Though an adult male is only eight feet high while his counterpart in the savanna may be well over ten, forest elephants are thought to have a shorter life span than the bush form, and probably reach maturity much faster, tusks and all. “In the bush elephant,” Jonah says, “you expect to find big tusks, because the male is so much bigger. But in the forest elephant, without dimorphism, such tusks are striking, even though male tusks grow much faster relative to age.” If this animal and his companion are specimens of “pygmy elephants,” as we suppose, there remains a certain enigma in those tusks, and their precocious development in at least some of young male cyclotis.
It is encouraging that these elephants are comparatively tame, a sign that they are harassed little if at all—a point to be made in our recommendation of this place as a national reserve. The foresters say that elephants are more plentiful farther south, and that gorilla and bongo, though difficult to see, are common in the region. What Dr. Western will probably recommend is a park far larger than the proposed reserve, occupying the whole triangle of C.A.R. that lies between Congo and Cameroon, with contiguous reserves or parks in those two countries—the first international forest park, preserving hundreds of square miles of undamaged habitat.
Since we have flashlights, Slaus and I, with Lalieh and Bisambe, decide to remain here until dusk, when we might hope to see bush pig or bongo, or possibly the giant forest hog. Our friends have scarcely disappeared when four more elephants, golden yellow with caked clay from another bathing place, walk out of the deepening evening greens onto the east end of the pan. Soon they are joined by the big gray savanna bull, whose size, color, and configuration make him look like a different species altogether. All five cross over to our side and reenter the forest, and we wonder if we will encounter them on the way back. Another elephant comes and goes. Then, quite suddenly, the Babinga are gesturing.
The vanished five have reappeared at the edge of a grassy swale just to our right. Not catching our scent, they keep on coming, passing too close as they head toward the center of the pan, where they bathe and drink for a little while before the female catches our scent in a subtle shift of wind. She lifts her trunk high, then directs it straight at us like a blunderbuss. Silently, in unhurried hurry, the elephants move out of the pan, and the sand plovers, the green sandpipers from Europe, and some blue-winged, chestnut-colored ducks shift just enough in the wash of mud and water to escape being flattened by the great round feet. I have never before seen this beautiful forest duck (labeled Hartlaub’s duck through no fault of its own), the nest of which has never been located. “Faunistically,” as Jonah says, in uncharacteristic resort to eco-jargon, “the rain forest of the Congo Basin is very little known.”
Two days later, while Richard continues with his transects, Jonah and I return to Dzanga Pan, arriving at two in the afternoon so as to be ready when the elephants come in; we are interested especially in large-tusked “pygmies.” The day is hot, the pan dead still: I watch a sun bird, a green shiny lizard, and a pair of chortling gray parrots catching the sun in their red tails. (This species is the loquacious favorite of caged-parrot fanciers and therefore threatened in the wild.) Not until midafternoon does the first group of elephants appear, looming suddenly out of deep green shadows in the forest wall across the pan, lifting their trunks to sniff the air, swinging a forefoot several inches above the ground, ears uncoiling, thin tails switching, in the constant “flowing” of the elephant, even a calm one. “The first ones in are always suspicious,” Jonah whispers.
This first group, which appear to be almost “pure” cyclotis, is scared away by two Babinga hunters who emerge from the forest to the southwest with big leaf-wrapped packets of fresh meat and whack a tree hard with a panga to clear out the elephants before crossing the pan. Twenty-two elephant come in once they are gone—mostly hybrids, with pronounced bush characters such as bulging brow, long back, and sharp-cornered ears. The sole young male is smaller than our “pygmy elephants” and lacks their heavy tusk development, yet he is even more independent in behavior, coming into the pan early, all by himself, traveling the length of it past other groups, and departing the pan, still entirely on his own, in another direction. “On the savannas,” Jonah says, astounded, “elephants are eight years old before they leave their mothers. That one can’t be more than three! In the savanna he wouldn’t last one day!”
