Determining my location required some fairly extreme guessing. After stumbling about in fairly high growth for several hours, I suddenly came upon a vast expanse of water; knowing that we had not flown south far enough to have reached Lake Victoria, I could only suppose it to be Lake Albert. I was at the northern end, out of which flowed waters that I thought I could remember reading were among the sources of the White Nile: following them, then, would lead me into Sudan, where I certainly didn't want to go. East and south were the butcher's yard of Uganda, and west? To the west was yet more war-ravaged country, which had been given so many names by so many successive regimes during the last twenty-five years that the rest of the world had gone back to referring to it by its collective ancient title: the Congo. It was into this great unknown that, by process of elimination, I now elected to travel, limping through the Mitumba Mountains with scarcely any idea of where I might be going or what I might hope to do when I got there.
Days passed, and the reports of wildlife extermination that I had read before my departure began to ring true: I saw no signs of any animals big enough to eat and indeed heard scarcely any signs of life at all save for the echo of gunfire throughout the mountains. Insects, rainwater collected from enormous leaves, and analgesic — as well as hallucinogenic — roots became my diet, the last at least keeping my mind off my throbbing leg. But no amount of mental alteration could disguise the fact that I would soon be dead; and when my long trek at last took me back into sight of Lake Albert — for I had no compass, and those who think it's easy for a novice to find his way through a wilderness by the sun and stars alone have evidently never tried it — I simply sat down on a steep incline and began to howl mournfully, keeping up the noise until I finally passed out from hunger and exhaustion.
That I was revived and then carried from that spot by a man who spoke English was, at the time, less remarkable than the fact that I was alive at all. "You are a great fool," the tall, powerful man laughed as he slung me over his fatigue-clad shoulder. "Did you come to see the gorillas, then, and discover that they are all dead?"
"Fool?" I repeated, as I turned my upside-down head around to see several other soldiers walking near us, their camouflaged uniforms faded but their assault weapons gleaming. "Why do you call me a fool?"
"Any stranger in Africa is a fool," the man answered. "This is not a place to be unless you are born here. How is it with your leg?"
In fact my leg was throbbing with every step he took, but I only said, "How did you know—?"
"We saw you jump from the plane. And land. And shoot our enemies! We thought the jungle would claim you. But then you began your womanish wailing. It might have attracted our enemies. So we decided it was better to rescue a fool than become greater fools by letting him be the cause of our deaths."
"Sound thinking," I said. "You speak English very well."
"There was still a school that taught it, when I was a boy," he answered. "Below the mountains."
"Ah." Wondering how long I was to hang there, I asked, "Where are we going, by the way?"
"We will take you to our chief — Dugumbe. He will decide what to do with you."
I eyed the rather ferocious-looking soldiers again. "Is he a compassionate man, by any chance?"
"Compassionate?" The man laughed again. "I would not know. But he is fair, even with fools." Shifting me onto his other shoulder without breaking stride, he added, "It must have been something very terrible."
"What must?" I said, wincing with the shift.
"Whatever drove you here," the man answered simply. "You must have been driven. I know this. Because not even a fool would choose this place."
CHAPTER 45
The man's name, I soon learned, was Mutesa; and during the months to come he and his family would prove my saviors, taking me in as something of a cross between ward and pet after their chief, the aforementioned Dugumbe, announced that I could not stay in his tribe's mobile armed camp without a sponsor. Dugumbe fancied himself an enlightened despot: he dressed in an elaborate combination of traditional garb and several modern military uniforms and liked to pepper his conversation with concise denunciations of Western society. His personal code of conduct was based, or so he claimed, on the principal dictate of one of his nineteenth-century ancestors: "Only the weak are good — and they are good only because they are not strong enough to be bad." Yet beneath all this bluster Dugumbe possessed surprising intellectual rigor, even erudition, and in time his attitude toward me would soften. Indeed, because of our shared resentment of the technologically advanced world beyond the shores of Africa, Dugumbe and I would eventually become friends of sorts; but my primary gratitude to and affection for Mutesa, his wife, and their seven children was by then already solidly and irrevocably in place.
Dugumbe made it clear from the beginning that in addition to requiring a family to shelter and feed me while I was among his tribe, I would also need to fill some sort of role in his impressive force of five hundred disciplined, battle-hardened — and, it must be said, ruthless — men. I had no intention, of course, of sharing the remarkable technology that was hidden in my shoulder bag; I had already been fortunate that Mutesa and his detachment had been far enough from the action during my encounter with their enemies that they'd simply thought that I'd killed the men with a conventional weapon. Nor did I much relish the idea of going into tribal battle with an American or European assault weapon in one hand and a crude machete in the other. I asked Dugumbe whether he had any sort of medical officer, to which he said that while of course he had his tribal shaman, he was aware that when it came to the wounds of battle Western doctors could often be more effective. And so I became a field surgeon, calling on my medical school knowledge and even more on the basic tenets of hygiene and sterilization.
We campaigned all that winter and spring in the mountains, where I spent much of my time learning what plants were known to Dugumbe's people to have medicinal properties. Eventually we assembled quite a rudimentary pharmacy, which was fortunate, as there were no longer any "medicines" in the Western sense available to such people: during the height of the AIDS epidemic, Western pharmaceutical companies — after making donations of meaningless amounts of anti-HIV drugs for publicity purposes — had stopped shipping to poverty-stricken Africa not only those expensive products but also drugs that treated the host of other diseases that were decimating the continent: sleeping sickness, malaria, and dysentery, to name but a few. Necessity had, in the years that followed, forced the women in tribes like Dugumbe's to seek new cures in the jungle forest (his shaman continued to rely on spells and absurd potions made primarily from desiccated animal and human flesh), and they had discovered several plants with quite powerful antibiotic and analgesic powers. Some of these, such as the root I had experimented with during my first days in the mountains, had extreme side effects ranging from hallucination to death; but in controlled doses they were quite useful, and it struck me as deeply ironic that the same drug companies that had written Africa off so cold-bloodedly could have made enormous profits had they only shown a bit more foresight.