The Hippo with Toothache (18 page)

Although we were hiking up to Joliami's vicinity fully prepared for immobilization and treatment, we needed to reassess his condition first before making a final decision to intervene. One of the nice aspects of working as a team was that Felicia and I could discuss such cases and make our decisions together. In this instance, she elected not to influence my impressions of Joliami's condition, saying I should have a first look at him with Graham and Barabwiriza before comparing notes with what she'd seen the previous day.

The three of us found the injured gorilla about twenty meters off the trail, sitting with his hands tucked into his chest and licking his wounds. I knew Joliami from previous years but had not seen him for a while. Like most male gorillas approaching adulthood, he'd been something of a prankster, liking to show off his bravery and strength by toying with human visitors—pushing them around, trying to remove their backpacks. Of course, this degree of contact is discouraged for both human and gorilla safety, but it's not always easy to follow the rules in the home of a three-hundred-pound gorilla intent on doing as he pleases. Though these encounters
could sometimes be dangerous, it was hard to take Joliami very seriously, in part because he had oversized, prominent ears that gave him a cartoonish, goofy look.

But he was no joke on this visit. The previous day, he'd been so miserable that he'd sat and let Felicia shoot two darts into him without resistance. He'd simply groaned as the first dart hit his right thigh, then feebly moved about six feet away. At the sound of the soft
pifft
made by the CO
₂
gun as it fired again, he'd turned his head to follow the flight of the second dart as it landed in his left thigh. Usually the injection of ten milliliters of thick penicillin from each dart stung enough to elicit a response from the patient, but Joliami remained listless.

Today when we approached, he immediately grunted a loud warning vocalization, then showed us he didn't want company by grabbing on to a small tree and snapping it down onto Barabwiriza's head. This is typical behavior for a silverback. Barabwiriza responded to this threat with a grin at the impertinence of this gorilla he'd known since birth.

Though Joliami had regained some of his usual energy overnight, probably the result of the antibiotics beginning to work, his condition was still very serious. After a brief discussion we decided to go ahead with the planned intervention. Moving up a trail out of the gorilla's line of sight, Felicia and I prepared the darts and reminded the team of everyone's role and responsibility. Felicia was always good about letting me play gun-toter, and this day was no different, especially since she'd had the opportunity the day before—Joliami presumably had little interest in seeing her again.

In theory, this intervention would be easier than most
because there were no other gorillas around to interfere with our work. But we were also immobilizing a full-sized and, at the moment, quite ornery silverback, a procedure that would require two carefully placed anesthetic darts. I tried to lighten the tension by joking about Barabwiriza's stoic reputation, saying, “If you hear anyone scream, it's Barabwiriza.” Unfortunately, the joke turned into reality in only a few minutes, though others would do the screaming.

Returning to where we'd left Joliami, we got a quick opportunity and delivered the first dart into his shoulder. To our surprise, he immediately rose and departed, moving much more quickly than we'd thought he could. We followed him as he climbed onto the trail above, uphill from where we'd left the rest of the team. One of the first rules of gorilla darting is never to dart
any
gorilla when there is a silverback uphill of you, let alone a silverback himself. Another obvious rule is to hide your equipment. No animal wants to see the barrel of gun pointing in its direction, and few ever forget. The previous day, with Joliami depressed and lethargic, Felicia had been able to violate both rules with impunity.

As Joliami moved up the trail, he gave me a perfect rear leg target. Impelled by the urgency of landing that second dart, I made the regrettable decision to shoot from what I knew was a vulnerable position. I waited until he turned and headed uphill, but just as I was raising the dart gun, he glanced back and saw it pointed at him. He immediately charged down the trail, screaming.