The forest west of the Sangha River is entirely roadless, stretching away across an unmarked boundary into Cameroon. Perhaps for want of firsthand knowledge, blacks and whites agree that the gorilla is most plentiful in that region, which is dense and treacherous, so Gustave says, and ridden with swamps aswarm with crocodiles. Its only inhabitants are Pygmies, but no local will accompany us, since they say that these Pygmies, who come in from Cameroon, are “très méchant.” (Cameroon is the westernmost territory of the Pygmies, who are thought to number about two hundred thousand altogether. The largest group—about twenty-five thousand—and the one most culturally intact, are the Mbuti, whom we shall meet in the Ituri Forest of Zaire.) International boundaries are of no concern to Pygmies anywhere, but possibly the Sangha River is a natural barrier between Pygmy nations. Or perhaps, being people of the forest, they are afraid to cross such a broad water at the mercy of the Yanga fishermen, who stand in the stern of their pirogues to paddle their narrow leaflike craft up and down the currents in the shadow of the gallery trees.
Under the circumstances, Jonah and I will set off on a gorilla hunt alone. Since the pirogues are too delicate and leaky to carry two big passengers, Slaus Sterculec offers to take us across the Sangha in his riverboat, a decommissioned metal landing craft from World War II. Soon we are rounding the broad sandbars that appear in midriver in the rainy season and crossing the heavy current to a break in the forest wall where elephants come occasionally to water.
Slaus is concerned that without a tracker we may lose ourselves in the dense forest, and on the far side he conscripts a young Yanga fisherman, Aliende, who agrees to guide us. Heading inland, Aliende skirts a broad and grassy marsh, perhaps an ancient oxbow of the river, and arrives at an overgrown, treacherous swamp perhaps a hundred yards across, all tussocks and tangled undergrowth, rotten footing and hidden holes, into which we sink well above the knee. On the far side, the rain forest has been much modified to their own advantage by the elephants, to judge not only from plentiful droppings but the numerous small clearings with abundant second growth that provides them fodder. This browse is also very useful to gorilla and the big forest antelope called the bongo, and before long we come upon gorilla sign—beds, feeding areas, old droppings. (There are thought to be several thousand gorilla in this southwestern forest of C.A.R.) Continuing westward perhaps two miles more, we find fresh green droppings and a sweet whiff in the air left behind from the night before. But the gorilla, who rarely shows himself until he wishes to have a look at his observers, remains hidden in the rank and heavy cover.
From the north, across the river, comes a shot; four more ring out in the next half hour. Aliende stops and shakes his head; any animals nearby are sure to flee. He is not a Pygmy, and he grows unsure as he goes farther from the river, for there are no paths. He has marked our course rather casually with panga flicks, and two or three times on the way back, we see him misread his own signs even before he backtracks to pick up the trail. Near the river, there is a sudden burst of rufous animals out of a thicket in the grassy swale—Bohor reedbuck, an antelope we know well from East Africa.
At the river, Aliende slips away in his pirogue, and, waiting for Slaus, Jonah and I sit on the bank gazing out over the water. So far we have gotten on extremely well, perhaps a bit better than I had expected, though we have been friends for fourteen years. Increasingly we can laugh at each other and have fun, and since, on this journey, we share many interests and concerns, we are rarely short of conversation. There by the river, splitting an orange, we are full of well-being and contentment. Jonah tells me about his father, a British build
ing surveyor and city planner who worked for the colonial administration in Dar es Salaam thirty years ago. In his spare time, Arthur Western was a hunter, but, like many hunters in East Africa, he was also a conservationist, and he was instrumental in the establishment of Mikumi National Park in what in those days was still Tanganyika. He was also an “honorary ranger” who was sometimes called upon to dispatch dangerous rogue elephants, and he was killed by such an animal in the Kilombero Valley, north of the Selous Game Reserve, in 1958, when Jonah was fourteen.
Jonah, who was born in England, returned there in 1961 to find work and complete his studies. “I was only anxious to get back to Africa,” he says. In 1967, he took up residence in Amboseli Park, in Kenya, to complete his thesis (“The Structure, Dynamics, and Changes of the Amboseli Ecosystem”), and for the next ten years he lived mostly at Amboseli, under Mount Kilimanjaro, which he still considers home.
