A FEMALE GORILLA.
After fixing our fires we went to sleep, and early the next morning we made for our camp. We had hardly gone two miles into the woods, when lo! I heard a kind of chuckle which told me that a gorilla was not far off.
The sound came from a densely-wooded and dark ravine, and from the very bottom of it. When we reached the place we found it to be one of those ugly bogs where you go knee deep into the mud, walking on the roots of trees, and sometimes get stuck fast in this position.
The gorilla was right in the midst of the bog; it was a female, and at every moment we expected to see a large male standing before us, roaring like a demon, and asking us what we came to do in this dark recess of the forest, where it had made its abode with his wife, and perhaps his baby gorilla.
How carefully we looked at our guns! how watchful our eyes were! We were not to be easily surprised. The bog was like one of the worst kind we have in America in the overflowed and woody land of the Western country; only here we have creepers, thorny bushes, and hanging lianas, and grass that cuts like a razor.
We entered the swamp, and went nearer and nearer the sound we had heard first, and came to a dry spot, when lo! we spied a female gorilla and her young baby. The baby was very small, a very dear little baby it was to its mother, for she appeared with her extremely black face, to look at it with great fondness. I was disarmed; I could not possibly fire. I seemed spell-bound, and could not raise my gun to fire. Yes, there was something too human in that female and her offspring; it hung by her breast, but, unlike our babies, who have to be entirely supported, its little hands clutched its mother’s shoulders and helped it to support itself. The little fellow gave a shrill and plaintive cry, and crawled from its mother’s arms to her breast to be fed, and the mother lowered her head and looked at her offspring, and with his little fingers he pressed and pressed her breast, so that the milk could come more freely.
On a sudden the mother gave a tremendous cry, and before I knew it she had disappeared through the forest.
I would not have missed this scene for a great deal, and I wish that you had all been with me to see it, for I know that perhaps such scenes may never be seen again by a civilized man; I knew that it had never been seen before. The gorilla will one day disappear. A day will come when he who writes these pages will have been long dead and forgotten, but perhaps the record of what he has seen may, like the record of Hanno, fall into the hands of some one, and it will be read like a strange tale.
I have brought away, altogether, thirty-one gorilla skins and skeletons; I have captured more than a dozen live gorillas, young ones, of course, and, altogether, I must have seen at different times during my twelve years’ explorations more than three hundred of them.
