Drums Along the Congo Read online

  The birds are crooning on high, but I can’t see any of them through the lush greenery. Parrots whistle and caw with touracos, as red-bellied flycatchers add silvery bars between the “shoo-wees” of sooty bulbuls. A warbler’s lilting song is nearly lost in the ringing cries of a yellow-crowned bishop, while several chestnut wattle-eyes crackle and croak. Raymond shrugs his shoulders in answer to each of my questions about the avian world. He has never given birds a second thought; there’s not enough meat on them to interest him.

  “Pygmies know birds, not Boha men,” he says, picking up a branch and pretending it’s a blowgun, the weapon of choice among bird hunters. “Crossbows are too loud, and shotguns turn a bird into feathers.”

  His grandfather knew how to use a blowgun, but Raymond has tried only a few times. His specialty is game he can strike with a spear. “Listen,” he says, and treats us to a rendition of several mammalian calls; his impersonation of a leopard’s cough is frighteningly good.

  Innocent and I are hunched over a silver-gray beetle the size of a walnut, when Raymond spins and snatches up his spear. Several branches crash down from the canopy. Overhead we see a troop of red colobus monkeys scampering past. This thumbless species with a long, slender tail rarely ventures far from home base. They’re out of range, so Raymond can only sit back with us and watch the brazen parade.

  Ange, Theo, and Gabriel all greased their rifles before they left. Might the monkeys have smelled the freshly oiled weapons and kept their distance until they were sure no guns were around? Raymond says a hunter’s success has nothing to do with when the shotguns are oiled. “When the gun spirits say no, it is no. Sometimes you see monkeys, sometimes you don’t.”

  I ask if rubbing a leaf on a gun to soothe its spirit has a practical purpose as well, such as masking the odor of oil.

  “You don’t understand,” Raymond lectures. “The tree spirit talks to the gun spirit for the human spirit… It has nothing to do with oil or leaves. Spirits, mundélé, spirits. They do everything.”

  I count eighteen monkeys in this troop. In the lead and at the rear are two old males with long wisps of gray fringing their otherwise reddish cheeks. The dominant male travels in the middle of the harem and hustles the females along whenever they dawdle. There’s one other male who has no set position in the troop, most likely a youngster who will one day either dethrone the leader or be exiled from the tribe. Red colobuses are the acrobats of the jungle, and these swing through the lianas with spectacular speed and grace.

  “The bad boy,” Raymond says, pointing to a dark form trailing the troop. It stays well behind the others, never closing the gap. As it nears, I can see that it is a black-and-white colobus, heftier than its red-furred cousins, with a gray Amish beard and long white hair sprouting from its sides.

  While the troop of reds moves through the area and disappears, the black-and-white lingers on a branch directly above the tent, watching us break camp. I leave a handful of dried fruit for him as we set off.

  After hiking several kilometers, we find a barwood tree encased by a strangler dotted with orchids; the vine spirals up the trunk like a stairway in a lighthouse. It seems sturdy enough to climb, I think, tugging and feeling for handholds. I’ve been collecting bulbs and cuttings from ground plants, and this seems like a good way to pick up a few orchids. I climb the first ten feet easily, and only a little bit higher is the first of several splendid epiphytes; just above them, astonishingly, is what appears to be a bromeliad. While thousands of bromeliads are found in Central and South America, only one species is known to be indigenous to West Africa. I could be on the verge of discovering the second native African bromeliad. A few steps higher, almost within reach of the first orchid, I touch something crinkly and dry. It’s sloughed-off snake skin, and from its size I reckon it came from a green mamba.

  The bottom orchid is flowering. Its fluted petals, the color of alabaster flecked with cinnabar, harbor golden stamens ringing a delicate pistil dripping with nectar. I run my finger around the carpel and am immediately besieged by red ants pouring out from under the orchid. A dozen of them dig their pincers deep into my forefinger, and scores of others race up my arm and attack my neck. I quickly climb back down. The bromeliad remains undisturbed.

  “Stand still,” Innocent urges, helping brush off the ants. “Use the climbing rope next time.”

