Gorillas in the Mist by Farley Mowat

gone. I waited there five hours until a priest from the Congo came and gained admissionto Uganda as he had a sick person with him who required hospitalization there. Once it was apparent that the men at the post had the keys, I was able to bribe them to open the gate for me.
    It was not quite that easy. Dian had no remaining cash, so she had to persuade the guards to let her drive on to Kisoro where she could get more. History repeated itself. It was agreed, on condition that one of the guards go too.
    When Dian’s Land Rover once again rattled up the dusty driveway of the Traveler’s Rest and skidded to a halt at the front door, Walter Baumgartel was there to see her stumble out of the driver’s seat drenched in sweat and close to collapse. She ran past him into the hotel, where she was solaced by half a dozen other refugees. Meantime, Baumgartel confronted an unhappy Congolese soldier who insisted he had orders to bring Dian back to the border post as soon as she raised the money she had promised. In his memoirs,
Up Among the Mountain Gorillas
, Baumgartel recalled the scene:
    “‘Miss Fossey is not your prisoner,’ I said. ‘She is going to stay here. If she wants to return, I shall tie her to that tree out there!’
    “‘But I have guaranteed to bring her back,’ her guard protested. ‘They will shoot me if I don’t.’
    “‘Better to shoot you than her,’ I said. Eventually he left.”
    The following day the American ambassador to nearby Rwanda arrived at the Traveler’s Rest to take Dian to his embassy in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, preparatory to sending her on to Nairobi where Leakey anxiously awaited her. She was gently interrogated by embassy staff, then asked to prepare an affidavit testifying to her treatment at the hands of the Congolese.
    “Did you suffer any material losses?” she was asked.
    “Some of my camp gear—a tent and things like that and, oh, yes, one of my pet chickens was kidnapped.”
    “Miss Fossey, were you ill-treated or physically abused in any way?”
    “Well, I was cussed out in French and Congolese. And a soldier tried to pull me out of my car but didn’t make it. No, I was not abused.”
    A widely circulated story maintains that Dian was raped by Congolese soldiers—gang-raped in some versions. However, the record that she herself wrote only a few days after her escape makes no reference to rape, attempted rape, or indeed to assault of any kind. Nor is there even a suggestion of rape in her other accounts of what took place. Finally, Dian herself consistently and vehemently denied the story.
    Myths—especially racist and salacious ones—die hard.

— 6 —
    T he unsung little country of Rwanda in which Dian now found herself was one of the smallest, most densely populated, and poorest in Africa. Its nearly five million people lived in an area not quite as large as the state of Maryland. Perched high on the continent’s central plateau only a few miles south of the equator, Rwanda had once been heavily and lushly forested. Now, with about four hundred persons living off the produce of each square mile, the land had been almost totally given over to the farmer and the charcoal-maker. The only remaining forests, and the only survivors of the once-abundant wildlife, existed somewhat precariously in two national parks-A’kagera in the northeast, and the Parc des Volcans in the higher reaches of the Virunga mountains to the northwest.
    Although overfarmed and overcrowded, Rwanda was and is dramatically beautiful. Its rugged, closely terraced hills resemble a terrestrial version of the huge and chaotic swells of the Atlantic Ocean, with the cluster of old volcanoes looming to the north like magical snow-capped islands against a vibrant tropic sky.
    Dian had neither the time nor the inclination to admire the scenery during her first few days in the country. “She was completely preoccupied—obsessed, really,” according to Rosamond Carr, one of the first white