Last Chance to See

silverback gorilla in the wild was vertiginous. It was as if there was something I was meant to do, some reaction that was expected of me, and I didn’t know what it was or how to do it. My modern mind was simply saying, “Run away!” but all I could do was stand, trembling, and stare. The right moment seemed to slip away and fall into an unbridgeable gulf between us, and left me simply gawping helplessly on my side. The gorilla, meanwhile, seemed to notice that we had been busy photographing its dung and merely stalked off into the undergrowth.
    We set off to follow it, but it was in its own element and we were not. We were not even able to tell whereabouts in its own element it was, and after a while we gave up and started to explore the area more generally again.
    The gorilla we had seen was a large male silverback. “Silverback” simply means that its back was silver, or grey-haired. Only the backs of males turn silver, and it happens after the male has reached maturity. Tradition has it that only the chief male of a group will develop a silver back, and that it will happen within days, or even hours, of it taking over as leader, but this apparently is nonsense. Popular and beguiling nonsense, but nonsense. And while we are on the subject of nonsense, I should mention something that we discovered a few days later when talking to Conrad Aveling, a field researcher in Goma who has for years been responsible for gorilla conservation work in the area.
    We told Conrad how alarmed we had been by Murara andSerundori’s accounts of simply going out and mowing down the local poachers, and he sat back in his chair, kicked up his heels, and roared with laughter.
    “It’s incredible what these guys will tell the tourists! I bet they told you they were ex-commandos as well, didn’t they?”
    We admitted, rather sheepishly, that they had. Conrad clasped his hand to his brow and shook his head.
    “The only thing about them that’s ex-commando,” he said, “is their uniforms. They buy them off the commandos. The commandos sell them to buy food because they hardly ever get paid. It’s all complete nonsense. I heard another great story the other day. A tourist had asked a guide—and this was at Rawindi, where there are no gorillas—the tourist asked, ‘What happens when a gorilla meets a lion?’ and instead of answering, ‘Well, that’s a silly question, because lions and gorillas live in completely different areas and would never ever meet,’ the guide obviously feels obliged to think of some sort of colourful answer. So he says, ‘What happens is that the gorilla beats the hell out of the lion, then wraps his body in leaves and twigs and then stamps on him.’ I only heard about it myself because the tourist came to me afterward and said how fascinated he had been to hear about it. It bothers me when they make up these colourful answers. I wish I could make them understand that if they don’t know the answer, or they think the right answer isn’t very interesting, it’s better to say so rather than just invent absolute nonsense.”
    One thing that was beyond dispute, however, was that when our guides were not inventing stuff or acting out Rambo fantasies, they really knew the forest, and they really knew the gorillas. They had (and Conrad Aveling confirmed all this enthusiastically) themselves “habituated” two of the gorilla groups for human contact. “Habituating” is a very long, complicated, and delicate business, but, briefly, it is the process of contacting a group in the wild and visiting them every day, if you can find them, over a period of months oreven years and training them to accept the presence of human beings, so that they can then be studied and also visited by tourists.
    The length of time it takes to habituate gorillas depends on the dominant silverback. He’s the one whose confidence you have to win. In the case of the family group we were visiting, it took fully three years. Conrad Aveling spent the first eight months of his time on the project crawling around in the undergrowth with them but never actually saw them once, though he was often no more than twenty or thirty feet away.
    “One of the problems of habituating in this sort of habitat,” he explained, “is that it’s so thick you can’t see each other, and what happens is you end up having these sudden confrontations at about three or four metres or less, and you
still
can’t see each other. Everybody’s jumping