing past the window.

  Cultivation crowded the valley floors, and small farms clung to the most precipitous hillsides—family compounds of thatch and tin-roofed huts surrounded by fields of banana, potatoes, sorghum, and tea, brilliant green with new growth. The turned earth looked black and rich, a product of ancient volcanic activity in the area. The Kigezi, or Rukiga Highlands, were formed by an upsurge of tectonic pressures along the western arm of the Great Rift Valley, where the restless Somali plate is slowly pulling East Africa away from the bulk of the continent. Twenty miles to the south, active volcanoes in the Virunga chain still steam and gutter, spewing occasional eruptions of ash and lava into the surrounding countryside.

  People waved and smiled from the villages and trading centers scattered along the route. With tourism still in its infancy, a car with two muzungus counted as a major spectacle for most rural farmers.

  Two hours into the drive we crested a hilltop and saw the Great Rift itself dropping gradually downward into a wide, hazy expanse of grassy plains and woodlands. Blue hills in the distance framed the western edge of the valley, and to the north the waters of Lake Edward glinted like a band of fine silver.

  “There’s Zaire,”* Liz announced, and I stared across to a country with its own complex history of exploration and colonial folly. Under Belgium, the Congo Basin was ruled as a virtual fiefdom by King Leopold, who dreamed of building an economic power to rival Britain’s East India Company. His notoriously tyrannical Congo Free State was stymied by climate and logistics, a failure that helped cement Africa’s reputation in nineteenth-century Europe as “The Dark Continent,” a sweltering wilderness plagued with fever and death.

  Near Bwindi, the international boundary ran along the top of the rift escarpment, and most of the valley floor lay in Zaire, part of the huge but poorly protected Virunga National Park. From the Great Rift, Zaire extended westward over the distant hills and a thousand miles of rain forest, winding down the muddy Congo River to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Our route took us south now, near the border and up a steep-sided river valley. Cows grazed in the lowlands, a lush pasture sprinkled with shambas and shaded by occasional massive canopy trees, remnants of the shrinking rain forest. Goatherds chased their animals from the roadside, and a group of men pushed bicycles laden with green matoke. We passed tiny villages whose names would soon become familiar, Rugando, Kanyashande, Mukono, and finally Buhoma, a cluster of huts where the road ended in a wall of tree trunks, tangled greens, and timeless shade. The Impenetrable Forest stretched away suddenly before us, towering and still in the midday heat, a serene curtain of emerald that filled the head of the valley and disappeared over the steep-backed hillsides.

  I felt as if I’d stepped momentarily out of my body, replacing cognitive thought with a vapid smile and phrases like “Beautiful,” “Wow,” and “Looks great.” In retrospect, the forest was magnificent, an intricate weaving of trees and vines that defied the eye to focus on any one aspect of the myriad whole. But at the time it was more overwhelming than the crowds at the kabaka’s coronation. Elation and awe vied with the suddenly imminent challenge of actually living there, of struggling to feel at home in a Central African jungle, and finding a sense of place in a community of rural villagers.

  I was grappling with these thoughts when Liz pointed up to a beautiful old church compound tucked into the hillside at the forest edge.

  “There’s your house,” she said simply, and put the car in four-wheel drive to climb the steep driveway. I felt like giving her a high five.

  The Apostles Church of Christ Jesus had transferred its flock to a neighboring village, and Liz used the abandoned church building as a combi
ned residence and field office for the gorilla program. The pastor’s house was mine, a three-room cottage with mud walls and a roof of woven banana fibers. Morning glory twined up the walls and into the damp thatching, framing the doorway in purple flowers. A narrow gorge separated our hill from the rain forest, and clear water ran through its fern-choked depths, filling the air with quiet stream noise. Across the valley, Bwindi descended from the ridge top in vast, looming waves of green.

  We unloaded the car, and Liz introduced me to Ephraim Akampurira, the gorilla program’s houseboy, handyman, and occasional night guard. He would become a steadfast friend and my first point of contact with the village, but on that day he looked wary as he shook my hand and said with an almost imperceptible smile, “You are welcome.”

