Perseverance

The elephants and the buffalo flooded the forest for days.  “It is the rain,” our staff explained to me.  The dry season was supposedly upon us, yet night, after the chimps and the researchers fell into their deep sleep and the leopards and genets emerged for their nightly hunt, rain began to fall from the sky in buckets.  The dry, barren swamps filled with deep, thick, blackened mud.  The bees and flies had already given up on their damp season of plenty; yet they enthusiastically returned to the forest to soak up the heavy moisture in the swamp air.  With them, came the feared beasts.  The elephants and the buffalo arrived in large numbers and tore through the forest.  They abandoned the savanna where they’d already retreated for the dry season.  They left tourists searching in vain from their land rovers and extravagant safari-lodge-porches and moved to our side of the reserve, tormenting us for days.  UWA finally sent us a ranger.  The three of us moved through the forest cautiously and silently, freezing at every low rustle in the bushes, exchanging nervous glances at the sound of cracking trees.  We never saw another elephant, but we heard them.  We found their dung, their giant tracks.  We wove through demolished trails that were covered in fallen branches and trees; we stomped through giant mud-filled crevices left by the feet of the giant beasts.  The chimps seemed unreachable.  Each time we found a route we thought could lead us to them, we were led astray to avoid the crashing and thumping of a nearby elephant or buffalo.  Modesto, our ranger, held his gun close to his side that week, finger poised on the trigger.

Then, just as suddenly as it began, the rainy spell ended.  The clouds dispersed.  The sun emerged in full force; boiling the dark swampy mud until the air sucked out all of the water and left cracked, dry dirt behind.  The elephant tracks remained like clay statues molded into the hard earth beneath our feet, a reminder of the real residents of this reserve.  The beasts moved on.  They traipsed back out of the forest, swinging their trunks and carelessly knocking down trees until they emerged in the expanse of grassland beyond.

And just like that, it seemed as if the chimps had vanished.  We hiked and searched, sweated and climbed, still returning to camp each afternoon looking breathless, dirt covered, sweat saturated, and pathetically downtrodden.  Where could they have gone?  I marvel at the way this single community of chimpanzees has ruled my life for the last four years, even before I arrived, at how they can leave me feeling so invigorated and hopeful one day, and so powerless and disheartened the next.  I’m not sure how many days it has been now.  I don’t even want to count it.  For seven hours every day I keep trying to cling to hope.  I crawl on the ground next to riverbeds, searching for knuckle prints in the dry sand.  I scan the treetops above, hoping for just one fresh nest, one sniff of dung, any sign at all that the chimpanzees have passed through.

The problem with building your dissertation around a population of chimpanzees with a potentially novel system of range use is that where they range at any given time, how they organize themselves in the forest - it is all a complete mystery.  They have evaded researchers for weeks, even months at a time for years.  Most chimpanzee communities organize themselves within a tightly controlled boundary.  Members of the community disperse within the territory, traveling in smaller “parties,” constantly reorganizing and reshuffling their party composition and association patterns.  All the while, they maintain a clear understanding of who is and isn’t a member of their strict community range.  All outsiders are considered to be hostile enemies.  Females tend to restrict their travel to a small “core area” within this territory, traveling just far enough each day to attain enough food for herself and her dependent offspring.  Meanwhile, males organize themselves into cohesive bands to go on regular “boundary patrols,” keeping out all chimpanzees from other communities and thus ensuring that the females within the territory are safe and are theirs alone.

Things seem to be shuffled and murky at Semliki though.  The habitat here is dry and patchy.  Most of the food that females need to reach each day occurs in one long corridor of rich rainforest along the riverbanks.  In the “gallery forest,” as we call it, tall, ancient trees loom over our heads by 40 meters or more.  Their canopies reach out like umbrellas that weave into one another, creating a shady ceiling over the Mugiri River.  Outside of that gallery tunnel, hungry chimpanzees are faced with miles and miles of tall, dry grasses.  The sun beats down on their backs unguarded.  It makes us sweat and slump over when we hike under it; our boots get heavy and our faces feel like they are on fire.  There are also patches of woodland with short, sparsely fruiting shrubs and trees, and a few muddy waterlogged swamps with some palms.  One of the Mugiri chimpanzees’ favorite foods is a legume-like seedpod that grows on giant Cynometra trees along the riverbank.  They look like large snap peas, and inside are dense, chewy, oily seeds that the chimps munch on and grind in their back teeth for hours on end.  These widely dispersed, slow-to-eat foods do not allow the Mugiri community to follow the usual chimpanzee rules of boundary patrols and overlapping core areas.  We aren’t really sure how they are coping with this.  We know that aggression is rare.  No one has ever heard or witnessed any sign of a boundary patrol, while at most study sites these battles regularly result in bloody hands, severed fingers – even death.  They are fierce, tense, famous events in chimpanzee behavior.  In fact, here at Semliki we’ve never seen any lethal aggression between males.  Furthermore, we have identified enough males to decide that we are tied with the largest community of chimpanzees ever studied, numbering at approximately 150 individuals now.  Our community seems to have a range that is at least twice as large as that one though, and their range may be even larger than we realize.  I’m here to find out just how they are using the space in this reserve.  Are boundary patrols really absent here?  Have community boundaries dissolved entirely?  That would be a first for chimpanzee research.  We aren’t sure if the males use the range in tight neighborhoods, if the community shifts their ranging to different parts of the reserve during different times of the year, if females range in core areas or in fluid bands like bonobos.  It is a mystery that excites me, perplexes me, and intimidates me all at once.

