Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Though only trackers lived here, working in shifts that lasted a few days or several weeks before
returning to their village, the camp was well tended. Gardens whose plants I didn't recognize added
touches of green, and beyond the sandy earth, the trees were immense, pillaring the sky, their thick
branches tufted with ferns, hung with vines.
I checked the GPS device that BCI had given to Roger:
N 00.30126
E 022.18418
Alt. 435 m
Over the next four days, we searched while the trackers' wives kept the camp. Each morning at
four o'clock, the trackers rose from their bamboo beds in the huts, and I from my tent, which I'd
pitched in a cassava field to distance myself from the crying of babies and the sand fleas. The track-
ers sang Christian songs with Roger, nine men chanting softly in Lingala, the only recognizable
word being
Jésus
. They'd lost track of the bonobos a few days before my arrival, and we set out
looking for them, finding their empty nests in a high tree, as well as the nest of the reported albino
in a much smaller one, halfway up to the canopy. A few times I heard the raw, repeated screech of
a great blue turaco, a bird whose broad wingspan appeared silhouetted against the sky.
One by one, when they were alone, I asked the trackers to point to something that was the color
of the albino, and they each pointed to a different bright yellow object. Bonobos were known to be
uniformly black, and I wondered if this one was not an albino but simply a very old bonobo, which
might have explained why it slept lower in the forest. But if it was an albino, it might simply be
sensitive to the direct sunlight of the high canopy. The trackers also insisted that a second bonobo
in the group had two white stripes on its back, one on either side.
We continued, but we saw only bonobo prints in the mud. Finally, after four days in the forest, I
had to meet up with Sally and Michael. They would already be in Djolu to meet an Australian crew
from VisionQuest who had arranged with BCI to fly in to Djolu. They intended to shoot a segment
of a 3-D film on great apes.
Before I left, I shared what extra supplies I had in my backpack. Roger's wife had an infected
eye, and daily I had been putting antibiotic ointment on her eyelid. I gave her the remaining cream.
Her eye had already improved dramatically. One morning, when the trackers saw me taking vitam-
ins, they asked if I would share. Later, they told me that their ailments had vanished, that they no
longer had chronic coughs or sore throats, that I had very strong medicine indeed.
My last evening in the camp, as thunder boomed in the distance and the horizon darkened, a
hard wind setting up, I crouched with the men, my notebook open, and recorded the names of the
gigantic trees around us. I jotted the following words:
Bokongu. Very tall and thick, next to it
Bokanga
, thin with a burst of branches at the top,
very high.
Beele. Pale trunk. Gives sweet fruit.
Botuna. A little out of sight and hard to see.
Bokangu. Very hard wood. The men say it holds carbon gas inside, that it makes a hissing
sound when you cut it, as all of the gas escapes.
Bokombe next to it. No leaves. I am having a hard time telling them apart.
Bokotombolo. Bosenge. Lifake.