We are taught to hold our ground on a charging gorilla, but that really only applies to bluff charges—which this was not. We had a mere second to react. My own best chance was
to make a bullfighter's move and dodge him at the last second, hoping his momentum would propel him down the trail into a less dangerous position. This worked for me, and, on the opposite side of the trail, for Barabwiriza. Unlucky Graham had nowhere to go, with the two of us occupying the only openings in the thick brush. Joliami wrapped his arms around Graham's legs and tackled him to the ground.

Joliami's and then Graham's screams sent most of the intervention team into rapid flight. Only Felicia and Elisabeth held their positions. From about thirty meters downhill and around a curve, they couldn't see what was happening, but they knew from the sound that someone was being savaged. Quickly they grabbed the heavy bags full of drugs and medical equipment and ran up the trail to help, wondering which one of us they'd find at the business end of the angry gorilla.

I sat frozen for those few seconds, helplessly watching Graham in Joliami's clutches, envisioning Robert Shaw's character sliding into the mouth of the shark in
Jaws
and thinking I would be next. Barabwiriza, on the other hand, fully lived up to his reputation. He ran across the trail and repeatedly booted Joliami in the rear end as hard as he could until the gorilla moved. Seemingly stunned by this affront, possibly recognizing that Barabwiriza outranked him, and with the partial dose of anesthetic starting to work, Joliami released his hold on Graham, stepped over him, and tumbled into a dry streambed a few steps away.

Another advantage of working together as a team is the ability to divide and conquer, which fortuitously came into play here. Graham, starting to go into shock, was helped to his feet and said he thought he'd been bitten. Though his
rain-pants were not torn, a quick examination underneath them revealed that one of Joliami's huge canine teeth had caused a single deep puncture in the fold of Graham's thigh near the large artery and veins that supply the leg, severely bruising the surrounding muscles but, fortunately, not damaging any vital structures. He needed immediate medical care as well as quick arrangements to get him the couple thousand feet down the side of the mountain before his adrenaline ran out and he began to feel even more pain. But we also had a partially anesthetized gorilla that required treatment. With little need for discussion, Felicia attended to Graham while Barabwiriza and I went after Joliami and got the rest of his anesthetic dose into him.

Before long, Graham was hobbling down the trail to meet a rescue vehicle with the support of several strong porters, Joliami was in the streambed with the second dart taking effect, and the whole team—minus Graham—was reunited for the job we'd come to do.

As the more thorough, careful, observant, and detail-oriented member of our partnership, Felicia took control of Joliami's anesthesia as planned. She placed a breathing tube into his trachea in order to ensure steady breathing and also to enable us to use gas anesthesia, something that had not been traditionally done with wild mountain gorillas. With assistance from Elisabeth, she continually monitored his breathing and heart rate, occasionally supplementing the anesthetic from the darts with isoflurane gas through our improvised field delivery system.

As the arguably more dexterous partner with slightly more hands-on surgery experience, I performed the bulk of
the wound repairs, trying to close Joliami's major cuts after a thorough cleaning and debriding of dead and infected tissues. Murphy's Law dictated the onset of rain just as this was under way, so part of the surgery was performed under an improvised tarpaulin rain-cover. I decided to partially close the deep lacerations on Joliami's forearm and both hands with sutures, leaving openings for drainage to help prevent abscessation but also because some areas were simply too swollen. We were relieved to find no damage to the tendons that open and close a gorilla's immensely powerful hands and fingers, nor were any bones or joints exposed. This was good news for Joliami's prognosis.

While I was suturing, Felicia prepped the next wound; while I was drawing blood for samples, she administered additional antibiotic doses. Close communication and a reliable support team made for a smooth and successful field procedure, despite all that had previously occurred.

We waited as long as possible for Joliami to start waking from the anesthetic, but knew we couldn't take many more chances with such a formidable patient. Felicia removed his breathing tube and we tried to set him in a safe position. We left him covered with the tarp in view of the increasing rain and his lowered body temperature from the anesthesia. Though we'd been working in cramped quarters in the deep, narrow ravine, the location was beneficial for the gorilla's recovery, as there was really only one direction for him to roll and stumble as he tried to regain his equilibrium. Once he was close to fully recovered, most of the team departed, leaving a couple of experienced trackers to verify his complete anesthetic recovery.

