The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 40

B8-The Post, Thursday, October 24, 1985 PB Gorillas' Protector on the Hunt for Poachers "If my office could grant her sainthood, it would, he says. Despite his high regard for Fossey, Ha biyaremye flatly denies an allegation in her i A 4yS? ff tTcri. Soft MONT VISOKE, Rwanda (AP) They call her "Nyiramachabelli," which in the Kinyar-wanda language means, "The old lady who lives in the forest without a man." For much of the past 18 years the controversial Dian Fossey, despite a lung ailment, has lived in a cold rain forest on a mountain more than 2 miles high, studying and protecting rare, mountain gorillas, tracking down the hated poachers. She teaches the apes to fear blacks, but not whites, because most of the poachers are Africans. She concedes the practice could be branded as "racist." She has been known to spray-paint a four-letter word on an errant cow that wandered into the preserve.

She once was accused of kidnaping a poacher's child to swap for a captured baby gorilla. Fossey's anti-poaching team is credited with ths capture in May of a notorious Rwandan poacher named Sebahuta. "He made a full confession and I did not have to pull out his eyebrows," she says, referring to rumors that she has been known to dispense harsh treatment to poachers. It's no surprise that Fossey is largely, feared by the local Rwandans. When a reporter and two companions arrived at her Mont Visoke cottage, she slowly approached their Rwandan guide.

The guide backed off. 1 She picked up two blades of grass, entwined them, then placed them in his path. "Why did you bring these tourists here?" she asked in his native tongue. "If you or your people come here again, there will be death." Terror-stricken, the guide hid in a small shed until the end of the interview. Later he explained that the placing of the blades of grass was like drawing a line between two people, a local tradition to warn an enemy not to proceed farther.

"That woman is evil," he said in French. Fossey, dressed in a maroon ski jacket, rubber boots and waterproof leggings over blue jeans, said she gave up a fiance to devote her life to Rwanda's mountain gorillas. She is now in her mid-50s. "I have no friends," she says, with no hint of regret. "The more that you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people." But the world attention she has brought to the large, long-haired ape, which rarely survives in captivity, now attracts thousands of wealthy tourists every year to this poor nation in Central Africa.

Due to her pioneering work, wildlife enthusiasts can intimately observe gorillas in their natural habitat. She has done much to popularize her cause through magazine articles, television programs, and a 1983 book, Gorillas in the Mist. Fossey, whose small anti-poaching team is oook mat a ranking park official here con spired in the killing of a gorilla named Kwelif which she had habituated. He also attacked her policy of teaching gorillas to fear blacks but not whites. Fossey maintains she received approval arj the highest level of the Rwandan government to continue the practice until poaching by Africans is wiped out.

But the park director disputes that, saying' "It is scandalous. She makes a mistake be- cause gorillas live in a country of Last year, 2,684 traps were removed and seven suspected poachers were Fossey says. Few poachers are now after the apes, pro-! ject members say. But traps illegally set in! the park for duiker antelope and bushbuck still snare gorillas. Previously, poachers killed the parents with bows and arrows to capture baby gorillas alive for sale to foreign zoos.

They decapitated the slain apes for souvenir skulls and Cut off their hands for ashtrays. Internation-j al restrictions have practically put an end to that. Fossey also advocates what she calls "ac tive conservation," which she says is continue ous anti-poaching surveillance. She says that only her own patrols are adequately protecting the apes, although they operate in a limited section of the park. "Active conservation involves simply go-ing out into the forest, on foot, day after daj after day, attempting to capture poachers killing regretfully poacher dogs whict spread rabies within the park and cutting down traps," Fossey said.

She contends a mountain gorilla projeci backed by other international conservatioi groups helps tourism but is ineffective against poachers because its patrols don'l rough it. Its staff sleeps in tents, not undel trees like hers, and can therefore be easilj detected by poachers, she says. The project, supported since 1979 by thi World Wildlife Fund, the Fauna and Flor Preservatiqn Society of London, and th Washington-based African Wildlife Founda tion, has three staff members who advis park rangers on tracking suspected poach ers, habituating gorillas and handling group) of foreign tourists. "It's incorrect to say that her Digit Fund ii the only real active conservation effor here," says project member Mark Condiotti 35, a former school teacher from Port Ange les, Wash. "I know.

