Dian was intimidated by the young scientists who came to Karisoke to study with her. She felt that they were more interested in their graphs of gorilla reproductive success than in the gorillas themselves. They weren’t willing to interrupt their observation schedules to go and cut snares. She believed that the local people were lazy, corrupt, and incompetent, and that there was no point in trying to work with them. Her first priority was to stop the poaching. The young scientists felt her war with the poachers was nasty and inappropriate, and they didn’t want to be associated with it.

In 1977 Digit was murdered and mutilated, and Dian “came to live within an insulated part of myself,” as she wrote in her book. She was increasingly reclusive and morose and peculiar, retreating even from the gorillas. During one eighteen-month period in the late seventies she went out to the gorillas only six times, when important visitors—a film crew, the American ambassador and his wife, big contributors to gorilla conservation—came up. On these occasions she pulled herself together and was charming, but by this time she was a sick and increasingly bitter woman. She had emphysema, for which two packs a day of Impala filtrée, the strong local cigarettes, were doing no good. She began to drink. Communications with other researchers in the camp took place mainly through notes.

Dian’s consuming interest was in punishing the poachers. Once she put a noose around a captured pygmy, threw the rope over a rafter, and threatened to hoist him if he didn’t start talking. Horrible rumors began circulating among the Belgian doctors in Kigali: that she had injected one poacher with gorilla dung to give him septicemia; that she had hired a sorcerer to poison another particularly incorrigible one.

Dian’s treatment of the poachers didn’t really bother the Rwandan authorities, since the park guards were just as brutal once she turned the poachers over to them. What the Rwandans resented was her open contempt for them. Dian was convinced that they were all corrupt. She publicly accused the conservateur of the park of being behind the attempted abduction of one young gorilla, at a time when the park officials were finally beginning to take their job seriously. There was a big row between Dian and O.R.T.P.N., the Rwandan agency that controls foreign visitors to the country’s national parks, over David Attenborough, who had asked Dian if he could shoot a gorilla sequence for his “Life on Earth” series. Dian said fine. Until then she had been allowed to invite up anybody she wanted to. Attenborough went up with a crew, but when he came down he was harassed for not having a permit from O.R.T.P.N., which wanted to assert its control over park visitors. Dian was furious. So bad were the relations between her and the director of tourism, Laurent Habiyaremye, that some Rwandans and European expatriates believe it was he who had her killed. According to this theory, Habiyaremye wanted to get rid of Dian so O.R.T.P.N. could take over Karisoke and turn it into a tourist facility, convert the groups of gorillas used for research into tourist groups, and make that much more money. A spokesman for O.R.T.P.N. told me that if they had wanted to take over Karisoke they wouldn’t have had to kill her; they could have just ordered her to leave. He said they wanted Karisoke to remain a research center that would one day be run by Rwandans.

The mountain gorilla proved to be as good a fund-raising animal as the panda or the whale. As money began to pour in, Dian agreed for it to be channeled through the African Wildlife Foundation, which was already set up to process donations. But there was a big blowup over how the money should be used. Dian wanted it with no strings attached, to beef up her antipoaching patrols, to implement what she called “active conservation.” Her refusal to cooperate with the Rwandans and the things she was doing to the poachers were unacceptable to the A.W.F., so Dian ended up pulling out with her Digit Fund, and accusing the A.W.F. of stealing her money. The A.W.F. joined with other conservation groups to fund the Mountain Gorilla Project, which takes a three-pronged approach to saving the gorillas: set up tourism as a way of providing Rwanda with income from the animals and a reason for keeping them alive; train and increase the number of park guards; and educate the local people about the value of the gorillas and their habitat. In 1978 two young Americans, Bill Weber and Amy Vedder, came out to help set up the project while working on respective Ph.D.s on the socioeconomic aspects of conservation and on the feeding ecology of the mountain gorilla. Bill and Amy were a couple (Dian had particular trouble dealing with couples), and an extremely dynamic one. Amy was everything Dian was not: a highly trained zoologist who spoke French and got on well with Africans, a wife and mother to boot. So jealousy was probably a factor in the bad blood that developed between them. But it was also that Dian couldn’t stomach the idea of tourists, whom she called “idle rubberneckers,” being marched up to see the gorillas. She though the tourism was going to be handled the way it is in Zaire, where twenty or thirty tourists at a shot are taken up by a dozen pygmies who cut a wide swath in the vegetation right up to the gorillas and taunt them into beating their chests and screaming and charging. In 1980 she fired several shots over the heads of a party of Dutch tourists who had hiked up to Karisoke uninvited.