In the fall of 1967, Dian set up a new study site on the Rwanda side of the Virungas. For the first few years she had the help of a Belgian woman who lived there, Alyette DeMunck. Alyette had just lost her son and nephew, to whom she had given a trip to Africa as a graduation present from their university in Belgium. The two young men had driven down from Kampala to see her and had taken a wrong turn into the Congo, where they were arrested and killed by soldiers who thought they were mercenaries. Alyette helped Dian choose the saddle between Mounts Karisimbi and Visoke as her new base, which Dian, combining the two names, called Karisoke, and she negotiated with the local people who built the cabins. Dian was hopeless at languages.

     In 1968 the National Geographic Society, which was sponsoring Dian, sent a photographer named Bob Campbell to film her at work. Bob was from Kenya-tall, quiet, kind, a devoted conservationist and a fine photographer who has accompanied the Duke of Edinburgh on safari. A "tenderness" developed between them, as one of Dian's friends delicately phrased it, since Bob was married. He spent several months at a time on the mountain with her until 1972. "Bob was perfect for her-a calming influence," the friend recalled. His movie is a poignant record of her early years at Karisoke. The footage is not exactly cinema verite; there is a slight flush of self-consciousness on Dian's face as she pretends to be absorbed in note-taking or walks before a breathtaking bit of scenery. She was always a little self-conscious about her six-foot height, and complained to friends that she wished she were more! "stacked," but she is definitely a good-! looking woman, willowy, with an Irish twinkle, and she looks very happy. Her voice is worldly, self-possessed, laid-back California. It has none of the innocence of some naturalists'. In one sequence Dian is sitting with a gorilla. The gorilla takes Dian's notebook, looks at it carefully, and politely passes it back, then does the same with her pencil-such a familiar, friendly interaction that you almost forget the gorilla isn't human. A few minutes later Dian and her student, Kelly Stewart, are watching gorillas together. Kelly looks just like her dad, the actor Jimmy Stewart. What an idyllic life, one thinks as Dian romps in her high rubber boots among Hagenia trees dripping with strands of lichen, looking here and there for gorillas. Everything at Karisoke-the cluster of tin-sided shacks high in the montane forest, Dian's home, which she created from nothingseems harmonious.

     In fact, Dian "was under enormous pressures that few people knew about," according to Bob Campbell, whom I reached by telephone. He now lives outside Nairobi, not far from where Karen Blixen had her coffee plantation. "She had to construct the camp and keep it going. It was very hard to get supplies, and her funds were meager. There were a couple of students who didn't work out-who came looking for a fabulous life in the bush and couldn't take the harsh conditions. Nothing is easy up there. She had to help Alyette through her tragedy, and she herself had suffered severely during the Congo rebellion, when she was held by the soldiers at Rumangabo." How? I asked. "She was always reluctant to describe it," Bob said. Was she tortured? I asked. "No," Bob said. "She was not harmed physically." Was she sexually molested? "Yes," he said, "and this experience set her attitudes toward the local people."

    The main external problem for both Dian and Bob at that time was that the gorillas were wild and unapproachable and afraid of humans. The only people they had had contact with were the Batutsi cattle herders and the "poachers." The Batutsi are the famous Watusi-tall, lanky Hamitic warriorpastoralists who came down from the north some four hundred years ago and subjugated the Bahutu-short, stocky Bantu agriculturists who had come from the south even earlier. When Rwanda won independence from Belgium in 1962, the Bahutu rose up and slaughtered their former masters. Thousands of Batutsi fled into the forests of the Parc des Volcans, driving with them tens of thousands of head of lyrehomed Ankole cattle. No one minded that these people and their stock were in the park, disturbing the gorillas, until Dian came along.

   Most of the poachers in the forest are Batwa pygmiesRwanda's third, and original, ethnic group. The Batwa have been hunter-gatherers since time immemorial. They are poachers only by recent legislative fiat. Like their cousins, the Bambuti and the Efe pygmies in the Ituri Forest of Zaire, they are a fun-loving people, mischievous, ready to dance at the drop of a hat. Incredibly alert in the forest, they have as little as possible to do with farming, which they consider dull, hot, demeaning work. The main quarry of the Batwa are forest antelope-bushbucks and black-fronted duikersfor which they lay snares. An antelope steps into one and, whoosh, he is hoisted into the air.

