Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [33]
“Cloud forest, like this, is much simpler. The trees are much lower and more spaced out so there is plenty of ground cover vegetation as well, all of which the gorillas like very much because it means they can hide. And there’s plenty of food within arm’s reach.”
For us, however, all the thick, wet vegetation made the forest hard work to fight through. Murara and Serundori swung their machetes so casually through the almost impenetrable undergrowth that it took me awhile to begin to see that there was more to it than just vague hacking.
Machetes are a very specific shape, a little like the silhouette of a banana with a fattened end. Every part of the blade has a slightly different curve or angle of cut to the line of movement, and a different weight behind it as well. It was fascinating to watch the instinctive ways in which, from one slash to another, the guides would adapt their stroke to the exact type of vegetation they were trying to cut through—one moment it would be a thick branch, another moment it would be banks of nettles, and another moment tangled hanging vines. It was like a very casual game of tennis played by highly skilled players.
Not only was the forest thick, it was also cold, wet, and full of large black ants that bit all of us except for Helmut and Kurt, who were wearing special antproof socks which they had brought with them from Latvia.
We complimented them on their foresight and they shrugged and said it was nothing. Latvians were always well prepared. They looked at our recording equipment and said that they were surprised that we thought it was adequate. They had much better tape recorders than that in Latvia. We said that that might very well be so, but that we were very happy with it and the BBC seemed to think it was fine for the job. Helmut (or was it Kurt?) explained that they had much better broadcasting corporations in Latvia.
The outbreak of outright hostilities was happily averted at this moment by a signal from our guides to keep quiet. We were near the gorillas.
“But of course,” said Kurt, with a slight smile playing along his thin Latvian lips, as if he’d known all the while that this was exactly where the gorillas would be.
But it wasn’t a gorilla itself that had attracted our guides’ attention, it was a gorilla’s bed. By the side of the track along which we were walking there was a large depression in the undergrowth where a gorilla had been sleeping for the night. Plant stems had been pulled down and folded under to keep the gorilla off the ground, which was cold and damp at night.
One of the characteristics that laymen find most odd about zoologists is their insatiable enthusiasm for animal droppings. I can understand, of course, that the droppings yield a great deal of information about the habits and diets of the animals concerned, but nothing quite explains the sheer glee that the actual objects seem to inspire.
A sharp yelp of joy told me that Mark had found some. He dropped to his knees and started to fire off his Nikon at a small pile of gorilla dung.
“It’s in the nest,” he explained once he had finished, “which is very interesting, you see. The mountain gorillas, the ones that live here, actually defecate in their nests because it’s too cold to get up at night. The western lowland gorillas, on the other hand, don’t. They live in a warmer climate, so getting up in the middle of the night is less of a problem. Also, the western lowland gorillas live on a diet of fruit, which is another incentive for not shitting in their nests.”
“I see,” I said.
Helmut started to say something, which I like to think was probably something about having far superior types of gorilla dung in Latvia, but I interrupted him because I suddenly had one of those strange, uncanny feelings that I was being watched by a truck.
We kept very quiet and looked very