To begin to answer this mystery, however, I need to actually find these chimpanzees.  So we hike.  We rise a little earlier each day; entering the forest closer and closer to the precise second that the sun rises, until finally we are going in so early that we cannot see the sticks and dirt under our feet.  We travel further.  Some days we travel slower.  We climb the escarpment from every angle we can imagine, huffing and puffing, pulling ourselves higher and higher into the thin, chilly air at the top.  We trudge through the river, splashing with our gumboots, searching for discarded fruits and smelling for dung.  Sometimes we talk; most times we walk in silence.  My mind has begun to wander.  I think of the chimpanzees.  I try to think like them.  I wonder what they like to eat, how far they can possibly travel, what the river feels like under their feet, how the sun feels on their backs.  I also think of home.  I try to push intrusive, unrelenting thoughts of ice cream and veggie burgers and cold beer from my mind.  I imagine where my friends are now.  I think of running with them often.  I think of all the things I’d tell them about my day if we were going for a usual brisk, relaxing evening on the sidewalks in our running shoes together, sharing our days through labored breaths while we swipe the sweat from our brows and weave our way through traffic and past houses and mailboxes.  Then I try to pull my thoughts back to the chimps, where we are.  I try to not let myself lose hope.

The loss of hope will be the death of this dissertation.  Creativity and patience are the only things that I can cling to now.  At the end of most days, even after ten or more miles of hiking and climbing, I often come back only to lace up my old trail shoes and jog around our camp.  The shoes are already nearly in pieces.  I keep stitching them back together anyway.  I don’t really need the exercise, but I do need those twenty minutes of rhythmic steps and faster, shallower breaths.  Even back home, ending each day this way was often the only way I held myself together.  I let my brain go wherever it needs to while I run around and around the 200 meter loop, pausing in the middle to sprint up and down the short, arduous hill that leads into the forest.  At the end of each short run I sit down on my tent porch, enjoying the familiar burn in my cheeks, the way the breeze feels on my sweat soaked neck.  This is always the moment of the day when I feel most hopeful that I will be able to do this.

It was during this moment yesterday that a new idea occurred to me.  If the chimps seem to have packed up and moved on, then so will I.  We are hearing rumors of chimp calls from the nearby village.  There is one trail near there attached to the local UWA headquarters.  Next week we will take our small tent, a few containers of cold rice and beans, our gumboots and notebooks, and my old trail running shoes, and we will continue our search.  We will not let the chimps evade us for long.

Earthquakes and Elephants

It all began just after midnight.  Camp was still.  The forest echoed with the songs of cicadas and frogs.  The rats were in the kitchen polishing off our discarded crumbs of rice and flour.  The warm, sticky haze in the air began to give way to the chill of the night.  We were asleep in our tent.  Hours before I’d shoved in my earplugs and given in to the exhaustion of the day, switching off my headlamp and letting the weight of my eyes overcome me.  In an instant my eyes were flung open.  I peeled my sweaty hair from my face and lifted my head, yanking the plugs from my ears to listen to what I thought was the sound of thunder.  The beams of wood that held our platform above the earth began to shift.  The dark canvas walls of the tent bent and swayed.  The forest fell silent. Then it came alive with the frantic roars of colobus monkeys and screams of baboons.  I heard a deep rumble that I thought could only be thunder moving from the escarpment just east of us.  Here comes one hell of a storm, I thought as I jumped from my bed, pulling the mosquito net from under my mattress and ducking out of our cocoon.  When I entered the chilly night air I was surprised to find only a light trickle of rain and a gentle breeze.  Still, I yanked down all of my laundry, ran to the main area and moved my dung samples to a safe, dry place, expecting a heavy rainfall to follow.  When I returned to the tent I noticed that Adam was awake and confused.  He drifted back to sleep immediately, but I just sat with my eyes refusing to shut and my mind racing with questions about this eerie storm.

