In 1977 Digit was murdered and mutilated, and Dian "came to live with in an insulated part of myself," as she wrote in her book. She was increasingly reclusive and morose and peculiar, retreating even from the gorillas. During one eighteen-month period in the late seventies she went out to the gorillas only six times, when important visitors-a film crew, the American ambassador and his wife, big contributors to gorilla conservation-came up. On these occasions she pulled herself together and was charming, but by this time she was a sick and increasingly bitter woman. She had emphysema, for which two packs a day of Impala iiltree, the strong local cigarettes, were doing no good. She began to drink. Communications with other researchers in the camp took place mainly through notes.

    Dian's consuming interest was in punishing the poachers. Once she put a noose around a captured pygmy, threw the rope over a rafter, and threatened to hoist him if he didn't start talking. Horrible rumors began circulating among the Belgian doctors in Kigali: that she had injected one poacher with gorilla dung to give him septicemia; that she had hired a sorcerer to poison another particularly incorrigible one.

    Dian's treatment of the poachers didn't really bother the Rwandan authorities, since the park guards were just as brutal once she turned the poachers over to them. What the Rwandans resented was her open contempt for them. Dian was convinced that they were all corrupt. She publicly accused the conservateur of the park of being behind the attempted abduction of one young gorilla, at a time when the park officials were finally beginning to take their job seriously. There was a big row between Dian and O.R. T.P.N., the Rwandan agency that controls foreign visitors to the country's national parks, over David Attenborough, who had asked Dian if he could shoot a gorilla sequence for his "Life on Earth" series. Dian said fine. Until then she had been allowed to invite up anybody she wanted to. Attenborough went up with a crew, but when he came down he was harassed for not having a permit from O.R.T.P.N., which wanted to assert its control over park visitors. Dian was furious. So bad were the relations between her and the director of tourism, Laurent Habiyaremye, that some Rwandans and European expatriates believe it was he who had her killed. According to this theory, Habiyaremye wanted to get rid of Dian so O.R. T.P.N. could take over Karisoke and turn it into a tourist facility, convert the groups of gorillas used for research into tourist groups, and make that much more money. A spokesman for O.R. T.P.N. told me that if they had wanted to take over Karisoke they wouldn't have had to kill her; they could have just ordered her to leave. He said they wanted Karisoke to remain a research center that would one day be run by Rwandans.

    The mountain gorilla proved to be as good a fund-raising animal as the panda or the whale. As money began to pour in, Dian agreed for it to be channeled through the African Wildlife Foundation, which was already set up to process donations. But there was a big blowup over how the money should be used. Dian wanted it with no strings attached, to beef up her antipoaching patrols, to implement what she called "active convervation." Her refusal to cooperate with the Rwandans and the things she was doing to the poachers were unacceptable to the A. W .F., so Dian ended up pulling out with her Digit Fund, and accusing the A.W.F. of stealing her money. The A.W.F. joined with other conservation groups to fund the Mountain Gorilla Project, which takes a three-pronged approach to saving the gorillas: set up tourism as a way of providing Rwanda with income from the animals and a reason for keeping them alive; train and increase the number of park guards; and educate the local people about the value of the gorillas and their habitat. In 1978 two young Americans, Bill Weber and Amy Vedder, came out to help set up the project while working on respective Ph.D.s on the socioeconomic aspects of conservation and on the feeding ecology of the mountain gorilla. Bill and Amy were a couple (Dian had particular trouble dealing with couples), and an extremely dynamic one. Amy was everything Dian was not: a highly trained zoologist who spoke French and got on well with Africans, a wife and mother to boot. So jealousy was probably a factor in the bad blood that developed between them. But it was also that Dian couldn't stomach the idea of tourists, whom she called' 'idle rubberneckers, " being marched up to see the gorillas. She thought the tourism was going to be handled the way it is in Zaire, where twenty or thirty tourists at a shot are taken up by a dozen pygmies who cut a wide swath in the vegetation right up to the gorillas and taunt them into beating their chests and screaming and charging. In 1980 she fired several shots over the heads of a party of Dutch tourists who had hiked up to Karisoke uninvited.

    It became increasingly clear to friends and foes alike that Dian's presence at Karisoke had become counterproductive and possibly even dangerous to herself. Bill Weber drafted a letter to the National Geographic Society, Dian's main backer, describing how badly run Karisoke was and speculating on a link between her persecution of the poachers and the fact that the only gorillas who were being killed were the ones in her study groups. This letter found its way into the hands of a friend of Dian' s at the American Embassy, who showed it to Dian. She was already convinced that there was a conspiracy to get rid of her. Now she had evidence. She took to sneaking up on the researchers' cabins at night and listening to their conversations, to opening and reading their mail.
 