  My Peace Corps predecessor in Buhoma had gone home early, frustrated by the isolation of life in the jungle. She did, however, stay long enough to commission furniture and decorate the house. There were tables, chairs, a bookshelf, a bed, and two Greg Brady–style fly bead curtains. She had even left me a half-used bottle of imported Heinz ketchup; for a volunteer, that was the definitive sign that she had left in a hurry. I was unpacking my bags, setting books on the shelf, and already beginning to feel at home when I heard a voice outside.

  “Kodi, kodiii,” someone called. I walked into the yard and found Ephraim shaking hands with a short, cherubic old man in a frayed knit cap. “Hooo.” The man looked at me, chuckling as I approached. He grabbed my hand and beamed, chattering in Rukiga while Ephraim slowly translated.

  “This one is your neighbor.” He pointed toward a shamba some distance up the hillside.

  “Dominico!” the man shouted merrily.

  I told him my name, and he nodded with a knowing, thoughtful look, as if some secret plan was finally coming together.

  “Ah, my son!” Dominico exclaimed in a sudden burst of English. “Liz…my son. You? Son!” he cried again, still gripping my hand. I wondered for a moment if he was drunk, recalling a muzee at Annette’s place who shook my hand for over forty minutes, chanting, “I love Clinton. I loovve Clinn-tunn.”

  Ephraim was smiling now too and laughing into his translation as Dominico went on to ask my age, my parents’ names, my hometown, and whether or not I was married. He concluded with a solemn declaration that he would be my only father in Buhoma. Then he looked down with a sudden expression of sorrow.

  “Eh, eh, eh.” He made a kind of verbal tsking sound, still staring at his feet.

  “He says that he is suffering,” Ephraim told me. “He says that when you go to Kampala you could bring him some shoes. Size seven.”

  Now we were all looking at Dominico’s feet. They were gnarled, hardened, and cracked from a lifetime of barefoot work in the fields. I felt suddenly conscious of my hiking boots and the pale flesh they hid, soft from a world where footwear was taken for granted. Torn between compassion and the knowledge that I couldn’t possibly shoe the whole village, I sought a compromise.

  “Tell him I will look for sandals.”

  Dominico paused for a moment, as if considering the offer. Then he beamed anew. “My son! Good!” he shouted, and finally released my hand. He picked up his walking stick from the grass and shambled off down the hill, still laughing and shaking his head. I shook mine too, picturing the news of my arrival sweeping through town: “Free shoes! The free shoe guy is here!”

  At some point in training, the Peace Corps had warned us about this situation: “Don’t give anything away. It sets a bad precedent.” I felt like I’d failed an important early test but realized later that in Dominico I’d come up against a master of negotiation. He struck early and aimed high, knowing full well that in a few weeks I’d argue for two hours over the stubby end of a pencil.

  The next morning I woke suddenly with a deranged soprano aria blaring through the eaves of my hut. Kuteerateera, I thought in a panic. Someone’s being robbed. But as the screaming tapered off into soft hoots and pants, I realized that these cries were coming from a different set of neighbors: chimpanzees, announcing the start of another day in Bwindi forest. I lay there in the gray light before sunrise, listening to the chimps and the nocturnal chirr of insects. Gradually, night sounds gave way to a dawn chorus of birdsong: prinias and mannikins chattering in the undergrowth, the clamor of hornbills high in the canopy, and a red-chested cuckoo’s descending three-note whistle.

  I brushed my teeth and bathed outside as the sky brightened to saffron and rose, and slender fingers of mist drifted gently through the treetops across the valley. The chimps had moved farther into the forest, but I watched a pair of cinnamon-breasted bee-eaters preening in a tree fern, while a blue-headed agama lizard peered down at me from the roof thatching, surreal yet pedestrian, like everything else in this strange new world.

  At the park office I watched myself shake hands and exchange greetings with a legion of future coworkers and friends. Betunga William . . . Phenny Gongo . . . Komunda Enos . . . Kawermerwa . . . Yosamu . . . Rwahamuhanda . . . Mishana . . . Bafaki . . . Tibamanya . . . Tukamahabwa . . . sesquipedalian names reeled past me in a spasm of garbled vowels, like music on a poorly tuned radio. I smiled a lot and didn’t try to pronounce anything. When two British tourists arrived with permits to track Mubare group, I found myself heading into the Impenetrable Forest with an urgent appointment: to meet my first group of mountain gorillas.

