Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [31]
A damp and heavy mist hung over the land, almost obscuring the distant volcano peaks. The evening was unexpectedly cold, and we spent it by the light of hissing Tilley lamps, eating our tinned pears and our single remaining bun, and talking in broken French to our two guides, whose names were Murara and Serundori.
These were magnificently smooth characters dressed in military camouflage and black berets who slouched across the table languidly caressing their rifles. They explained that the reason for the getup was that they were ex-commandos. All guides had to carry rifles, they told us, partly as protection against the wildlife, but more importantly in case they encountered poachers. Murara told us that he had personally shot dead five poachers. He explained with a shrug that there was pas de problème about it. No bother with inquests or anything like that, he just shot them and went home.
He sat back in his chair and idly fingered the rifle sight while we toyed nervously with our pear halves.
Poaching of one kind or another is, of course, the single most serious threat to the survival of the mountain gorillas, but it’s hard not to wonder whether declaring open season on human beings is the best plan for solving the problem. We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.
In fact, the poaching problem itself is declining—or at least parts of it are. Four in every five of the gorillas alive in the world’s zoos today were originally taken from the wild, but no public zoo would accept a gorilla now, except from another zoo, since it would be a bit difficult to explain where it came from. There is still a demand for them from private collectors, however, and the unprotected Ugandan part of the Virungas is still a weak link. In September 1988 an infant was captured on the Ugandan side: two adult members of its family were shot dead and the young animal was later sold to Rwandan smugglers by a game warden (now in prison) for about twenty-five thousand dollars. This is the most destructive aspect of this sort of poaching: for every young gorilla captured, several other members of its family will probably die trying to protect it.
Worse than those who want to collect gorillas for their private zoos are those who just want to collect bits of gorillas. For many years there was a brisk trade in skulls and hands that were sold to tourists and expatriates who mistakenly thought they would look finer on their mantelpieces than they did on the original gorilla. This, thank goodness, is also now declining, since a taste for bone-headed brutality is now held to be less of a social grace than formerly.
In some parts of Africa gorillas are still killed for food, though not in the Virunga volcanoes—at least, not deliberately. The problem is that many other animals are, and gorillas very frequently get caught in traps set for bushbuck or duiker. A young female gorilla called Jozi, for example, caught her hand in a wire antelope snare and eventually died of septicemia in August 1988. So to protect the gorillas, anti-poaching patrols are still necessary.
There were two other people sharing our hut that evening. They were a couple of German students whose names I appear now to have forgotten, but since they were indistinguishable from all the other German students we encountered from time to time on our trips, I will simply call them Helmut and Kurt.
Helmut and Kurt were young, fair-haired, vigorous, incredibly well-equipped, and much better than us at virtually everything. We saw very little of them during the early part of the evening because they were very busy preparing their meal.