The Chimp and the River by David Quammen

Author:David Quammen [Quammen, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

17

The idea of Ouesso and its market served as a crucial enticement to get the Voyager, as I imagine him, on his way. That’s where the wildcat notion of his wildcat journey began: Ouesso. He hadn’t intended to go farther. A trip down to Ouesso and back (he had meant to come back, though life unfolded otherwise) would be ambitious and risky enough. But even before the idea of Ouesso, there was the dizzying happenstance of the tusks. If it was Ouesso that pulled him, it was the tusks that pushed him.

He had never gone looking for ivory. It came by accident. One day he was upriver on the Ngoko, working his net at the mouth of a feeder stream that drained from the Congo side. It was dry season—near the end of the long dry season, early March. The river was low and slow and warm, which was why he had thought the freshening flow of the feeder stream might attract fish. As it happened, not many. The catch there scarcely repaid his effort. So in midafternoon he decided to walk inland, back-following this little stream into the forest, looking for pools where small fish might be trapped and vulnerable. He fought his way along the mud banks for almost half a mile, through the thorn vines, over the cobble of roots, finding few pools and no fish. It was frustrating but not surprising. He paused for breath, dipped up a handful of water to drink, and frowned ahead, deciding whether to continue. That’s when he noticed a large gray mound in the stream bottom about forty yards on. To you or to me it would have looked like a granite boulder. But there are no granite boulders in northern Congo or southeastern Cameroon, and the Voyager had never seen one. He knew immediately what it was: an elephant. His heartbeat surged and his first instinct was to run.

Instead he stared. His legs didn’t go. He lingered, unsure why. He sensed terror in the scene somewhere, but the terror wasn’t his. Then he realized what seemed wrong—the elephant was down, and not in a position that might suggest sleep. Its face lay smashed into the mud, its trunk sideways, its hip canted up. He approached carefully. He noticed the purplish red holes along its lower sides and belly. Protruding from one of those holes was a Baka spear. He could see the awful way the beast had collapsed down over its left shoulder, its front leg on that side bent out at a ruinous angle. By the time he had crept within ten yards, he knew that it was dead.

A sizable male, a youngish adult, with good ivory. Left to die alone in a stream bottom and rot. Quickly the Voyager made some deductions. Probably it had been killed by a hunting party of Baka men—but not quite killed, just mortally wounded. It had broken away, escaped, and to do that, presumably, it would have had to kill one or two of the Baka who surrounded it.

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