Wild Spirit (14 page)

The rivers rose quickly. The ford at the Djadié was rapidly submerged, so that the new road could only be used by setting up a meeting of two vehicles, one on either side of the river, at a pre-arranged time, and ferrying passengers and cargo across in a pirogue. On the Ivindo, the rapids, sandbanks and rock outcrops were soon covered by a metre of muddy water, allowing us to reach Makokou once more in just three hours.

In mid-September, the carpenters finished the new kitchen and a recreation area in the
cas de passage.
Here, Samba Bernard and Mohibi Léon would keep house for the surveyors and any visitors.

With the growth in size of the camp, maintaining supplies and servicing equipment had become major tasks. In some weeks we used 12,000 litres of diesel fuel, and Jacques now had a fleet of twelve vehicles to maintain. Fortunately, despite the wet, Eamon set the earthworks machines to grading and widening the road to the
débarcadère
. When the work was complete, the old forty-five-minute trip to the
débarcadère
became a thing of the past; it became possible to do the trip in just seventeen minutes.

 

Win and I were having coffee in the guesthouse one day when Rodo walked in carrying a dead cobra.

‘Do you want to have a close look? The surveyors got it out on Bakota South.'

I left my paperwork to peer at the metre-long reptile dangling limply from a stick. The head had been mangled, so the fangs and eyes were just a crushed mass. Étienne and Mambo Bernard put their heads around the kitchen door. They were usually quick to appreciate game meat, but they
greeted the snake with silence. I knew many of the people ate snake – even regarded it as a delicacy – so I asked them whether this one would be good to eat.

They shook their heads. ‘No, madame! We do not eat that.'

‘Oh?' I said. ‘Why? Because it's poisonous?'

‘No, madame, it's not that—'

‘But some people eat them, don't they?'

‘Yes, madame, some do, but we don't.'

I wasn't about to give up, as traditional beliefs and practices intrigued me. ‘Don't you like it?'

They looked at each other in silence, then back to me, shrugged their shoulders and repeated that they just didn't eat it. Rodo handed it to them, and we watched as they made much of throwing it onto the fire and watching it turn black.

Win looked on with intense interest. He'd often handled snakes back in Brisbane: one of his sons had kept a collection of them in cages in the backyard. For Win, they were beautiful and fascinating, whereas for me they were creatures to be feared and avoided. My childhood understanding of them had been shaped by my grandmother's stories of her early married life ‘out on construction' at Oakey on the Darling Downs in Queensland when the western railway line was being built around 1906. The surroundings of their bush home, overgrown with shoulder-high grass, harboured many venomous snakes. Her tales of a deadly red-bellied black curled up under the back stairs or a king brown sunning itself near the clothes line filled my child's mind with terror. Snakes were to be killed, I was taught – a belief that most Australians held as I grew up. Only when Win
began educating me about them did I start to see them differently. ‘They're more afraid of you than you are of them,' he would tell me in our early days. ‘They'll usually get out of your way; they'll only strike if they think you're threatening them.' His respect for them, as for all wildlife, meant that he would never kill one.

I had occasion to witness Win's comfort around snakes just weeks after Rodo had brought the dead cobra into the guesthouse. The two of us were out driving along Bakota South when we spotted the graceful curves of a snake moving across the track ahead. As the sky was overcast and the air cold it moved sluggishly, then stopped altogether when it saw the Kombi. We pulled up just metres away, close enough to have a clear view of its distinctive black and yellow markings. ‘It's a cobra!' Win said excitedly. ‘See if you can get a shot of it. I'll get out and try to keep it still, but you'll have to hurry.'

The cobra was large – around two metres long – with a small neat head. We knew deadly hooded cobras were endemic to the Belinga area and assumed that this was one, although no hood was visible. Somewhat nervously, I climbed out with the camera slung around my neck. Win had positioned himself in front of the snake, blocking its path to the nearby vegetation. Confronted, it slowly rose up, extended the hood on either side of its head and settled into a ritualised motion of threat, swaying from side to side, its eyes fixed on Win.

‘Now don't fiddle around,' Win urged. ‘I'm not going to be able to keep it here for long.'

‘For God's sake be careful,' I hissed as I fumbled with the camera settings, trying to compensate for the low light. ‘They're not aggressive, you know,' Win assured me. ‘I
wouldn't be doing this if they were. Come on! Hurry up!' Each time I focused afresh the cobra moved and I had to start again, my concentration blurred by fear. The short depth of field dictated by a fully open lens only made the task more difficult. With each passing moment Win's impatience grew, and with it the snake's discomfort at being cornered.

‘For pity's sake, get on with it!' Win shouted. ‘What the hell are you doing?'

‘Trying to get it right. What do you think?' I snapped.

In a languidly beautiful movement I wish I could have appreciated at the time, the cobra ceased swaying, sank to the ground, and began advancing towards Win's feet. He leapt backwards, cursing my procrastination, grabbed a handful of dirt and threw it at the glossy black head. Momentarily distracted, the cobra paused just long enough for me to click twice and retreat to a safer distance. No longer cornered, it changed direction and moved off to disappear into the cover of vegetation.

‘Did you get it?'

‘I got something, but I don't know whether it'll be any good.'

I had never photographed a snake before, much less a deadly one that was threatening to strike at my husband's legs, and it was not an exercise I was keen to repeat. ‘Next time we won't be doing that,' I said tartly as we returned to the Kombi. I should have been used to Win's risk-taking behaviours by then, but they still had the power to annoy me. In contrast, Win was glowing with the excitement of his first cobra encounter. ‘I wasn't in any danger,' he insisted. ‘It was just telling me to move on.'

