Читать книгу Of Bonobos and Men - Deni Ellis Bechard - Страница 15
ОглавлениеRoosters woke me. They began at dawn, echoing each other’s cries from across the town. My sleeping mind seemed to unravel, pulled little by little back into the world. Occasionally there were lulls and I dozed off, but then the crowing started up again.
It took me a moment to remember where I was. When I’d first moved to a city in my early twenties, to downtown Montréal, I lived in an apartment whose windows faced an inner courtyard. I sometimes awoke at night, disoriented, and had to go out to the street, to stand on the sidewalk in my socks, just to find my bearings, to see which direction was north. I wasn’t sure what startled me awake those nights, at two or three o’clock—if I was used to freedom and big spaces, to sensing my place on the earth.
I often had a similar experience during my travels, a desire to look at a map and see how the landscape made sense, where the rivers originated, whether the mountains I was seeing were the beginning of a higher, more dramatic range, or just ragged, stony outcroppings stripped of earth by millennia of wind. The rises and curves on the map, and the winding human paths that conformed to them, remind me of something I once read, that the ancient Greeks perceived knowledge as a means of expanding the self, of feeling connected to existence. I couldn’t name the African trees, the ferns and flowers and reeds, or say how they interacted, which roles they played within the ecosystem, but I was sure that if I could, my world would have seemed larger and more open.
Now, as roosters crowed and I woke up in a room the length of my too-short bed, I tried to connect this landscape with all I’d learned about it, to make sense of this spot on the map—Djolu, mud huts and dusty footpaths, a town harder to reach than the vast majority of places on earth. It lay at the heart of the Congo River basin, an immense territory covering more than 1.4 million square miles, its tributaries draining from Gabon, Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, Congo-Kinshasa, and Congo-Brazzaville. Half of the basin’s territory is rainforest, nourished by the tributaries on their way to the Congo, the fifth-longest river on earth carrying the third-largest volume of water. Djolu lies to the south of the Congo’s arc, just north of the equator, near the Maringa River, in the middle of a landscape that has been forested almost continuously for millions of years.
Long before my first trips to Africa, from numerous photographs, I’d sensed something different about the continent, so visually unlike anywhere else: its high, rolling plains, its undulating landscapes and gradual, expansive basins, all unmistakable.
It hasn’t been shaped in the same way as the other continents. Though it separated from South America about 126 million years ago, Africa remained largely unchanged for 100 million years, with virtually no rifting or volcanism. By 65 million years ago, erosion and the lack of volcanic activity had turned it, as geologist Kevin Burke writes, into “a low-lying continent with widespread deep weathering.” I liked this image and found it easy to picture the endless, worn-out ranges of ochre dust, the landscape wind-scarped and cut with rivers.
This erosion continued until thirty million years ago, when Africa collided with Europe. The African plate ceased to drift, pinned possibly by its collision in the Mediterranean, or by the giant volcanic plumes that rose through the earth’s mantle to create the Cape Verde and Afar archipelagoes. Only once Africa became static did the continent we know begin to take its shape. This large, flat expanse of deeply weathered land rested above a hot area, a convection circulation in the underlying mantle. Like a sheet of metal slowly warping above a flame, the continent changed its shape over millions of years. Plumes of less dense material rose from the hot mantle, pressing against the crust, at once thinning it by partial melting and pushing it up, warping its surface, initiating volcanic activity, and reactivating ancient faults.
The old Africa of low, eroded plains lifted into the landscape that geographers and historians have remarked on since Herodotus’s time, a continent of long swells and basins. Whereas most continents have areas of extremely high elevation and others almost at sea level, very little of Africa is extremely high or low. The continent bulges from ocean to ocean, rising and falling in successive sweeps 125 to 1,250 miles in length. On the resulting tablelands are peaks, ridges, and escarpments created by millions of years of wind and water erosion. The elevation drops to both the north and west, marking the paths of the Nile and the Congo, the continent’s two largest, though dramatically different, rivers.
The Congo is unlike other rivers in Africa. The gradual slope of the landscape usually results in slow drainage and immense deltas, as with the Nile, Niger, Zambezi, and Limpopo, all of which carried large quantities of sediment down from areas of the continent that were lifted. But Africa’s basins and swells also cause internal drainage. As the continent was reshaped, water that was unable to reach the ocean formed immense lakes, then spilled out into a new river, to another set of lakes, slowly working closer to the coast.