On a reconnaissance flight on our last afternoon, we are sorry to see no elephants whatever in the pans to the south near the Congo frontier, and only a single herd of forest buffalo. But once again there are elephants at Dzanga, which seems to attract most if not all of the local population.
During the flight over the forest, the plane develops a mysterious whine, as some sort of minor oil leak from the propeller films the windshield. I notice that on the return flight Jonah crosses over to the Sangha River and follows it back upstream to Bayanga. On the ground, as we refuel and prepare the plane for tomorrow’s four-hour flight, I ask if coming back along the river had been a precaution, and he said it was. He tells me that that whine is nothing serious, the motor was overhauled completely before we started on this voyage, perhaps we will have it checked in Libreville.
Jonah seems preoccupied and even downcast; he says he is fighting off an achy flu. Walking down the twilight road toward the village, we discuss for the first time the fine points of a forced landing in these jungle rivers. “No margin for error out there, is there?” Jonah murmurs, managing a grin, and I nod, relieved that he realizes this, too, and feels relaxed enough to say so. He describes how Douglas-Hamilton once conked out over the forest, and, with the usual amazing luck that has rescued our friend from one scrape after another, peered down to see the only clearing in the region, which he glided into.
Since Jonah is nothing if not stiff-upper-lipped, he rarely mentions the awesome inhospitality of the equatorial forest from the perspective of a single-engine plane, perhaps because there is nothing to discuss: in the event of engine failure or forced landing, unless a swamp or river is within gliding range, a light plane would disappear into this greenness like a stone dropped from the air into the sea. (Even if by miracle the plane managed a pancake landing on the canopy without disintegrating or exploding, there are no low limbs on the forest trees, and the injured passengers might find themselves confronted with a jump of at least a hundred feet into the gloom below.) It would do no good to worry people by telling them our course, which is usually remote from radio contact, even if radio contact would be useful. One’s best hope, all things considered, would be death on impact, since survivors could never be found, far less assisted. In short, why talk about it—the less said, the better.
The morning is hazy, and we do not take off until 9:30 A.M., after bidding adieu to our cheerful C.A.R. associates and kind Slavic hosts. Climbing above a lens of cloud, the plane heads southwest, crossing the invisible frontier and drifting out over Cameroon. An hour later, by rough estimate, Cameroon’s border with northwestern Congo falls behind. Occasionally we glimpse the green snake of a slough or a dark gray-brown jungle river, the scar of a burned clearing, or even an overgrown red road with the glint of a tin roof at the end. (Later Jonah estimates that we were in sight of a swamp or river or some other such place to attempt a landing about a third of the time—optimistic in Richard’s opinion and my own, and not heartwarming odds in any case, quite apart from one’s prospects during and after such a desperate measure.
In Congo, we peer down at Souanké, a human outpost perhaps an hour from the Karagoua River and two hours from the Gabon border, at the bitter end of the most remote road in all the world. We cross the northernmost province of Gabon, then the southeast corner of Río Muni, a former Spanish colony currently known as Equatorial Guinea. Then we are back over Gabon again, crossing the steep green Monts de Cristal, from which fierce whitewater streams course down to the Atlantic. The Gulf of Guinea comes in sight within the hour, a dull streak on the gray tropical horizon. A rough crust on the sea edge is Libreville, the capital of Gabon, where we must seek permission to visit Makokou, in the tropical forests we have just flown over.
Makokou, on the Ivindo River of northeast Gabon, lies less than fifty miles north of the equator. The Makokou Institut de Recherche en Ecologie Tropicale, founded originally by the French, seems just the place for Richard Barnes to perfect the techniques for censusing the forest elephant, a task in which he is cheerfully assisted by his fiancée, Karen Jensen; Ms. Jensen has trained herself carefully in analysis of dung, which provides forthright and honest evidence of elephant numbers. An easygoing and informal young American from Long Beach, California, where they are to be married in July, she appreciates Richard’s rather formal personality (and vice versa) and suits herself up in full jungle regalia for their expeditions, just as he does.