It was only months later when Win related the episode
to Eamon Temple that we were brought up with a jolt. Eamon sat poker-faced listening to the whole story, then in his measured Midwestern tones offered one of his heart-stopping retorts: ‘You know there are spitting cobras round here, don't you? They can spit venom into your eye from a couple of metres away, and if they get you you're blinded for life. You're just lucky it wasn't one of those.'

There was little we could say at this news, but I hoped it might instil some caution into Win for future occasions. Eamon must have grimaced privately at the audacity of this newcomer to the African forest whose supreme confidence could have cost him so dearly. The ultimate irony was that when I had the film developed, I discovered the shots were grainy and out of focus.

 

I thought little about Étienne and Bernard's comments about the dead cobra until one day I was chatting to Jacques' plumber, Lougué-Lougué Marcel, about various types of game meat, and he told me he didn't eat a certain animal.

‘And why is that?' I asked.

‘Where I come from, we don't eat that.' I couldn't persuade him to tell me why. These food taboos – for that is what I believe they were – reminded me of something Mary Kingsley had written. She described a Gabonese custom whereby each person was allocated a forbidden food at birth or in infancy that they were prohibited from eating for life. The food differed from person to person; abstinence from it was intended as a sacrifice to the spirit governing the person's life. In Kingsley's day, most people adhered strictly to this custom, as any lapse could result
in misfortune. The belief was widespread, and the consequences of breaking the taboo greatly feared. I could only speculate whether this custom underlay the two conversations I'd had.

I often chatted with Mendoum Dominique about subjects unrelated to work, as he was articulate and precise in expressing himself. If anybody could explain to me the intricacies of traditional beliefs, I thought, perhaps he could. So one day I decided to try. I began with some general questions about local belief systems. I had barely started when his eyes widened and he became tense and guarded. He took a step back, put up his hands and declared, ‘Anyway, I'm a Christian, so it's no use asking me!' He repeated this several times, declaring that the Good Lord was his God and that he left all that traditional nonsense to others. I felt myself blush and changed the subject immediately. From then on I never asked people directly about their beliefs, and resigned myself to learning what I could piecemeal.

Not long after that conversation, Dominique received a large advance on his salary to cover the cost of his daughter's treatment by a traditional healer near Makokou. The girl was gravely ill. As she had not responded to western medical treatments, he had taken her to the healer, where she spent three weeks being treated. Dominique related all this to me on his return. I listened carefully but asked no questions. I guessed that the girl was considered to be suffering spirit possession, a paralysing condition that some of our workers had experienced. It made them lethargic, fearful for their lives and unable to carry out their normal daily activities. Under Gabonese law, spirit possession was an illness for which workers were
entitled to time off to be treated. In these cases, western medicine had nothing to offer.

As time passed, we found that traditional beliefs often emerged unexpectedly in the midst of everyday situations. One day, one of the men asked to be driven out into the forest to bring in a leopard he had caught in a trap. We took the Toyota utility, and the man and several other hunters rode in the back. When we arrived at the spot, there was a large antelope with its leg snared in a
piège
– a wire trap – but no sign of a leopard.

‘Where's the leopard?' I asked. The man looked sheepish, mumbled something and turned his head away – the leopard story had evidently been a ruse to persuade us to use the Toyota to save them carrying the carcass back on foot.

We stood at a discreet distance and waited for the hunter to kill the antelope. It bellowed in pain and fear as he twisted its head around to expose the throat for slitting, but then he froze, his face covered in sweat and his eyes wide. He remained bent over the animal for some minutes, paralysed, before calling to one of the other hunters to kill the beast for him. I turned away, unable to watch. When it was all over and the carcass loaded into the Toyota, I asked him why he had not killed the antelope himself.

‘
Ma femme est enceinte
,' he explained – my wife is pregnant – as if that clarified everything. On the way back to camp, I mulled over what it could mean. Was it similar to the taboo the people observed on eating eggs? Eggs were never eaten but always fed back to the chickens. Was this about the sanctity of unborn life? Each time we witnessed these traditional beliefs in action, I realised afresh how little I knew about the world view of the people, and how little seemed to have changed since Mary Kingsley's time.

By the end of September, Win had finished work on our flat at the eastern end of the old sample shed. It was one large room with a shower and toilet to one side and a bare concrete floor. Along the northern wall, louvre windows revealed a view out over the old plantations to the forest and mountains. The flat was insect-screened and equipped with a stove, a fridge, a double bed and a wardrobe with a light bulb inside to prevent mildew growing on our clothes. We set up our camping table and chairs at the kitchen end and our radio cassette player on the bench, then unpacked all the crockery, appliances and linen we had bought in Libreville three months before. Our long-awaited privacy had come at last. I could escape from the daily chaos if I needed to. It was cause for celebration.

It was a destiny day for another reason, too – I had turned thirty. Rodo, in his characteristically thoughtful way, had made me a birthday card and secretly organised Étienne to bake me a cake. We'd invited him in for a celebratory drink in the flat that afternoon; when he arrived at the door, he held the cake high over his head and sang ‘Happy Birthday' in his gravelly bass voice.

I hugged him hard, thrilled that he had gone to the trouble. Win put on one of our classical music tapes, and the three of us sat at the table eating the cake and looking out over the forest.

During the three months since we had arrived, I felt I had been in a crucible, tested at every turn. It was as if all the outer layers of myself that I had carried around for so many years had been stripped away, and I had come face to face with my inner self for the first time. I'd discovered I possessed a kernel of toughness. The more I had engaged
with the challenges of helping to run the camp, the more my confidence had grown.