At first glance, the Congo basin fits this description, draining internally. For millions of years, it most likely formed a massive inland lake as the result of a geologic swell along the coast that blocked access to the ocean. But at some point in the last thirty million years, the Congo River cut through the highlands beyond the Pool Malebo and created an outlet, a 220-mile descent of narrow, violent rapids that possess, Adam Hoschchild writes, “as much hydroelectric potential as all the lakes and rivers of the United States combined.” Over millions of years, the water rushing out from the land created the world’s largest submarine river canyon, 497 miles long and 3,900 feet deep on the floor of the Atlantic, as well as an abyssal fan, a river delta composed of millennia of sediment, hidden beneath the ocean.
But the landscape where I found myself listening to roosters crow across Djolu’s clustered homesteads is more ancient than much of the rest of Africa. The Congo basin is a craton, an ancient continental core dating back 2 to 3.6 billion years. Whereas much of the earth’s crust is composed of relatively new material from plumes and rifting, cratons are typically thicker and deeply rooted, resistant to volcanism, which will occur at their edges but not their centers. While the lands of Africa swelled and broke open around it, the Congo craton held its place. East Africa lifted, drying out and losing its forests as it gained altitude, but the Congo remained lush. The waters drained from the newly raised lands, pouring into the low, immovable basin and making it one of the wettest places in Africa. Today, most of the DRC lies within what Alden Almquist, in Zaire, describes as a “vast hollow . . . the shape of an amphitheater, open to the north and northwest and closed in the south and east by high plateaus and mountains.”
When the glacial cycle started in the Northern Hemisphere, a brief 2.6 million years ago, trapping vast quantities of the planet’s moisture in polar ice, many African rivers, the Nile among them, ceased to reach the ocean, and the tropics withered. The Congo basin was one of the few areas to retain some of its rainforest. Though great apes likely died off elsewhere on the continent, small groups of them could have survived here.
As early as six million years ago, in the long cooling period leading up to our current ice age, our earliest ancestors became increasingly bipedal, spending more time on the ground. However, the severe changes caused by glaciation coincided with a rapid spurt in evolution that may have given rise to modern humans. The situation could have been similar to that of the earlier apes, only more extreme: the drying eliminated trees and created a hostile environment with few resources. Paleontologist and anatomist Kevin Hunt argues that as trees became much smaller and branches thinner, early hominids found that foraging by climbing was increasingly difficult; instead, they often stood on the ground and reached up for the fruit. Supporting this theory is the observation that today, among chimpanzees, tool use, carrying food, confrontational display, and looking over obstacles account for only 1 to 2 percent of bipedal behavior, whereas feeding, most often from the low branches of small trees, accounts for 85 percent of it. Again, if the environmental conditions were harsh, a bottleneck might have occurred, many of the early hominids dying off, leaving only those who were adapted to the new circumstances and capable of using bipedalism to their advantage, not only for foraging but also for hunting. Those human ancestors who could walk upright also used less energy during travel and freed up their hands to carry food, thereby nourishing themselves even when they couldn’t forage successfully. They could also move between distant patches of forest more readily, and, as a result, provision more offspring.
In Catching Fire, Richard Wrangham offers an analogy to evoke the close bond that humans share with these early hominids. He gives the example of an australopithecine, an ancestor of modern humans that lived three million years ago, approximately halfway along the evolutionary path from our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos:
Imagine going to a sporting event with sixty thousand seats around the stadium. You arrive early with your grandmother, and the two of you take the first seats. Next to your grandmother sits her grandmother, your great-great-grandmother. Next to her is your great-great-great-great-grandmother. The stadium fills with the ghosts of preceding grandmothers. An hour later the seat next to you is occupied by the last to sit down, the ancestor of you all. She nudges your elbow, and you turn to find a strange nonhuman face.
As for all of the grandmothers going back to the last common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos, it is conceivable that they could be housed in the United States’s largest stadium, that of the University of Michigan, which hosted a record 114,804 attendees in 2011. In Richard Dawkins’s essay, “Gaps in the Mind,” he describes a similar thought experiment and writes that, in the lineage leading back to the last common ancestor, “you would nowhere find any sharp discontinuity. Daughters would resemble mothers just as much (or as little) as they always do.”