I've been involved in anti poaching." THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Dian Fossey teaches Rwanda's mountain gorillas to fear blacks, who may be poachers He was referring td her technique of accustoming apes to the presence of humans. "Before that, people thought gorillas were highly dangerous, and then other scientists followed her. Before, the park had six rangers. Now there are 60 thanks in large part to Dian." The habituation of gorillas, which can grow to 6 feet and weigh 400 pounds or more, has led to a money-making tourist industry in Rwanda, says Laurent Habiyaremye, 48, director of parks and tourism. About 16 percent of the national revenue comes from tourism, three-fourths of that directly traced to gorilla-viewing activities, he says.

Although an adult gorilla could easily crush a man, no tourist has yet been hurt by the creatures. They munch bamboo shoots and nettles inches away from the photo-snapping interlopers and then lumber away indifferent. The Rwandan park director credits Dian Fossey for making that possible, and he has a lot of praise for her. cials recall how she fired a rifle over the head of a gorilla-watching West German who had strayed near a group she was observing. Before returning to the United States in 1980 on a three-year teaching assignment, Fossey was summoned by the magistrate of nearby Ruhengeri for allegedly taking hostage the small daughter of a Rwandan she accused of abducting a baby gorilla.

She reportedly offered the suspected poacher an exchange. "Dian was reprimanded by the magistrate but not punished because she took good care of the child." recalls Belgian ecologist Alain Monfort, 42, an adviser to the park serviceThe girl cried and said, 'I prefer to stay with But she was returned to her parents, he said. Fossey, formerly a physical therapist who earned a doctorate at Britain's Cambridge University for her work among gorillas, no longer does research and her earlier studies are somewhat outdated. "But what is important is that she was the first to 'habituate' gorillas," Monfort says. supported by her U.S.-based foundation, the Digit Fund, dismisses as ineffectual efforts by others to protect the 240 gorillas in Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park.

A tall Californian, Fossey has emphysema. Nonetheless, she chain-smokes the local Im-pala brand of cigarettes. She takes small steps, pausing for raspy breaths of air, while leading visitors to the gorilla cemetery she built near her small cottage of corrugated metal. The visitors slogged on foot for about an hour and a half through sometimes thigh-deep mud and clumps of stinging nettles to reach Fossey's settlement in the ghostly beautiful rain forest. She says all but one of the apes buried in the cemetery were killed by poachers, including "Digit," whose death in 1977 generated considerable publicity and concern for the threatened species.

She refers to the apes as "my" gorillas. She can mimic their greetings. Stories abound of the lengths she has gone to protect them. Before organized tourism began, park offi Ft 1 Life on 'The Hill' -'Never a Dull Moment' 2 Inherit Historic Ranch rZZ-X i A4 -v-' -1 i rt i I. 1 1 a 1 I.

izf- I llvki THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Henrietta Horton, 81, at work at one of the West's oldest dude ranches SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) Four decades ago, Dorothy McKibbin, from a hectic office in Sante Fe, carefully controlled access to "The Hill," where scientists were working on the atomic bomb in deepest secrecy. The Hill, an isolated mesa 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe, was transformed into the city of Los Alamos under the wartime Manhattan Project. Now 87, Mrs. McKibbin lives quietly in the same cool, dark adobe house in Santa Fe where scientists once relaxed and discussed the principles of nuclear fission.

She rests daily in front of the fireplace in the room where 27 couples, all willing prisoners of the Los Alamos secret, were married without family but surrounded by new friends. She can no longer see the distant glow from the full-fledged city of Los Alamos or read the books written about its birth. Her blindness and her need to use a walker are great frustrations, but Mrs. McKibbin's memories are fresh. "I was the front man," she recalled.