   Occasionally one of Dian's gorillas would get a hand or a foot caught in a Batwa snare. It would usually struggle free, but its wrist or ankle would be a bloody mess, gangrene would set in, and often it would end up dying a month or two later. Understandably, when this happened Dian would be very upset. She considered the Batwa and the handful of Bahutu who live among them and organize them and make use of their superior hunting abilities the main threat to the gorillas, and as time went on she devoted increasing energy to cutting their snares, destroying their traps, raiding their villages, terrorizing and punishing them.

   How much Dian's war on the local cattle herders and hunters was motivated by concern for the gorillas, and how much it served as an outlet for her Thoreauvian antipathy to people, especially to Africans, after what had happened at Rumangabo, is hard to say. There are many different views of Dian. People either loved her or loathed her. In general, the Dian lovers are women who knew her in the States, socially, or through her warm, funny, generous-spirited letters, while the Dian haters are fellow scientists who were up on the mountain with her. The lovers describe the haters as "aggressive Young Turks who were in competition with her," while the haters describe the lovers' perception of her as "rose-tinted." Very few people are aware of what happened at Rumangabo. The experience must have burned into her being, as the torture and sodomy T. E. Lawrence suffered from Turks did into his.
Bob Campbell remains one of her staunch defenders. "She was caught up in circumstances beyond her control, disasters that upset her mind in the early stages and soured her later years. Others would have quit. She was never physically strong, but she had guts and willpower and an urgent desire to study the gorillas, and that was what kept her up there." I asked him how close their relationship had been. "Close enough that she didn't want me to leave," he said. "She came to rely on me for many things that weren't part of my assignmentrunning the staff, dealing with the students. After six months we reached an agreement that we were both up there to work for the gorillas, but even so, I left before my assignment was completed." Friends remember that Dian was devastated by Bob's departure. The part of her that yearned for a mate and children was shattered.

   The primatological community, which had mixed feelings about Dian, is a small, intense one. It isn't easy for primatologists to get funded, and university positions and opportunities to work in the field are limited. This forces them into competition with one another. In order to get his Ph. D. the primatologist must go out into the field for a year or two, alone or with several colleagues, and collect data. This is the critical phase of his or her career, because a scientist who doesn't have data doesn't have anything. It is also the most stressful phase. You have to adapt to primitive living conditions, an alien environment and culture, and isolation. The fieldwork itself is a constant worry. Maybe your line of reasoning will turn out to be all wrong and you'll have to come up with a new hypothesis and collect entirely different data. Maybe somebody will come up with a better approach to your problem and solve it before you do. Maybe-this is a huge worrysomebody will rip off your data. Or maybe your data will be lost or destroyed. (This happened to Kelly Stewart, who was collecting data at Karisoke for a Ph.D. from Cambridge. One night she hung her wet clothes too close to the wood stove in her cabin, and while she was having dinner at Dian's cabin, eighteen months' worth of field notes went up in smoke.) And during all this time you get little or no feedback. The animals certainly aren't going to tell you if you're on the right track.

    Dian was not academically qualified to study gorillas, and that always bothered her. She felt in the shadow of Schaller, who in eighteen months had picked up probably 80 to 90 percent of what there is to learn about mountain gorillas, at least at our present level of understanding. So in 1973 she went back to college. If she was going to get continued support, she was going to have to get a degree. She enrolled in the Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour at Darwin College, Cambridge, under Robert Hinde, Jane Goodall's supervisor, and fell in with some brilliant young primatologists. For the next few years she went back and forth between Cambridge and Africa.

    There had been a tremendous surge of environmental awareness in the West while Dian was on the mountain. Ecology, an abstruse scientific term, had become a household word. The baby-boomers were getting Ph.D.s in record numbers from newly created or expanded natural-science departments. A new breed of biologist was arriving to do fieldwork in the African bush. He brought with him new political attitudes, an openness to the local people, a willingness to learn their language, to include their needs and point of view in his conservation strategies. The only way you can save animals in the Third World, these newwave biologists realized, is to make the animals worth more to the local people alive than dead, to give them a stake in their survival.

  Dian was intimidated by the young scientists who came to Karisoke to study with her. She felt that they were more interested in their graphs of gorilla reproductive success than in the gorillas themselves. They weren't willing to interrupt ,their observation schedules to go and cut snares. She believed that the local people were lazy, corrupt, and incompetent, and that there was no point in trying to work with them. Her first priority was to stop the poaching.
   The young scientists felt her war with the poachers was nasty and inappropriate, and they didn't want to be associated with it.

Page four of Fatal Obsession, The Jungle Death of Diane Fossey