Wild Spirit (10 page)

In a combined operation involving Eamon's men and a party of Gabonese military personnel, a track was cleared from the Makokou road to the crash site. A scene of unspeakable tragedy awaited them when they reached it. Two of the six people had survived the crash and managed to crawl away some little distance to escape the fire, but had perished along with the others in the days that followed. Four Van Splunder executives were among the dead, together with a seventeen-year-old girl, the daughter of one of the men, who had been visiting Gabon on holidays.

Eamon's head sunk to his chest as he told us, ‘I knew that pilot well. He was one of the best in the country.'

The bodies were brought out on stretchers through the squelching mud, to be transported back to Makokou in an army truck. The only question I felt able to ask Eamon was why that experienced pilot had overshot the airfield at Makokou. Why couldn't he have been guided in by the navigation beacon? Eamon looked me in the eye, his face
ashen, and said, ‘The beacon wasn't working that day because they'd run out of fuel for the generator.'

For days afterward, I tried to get my mind around the senselessness of it, this brutal extermination of life in the most stupid of circumstances. And I wondered, pointlessly, what we might have been able to do in time had we known the crash was only twenty kilometres from Belinga. For me, the tragedy proved a stark introduction to life in this frontier region where safety nets seldom existed.

 

Our supplies of fresh food, mail and other items arrived on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The iceboxes –
glacières –
usually contained an assortment of vegetables, meat, cheeses, yoghurt and fruit, originally from Paris or Johannesburg, but purchased at Mbolo supermarket in Libreville. The vegetables often arrived perished from being in transit too long. Small articles of hardware came up in padlocked tin trunks called
cantines
, which shuttled constantly back and forth on the aircraft, trucks and pirogues.

The consignment of builder's tools we had ordered in Libreville took a fortnight to arrive. When the shipment came in, it was time for Win to begin work. I accompanied him in the Kombi up to the carpenters' workshop – the
atelier du bois –
for his first encounter with the men. Bruno and Joseph, the chief carpenters, were there, along with another carpenter, several labourers and some trainee masons.

Win bounded out of the driver's seat and greeted them with a beaming smile. ‘
Bonjour!
'

‘
Bonjour, patron! Bonjour, madame
,' they chorused.

‘
Bonjour!
' I smiled around at the group, then stood back and waited to see how Win would handle the next five
minutes. I had made no progress in teaching him French, and I knew I was unlikely to succeed, however long I tried.

He picked up an offcut of plywood from the floor, drew a felt pen from his pocket, and wrote his name on it in capital letters. He held it up to the men. ‘My name is Win, Win Henderson.'

The men who could read looked disconcerted and shifted their weight from one foot to the other. Those who could not looked on with blank stares. Bruno and Joseph spoke up, telling Win it was fitting that they should address him as ‘
patron
'. He was their boss, and that was how things were done. It was a term of respect.

‘You'd better listen to them,' I said. ‘We're the outsiders here.' He thought for a moment, then grinned his acquiescence to the circle of faces. ‘Okay, okay!' He motioned everyone to follow him over to the Kombi, where the boxes of new tools lay open – electric drills and circular saws, German hammers, leather carpenters' aprons, measuring tapes, spirit levels and dozens of other items, many of which the men had never used before. Their eyes lit up, and a hubbub of approval broke out. ‘
C'est bien, patron!
' They looked from one to the other, smiled and nodded as if they had never expected such a windfall. Through me, Win explained that each man would have a full set of tools, and everyone would be responsible for his own kit, to be kept in a lockable wooden box. I left them shortly afterwards, crowded around Win while he made the first toolbox as a demonstration. The introduction had gone better than I expected. I could see that the men already respected him, and his sense of humour and energy more than compensated for his lack of French. I told Win that in the
early stages, I would spend half an hour in the
atelier du bois
each morning interpreting where necessary.

In the weeks that followed, Win instituted a program to teach the men modern building methods and safe work practices. He led by example, demonstrating techniques first, then supervising as each man tried them. I sometimes watched from the sidelines. They communicated so well it was almost as if no language barrier existed. The men taught him words for tools and types of timber, which he picked up quickly, laughing readily at his own mistakes. He slotted into the role seamlessly, so I gradually withdrew as interpreter and left them to it.