  The bites on my hands and arms are a stinging example of the many symbiotic relationships among species in the jungle. In this case the orchid produces enzymes and other basic foodstuffs that the ants need to subsist; in return, the ants zealously guard the orchid from intruders, save a select beetle species that carries pollen from plant to plant. Without the ants, the orchids would probably become extinct, and without the orchids, the ants would have to find a new food source or die.

  As we continue toward the great swamp, I recall how Alain and Caspar described animism as the sum of all parts in nature, a mosaic, with each piece integral to the overall design. The witch doctor in Boha believed the essence of everything to be the same; what differentiated things, he said, was the power of the spirit imbuing each bit of creation. There’s a hierarchy all around us, with man at the top of the worldly order and the gods forming their own astral ranks above man. When I spoke of Mokele-Mbembe as a stirring deep inside the individual, the witch doctor corrected me. Mokele-Mbembe is a god, he explained, and therefore separate from man. “We are this,” the witch doctor said, pinching his skin, “and Mokele-Mbembe is that,” he added, opening his arms wide and raising his head to the sky. To him, Mokele-Mbembe, along with the other great spirits in the animist pantheon, helped him to understand why coconuts grow on trees and how stars stay in the sky.

  “Beesch!… beesch!” Innocent calls off to my left. He points to a branch in a false nutmeg tree, where a lone black-and-white colobus monkey stares down at us. Innocent and Raymond are positive that it’s the same one we spotted back at the camp.

  Raymond studies the monkey through the binoculars. “He’s a messenger,” Raymond pronounces, correcting his earlier charge that the monkey was “a bad boy.” Innocent agrees: “Messenger, no doubt about it.” Raymond slices off a portion of manioc for it. In Ubangi folklore, monkeys often run errands for the gods. If this were a chimpanzee or a gorilla, Raymond would have left an entire loaf of manioc. Gorillas are the guardians of the gods, bouncers protecting their jungle lairs. Chimps are sentries, chattering warnings of danger. When chimps or gorillas appear, it’s a sure sign that a powerful spirit is nearby; when a monkey identified as a messenger appears, it means a god is planning his arrival. Raymond tells us to move on: “Let the messenger eat.”

  I check the map, and by my reckoning we’re entering the geographical center of all recorded Mokele-Mbembe sightings. In 1913 a Prussian military commander, Freiherr Von Stein, encountered traces of Mokele-Mbembe the same distance ahead of us as Djéké is behind. He was leading an expedition south from Cameroons, then a German colony, and while exploring the Sangha River, he came across “a monstrous” path in the jungle leading to a molombo vine. His guides recognized the path and droppings as those of Mokele-Mbembe. They told Von Stein about the creature, the biggest animal in the jungle, larger than an elephant and equipped with a long, flexible neck. Other tales of a jungle beast filtered down to Brazzaville, where enterprising journalists wrote dispatches about giant brontos trampling native villages. Six years after Von Stein’s expedition, the Smithsonian Institution offered a three-million-dollar reward for one of these Congo dinosaurs, dead or alive. Among those attracted by the bounty was the Englishman Leicester Stevens. He set off accompanied by his dog, Laddie, which had been decorated by the British Army for service as a “barrage dog,” or front-line courier during World War I. Stevens told reporters seeing him off that Laddie could take on anything, “from a tank to a dinosaur.” Stevens was never heard from again, and natives insisted that he and Laddie were both eaten by Mokele-Mbembe. The Smithsonian later retracted its bounty, and the hunt for t
he congo dinosaur wasn’t resumed until Mackal’s expedition in 1980.

  Innocent and I are walking ahead of Raymond when we see Ange and Gabriel in the distance and alter course to join them.

  Whoosh! A spear whizzes over my shoulder and sticks into a tree. The shaft vibrates on impact, strumming the air: a-wanngg.

  “Stop!” Raymond shouts.

  I stand rooted to the ground, with Innocent trembling next to me. Raymond trots past us to retrieve his spear, yanks it out of the bark, and kisses the tip. He turns and points behind us. “That way.”

  “You could have hit him,” Innocent reprimands Raymond.

  “At that distance I don’t miss… I was aiming at the tree.”

  He had thrown his spear to stop us from trespassing into the old village grounds of Boha, which are sacrosanct. While it would be bad enough for Innocent to step on a grave, it would be an unspeakable blasphemy for a mundélé to do so.

