`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 out of their skin. The gorilla’s jumping out of his skin, I’m jumping out of mine. It’s extremely exciting. You get a real adrenalin rush. A problem with the Bukavu group was that the silverback wouldn’t charge. I actually wanted him to, because then, having charged, he would expose himself and then realise that I didn’t mean him any harm. But he wouldn’t do that, he just kept circling. Usually they do charge, and if they do you have this face-to-face, and you have a moment to understand that neither of you means the other any harm and the gorilla backs off.’
`But you go into a submissive posture, do you? asked Mark. `You don’t confront him??
‘No, I usually don’t go into a submissive posture. I’m usually too frightened to move.’
Once a silverback accepts humans, the rest of the group will quickly fall into line, and, interestingly enough, any other groups in the area will usually become habituated much more quickly. There is hardly ever any trouble provided everybody treats everybody else with respect. The gorillas are perfectly capable of making it clear when they don’t wish to be disturbed. There was one occasion on which a gorilla group had had a particularly stressful morning as a result of an encounter with another gorilla group, and the last thing they wanted was to be bothered with humans in the afternoon, so when a tracker brought some tourists and overstayed his welcome the silverback took hold of the tracker’s hand and gently bit his watch off.
Now the business of tourism is obviously a vexed one. I had myself wanted to visit the gorillas for years, but had been deterred by the worry that tourism must be disturbing to the gorillas’ habitat and way of life. There is also the risk of exposing the gorillas to diseases to which they have no immunity. It is well known that the famous and extraordinary pioneer of gorilla conservation, Dian Fossey, was for most of her life passionately opposed to tourism and wished to keep the world away from the gorillas. However, she did, reluctantly, change her mind towards the end of her life, and the prevalent view now is that tourism, if it’s carefully controlled and monitored, is the one thing that can guarantee the gorillas’ future survival. The sad but unavoidable fact is that it comes down to simple economics. Without tourists it’s only a question of which will happen first – either the gorillas’ forest habitat will be entirely destroyed for crop farming and firewood, or the gorillas will be hunted to extinction by poachers. Put at its crudest, the gorillas are now worth more to the locals (and the government) alive than dead.
The restrictions, which are tightly enforced, are these. Each gorilla family can only be visited once a day, usually for about an hour, by a party of a maximum of six people, each of whom are paying US$100 for the privilege. And maybe they won’t even get to see the gorillas.
We were lucky; we did. Though after our first brief encounter with the silverback it looked, for a while, as if we would not find any more. We moved slowly and carefully through the undergrowth, while Murara and Serundori made regular coughing and grunting noises. The purpose of these was to let the gorillas know we were coming and reassure them that we meant no harm. The noises are imitations of a noise that gorillas themselves make. Apparently it doesn’t actually matter much about trying to imitate them, though. It’s hardly going to fool anyone. It just reassures the gorillas that you always make the same noise. You could sing the national anthem as far as they are concerned.
Just as we were about to give up and go back, we tried one more turning, and suddenly the forest seemed to be thick with gorillas. A few feet above us a female was lounging in a tree idly stripping the bark off a twig with her teeth. She noticed us but was not interested. Two babies were cavorting recklessly four metres from the ground in a very slender tree, and a young male was chugging through the undergrowth nearby on the lookout for food. We stared at the two babies in astounded fascination at the wonderful wild abandon with which they were hurling themselves round each other and the terrible meagreness of the tree in which they had elected to do it. It was hard to believe the tree could support them, and indeed it couldn’t. They suddenly came crashing down through it, having completely misunderstood the law of gravity, and slunk off sheepishly into the undergrowth.