The initial building priorities were to finish off the toilets and showers in the surveyors' quarters, double the floor area of the
atelier du bois
to take the
combinée
, and convert the far end of the old sample shed into an office for the surveyors. Once the
combinée
had arrived, house frames and roofing beams would be pre-cut in the workshop before being transported down to each site, halving the time taken to complete each dwelling. As there was no spare vehicle, the Kombi quickly became vital to the building program. By day it transported materials, men and equipment around camp. By night we slept in it.

 

On Sundays, Mario sometimes drove down to the river to fish, using a line with a piece of soap on the end. We had been in camp just two weeks when he made the catch of his life. He pulled up in a cloud of dust in front of the guesthouse, hit the horn and shouted to Étienne and Bernard to come quickly. We ran out to join them, peering into the back of the Toyota utility. A colossal fish,
over a metre and a half long, lay motionless on its belly. Its smooth skin was dark grey and white with no scales. Whiskers protruded from either side of its broad, flat head. It had no dorsal or ventral fins, and its tail tapered off like an eel's. To me, it resembled an exhibit from a natural history museum. I had never seen anything like it.

‘A catfish!' Win cried.

Mario nodded vigorously. ‘
Oui, oui – c'est ça
.'

Win turned to me, knowing I'd never seen one before. ‘They're bottom feeders. They spend their time on the riverbed, cleaning up everything that builds up on the silt.'

I ran to fetch the camera and insisted Mario let me take his picture with it. He beamed in triumph and struck a pose that reduced me to helpless giggles. Then Étienne and Bernard grabbed one end of the fish each and staggered into the guesthouse, where they dropped it onto the kitchen table. I heard their voices through the window: ‘
C'est bien, ça! Bien à manger!
'

‘They're good eating, those catfish,' Win said to Mario.

‘
Oui, oui – ils sont délicieux
.' Étienne and Bernard had already begun skinning and gutting it and cutting slabs of the flesh for freezing.

‘Leave some out,' Mario called through the window to them. ‘We'll have it for dinner tonight.'

That evening afforded Win and me our first taste of Gabonese wild food. Mario had told Bernard to prepare the fish in an Italian sauce of herbs and tomato, served on a bed of boiled rice. The flesh was moist and sweet, with a delicate flavour that belied the fish's life as a bottom scavenger. Mario kept a good cellar: we drank one of his light white wines with it. The meal created a festive
atmosphere, and I could see that a day away from camp had lifted Mario's spirits.

The following week, Doug made one of his regular visits, and sounded me out about a job. His original idea that I might teach expatriate children had been overtaken by subsequent events, as the family in question would now be based in Makokou. Instead, Doug wanted me to take over some of Mario's more routine administrative duties in running the camp. We sat out on the porch over morning coffee and he outlined it to me.

‘How would you feel about a part-time job supervising the hunters and the distribution of rations, monitoring the movement of supplies, doing the ordering and accounting for the
économat
, and gradually taking over the radio operation? We could pay you US$300 a month.'

‘What do you mean, supervising the hunters?' I said. I was sure they didn't need me to tell them how to shoot monkeys.

‘It would just be a case of issuing them with their ammunition and weighing and recording the meat each afternoon – that's all.'

‘And what's involved in monitoring the movement of supplies?'

‘Well, we need someone to keep track of what's been ordered, where it's coming from, whether it's been delivered, and making sure it's locked safely into the warehouse – all that sort of thing.'

‘Mmm,' I mused. ‘Sounds like a lot of work for US$75 a week.'

‘Oh, it sounds more than it really is. Once you get into a routine with it, you won't find it takes much time.' I gulped down some coffee and chewed on a biscuit while
I thought about the practicalities. My technical vocabulary was still weak, but I liked the prospect of having something definite to do. From the company's point of view, it made sense. Mario was overloaded, and my French was under-utilised. From my standpoint, there was another thing in its favour too. It could give me an opportunity to influence what animals the hunters shot.

‘I'll make a deal with you,' I said, because I knew I was in a strong position. ‘I'll take on the job if you instruct the hunters that they are not to kill any more gorillas, and if they do, they won't be paid for the meat.'

Doug screwed up his eyes, sat back and regarded me with mock seriousness. ‘You're a hard woman, but I think we can do that.'

‘Good! So you'll tell the hunters tonight, will you?'

