Last Chance to See

However, they had good news for us. Since gorillas tend not to make their personal arrangements to suit the convenience of visiting collateral relatives, they were sometimes to be found up to eight hours’ trek away from the visitors’ hut. Today, however, the news was that they were only about an hour’s distance from us, so we would have an easy day of it. We gathered together our gorilla-watching gear, carefully leaving behind the aftershave, the Dickens, and also our flash guns, on the assumption that these wereall things that would, to differing degrees, upset the gorillas, said good morning to Helmut and Kurt, who were joining us for the expedition, and set off together in search of the gorillas. Ahead of us through the misty morning light reared the hump of Mikeno volcano.
    The forest we plunged into was thick and wet and I complained about this to Mark.
    He explained that gorillas like to live in montane rain forest, or cloud forest. It was over ten thousand feet above sea level, above the cloud level, and always damp. Water drips off the trees the whole time.
    “It’s not at all like lowland primary rain forest,” said Mark, “more like secondary rain forest, which is what you get when primary forest is burnt or cut down and then starts to regenerate.”
    “I thought that the whole problem with rain forest was that it wouldn’t grow again when you cut it down,” I said.
    “You won’t get
primary
rain forest again, of course. Well, you might get something similar over hundreds or thousands of years, we don’t know. Certainly all of the original wildlife will have been lost for good. But what grows in the short term is secondary rain forest, which is far less rich and complex.
    “Primary rain forest is an incredibly complex system, but when you’re actually standing in it it looks half empty. In its mature state you get a very high, thick canopy of leaves, because of all the trees competing with each other to get at the sunlight. But since little light penetrates this canopy there will tend to be very little vegetation at ground level. Instead you get an ecological system which is the most complex of any on earth, and it’s all designed to disseminate the energy which the trees have absorbed from the sun throughout the whole forest.
    “Cloud forest, like this, is much simpler. The trees are much lower and more spaced out so there is plenty of groundcover 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 playingalong his thin Latvian lips, as if he’d known all the while that this was exactly where the