A Natural Selection

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE DARK ROMANCE OF DIAN FOSSEY by Harold T.P. Hayes

Simon & Schuster; 351 pages; $21.95

The late Louis Leakey, for years the dominant male in the field of human- fossil studies, believed that women made better primate researchers than men. His Exhibit A was Jane Goodall, whose work on chimpanzees in Tanzania has been justly celebrated. Exhibit B also achieved acclaim but, on balance, muted the generalization. In 1966 Leakey sent Dian Fossey to the Congo slope of the Virunga volcanic forest to study the habits of the mountain gorilla. Fossey convinced the eminent prehistorian of her resolve with only a few free-lance articles she had written for the Louisville Courier-Journal. Her previous job was as an occupational therapist in Kentucky.

What Fossey had was determination and emotional hungers that drove her to extremes. She told her story in Gorillas in the Mist (1983), a bold mix of field observation, adventure and ecological tragedy. The mountain gorilla was being pushed out of its habitat by human population growth. Poachers were trapping the creatures for zoos or killing them for trophies. Gorilla heads made unusual hat racks. The hands could be used for ashtrays.

In 1967 a civil war forced Fossey to flee the Congo for Rwanda, where she established Karisoke Research Centre and generally shunned the company of her own species. "All of you have a family, a marriage and kids," she told curious visitors. "Those gorillas are my family."

More than most other naturalists, Fossey bonded with the subjects of her inquiry. When poachers killed the animals she had named Digit, Uncle Bert and Macho, she turned into a Rambo of animal rights. She beat captured poachers and terrified others with sham witchcraft. She shot at cattle that got too close to her "family's" territory.

Not pleased with these tactics, the Rwandan government wanted to displace Fossey and market her research center as a tourist attraction. She dug in. To a journalist planning a visit in 1985 she wrote, "If push comes to shove, I am prepared to fight for my claim." Two days after Christmas, Fossey was hacked to death in her bed. Suspects ranged from vengeful poachers to an American researcher who had proclaimed his innocence and fled the country before a Rwandan court found him guilty in absentia. The judgment is questionable. Harold Hayes does not offer conclusive evidence about who committed the crime. It is enough that he has given us a picture of Fossey that is more complex than the ones offered in the film version of Gorillas in the Mist and in Farley Mowat's Woman in the Mists (1987). Hayes, former editor of Esquire, died last year of a brain tumor.

Not surprisingly, his book portrays a loner starved for affection. Raised in California, Fossey was an awkward six-footer by the time she was 14. She loved horses and dreamed of working with animals, but her college science grades were too low to qualify her for veterinary school. Working as an occupational therapist proved an insufficient outlet for Fossey's yearnings. In 1963 she took her first trip to Africa, where she paired off with a strapping young Rhodesian farmer. An on-again-off-again engagement eventually ended, as did a later romance with a nature photographer. Her tempestuous affair with Africa endured.

That Fossey impulsively embraced a heart of darkness is obvious. Yet the wild shadows in Hayes' biography are illuminated by what he calls a "miracle of will." Its origin is Fossey's desperation to escape her own loneliness. It made her fearless; it triggered her outrage and outbursts and was the source of her fierce attachments.

A personal, somewhat awkward but elucidating note: in 1984 Fossey wrote me that she had read my review of Gorillas in the Mist over the graves of Digit, Uncle Bert and Macho. "I could finally comprehend," she said, "that the gorilla individuals I had known and named over the years since 1967 might well become public figures, not on a rock-star scale, but renowned for their own worth, lamented for their loss." Postscript: Fossey is buried next to them.