Recent research suggests that there were numerous species of early humans, often overlapping or being rendered extinct as they spread out. Homo sapiens—modern humans—originated in Africa sometime before two hundred thousand years ago, then moved into Europe, killing off or absorbing the Neanderthals, adept dwellers of cold climates whose cranial cavity, despite our image of them as brutes, was in fact larger than our own. The Neanderthals left a significant trace of their DNA in humans living outside Africa (about 2.6 percent in mine, according to a genetic test), but Homo sapiens endemic to the Congo have no trace of Homo neanderthalensis in their genes. Nor do they, the Europeans, or Asians, have the genes of Denisovans, hominids living in Siberia forty to sixty thousand years ago, though the Melanesian and Australian aborigines share about 3 percent of their DNA with them. Numerous tribes of early human species likely dotted the earth, interbreeding and gradually forming our own species as we now know it.
Unlike in other parts of Africa, where volcanic activity has preserved traces of ancient peoples, the Congo rainforest leaves few fossils. Though migrations have crisscrossed the region, the soil of the forest is high in acidity, dissolving bones. What we know of human history here is limited. Before the arrival of the current racial majority, the Bantu, the likely inhabitants were pygmies, people thought to have evolved smaller because of forest conditions. Modern-day pygmies use non-Bantu words for many aspects of the forest and its plants, but speak languages derived from their contact with the Bantu, who spread from Cameroon and eastern Nigeria three thousand years ago. Empowered by Iron Age technology, the Bantu moved out in successive waves over centuries, in one of the largest expansions in human history.
Today, there are over seven billion humans, and no other mammal species can claim our rate of successful adaption. As Dale Peterson writes in Eating Apes, a book that describes some of the failures of major conservation NGOs and the degree to which logging and the commercial bushmeat trade are decimating great ape populations, “we are growing rapidly enough to displace, body for body, the entire world population of chimpanzees every day; rapidly enough to displace, body for body, the entire world population of gorillas every twelve hours; and rapidly enough to displace, body for body, the entire world population of bonobos every six hours at least.” The destruction of other creatures’ habitats has allowed this, though increasingly we are looking for other ways of living, our self-awareness being the trait that can most help us as our climate again changes and we question the future of our resources. In the process of trying to understand ourselves, we have become fascinated with our origins. But if we want to reconstruct the path of human evolution, the best way for us to understand what is lost or left only as rare, incomplete fossils is to consider the great apes, our closest cousins who are hunted to the verge of extinction. Though the reduction of great ape habitats likely began thousands of years ago as a result of human expansion, farming, and hunting, various factors have caused it to speed up exponentially. Booming human populations fuel the demand for timber and bushmeat, and modern weapons and motorized transportation facilitate their extraction. Even though laws forbid great ape hunting throughout Africa, they are rarely enforced, and few people know about them. Furthermore, as a result of both the local and global demand for palm oil, which is found in many Western household products, plantations are being created across Africa, resulting in massive habitat destruction. Lastly, the international race for mineral resources has funded the recent wars here, displacing communities, destroying the infrastructure, and forcing millions of people to rely on bushmeat to survive.
I was only beginning to grasp how the rainforest had shaped these people. It was a world of close horizons, walls of trees blocking my sight, the earth itself suddenly rising or falling, so that paths had to wind constantly around obstacles. Ever since I was a child, I’d thought in landscapes. I loved photographs of mountains, deserts, or plains, rolling hills or savannah, and only after staring at them for some time did I feel that I was ready to learn about their inhabitants, that I might understand them. But this terrain was unlike any I had known, and since our landing the day before, it seemed to me that the rainforest had absorbed the past, dissolved it like ancestral bones, and it would take time for me to begin to comprehend the culture here in deeper ways.
More and more cocks crowed, and when I opened my eyes, the light was stronger, brightly outlining the wooden window shutter and the bedroom door’s uneven planks. There was the swishing sound of someone sweeping the dirt around the building. I got up and opened the uneven square of wood that fit into the empty window.
Willy, the keeper of the Vie Sauvage headquarters, a tall young man with high cheekbones, swept, moving the broom in controlled, rapid motions as sunlight spilled across the town, lighting up earthen buildings and palm thatch in incandescent shades of orange and yellow. He held one arm behind his back as he worked, bent at the waist, taking short steps, sweeping the dirt of the yard into a pattern of symmetric brushstrokes like those in a Japanese stone garden.
In the main room of the headquarters, I found Sally already deep in conversation with local leaders. She had told me about the delicate and time-consuming way in which social relationships were built. All morning, as I prepared my bags and the cooks readied breakfast, people constantly arrived to speak with her. They said they’d come to thank her and Michael for all that they’d done, before sitting down and explaining their needs: the lack of funds to educate their children, the suffering of a sick relative, the cost of medicine. Then they stayed, so that every task and discussion was slowed by the presence of people sitting in the plastic chairs, on the wooden benches, squatting in the shade of the overhang, leaning against the Land Cruiser’s fenders.