   Weber threatened to send his critical letter if the American ambassador, Frank Crigler, didn't get her out of the country, and Crigler spent" an enormous amount of government time," as he told me, on what was a private-sector problem-trying to find an academic institution where she could go and write her book, which she was under increasing pressure to produce. Harvard and other institutions were approached, but none was interested. Finally Cornell offered her a visiting associate professorship, and in 1980 she left for Ithaca, where she stayed three years before returning to Karisoke.
 

    While Dian was in Ithaca, Sandy Harcourt, one of the new-wave zoologists, a bright, handsome, reserved, ambitious young Englishman, took over as director of Karisoke. He is one of the leading experts on Gorilla gorilla beringei. Sandy had spent several years on the mountain with Dian in the mid-seventies. They started out friends, but then Kelly Stewart, of whom Dian was very fond, began living with Sandy. Dian' s antipathy toward couples surfaced, and she turned on them.

    The Harcourts (Sandy and Kelly got married in 1977) live outside Cambridge, but I reached them in Beverly Hills, where they were visiting Kelly's parents for a few days, on their way to a primate center in Japan. Sandy didn't want to talk about Dian. A number of primatologists didn't want to talk about Dian, because they felt that the negative things they would have to say would do nobody any good, especially the gorillas, with whom she is identified. But Kelly wanted to talk.

    The fIrst time I saw gorillas was in the summer of 1972, in Zaire," she began. "I had graduated from Stanford with a degree in anthropology and I was on a tourist trip and I went up to see the eastern-lowland gorillas near Bukavu. I was so amazed, I knew I wanted to work with them. So I wrote Dian-I'd read her National Geographic articleand asked if she needed anybody, a gofer, a research assistant, anything. After she got the letter, she met me at Stanford to check me out. At the first meeting and for a long time afterward I idolized her. That's how a lot of the students thought of her, until they got to Karisoke.

   "When I got there in 1974 she was engaged to a French doctor in Ruhengeri [a good-size town below the mountain], but that didn't work out. She broke up with him near the end of 1975. The problem was that she wasn't willing to leave Karisoke, and he didn't want to live up there. Her trouble with relationships was that she wanted them and she didn't. Birute Galdikas [the third "Leakey lady"] married a Dayak with bones through his nose, but Dian did not consider that strategy.

    She had a perfectly colonial attitude toward the Africans. On Christmas she'd give the most extravagant presents to them; other times she'd humiliate them, spit on the ground in front of them-once I even saw her spit on one of the workers-break into their cabin and accuse them of stealing and dock their pay. Two researchers left Karisoke because of the way she treated the Africans. 'My people,' she called them, like Blixen. They were loyal to her, but they had to stay because there are few paid jobs in the area and there is a certain cachet to being a tracker. The men never knew when she was going to start yelling at them. When she left camp it was like a cloud had risen, and it got worse over the years."

    Soon after her funeral, five of Dian's trackers-Bahutu she had hired from the villages below-were arrested and placed in the Ruhengeri prison, where they were held for months without charges. The panga, the heavy-bladed local machete that was used to kill her and was found under her bed, was from the camp. Prints were unobtainable because it had been passed from hand to hand at the scene of the crime.

    According to one theory, the trackers were taken in because of a cultural misunderstanding. At Dian's funeral, Amy Vedder went up to Nemeye, one of the trackers, and hugged him. This was a very American thing to do at a funeral, but not a Rwandan one at all. Rwandans shake hands vigorously upon meeting, they don't hug. The police, who were at the funeral looking for anything out of the ordinary and knew that there was bad blood between Dian and Amy, saw her hug Nemeye and assumed the two of them were in cahoots, so Nemeye and the four others were taken in. Kelly Stewart said, "The guys in jail are really good guys. It's not possible any of them could have done it."

    Many other Karisoke veterans agree with her. Subscribers to the tracker theory offer two motives: money and revenge for humiliation. African men find it very hard to be dressed down by a woman.
 Other theories focus on the Bahutu poachers who live with the Batwa. They certainly had reason to want her out of the picture. Dian had at least one mortal enemy, the poacher Munyarukiko. Munyarukiko was a real killer, and he hated Dian. She had broken intQ his house and destroyed his possessions and kidnapped his boy (who was well treated, and told Dian a lot about the poaching). He had been involved in the death of Digit and may have been the one who shot Uncle Bert, the dominant silverback male in Digit's group, in an act many believe was a vendetta against Dian. Munyarukiko could have reasoned that the sweetest revenge he could inflict on her was to kill her gorillas one by one, before he got her. But Munyarukiko died in 1978, or so Dian heard from local informants. According to one story, he ran away with a woman to Uganda and the woman's people tracked them there and killed him. But is Munyarukiko really dead?