Richard and Karen met a few years ago at Dian Fossey’s gorilla camp at Karisoke, in Rwanda, where Richard was director of research and Karen was a research assistant. Both were impressed by Miss Fossey’s fierce commitment to and thorough knowledge of gorillas, and both were alarmed by her misanthropic personality, which expressed itself most disagreeably in her violent prejudice against Africans, including her own cowed and frightened staff. “They lived in dread of her return,” says Richard, “and when she arrived, the morale went all to pieces. She liked to abuse and humiliate African men, and because they had families, and jobs were scarce, they had to take it. We were told she would have poachers stripped, then thrash them head to toe with nettles; when she was drunk, she fired her pistol over people’s heads.”
One cannot question the veracity of Dr. Barnes, who goes out of his way to be conservative in his opinions, and Miss Jensen supported him in all he said. “At the end,” he told us, “she rarely went out into the field unless cameramen or reporters were in camp. She loved gorillas, perhaps, but she had no love for human beings. We were certain there was going to be violence, with which, on moral grounds, we didn’t wish to be associated. It never occurred to us that she might be the victim until we spoke with the American ambassador, whose comment was, ‘One of these days, they’re going to come after her with pangas, as they did Joy Adamson.’ Finally I went to the authorities and advised them strongly not to renew her visa. They had already heard how serious things were, but they said she attracted tourist income to Rwanda, which was badly needed, and they couldn’t refuse her. Under the circumstances, we resigned; we felt we could not work there any longer.”
Karen Jensen nodded her agreement; she has unpleasant memories of her own. That a colleague who started out so well (and won the admiration of such peers as George Schaller and Jane Goodall) should have come to such an ugly end was very upsetting, but their impressions of the last years of Dian Fossey are widely shared by others who had dealings with her. At a primate conference in 1985 in San Diego, Miss Fossey informed Dr. Western that the only meaningful approach to conservation in Africa was to hand out condoms. “I thought I was talking to a crazy person,” Jonah says. “I told her I didn’t think we had much to talk about, and walked away. She was spitting mad.”
In his years at Amboseli, Jonah worked continually with Africans, in particular the Masai, whose cattle competed with the wild animals for the scarce grass, and he is convinced that conservation that does not cooperate with the local people is of limited value, confining the preservation of animals to the artificial limits imposed by the boundaries of a national park. “Putting a boundary around Amboseli did not prot
ect it. If you work with the people, show them the benefits that may come to them, show them the compatibility of human use and conservation, they will support what you are doing, even help with antipoaching. This way, wildlife conservation can extend beyond park boundaries.” Jonah shrugged. “Things still go wrong, of course. The Masai morani are forbidden to kill lions these days, and so last year, to prove themselves, they killed forty elephants instead. Nevertheless, cooperation with the other interests, with the farmers or pastoralists, or with the foresters, is far more effective in the long run than fighting everyone as Dian Fossey did. For one thing, the governments can support both interests instead of always having to choose.”
One day we join Richard and Karen in a walk of ten kilometers through the forest, led by an old Ba-kota hunter named Bilombi. Though popularly supposed not to be a Pygmy, Bilombi is so small that much of the day is spent ducking under vines that the old tracker does not slash aside because he himself passes easily beneath them. This is not a failure of courtesy but of spatial apprehension, for he is an amiable old man. For a Bantu, he seems very easy in the forest, and familiar with all the nuts and fruits consumed by forest inhabitants, including man. One fruit the size and color of an orange comes from a liana called mbolo, which also produces a white sticky resin sometimes used in rubber manufacture. The mbolo climbs hundreds of feet to the top of some great tree in the canopy, where its bright fruits are consumed by monkeys. “Monkey candy,” Bilombi says. Another small fruit, the atanga, is shiny purple-blue, and Bilombi stops to gather up a pocketful, which he wraps carefully for his family in the wide thin leaves that characterize the light-starved plants of the forest floor. “Everybody eats it!” Bilombi exclaims, with an utterly open smile of delight, as if in approval of all life. Then he says, “If you wait here, all the antelope will come!”