Willy and Marie-Claire, head cook, hospital nurse, and the wife of Cosmas Bofangi Batuafe, a local conservationist also supported by BCI, tried to convince Sally to stay another night. They became visibly downcast when she explained that BCI had work in Kokolopori.
“If we stay another night,” Sally told me, “then they get paid for cooking and taking care of the guesthouse. But we need to get to the reserve.”
Behind her, the hood of the Land Cruiser was up, held in place by a stick polished yellow from use, five men looking closely at the engine. One wheel was off, and a young man was cutting squares from old rubber tubing with a handsaw to patch leaks in the tire’s inner tube. Marie-Claire, whose round face had quickly regained its smile, began reciting prices, speaking Lingala though the numbers were in French, as was the word franc.
“No, no, no, no,” Sally said, then answered in Lingala. From Marie-Claire’s expression and bits of French, I could tell that Sally was saying the prices were too high. Briefly, Sally looked angry, but then she laughed and Marie-Claire did the same. I listened to Sally’s new list of numbers, punctuated by franc. Marie-Claire agreed, and afterward Sally explained the interaction to me.
“Because the election held us back, people haven’t been paid in a long time. We’re only around for a month, so they know that this is their chance to make money, and the women in the kitchen want to work. There’s virtually no cash economy in the area. People barter, but conservation brings in money that they can spend at the market.”
It was almost noon when we finally crowded into the Land Cruiser, Michael and I sharing the front seat next to Jean-Pierre, the driver who, like many of those who worked with BCI and Vie Sauvage, lived in the reserve. Sally climbed onto the back of a motorcycle. Michael explained that Congo time required the addition of two or three hours to any plan, that if you didn’t calculate the extra time you’d get caught in the dark on a road, or spend your visit to the rainforest in a state of constant disappointment.
Young men gathered to push-start the Land Cruiser, Jean-Pierre at the wheel, Michael and I crammed thigh-to-thigh next to him. A man in a red T-shirt hurried over and told Sally that we couldn’t leave until we’d seen the local DGM official, that today was Sunday, so he wasn’t working, and we’d have to spend the night. There was strict control on all aspects of travel in the country; before leaving Kinshasa, we had to get permits not only to take photos but to stay in Équateur.
All of the Congolese paused to watch, eyes static, curious but not too hopeful. I got the sense that the entire town was bent on keeping us there, but I also understood that we would probably leave.
Sally told the man that she’d already worked out an agreement to have the official driven by motorcycle to Kokolopori on Monday, but he shook his head. He said that the official must check our papers and passports to make sure that we even had permission to go to the reserve. She pointed out that BCI and Vie Sauvage had created the reserve, so why wouldn’t it be legal?
Willy, Marie-Claire, the women who helped in the kitchen, and all of the lingerers watched, standing where they were about to wave good-bye. The men remained at the rear of the Land Cruiser, hands on the metal, ready to push-start it. In its cargo area, with heaped bags and jerry cans of gas, two young men—along to help with engine problems and repair flats—stared out the side windows without glass, and other villagers, unknown to us, crammed in like stowaways, until now keeping their heads low, looked out.
“Couldn’t the official just come now?” I asked Michael.
“That’d be against the rules. The people here love their rules,” he said and paused. “And they also love breaking them when it suits them.”
In a place this impoverished, I realized, everything was currency, even laws and formalities.
Sally stared at the man a moment longer, as if evaluating how serious all this was. But as I was soon to learn, when the rules were ignored, no one was quite sure what to do.
“Oh come on,” she said, speaking English now, and shouted to us, “Let’s go!”
The men pushed the Land Cruiser. Jean-Pierre popped the clutch, and the tires grabbed at the earth as the engine sputtered and fired. Children scrabbled up the termite hill to get a vantage on our departure, then decided they’d rather be with the children running behind us. Two more young men jumped on our back bumper, clutching the edges of the glassless back window, and our convoy was off, racing along the rutted dirt road as people leaped aside and screamed “Mundele!” and pointed.