‘I will, and I want you to be there when I do.' He was as good as his word. The hunters listened gravely while he spelt it out – no more gorillas to be killed. They took it on the chin. I had the impression it didn't matter to them what they shot.

Doug was delighted that I had agreed to the job.

‘I'll have the office draw up a contract for you as soon as I get back. We'll probably have to designate you as a bilingual secretary. Then, as soon as that's approved by the government, your salary will start going into the bank.'

‘You realise it'll take me a while to master the radio,' I warned him. ‘I've listened to Mario handling Kruger sometimes and it's not beer and skittles.'

‘I've got no doubt you'll be equal to it,' he replied. ‘In a few weeks you'll be giving them heaps.' I wished I could be as confident as he was, but I welcomed the challenge and would give it my best shot.

My new duties commenced immediately. At six-thirty next morning I heard the hunters calling to me from outside the annexe: ‘
Madame! Madame!
' I stumbled out of bed, pulled on some jeans and stuck my head out the door.

‘
Bonjour, madame. Les cartouches s'il vous plaît, madame
.'

‘
D'accord. Attendez
.' They waited in the chill air – woollen hats pulled down over their ears and ragged pullovers covering their flimsy shirts – while I went to the locked cupboard in the guesthouse and counted out the day's quota of shells.

‘
Voilà!
' I placed the shells in their calloused hands and wished them good hunting.

At nine-thirty, I sat beside Mario at the radio and tried to follow the rapid bursts of French coming from Kruger in Makokou and the staff in the Libreville office, through the dry-season crackle. I realised how much colloquial French I had yet to learn. Kruger's laconic way of speaking didn't help either, and I guessed, knowing his style, that he wouldn't be making too many allowances for my inexperience. I'd put myself on a steep learning curve accepting the job. Time would tell whether, as Doug had predicted, I was equal to it.

The first six weeks in camp tested my mettle, both emotionally and in my job. Mario was only too pleased to pass on some of his tasks to me. The strain of the previous six months, during which he had managed the camp by himself, had begun to show, and he was often edgy and distracted. In the early stages, I had no concept of the sorts of problems he faced daily. By mid-August, my initiation would be complete.

Not long after I started work, I accompanied him on a river trip to buy manioc.

‘That's M'Vadhi up there, on the bluff.' Mario pointed to a cluster of huts in a clearing, high on the southern bank of the Ivindo, as our pirogue rounded a bend in the river. We had travelled upstream for an hour through the still, cool morning. The surface of the water was like brown glass, the only ripple our gentle bow wave. I'd wanted to go to M'Vadhi ever since I'd first heard about it from Kruger and Peter Telfair. Now I had a good reason: Mario came here every Wednesday to buy supplies of manioc for the
workforce. Since I would be supervising the distribution of rations, I decided it was important for me to know where the manioc came from and how we acquired it.

It was now several weeks since Win and I had moved into camp, but the sense of wonder was still fresh, and being in the heart of Africa still had the power to overwhelm me. On the river, I had one of my ‘pinch me' moments, not quite able to believe I was really there. Joy, wonder and awe all mingled together – and I felt too small to encompass them. I wanted to make these intense moments last, to carry them with me always, because nothing in my life before could compare with them.

M'Vadhi was the furthest settlement on the river, close to the Congo border. We glided towards a wide bank of white sand, left exposed by the drop in water level during the dry season. A flotilla of small pirogues laden with bundles of manioc and bunches of plantains lay beached on the bank below the village. A crowd of women and children watched as we pulled in. Dressed in their brightly patterned cotton cloth and headscarves, the women could have been a cluster of vivid butterflies, forming a mosaic of colour against the white of the sand and the red ochre of the bluff.

Mario greeted them with jokes and banter – they smiled shyly and giggled behind their hands while the children played and splashed at the water's edge. I greeted them in French, and shook hands with a few of the nearest ones.

I was eager to see what a traditional Gabonese village looked like, as the only one I had seen close up was Mayebut. I followed Mario up the steep dirt track. The bare, ochre ground had been swept clean of fallen leaves and debris. Pavilions with thatched roofs, open sides and bench seating formed the hub of the village; huts of puddled mud skirted
the perimeter. Behind them vegetation rose in a green jumble of shapes. Several men were working in the open air, carving small objects and repairing traditional weapons. Small groups of older men sat in the sun, talking and smoking pipes. The view from there took in a panorama of river, a patch of savanna and distant mountains through a line of banana trees and palms.