    In May of last year another notorious poacher, Sebahutu, was caught, but he was in jail in December, so that rules him out, at least as the actual murderer. Then, on November 14, Hatageka, whom Dian described as "one of the last of the old-timers," was caught skinning a bushbuck fifty yards from the park boundary. Hatageka was brought to Dian. In a letter to Ian Redmond, who went to Karisoke in 1976 to study the parasites in the gorillas' dung and in his two years there became increasingly involved in antipoaching work, she wrote, "I gently examined his clothing and sewn in his sleeve was a small pouch of sumu [poison in Swahili], containing bits of vegetation and skin, all looking like vacuum cleaner debris." Dian took the bits and put them on her mantelpiece. While she was in her bedroom getting a reward for the guards for bringing Hatageka in, he lunged for the pieces. The guards subdued him and Dian took them back. Then Hatageka was led away. "I still have them," Dian wrote. "Nasty lady. It was like taking a nipple from a baby. He just deflated after I took them."
 

    Redmond's theory, which has received a lot of attention in the American press, is that Hatageka sent someone to break into the cabin and get back his sumu. (Incarceration in Africa is a lot more relaxed than it is in the West. Food, women, dope, a trip to the market are only a question of money. There is ample opportunity to plot revenge with your brothers, to arrange with someone on the outside to get the person who put you there.) Dian awakened. The burglar panicked, grabbed a handy machete, and killed her. When Ian was collecting her personal effects to send to her parents several weeks after the murder, he found in a drawer a Ziploc bag containing what looked like the sumu. He also found the letter to him, dated November 24 but never sent, describing the capture of Hatageka.

    It is perfectly possible that a Bahufu, particularly one in as dangerous a profession as poaching, might carry a protective talisman, although a more correct word for it would be impigi, not sumu. "The talisman could be a little packet of herbs, the tooth of an animal, a piece of antelope horn-no telling what," the anthropologist Chris Taylor, who studies traditional Bahutu medicine, told me. "Children are thought to be particularly vulnerable to witchcraft, and are often given a leather thong to wear around the waist to ward it off."

    Ian Redmond, whom I reached at his home in Bristol, England, said that he never saw a talisman on any of the doz. en poachers he had direct contact with. "But this isn't something they're going to show you," he added. "Only after my return to England did Dian become aware that if you got the poacher's talisman that really weakens him and gives you a psychological advantage."

    It is also possible that a Bahutu might kill to get his talisman back. He would be afraid that whoever had it could use it to work a spell against him and do him great harm. The belief that illness is caused by the magic of an enemy, or by actual poison, is widespread in black Africa. The cure is to hire a healer to identify the enemy and to work a counterspell. Moreover, if someone had suffered a dreadful family misfortune and had attributed it to Dian (who to scare the poachers cultivated ~he image of a witch), that could have been the end of her. But would avengers have come unarmed? That's a problem with this theory.

    Dian 's treatment of the poachers, as Kelly described it, was merciless. "She would torture them. She would whip their balls with stinging nettles, spit on them, kick them, put on masks and curse them, stuff sleeping pills down their throats. She said she hated doing it, and respected the poachers for being able to live in the forest, but she got into it and liked to do it and felt guilty that she did. She hated them so much. She reduced them to quivering, quaking packages of fear, little guys in rags rolling on the ground and foaming at the mouth."

    Some of Dian's friends condone her methods with the poachers. Ian said he never actually saw Dian lay a hand on anyone. "A lot of her alleged mistreatment was not stopping the guards." He had heard stories about Dian whipping the pygmies' balls with stinging nettles, "and I know how that is going to sound to the tender-skinned European reader sitting in his armchair, but don't forget that the pygmies run through stinging nettles every week," he argued. Ian himself recently advocated equipping the antipoaching patrols with submachine guns. He also defended Dian's treatment of the camp staff. "If you're working with Africans and want them to perform up to European standards, you have to blow up at them, because they try to get away with doing as little as possible." He is the only person besides Bob Campbell and Alyette DeMunck who was with Dian on the mountain for any length of time and remained her friend. "Dian as an individual was in many ways like the gorillas," he told another journalist, "in that if you are easily put off by bluff charges, screaming and shouting, then you probably think that the gorillas are monsters. But if you are prepared to sidestep the bluff charges and temper and sh')uting and get to know the person within. ..then you'll find that Dian, like the gorilla, was a gentle, loving person."

    Kelly Stewart wasn't so magnanimous. "I think by the end she was doing more harm thaI. good," she told me. "Dian went out to the gorillas because she loved them and she loved the bush and being on her own, but she ended up with more than she bargained for. She wasn't planning on having to organize and work with and fight with people. She was no good as a scientific mentor, but she couldn't hand over control. She couldn't take the backseat. Her alternative-to leave and die somewhere an invalid-was never something she would have considered. She always fantasized about a final confrontation. She viewed herself as a warrior fighting this enemy who was out to get her. It was a perfect ending. She got what she wanted. It was exactly how she would have ended the script. It must have been painful, but it didn't last long. The first whack killed her. It was such a clean whack I understand there was hardly any blood." 

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