Gorillas in the Mist Read Online Free PDF Page A

sulked last night as
    Alexie and I really hit it off and kind of ignored him all day.
    Pookie wants me to go off on a tour and see Victoria Falls, but if I go I won’t see Alexie again. And so-o-o-o …
    Politeness overcame passion and she took the tour. But it was not the last she was to see of Alexie.
    She heard from him soon after she’d returned to work at the Korsair Children’s Hospital.
    Alexie! Oooh what a letter! He has been traveling in Mozambique to survey tobacco plantations and opportunities, but says there’s not much security there for whites.
It is not the place to get married in and raise a family and work for a future
, he says. He seems terribly eager for my advice and thinks he’d like to come over here and go to Notre Dame University for a while, if I approve!
    Dian approved, though cautiously. “I believe you would like this country but doubt you would care to live here. I’d be happy to show you ‘my’ farm and introduce you to the Angus family—all ninety of them.”
    The following autumn Alexie flew to New York, then on to Notre Dame to register. Dian had anticipated an early reunion with him, but as she soon discovered, it was first things first with Alexie. Although he phoned her frequently, he did not come to Louisville. “It’s three hundred miles from South Bend,” he told her, “and I don’t have the time to spare just yet.”
    It was not until Thanksgiving that he found the time.
    Alexie has just left after his week here…. I really need all of this week to recover; tornadoes and hurricanes have a lot to learn from him! It seems he has taken a part-time job that occupies his weekends, thus he hasn’t been able to make it down here and was too embarrassed to go into details before.
    At first he seemed stiff and distant in his city clothes, but when he shed them for farm attire to help with the chores at Glenmary, he exuded the same appeal she had felt when she met him on a tractor at his family’s estate. They became lovers.
    But when he returned to Notre Dame, he left behind him a confused and resentful woman.
    I cannot as yet express what I feel or don’t feel about him. I can say this, though-I will have nothing to do with him seriously until he is through taking his bows. I would say he is suffering from a rather enlarged cranium, and rightly so, because everybody in his university, business, and social world is apparently approaching him on bended knee just to share the aura of his personality and brilliant magnetism.
    The brief relationship between them already seemed to be waning. Dian immersed herself into her several projects. In addition to her regular job at the hospital, she gave slide shows to local service clubs for a small fee; she was trying to sell her 16mm safari film to a television program,
Bold Journey;
she was attempting to interest the
National Geographic
in her still pictures of the Karamojong tribe; and she was working on several magazine articles.
    Dian spent at least three hours each night writing—usually scratching out half of what she had written the night before. One piece, entitled “I Photographed the Mountain Gorilla,” ended:
    It was with no small degree of reluctance that I departed from the Virungas, the Roots, Sanweke, and the gorilla families I had come to know and respect for their individuality, their independence, and their majesty.
    I am deeply concerned over their future. How much longer will they continue to thrive, in view of the many opposing interests threatening their habitat-poachers, agriculturalists, and pastoralists? Will an uneasily settled, newly independent Congo cease to care about the anthropoid treasures it harbors? Will the gorilla, like so many other wild animals, merely become the hapless victim of our times, whose future bends to the will of frenzied human aggrandizements?
    This article produced only rejection slips from
Saturday Evening Post, Life
, and
Reader’s Digest
. Long discouraging monthswere to pass