It wasn’t a storm.  It was an earthquake.  USGS measured it at a magnitude 5.4, with the epicenter not far to our north, at Lake Albert.  Our camp sits in a rift valley along a river.  To the east is a giant escarpment, and to the west is the Rwenzori Mountain range.  I had been stirred awake not by a gust of wind that shifted my tent, but a quake in the earth that shook the whole reserve.  This seemed surreal and exciting all at once, but I had no idea that the day was about to get stranger.

I knew where I wanted to find the chimps today.  Yesterday morning I stumbled upon them at the same spot that we did several times last week.  Adam was in town getting supplies with our camp manager.  Typically on a day like that I would go out with a ranger provided to us by the Ugandan Wildlife Authority (UWA).  The director of the project pays monthly salaries for two of the UWA rangers here in the reserve so that we can have two in camp with us at all times.  They carry a gun to protect us from poachers, buffalo, and elephants, especially from elephants.  It also guarantees that one researcher will always have someone to go into the forest with.  It is absolutely against the rules to travel alone in the forest here.  Dealing with the bureaucratic forces of an African country is often the ultimate test of patience and perseverance, to say the least, and on this particular day I was fighting the frustration of being without a single ranger for the fourth day in a row.  We keep two full time porters in camp to maintain our trails, repair camp, carry our water, and gather firewood.  We pulled one of them from his daily trail-slashing duties to accompany me on a chimp search.

Baluku and I did not find the chimps yesterday.  They found us.  Last week, when I had good, open observations for nearly 3 hours I noticed a large fig tree just off the trail.  Right before the whole group left us, I watched an adult female move across a fig branch with her infant tightly clinging to her chest.  She gingerly reached her fingers out over a clump of the green, round figs, giving each one a slight squeeze.  She plucked one, moved it to her nose, inhaled, and dropped it before moving to the next tree.  I decided right then that this was the tree to watch.  While most of the fruits in the forest are quite predictable, following the ebb and flow of biannual rain cycles with their fruiting and hibernating, fig trees scatter themselves among the whole forest, fruiting at random.  Each time one fills with perfectly ripe fruit it becomes the hottest spot for chimp activity in the reserve.  Ficus mucoso, the large tree that I was looking at right then, can feed many chimps for several days.  As soon as those figs became ripe, that female would likely return, and so would many others, spending all day long gorging themselves on the juicy little treats.  So we returned to that fig tree, clicked off our packs, found a soft spot on the trail, and plopped ourselves down.  Within minutes Hunter, the one handed male, silently appeared above me to once again stare down at this strange human with the blonde hair.  We spent nearly an hour with Hunter and a few other chimps before they left.

Today we set out straight for that giant fig tree.  The earthquake left me feeling a bit disheveled and distracted, but my first priority was to find that party of chimps once again.  We marched through the forest, headed straight for the escarpment.  My eyes scanned all around me for prints, leftover fruit pieces, nests, and motion in the branches overhead.  The further from camp we got, the faster we began to move.  After nearly two hours of weaving over and through the river, sliding through mud and ducking under fallen trees, my mind began to wander a bit.  That was when we heard that unmistakable cry of a chimpanzee – not just one chimpanzee actually, a whole group of them.  They began to call out from both sides of us, and it sounded like they were moving toward the same place that we were.  When I hear a chimpanzee pant-hoot, it freezes my thoughts, my breath, my whole body.  Then, impulsively, I run toward the sound.  This is what we began to do.  We picked up the pace instantly, skipping over logs and under vines as we softly moved toward the relentless calls of a large group of chimpanzees.  We were getting closer!  My heart was beginning to race.  My pants and my shirt and my hair were dripping with water from last night’s rain as we glided through the tall grass of the savanna.  I passed over large piles of dung on the trail.  They looked like the rain had washed them.  “Is this buffalo?” Adam asked.  “No,” I answered, “That’s elephant.  Look, it’s been washed by the rain though.”  Then he paused, “I smell something here.  Is that chimp?”  I sniffed for a second, “no, elephant.”  More calls!  I moved even faster now.