We moved through to the far end of the village, where a cluster of hemispherical leaf-thatched shelters housed families of Pygmies. The shelters were made from thin sapling frames curved over and crisscrossed, then covered with a thick layer of enormous leaves.

‘The Bakwélé here have taken the Pygmies as slaves,' Mario said matter-of-factly. Pygmy families sat dejectedly in the dirt, framed by the curved doorways of the shelters. They appeared poorly nourished and lethargic. To me, it was a sight of profound pathos. I knew how they had lived traditionally, that they hunted and gathered in small family groups, that they possessed intimate knowledge of the forest and animals. Their lives in the deep forest had been a celebration of freedom and harmony. They had sung and danced in the euphoria of an elephant kill. Now all that had gone. I thought back to the story Kruger had told us, about Pygmy genitals being used as a cure for impotence by the Bantu, and I wondered whether the murdered Pygmy had been one of their relatives.

I consciously steeled myself. I was powerless to change this situation, and hadn't yet developed the emotional resources to cope with it easily. As each day passed, I became increasingly aware that the juxtaposition of the glorious with the desperately sad was the essence of Africa, and that I had better get used to it.

On the way back to the riverbank we passed a woman with severe elephantiasis. Her lower leg was swollen to the size of a long fat vacuum cleaner bag. She couldn't walk, and sat on a wooden bench staring vacantly into space. Elephantiasis was one of the extreme manifestations of filariasis. Village people had no access to expensive prophylactics, so the disease was endemic throughout the interior. I tried not to stare, but my thoughts turned dark: in Equatorial Africa, it seemed idyllic village life didn't exist. There was always a dark underbelly of suffering.

Back at the riverbank, the women had unloaded their produce from the pirogues and arranged it in heaps along the sand. Each woman sat behind her own bundle. Each bundle of ten
bâtons
of manioc sold for 250 CFAs or about US$1. Mario had a briefcase full of cash under his arm; as he moved slowly along the line, each woman stated how many
bâtons
she had for sale, and he paid her in notes. Some women had taro and plantains as well.

‘I always buy whatever they bring, as a mark of good faith,' Mario explained. I thought of the mutual dependence that this riverbank commerce embodied: the women produced something the company needed, while in turn, the needs of our workforce afforded them the chance to make some money without leaving their villages.

They loaded the bundles of manioc, taro and plantains into our pirogue until every spare inch of space was filled. Then Mario retrieved the lunch box that Étienne had prepared, and we sat down cross-legged on the sand looking out over the river to eat.

In the warmth of midday, a torpor had fallen over everything. There were no sounds from the forest, and the women and children had moved back up to the shade of the
village to rest before returning to their own villages. Where the river met the bank, the clean white sand showed clearly through the tea-brown water. A gentle sun had broken through the dry-season cloud, and bathed the sandbank in soft light. We sat in silence, absorbed in our own thoughts – Mario the experienced Africa hand, I the novice. I wondered how many other white women had been so far up the river. Carmen Roux must have, in the days of the gold workings at Camp Six, but that was decades before. And Annie Hion, the primatologist who'd studied the gorillas in the 1960s, might have come here. But there couldn't have been many others. There were no missions, no trading posts, no reasons to come. I was convinced no other Australian woman had ever been here. That thought lodged in my mind as I ate the salami and tomato roll Étienne had made, and drank the cold Regab beer straight from the bottle. Could I ever have imagined myself in such a place as I grew up in suburban Brisbane in the 1950s? I hadn't been out of Australia until I was twenty-seven, and now I was here. I pinched myself again.

By the time we were ready to go, most of the women were preparing to leave too. I realised that these women were the linchpins of their families. They reared children, produced crops, collected water, carried heavy loads of firewood, cooked meals and transacted commerce, all in the most basic of conditions. And on these market days, they paddled their small, fully-laden pirogues with the grace and skill of elite athletes. All the way back I reflected on their lives of unremitting hard work, and was filled with admiration.

Jacques Poussain, the French mechanic, arrived on the barge early in July, bringing a small car with orange plastic bodywork and a black vinyl soft-top. The badge on the side identified it as a Citroën Méhari. It looked like a Mini Moke.