  Raymond leads us off in the opposite direction, and we soon find Theo eating in a roofless lean-to. “We got here two hours ago,” Theo says. “We saw a reedbuck. Real big… We almost got it, but it escaped into the swamp.” After the chase, Ange ordered Theo not to leave the campsite. “He and Gabriel said they had to do something alone.”

  Raymond pulls out a sharpening stone to hone his spear tip, and tells us to prepare for hunting. Innocent and I scout around for pebbles to use in my slingshot but soon give up, realizing that all surface rocks probably dissolved thousands of years ago.

  “If the water and tree roots didn’t get them, the acids did,” Innocent says, dipping a strip of litmus paper from his kit into a puddle. The paper turns bright red, reacting to the tannic and humic acids leaching from the trees.

  The jungle compensates for its lack of minerals through hydrolysis, energy conservation, and efficient recycling. There’s no waste here. All organic matter is eventually broken down into usable compounds: rotting leaves nourish bacteria, which in turn fuel protozoans, algae, fungi, termites, ants, millipedes, beetles, centipedes, birds, reptiles, and mammals. Parasites tap the strong for the eventual benefit of countless microscopic organisms. Death begets life.

  Because of the jungle’s near-constant rainfall, water carries away soil before it has time to accumulate. The topsoil in the rain forest rarely exceeds a foot or two in depth, and when Innocent digs a test hole, he hits clay about sixteen inches down, intimating that the trees around us are less a product of the soil than the soil is a product of the trees. The trees have adapted by evolving buttresses, giant horizontal braces that stabilize vertical growth. This frees the roots from anchor duty, allowing them to grow close to the surface, fanning out in the thin layer of nutrient-rich humus.

  Cut down the trees and everything quickly falls out of balance. Erosion accelerates, acidity increases, and nutrients are leached away, not to be replenished naturally through leaf fall and animal excrement. The manioc field in Boha, for instance, is only three years old, but its productivity is almost gone. Raymond told us that the village council plans to slash and bum another chunk of the jungle next year.

  When Ange and Gabriel return to the campsite, they pass out limes. “The old trees still work,” Gabriel says, slicing open a fruit and sucking the juice. “The spirits will never leave old Boha.”

  They have been paying their respects to the home of their ancestors. Seventy-three years ago, two missionaries visited old Boha for a day and then disappeared on their way back to Epena. Neither their bodies nor their canoes were ever found, so French investigators summarily concluded that the priests were murdered.

  “All lies. Our ancestors were peaceful people,” Ange insists.

  French troops were sent to exact justice in the colonial manner, killing fifty natives for every dead Frenchman. More than half of the village was massacred, including the chief, his wives, and all his children over the age of seven. The survivors were forced to resettle by the Bai River, where it would be easier for the French to monitor them. The old village was burned to the ground.

  “The first mundélés to see Boha were priests, and the next to come were Legionnaires with guns and torches… A good introduction to mundélés, eh?” Ange scowls.

  CHAPTER 23

  “CHASSE!” ANGE SOUNDS the beginning of the hunt. Our little safari group has obviously not been outfitted by Eddie Bauer or Banana Republic. Raymond has no left sleeve; Gabriel’s back pockets are back at home. “Good pot-holders,” he explains. Ange and I have sewed the inside seams of our pants with philodendron, or tie-tie, as the vine is commonly called.

  Gabriel gives us a short reminder in hunting techniques, telling us to walk on our toes and crouching to demonstrate how a low center of gravity makes it easier to jump, turn, and sprint. “Stay low. Stay ready.”

  “And stay alert for snakes,” Ange cautions.

  The equatorial rain forest has the highest concentration on earth of venomous snakes. Some live in the trees and others on the ground; most are four to seven feet long, with a few growing to twenty feet. The black mamba is perhaps the most dangerous: two drops of its venom can kill a person. While stories about its speed have been greatly exaggerated (mambas cannot outrace a man), it has unusually quick reflexes and a bellicose nature.

  Two varieties of black snake, the burrowing cobra and the African garter snake, live on the ground here, but they are sluggish and shy and rarely bite unless someone unwittingly sits on their shallow burrows. Their relatives in the trees, the Gold’s cobra and the black tree cobra, have a tendency to snooze on low branches, from which they can easily fall onto a shoulder or leg. The Gaboon viper is called the “sudden death snake,” and its two-and-a-half-inch fangs can pierce a shoe and splinter bone.