We were closer, and closer, and almost there!  I bolted around a corner, dead set on the great day this was about to become, and there they were.  Not chimps.  Not baboons or colobus monkeys.  Not even buffalo.  It was a heard of elephants, and I had run us right into the middle of it.  Now, when you are on a safari in a giant Land Rover, elephants are an amazing and exciting sight.  They were the highlight of my safari in the Masai Mara in 2008.  Right now, right here, however, on a trail at the base of an escarpment with no ranger, no gun, no car, no easy direction to run to, elephants were the very last beings on earth that I wanted to startle.  That is just what I had done though.  Here I stood, just a couple of meters from these giant beasts, paralyzed with fear.  I could not speak.  I could not breathe.  I felt like I was not even in my own body anymore, like I’d suddenly floated over this trail and looked down on us all, laughing at just how out of place I was.  I did not belong here.  They belonged here.  I’ve never felt so small and insignificant in my life.  One step.  It would only take one step of that giant foot to crush me.  For what felt like an eternity, but was actually less than 30 seconds, my mind raced with different strategies.  Could I run?  Even if I were a good sprinter, which I’m not, I would never outrun an elephant.  No, that was a bad idea.  Should I climb a tree?  There were no large trees here!  Do I speak?  Do I turn my back?  Have they seen me?  Right then the chimps called again.  Adam was moving toward me, wondering why I’d stopped moving toward the calls.  I could not so much as raise a hand to him.  My eyes met the eyes of a big, scared, elephant cow.  Like me, she seemed frozen in fear. 

Then Adam saw them, and when I knew he had, like a switch, it snapped my body back to life.  The only word that would softly come out of my throat was, “Shit.”  With that, the elephants swung their heads away from me.  They lifted their trunks, then let their legs follow, and began to storm in the other direction, all with one eye on me.  I took their cue and did the same.  Slowly stepping away, I began to turn my body to follow my feet.  I looked at Adam and realized he was spinning around to bolt. I heard myself say, “Don’t run!”  That seemed like a bad idea right then.  I had this image of us crashing through the bush, acting like a couple of crazed humans, scaring these elephants that were already on edge.  Our only hope was to keep them calm.  I found myself reaching for a tree to climb it.  That was silly, because the tree was not even as tall as the elephant.  I was wearing a giant pack and gumboots.  Where was I going to go?  We just moved back, away from the calls of the chimps.  I’m embarrassed to say that as we parted ways with the elephants all I could think was, “Shouldn’t I try to go back and follow those chimps?”  I think Adam might have carried me away if I tried though.

We tried to get out of there.  That involved some poor decisions on our point though.  We turned a corner, reached a different trail, and began our silly laughter of relief.  “Can you believe that?!”  “What just happened?!”  “That was crazy!”  We weren’t as safe as we thought just yet though.

With a quick glance at the map, we realized the only other trail to take back was a longer one that took us through the swamp.  We would continue to move down into the valley, back toward camp.  In hindsight, a swamp was a terrible idea.  What do elephants love even more than giant expanses of grassland?  They love the deep, thick, cool mud of a swamp, especially after a fresh rain.  And onward to the swamp we marched.

It was not long before we saw more dung, even fresher this time.  We fell silent again.  No gasps, no cussing, just a point of my finger, and a deafening silence between us.  I have never heard my husband hike that quietly and gracefully.  I heard him step more softly than I ever thought he could.  We had nowhere to go but forward.  We were in the middle of a herd of these beasts, and we just wanted to get home.  There were giant tracks all over.  They created small wading pools all over the swamp.  We were walking over crushed branches and logs.  It made my heart jump into my throat to think of the heavy foot that crumbled these trees beneath it.

I saw urine on the ground – a fresh, smelly, heart-wrenching puddle of elephant pee, right next to my foot.  We began examining the tracks.  Where are the toes?  Which way was this elephant going?  Were we just following it?  That was when I saw different tracks – human tracks.  Our staff had not been on this trail in weeks.  UWA did not maintain this trail.  No tourists came here.  Those tracks could only belong to one kind of person: poachers.  Inside each of the giant elephant feet was a human boot, clearly in close pursuit.  For a second these giant beasts that I was so terrified of seemed so weak and vulnerable to me.  My heart broke for them.  I understood why they would want to trample me.  Oh yes, they want to trample me.  That thought snapped me back into the reality of fleeing this whole day.

We made it out of the swamp.  We made it back to the safe part of the forest.  We didn’t laugh this time.  We didn’t shout.  We just sighed deeply, exhaling two hours of tightly held breaths as we reached out to touch each other on the shoulder.  I nearly fell over from exhaustion as Adam touched my shoulder in the same moment that the adrenaline began to leave my veins.  We collapsed onto the trail.  Both of us were suddenly starving.  For a few minutes we scarfed down chapatis and bananas in silence.  Then we began to talk.  Actually, we began to rant.  Those chimps were so close!  A whole group of them!  We almost had them!  We could have followed them all day!  We knew where they were.  I could shut my eyes and picture them shoving figs into their mouths, rolling them around and spitting out the leftovers, all while we were stuck on this side of the elephants.  The only way to the chimps was through the herd, and we weren’t going back there.  We hiked back to camp with heavy feet and discouraged, downward stares.  We spent the afternoon catching up on data, washing dung for seeds, transferring DNA samples to drying tubes, and jumping every time someone or some animal made a sudden move.  This was by far the strangest Independence Day I’ve ever had.