The path we were traveling was listed as a national highway, R401, one of the few bright yellow lines on the map of Équateur. There were four working vehicles in this entire area of seven thousand square miles, with a population of at least 250,000 in tiny, scattered villages, and the road was used primarily for walkers and the occasional bicycle or motorcycle. During the rainy season, it was impassible, too soft and slick, treacherous on the inclines.
As he drove, Jean-Pierre told me that his father was Belgian, that for some reason his siblings had been born almost white whereas he was black, though other Congolese saw him as white. He averaged about eighteen miles per hour, slowing for rain-gouged trenches and sandy hollows. Sometimes we rode in ruts where the ground was soft, crossed by gullies so deep that he almost stopped, letting one tire drop in at a time, the Land Cruiser shaking and rattling. Or we skirted drop-offs where the road narrowed, two tires over the edge, the vehicle wildly tilted as the earth scraped the undercarriage. On a few occasions, the hollows were on both sides, and the edges of all four tires hung as he steered, leaning forward, the rest of us staring down the wet inclines into the shadow of the forest.
From time to time, the path opened into a sundrenched village, a dusty yellow clearing smoothed from decades of feet. Jean-Pierre stomped the accelerator so that we soared past flapping chickens, ducks, goats, dogs, and pigs, past dozens of children who ran out shouting, in underwear or torn shirts. Everyone waved, families in doorways, men seated in the shade of their eaves, beneath the open-sided village paillotes, or beneath the patch of roof protecting the talking drum, a five- or six-foot section of thick, hollowed log with slits cut into it, which people strike rhythmically to send messages across long distances. Then we plunged back onto the forest path, branches lashing the Land Cruiser, the young men on the rear bumper ducking.
Two hours into our journey, we passed the fork in the road to Kisangani, the nearest major city and a regional crossroads where the Lingala- and Swahili-speaking parts of the DRC meet—only a ten- or twelve-day walk from here, Jean-Pierre told me. Michael explained to me that I should know the expression kaka awa, “just here,” how the Bongandu, the people of the local Congolese ethnic group, answer all questions regarding time and distance. They delivered the words with the same assurance with which a parent driving a car says “almost there” to a child. To demonstrate this, he switched to French and asked Jean-Pierre how much farther we had to go, to which Jean-Pierre responded without hesitation, “Kaka awa.”
Three hours and two kaka awa later, he finally announced that we had crossed the boundary into the reserve. The forest was denser, its trees huge, crowding the path, which was even narrower and more degraded. The rainwater gullies were so large that Jean-Pierre opted to take us through them instead of on the remaining road, a narrow ledge several feet higher.
When we pulled into Yetee, the village where BCI kept one of its main camps in the Kokolopori Reserve, children and adults surrounded the vehicle. The camp was near the village, against the forest. Men were striking sticks together, singing as we got out. Michael began dancing with them, and they hooted in appreciation.
Someone took my arm and told me in French that it was impolite not to dance, so I joined the mass of people. They all had their knees bent, their butts stuck out, bobbing and swaying, shuffling side to side as they sang. Sally and Michael’s names were distinct among the words.
The two motorcycles arrived with the rest of the BCI and Vie Sauvage personnel. The singing grew stronger as people began shouting, “Mama Sally!” They swarmed her, and she danced with them as our supplies were unloaded by dozens of hands and swept into a mud hut.
I didn’t manage to retain all the names, as the reserve’s staff were introduced in rapid succession, alongside those I had already met: local conservationists and BCI employees. After the singing had gone on for half an hour, we retreated inside to inspect our mud hut, which was built on a slope, tables and chairs tilted. There were four bedrooms, two on each end, and a center dining room with wooden chairs. The temperature inside was distinctly cooler, the earthen walls moist. Beyond the windows, the sunlight appeared white, erasing everything but the steady chanting.
We began unpacking as men with machetes gathered outside and cut up bamboo and tree branches, crossing the pieces and tying the edges with vine to make shelves and tables for us. By the time the sun’s disk neared the forest, they had furnished the house. BCI and Vie Sauvage had several camps in different villages throughout the reserve and tried to alternate where they worked, so as not to create jealousy or rivalry. The simple presence of conservationists meant that scores of local people were hired to repair camp houses, as the mud crumbled a little with each wet season. Already points of light had appeared in the relatively new palm thatch, insects rustling inside the leaves, lizards hunting them, occasionally bringing down showers of dust.
