Ancestral Passions by Virginia Morell

Author:Virginia Morell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 1995-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 28

AN UNSTOPPABLE MAN

Louis remained in the hospital for a month recovering from his bee stings and stroke. He was finally released in mid-February 1971, though he had to return daily for physical therapy. As she always had, Mary had traveled up from Olduvai as soon as she heard about Louis’s plight, but she headed back just as quickly when she was assured of his recovery. Louis thus once again found himself alone at their Langata home. White-haired and heavy, with his paralyzed right arm dangling awkwardly at his side and his left arm braced against his cane, Louis hobbled slowly but determinedly through the house—a half-crumpled figure who refused to give way.

“Louis used to joke [that]… he had more lives than the cat… because he had already had more than nine life-threatening experiences,” said Joan Travis, one of the founding members of the Leakey Foundation. “And he survived them all. So he, with bravado, would say, ‘You know, I’m going to go on forever’; and then on the other hand he would recognize his frailties and he would say, ‘I’m a prisoner in my own body; it’s a terrible thing. And I used to play tennis and I used to do this and I will again some day.’ He would hold it out [as a possibility] for himself as well as for you. But it was also apparent that each succeeding incident would take its toll.”

More than ever now, Louis was forced to delegate his field studies, to find protégées who would embrace his dreams as their own. Besides Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas—the “trimâtes,” as they were sometimes called—Louis had a young woman studying the De Brazza monkeys in western Kenya, another beginning to track wild colobus monkeys, and a third looking into (yet again) the classification of the wildebeest. Galdikas was about to leave for Indonesia to watch the orangutans, as soon as Louis found the money. Although financing these ventures was always trouble-some, Louis was omnivorously curious; he wanted to launch studies of the pygmy chimpanzee as well as such little-known African mammals as the aardvark, zorilla (a creature resembling the skunk), and warthog—animals he had watched as a child, but whose behaviors remained little-known.

There was certainly no shortage of projects—and an equally long line of eager students to take them on. Most of Louis’s recruits, as ever, were bright, attractive young women. “Everyone knew that Louis liked to take on young women who were untrained in academic matters and send them into the field,” said Alan Walker, who was then teaching anatomy at the University of Nairobi. “You’d meet some young woman and you’d ask, ‘What do you do?’ And she’d say, ‘Oh, Dr. Leakey’s got me doing this.’ And it would be something for which she was totally untrained, that Louis was training her to do—sometimes quite important things. I don’t think he ever did this with a man; he might point a young man in a direction and help him get his doctorate.

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