Our New Year's Eve celebration was diminished by Graham's situation. Joliami's crushing bite had fortunately not injured any large blood vessels, but the damage to Graham's thigh was painful. Thanks to some strong painkillers, though, he was quickly able to joke about the episode and to accept my apology for making a bad professional decision in darting Joliami from a dangerous position. Graham was back in the field in a few weeks, with just a slight lingering limp and a nice scar to show for his close call, while the hero of the day earned a new nickname, Super Barabwiriza.

Joliami's recovery was not as easy to monitor. As a lone silverback, no doubt intent on eluding anyone who might dart him again, he was hard to follow. But since he was also injured, his trackers were able to find him on most days and to verify that he was moving around a bit and managing to eat with only a little difficulty. They also observed him licking and cleaning but not chewing his wounds, which was good news to us.

On the sixth day after the intervention, Felicia and I made another visit with Barabwiriza. Joliami doubled back on his own trail and gave us the slip multiple times, which had us all laughing at being outsmarted by a gorilla, but eventually we tracked him back to his former group. This worried us at first, as it was possible he'd suffered his wounds at the hands of his own group members and that returning injured might invite another thorough beating. To our relief, the group members mostly ignored him, except for his younger brother, who greeted him and then spent time inspecting his wounds. We too had a good opportunity to assess them as Joliami sat quietly among his friends and family. His injuries
were healing well, and it seemed likely that he would recover most of the use of his hands and go on to lead a normal life.

Unfortunately, no one has been able to verify Joliami's recovery, as he left the group shortly after that visit and hasn't been definitively seen since. We continue to hope that he will eventually turn up as the dominant silverback in a group. He was just approaching his physical prime, and it is common for lone silverbacks to elude observation for many years before starting or taking over their own groups, so we're still optimistic that this story about the big-eared gorilla will have a happy ending.

The flexible model Felicia and I created that day for working together during gorilla interventions went on to serve us well for many years. There were many occasions in which we had to go in separate directions or work on two gorillas in the same group—confirming that there was indeed enough work for two separate veterinarians. We continued to improve our field procedures during the succeeding years and worked together to train in-country veterinarians. No matter what issues we had with apportioning office and administrative work or with the other stresses of living and working in central Africa, we were always able to bring out the best in each other when a gorilla's health was on the line.

Christopher A. Whittier grew up on a small family farm in rural New Hampshire. He received double bachelor's degrees at Brown University, during which time he studied
abroad in Tanzania. He also traveled across parts of east and central Africa, visiting many primate field sites. While earning his veterinary degree from Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, he returned to Tanzania to study the parasites of wild chimpanzees. Fascinated with primates, Dr. Whittier went on to work as relief veterinarian at the Duke Primate Center and began his PhD at North Carolina State University on the molecular diagnostics and epidemiology of diseases in wild gorillas. His graduate work led him back to Africa, this time to Rwanda. He and his wife, Felicia, worked together for several years as regional field veterinarians for the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project. The couple recently returned to the United States, and he is now finishing his dissertation.

Felicia B. Nutter announced when she was four years old that she was going to be a veterinarian, and went on to graduate from Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine in 1993. Always interested in great apes, she studied parasites among chimpanzees, baboons, and humans at Gombe National Park, Tanzania, as a Fulbright fellow. Dr. Nutter returned to the United States for a small animal medicine and surgery internship, residency in zoological medicine (specializing in free-ranging wildlife), and PhD in population medicine, all at North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine. She joined the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project in 2002, where she and Chris worked together for four years. Dr. Nutter became staff veterinarian for The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California, in 2007, where she works with individual clinical cases, helps train young veterinarians, and studies health issues that impact the conservation of larger populations and entire species.