  With one adult male, six females, and five juveniles, Mubare was a stable, textbook gorilla family. The silverback, Ruhondeza, set the tone for the group. His name meant “sleeps a lot,” after a local Rip van Winkle story of a hunter who slept away three generations deep in the heart of the forest. The other gorillas followed Ruhondeza’s calm lead, learning to tolerate daily visitors in less than two years. Group number two, the Katendegyere gorillas, were another story altogether. Bwindi’s “dysfunctional” apes included three silverbacks and a pair of feisty black-back males, all posturing and contending over two ladies and a child. Helping overcome their habit of screaming and charging to within inches of human observers was to be my first major task as a volunteer. But for day one, my introduction to mountain gorilla behavior, I was more than happy to be visiting Mr. Sleepy.

  We set out from the office in a flurry of walking sticks and parting handshakes, and I introduced myself to the tourists, a young British expatriate couple working for the World Bank in Kampala. Our guide, Medad Tumugabirwe, led us to the forest edge, under the spreading boughs of a fig tree, and launched into the park’s standard tourist briefing. In spite of the shade and a cool morning breeze, he was sweating profusely, and I suddenly realized my presence was making him nervous. Since I was a foreigner and his future supervisor, he assumed I must be a seasoned rain forest veteran and an expert at tracking mountain gorillas. Not so. Beyond a basic degree in ecology, I had no real qualifications for the job, and sometimes wondered what determination the Peace Corps had used in my placement: “Well, he’s a primate…he’ll do.”

  But Medad didn’t know any of this, and I kept a poker face, nodding sagely as he covered each point. It would be several weeks before the staff realized I couldn’t track a gorilla in a bathtub, let alone the Impenetrable Forest.

  “If the gorillas charge, you don’t shout out or try to run,” Medad concluded, looking furtively at the crib notes on his palm. “These gorillas are well habituated,” he assured us, “but sometimes they can change their mind.”

  With that, we shouldered our gear and entered the forest. My first impression was shadow and wet, with pale tree trunks rising through the gloom like great marble columns. Far above, a tight lattice of leaves and vines blocked all but the faintest rays of morning sun, and a cloud of pale butterflies winked like starlight through the shade. As my eyes adjusted, the dim undergrowth revealed itself in a chaos of greens—olive, emerald, and jade—that permeated the air with a moist, earthy smell, like water dripping through moss. Dense thickets of saplings and tree ferns struggled upward, vying for any patch of light, while creeper
s and lianas hung down in thick, ropy coils.

  We soon veered off the main trail, and the trackers disappeared instantly from sight. The forest definitely lived up to its names, both “Impenetrable” and “Bwindi,” a “dark, muddy place,” in the local tongue. We caught occasional glimpses of khaki raincoat through the leaves, but mainly followed the trackers by the metallic ring of their pangas as they cut a narrow path through the vegetation. Several hours passed with slowly building anticipation as we climbed and descended, retracing the gorillas’ meandering route across the steep hillside. Medad pointed out trampled leaves and broken saplings along the way, assuring us that “Mubare group has passed here but yesterday.”

  Once, the canopy above us erupted with shaking branches and high-pitched, birdlike chirps. A flash of russet fur and the bearded face of a red-tailed monkey peered down for an instant before leaping away into the green. We pressed on and came finally to a cluster of carefully matted leaf-and-vine platforms, set low in the vegetation of a small clearing.

  Mountain gorillas construct a new bedroom every night of their adult lives. At dusk each individual pulls down the surrounding branches and leaves to weave a stable, circular nest from four to five feet in diameter. Usually grouped loosely around the lead silverback, these night nests help keep the apes from sliding downhill while they sleep. On the rare occasion when a gorilla decides to sleep in the trees, nesting prevents its massive bulk from tumbling earthward during the night. Only infants and juveniles escape this daily task, choosing to sleep with their mothers until fully weaned after three to four years.

  As we approached, the trackers were bent over, examining the nests carefully. Something was wrong.

  “No dung,” Medad whispered. “They did not spend the night.”

  Gorillas show far more aptitude for construction than housekeeping and invariably soil their beds at some point during the night. Measuring dung width and counting nests is an important technique for censusing wild populations, but scientists would have found little to go on here. The nests were perfectly arranged, but there was no sign of the gorillas’ distinctive three-lobed boluses. Mubare group had settled in for the night but moved on before sleeping. Something had driven them off.