With her academic credentials well on the way to being secured, and with regular help provided by some of the students from Cambridge and elsewhere who were eager to work at Karisoke, Dian was able to devote much more of her time to doing what she loved best—being with her gorillas. In 1972 there were ninety-six gorillas in or on the fringes of the study area, living in eight family groups. While students and the staff of trackers kept tabs on the others, Dian spent much of her time with Group 4, which had accepted her presence so completely that she had virtually become an adopted member of the family. This was the group to which the poachers had led her on her first day at Karisoke. At that time it consisted of fourteen members led by an aged silverback whom she named Whinny because of his strange, horselike cries. When Whinny died in 1968, Dian and a group of porters tied his body to bamboo poles and transported it to the hospital in Ruhengeri, where an autopsy was performed. The patriarch, whom she estimated to have been about thirty years of age, had been suffering from at least three potentially fatal ailments: peritonitis; an infection of the skull lining that may have been meningitis; and advanced deterioration of the lungs, which had accounted for his distinctive “whinny.”
What do You think about Gorillas In The Mist (1987)?