  “Is the snake bite kit handy?” Innocent asks. I pat the side of my bag. My doctor in New York, bless him, prepared me well for this trip. He’s a tropical-disease expert who spent years practicing in West Africa. In the stack of prescriptions he handed me was one for morphine. “Snake serums often don’t work, and there’s no serum for some snakes… Use the morphine if things look bleak. At least you’ll go out smiling.”

  Like the Epena crocodile hunters, the men of Boha coordinate the hunt through hand signals. An open palm means halt; a closed fist means retreat. When Ange, walking about thirty yards ahead, stops suddenly and holds up an open palm, we freeze and concentrate on the myriad jungle sounds. The only unusual thing I detect is the rapid pulse of my heart.

  Ange crawls back and whispers, “Dinner.” Like a sandlot quarterback, he draws lines of attack on the ground. Everyone but me is assigned a position. Gabriel kindly suggests that I tag along with him.

  “We will wait five minutes… Move on my whistle,” Ange instructs Raymond, who slinks off to circle behind a troop of monkeys. Theo positions himself on the spot; Ange and Innocent head to the left, while I follow Gabriel off to the right.

  In the old days, before they had access to guns, villagers used to hunt monkeys with crossbows. “That was hard,” Gabriel says. “Men like my grandfather used to hunt duiker and reedbuck with nets,” a technique still used by the Pygmies. Made out of vines, usually philodendron or vanilla bean, the nets would be strung from tree to tree. Several men would bury themselves in leaves near the traps, ready to spring on a snared animal with clubs or spears. The rest of the hunting party would spread out in a crescent about a kilometer away and chase the game toward the camouflaged nets. “Today we’re much smarter,” Gabriel assures me.

  A few minutes later Ange mimics the song of a black chat, a repetitious sequence of two notes, and Raymond starts running and shouting, trying to scare the troop our way. The forest erupts with howls and screeches as the older males sound the alert. Birds fly out of the canopy, adding their voices to the tumult. Gabriel sights down his gun barrel at a large crested mangabey in a troop of sixteen crashing through the upper limbs. Several monkeys in the middle of the pack appear clumsy and not particularly frightened; a few even pause to look back at Raymond, who is cl
osing fast.

  Gabriel rubs a lucky leaf on his gun sight and keeps the muzzle trained on the large male; he won’t fire, though, until Ange, the huntmaster, shoots. He clenches a spare shell between his teeth and blinks rapidly. Sweat beads up on the back of his neck.

  Ange fires and Gabriel almost simultaneously pulls his trigger. Blam! The sulfur fumes sting my nostrils. Blam! Gabriel’s second shot peppers a tree trunk. Ange fires his second round on the run, and Theo empties half a clip from his automatic. The unwounded mangabeys scramble in terror, leaping out of sight.

  Four monkeys have tumbled to the ground, but only one lies motionless. The others careen off in different directions. Raymond calls for help and I race after him, zigzagging in pursuit of a monkey hit in the shoulder; its right arm hangs limp, but it somehow manages to maintain speed.

  “Hoy-bah!” Raymond snorts, cocking his arm and loosing the spear without breaking stride. It strikes the ground inches from the mangabey, which cuts left.

  “Bad move, Mister Monkey.” Raymond grabs the spear and continues the chase. “You should go for the swamp.”

  This time the spear pierces the mangabey’s throat. The monkey falls to the ground, blood gushing out, and in a few seconds is lifeless. Raymond casually puts his foot on the toddler-sized creature and extracts the spear. He picks up the prize by its hand and drags it along. There’s no sign of Gabriel and Roland, but we can see Ange and Innocent chasing another mangabey. Ange has his machete out.

  “Must save shells,” Raymond says. “I’ve finished off monkeys with my bare hands.”

  Raymond strings the catch from a sapling, and we backtrack for the one that fell dead; bees, leather beetles, and blowflies are already swarming over it. Carolus Linnaeus, father of taxonomy, called blowflies the most voracious creatures on earth after watching them strip a horse faster than a pride of lions could. Raymond lifts the dead monkey and smacks it repeatedly against the ground, scattering the insects.