Last Chance to See

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 andhands 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. This involved constructing some kind of brick oven outside, and then doing a lot of coming and going with bowls of boiling water, stopwatches, penknives, and dismembered bits of the local wildlife. Eventually they sat and ate their feast in front of us with grim efficiency and an insulting refusal to make any disparaging glances at all in the direction of our tinned pear halves.
    Then they said they were going to bed for the night, only they weren’t going to sleep in the hut because they had a tent with them, which was much better. It was a German tent. They nodded us a curt good night and left.
    In bed that night, after I had lain awake for a while worrying about Murara and Serundori’s casual propensity forshooting people, I turned to worrying instead about Helmut and Kurt. If they were going to be like that, then I just wished they hadn’t been German. It was too easy. Too obvious. It was like coming across an Irishman who actually was stupid, a mother-in-law who actually was fat, or an American businessman who actually did have a middle initial and smoke a cigar. You feel as if you are unwillingly performing in a music-hall sketch and wishing you could rewrite the script. If Helmut and Kurt had been Brazilian or Chinese or Latvian or anything else at all, they could then have behaved in exactly the same way and it would have been surprising and intriguing and, more to the point from my perspective, much easier to write about. Writers should not be in the business of propping up stereotypes. I wondered what to do about it, decided that they could simply
be
Latvians if I wanted, and then at last drifted off peacefully to worrying about my boots.
    Mark had told me before we went to bed that when I woke up the first thing I had to remember was to turn my boots upside-down and shake them.
    I asked him why.
    “Scorpions,” he replied. “Good night.”
    Early in the morning Murara and Serundori were waiting at the hut door fondling their rifles and machetes, and wearing meaningful glints in their eyes that we weren’t at all certain we liked.