Jacques himself was dressed plainly in jungle boots, shorts and a short-sleeved cotton shirt. He looked to be in his late forties, tall, with light brown hair and fair skin. His reputation had preceded him. He was a first-class mechanic, an expert on Caterpillar earthworks machines, and a veteran of the camp's previous epoch.

During his long working life in Gabon, Jacques had worked in the timber industry and at the manganese mine. He and Eamon were so close from their years at Belinga that they were like brothers. I shook his hand on the riverbank. ‘This is my husband, Win,' I said. ‘He doesn't speak much French yet.'

‘
Et je ne parle pas anglais – rien du tout!
' he replied. The two shook hands. They were about the same age, and each had a depth of experience that put them on an equal footing. I hoped they would get on.

With Jacques' arrival, we now had eight expatriates in camp of four different nationalities – Italian, Australian, British and French. Two spoke no English and five spoke no French, leaving me as the only one who spoke both.

Jacques moved into a room in the surveyors' quarters. His wife and daughters would live in Makokou, and he would commute there at weekends. In the months ahead, Jacques would teach me much about the wildlife of the Gabonese forest. My first lesson came one night during dinner when a penetrating sound from the forest cut through our conversation. It began as a low insistent murmur, then quickly rose in pitch, volume and tempo,
until finally it erupted in a prolonged piercing scream that made my flesh crawl. I put down my knife and fork to look across at Win: we had heard this sound once before while camped in a forest in Cameroon, and were convinced then that we had heard someone being murdered.

I turned to Jacques, wide-eyed, hoping he could identify its source: ‘
Qu'est-ce que c'est?
What's that?' With his long experience, I felt sure he would know.

‘
C'est un daman
,' he said calmly.

‘A
daman
? What do they look like?' Jacques described a small, brown, tree-dwelling animal that resembled a guinea pig, hard to see during the day, but active at night, calling from the treetops. When I translated for Win, he recognised the description immediately: ‘Ah, a tree hyrax!'

Jacques nodded vigorously: ‘
Oui, oui, c'est ça!
' I marvelled that an animal of that modest size could make such a terrifying sound, but was relieved that at last I could put a name to it. That night was the first of many when the tree hyraxes punctuated our evenings with their screams. Months later, I realised that these vocal displays had ceased, and guessed that they had been a seasonal phenomenon connected with territories and mating.

We shared the guesthouse with a family of geckoes that lived behind the sideboard and the framed photographs on the walls. Each night as we ate, they crawled out and positioned themselves to wait for insects that congregated near the lights. To me, the geckoes' delicate translucent cream bodies and large chocolate-brown eyes were exquisite, and I never tired of watching them launch themselves at moths so big that their small mouths seemed barely able to hold them. When they had gobbled their prey whole, they retreated to lie in wait for more. I expected
them to make the clicks and chirps that their Australian and Asian relatives do, but they were always silent.

 

Jacques slotted back easily into the place and his work. I struggled to pick up the threads of my own job: I felt I was dealing with an iceberg. The part above the waterline was what I knew, but underneath was everything I needed to know and didn't. There never seemed to be time for a proper briefing. Mario would explain a task, then be called away to deal with some urgent matter, leaving me with the words ‘but how …' on my lips.

I soon discovered there was no system in place to track orders for materials. There was no such thing as a ‘normal' turnaround time between ordering and receiving goods, and I didn't know who was responsible for what in the chain of command. Communication between the three company locations occurred in a kind of staccato pattern: people fired off requests, complaints and directives like pellets from a peashooter. From where I stood, things seemed to happen in a vacuum, with me in the middle. I gleaned snippets of information piecemeal, mainly on the run.

I learned that our fleet of pirogues consisted of two small ones and two large. The large ones –
grosses pirogues
– were twelve metres long and over a metre wide in the middle. They could carry twelve 200-litre fuel drums at a time, or two tonnes of cement in bags, or several hundred sheets of aluminium roofing, or a large quantity of sawn timber. The two six-metre pirogues were used for lighter cargoes. We also had the barge, which could carry vehicles and large quantities of materials, but it was limited by the height of
water in the river – fully laden it could run aground in the dry season, and there would be no way to free it until the rains came.

The radio links gave me some of my most testing times. Win and Jacques were working to critical deadlines, and the timely receipt of supplies was vital. Some mornings they would stride into the guesthouse for the nine-thirty radio link sweaty, grimy, red-faced and pumped up with anger.