Last Chance to See

up, and from which we had to travel on by foot.
    Set a little way above the village, in front of a large square, was an absurdly grand ex-colonial building, empty except for an absurdly small office tucked into the back where a small man in an Army uniform pored over our gorilla permits with a grim air of bemusement, as if he’d never seen one before, or at least not for well over an hour. He then occupied himself with a shortwave radio for a few minutes before turning to us and saying that he knew exactly who we were, had been expecting us, and that because of our contacts with the World Wildlife Fund in Nairobi, he was going to allow us an extra day with the gorillas, and who the hell were we anyway, and why had no one told him we were coming?
    This seemed, on the face of it, to be unanswerable, so we left him to try and figure it out for himself while we went to look for some porters to help us with our baggage for the three-hour walk up to the warden’s hut, where we were to spend the night. They weren’t hard to find. There was a large band of them gathered hopefully around our van and our driver was eager to know how many we needed to carry all our bags. He seemed to emphasise the word
all
rather strongly.
    There was a sudden moment of horrible realisation. We had been so keen to clear out of Goma as fast as possible that we had forgotten a major part of our plan, which was to leave the bulk of our gear at a hotel in town. As a result of this oversight, we had more baggage with us than we actually needed to carry up to the gorillas.
    A lot more.
    As well as basic gorilla-watching kit—jeans, T-shirt, a sort of waterproof thing, a ton of cameras, and tins of pears—there was also an immense store of dirty laundry, a suit and shoes for meeting my French publisher in Paris, aftershave, a dozen computer magazines, a thesaurus, half the collected works of Dickens, and a large wooden model of a Komodo dragon. I believe in traveling light, but then I also believe I should give up smoking and shop early for Christmas.
    Hiding our considerable embarrassment, we chose a team of porters to carry this little lot up into the Virunga volcanoes for us. They didn’t mind. If we were prepared to pay them to carry Dickens and aftershave up to the gorillas and back down again, then they were perfectly happy to do it. White men have done much worse things in Zaïre than that, but maybe not much sillier.
    The trek up to the visitors’ hut was strenuous, and involved plenty of stops for sharing our cigarettes and Coca-Cola with the bearers, while they frequently redistributed the bags of Dickens and computer magazines among themselves and experimented with different and novel methods of keeping them on their heads.
    For much of the time we were tramping through wet fields of sago, and a foolish but happy thought suddenly occurred to me. We were walking through the only known anagram of my name—which is Sago Mud Salad. I speculated footlingly as to what possible cosmic significance there could be to this, and by the time I had finally dismissed the thought, the light was fading and we had arrived at the hut, which was a fairly Spartan wooden building, but new and quite well built.
    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