As in Djolu, people came to ask what supplies we’d brought. Jean-Pierre arrived with his four-year-old daughter, a pretty girl who kept glancing up at us curiously. He told us that she had a fever and asked if we’d brought medicine. None of us were doctors, but the fever was low, and she had only a slight cough. We shared what we could find in our supplies, Advil and vitamin powder. One of the reserve’s trackers came next, a tall, rawboned man, moving woodenly, ducking his head shyly when he looked at us. The previous night, he’d stepped barefoot on the cut stump of a sapling and gashed his heel. Sally washed it with peroxide and bandaged it.
Sick or injured people would come by often in our first days, telling us that there was no more medicine at the reserve clinic. Sally assured them that it was in the boat with the rest of BCI’s field staff, and in the meantime, we shared what we had on hand.
Even the DGM official from Djolu, an aging man with hooded eyes and a small black beard, who arrived the next day by motorcycle, showed up with an injury that needed treatment. He had come to collect the fees that BCI paid to operate legally in the region. He unfolded a plastic grocery bag and produced all the forms relating to BCI’s previous visits. One was so old and worn that he handled it like tissue paper, evoking the love of ceremony here. Gently, he opened it and laid it on the wooden table in the paillote as if it were a relic, the document’s remaining ink pale blue, the folds in the paper worn through.
Sally paid a year’s fee of one hundred dollars to operate in the region, and Michael called for lotoko, the local moonshine used in ceremonies or to show respect. One of the eco-guards brought a beer bottle with a folded palm leaf for a plug. As soon as Michael removed the leaf, a smell like rubbing alcohol permeated the air. He poured three fingers’ worth into a plastic cup, and the official took a drink.
“Other NGOs, they come in here and they do their projects,” the official said, “but they do them for themselves. They do their projects, and when they finish, they leave, and that’s it.” He waved his hand dismissively. “But BCI has given us a lot. You have made people’s lives better. You are a part of us.”
I was surprised to hear the official speak so dismissively about other NGOs. Even Michael and Sally appeared shocked. That was when the official told us about his injury, that on his way here, his son had lost control of the motorcycle on a sandy stretch and they’d fallen. He showed us the long burn on his ankle from the muffler, the skin darkened and papery.
As he drank, Michael and Sally went inside to get the medical kit.
The official looked at me and, still speaking French, said, “Is it true they do not even have children?”
“No, they don’t,” I said.
He shook his head, eyes still and serious, as if he couldn’t imagine anything worse.
“They just work, helping people,” he asked, softly, “instead of having children?”
I turned my palms up, not sure how to answer.
He nodded once, solemnly, and stared off, appearing sad for them. Nearly every man I’d met in the rural DRC had at least five children.
Sally and Michael returned with the medical kit and hydrogen peroxide. Together, they bandaged the official’s ankle as he studied them, maybe trying to make sense of why they would do what they do.
But already, on our first day in Kokolopori, before his arrival, when Sally and Michael were still unpacking and the people kept coming and asking for medicine, I began to feel—to sense in my body in a way that had nothing to do with thinking—why they had chosen this life. There was no puzzle in the poignancy of human need, the way men and women showed their injuries and asked for help, requiring disinfectant or antibiotic ointment or a large Band-Aid, medical supplies that most North Americans had in their homes. It was not easy to see through the illusion that many of us harbor about helping others: that we must wait for scientists or doctors or governments. Aspiring to an ideal—to a grand vision of change—is often the enemy in such cases. We forget simple needs and how much each of us can do even with our limited resources.
The last person to ask for help was a young man named Mbangi Lofoso, a team leader for the bonobo trackers. He said that his daughter was sick, her arms and legs straight and rigid, her hands clenched, unable to open. She hadn’t eaten in days now. Michael told him that he should take her to the reserve’s clinic immediately, just seven miles away, in the next village over within Kokolopori, but Mbangi explained that he just wanted purified water for her, that he was already working with a traditional healer. Even later, when Sally and Michael offered to drive him and his daughter there, he refused. He looked hardly more than twenty, the skin of his face smooth, a hollow scar at the side of his throat, just to the right of his Adam’s apple.
Afterward, Michael showed me the small river near the camp. We descended a steep path through the trees. A log bridged the water, and two children squatted on it, fishing for minnows. Hundreds of white and violet butterflies covered the smooth wood, pulsing their wings. Dozens more of them pressed together, fluttering in place. I had never seen butterflies like these: a few with white tails, others turquoise or tiger-striped. One had brown wings when they were closed, but the insides were baby blue, visible only when it flew.
As we walked onto the log, they fluttered up from in front of our feet, clouding around us, landing again as soon as we had passed.