"You had to get past me before you could get up on 'The Hill' There never was a dull moment. The office was a madhouse. We worked six days a week, but even so, I couldn't wait to get back in the morning." She was hired in March 1943. "I'd been a young widow with a teenage son to support, and I'd lost my job as a bookkeeper," Mrs. McKibbin said.

"I was thinking of working in a bank when a friend offered me a position he vaguely described as They were talking it over in the lobby of a Santa Fe hotel when a tall man in a trench coat and porkpie hat stopped and was introduced to Mrs. McKibbin. "I didn't catch the name and had no idea what his work was, but I was struck by his intense, magnetic personality, by the way he walked so lightly on the balls of his feet," she said. "I knew right then I wanted to be part of whatever project a man of such vitality was connected with." The man was J. Robert Oppenhei-mer.

Mrs. McKibbin became one of the project's first employees. Mrs. McKibbin represented The Hill's first line of defense, as well as the initial aid and comfort given to the scientists, their families, soldiers, nurses, doctors, secretaries and technicians whose confidential orders directed them to her office at 109 E. Palace where they were to be given further instructions.

In a 1946 contribution to the project's official history, Mrs. McKibbin wrote: "They arrived, those souls in transit, breathless, sleepless and haggard, tired from riding on trains that were slow and trains that were crowded, tired from missing connections and having nothing to eat. Often the traveler arrived days after he had been expected, and settled down with a sigh into a chair at 109 East Palace as if he could never move again "Most of the new arrivals were tense with expectancy and curiosity. They had left physics, chemistry and metallurgical laboratories, had sold their homes or rented them, had deceived their friends and launched forth into an unpredictable world expecting anything and everything, the best and the worst." It was Mrs. McKibbin's job to transport them to Los Alamos; cut their security passes on her code machine; forward freight, luggage, mail and furniture; arrange temporary housing; be a go-between, easing suspicion of The Hill people among the residents of Santa Fe; screen prospective employees; and scare off snoopers.

"Babies were parked here while their mothers, down from The Hill for the day, went shopping," Mrs. McKibbin said, obviously pleased at the memory. Originally Oppenheimer had envisioned Los Alamos as an outpost of about 100 scientists and their dependents. By 1945, there were about 5,000 people living behind barbed wire on the mesa. Despite the hectic pace and secrecy ot The Hill, Mrs.

McKibbin often went up to Los Alamos to socialize. Her son Kevin, now 55 and the chief ranger at Bandelier National Monument, bordering Los Alamos, keenly remembers the excitement of those long trips to the mesa. "I never questioned what was going on, I just thought all those smart people who overflowed our house were neat," McKibbin said. "Often I'd come home to find a scientist in my room and a note from my mother telling me to get my sleeping bag and find a place to park i it," he remembered. "People from The Hill weren't allowed to frater- nize with anyone in the valley except the McKibbins, so our house was al- ways overflowing, the kitchen full of people making picnics or somebody getting married while I popped the champagne." By the summer of 1945, Mrs.

McKibbin and her son knew some- thing big was at hand. As many as 70 people a day were checking into het office for transport to the mesa. It i was at that time that Mrs. McKibbin 1 issued the only pass she ever gave out without prior authorization from some higher authority. "A young man arrived during the noon hour and the offices on The Hi were shut down," Mrs.

McKibbin re called. "He looked honest and sound ed as if he knew where he was goin and who he was supposed to see, rather than wait an hour I gave him pass. He had a lovely smile." The man was Paul Tibbets, th pilot of the Enola Gay, who droppe the bomb on Hiroshima. As the July Trinity test af proached, Mrs. McKibbin said, "Th voices on the telephone showed strai and tautness.

I sensed we were aboi to reach some sort of climax on th project." She was invited to a picnic tha lasted throughout the night of Jul 15-16, 1945. Standing in the deser south of Santa Fe, she saw the sk; light up and knew the Manhatta: Project had accomplished its mis sion. The rest of the world was told a ammunition dump had accidentall exploded. Mrs. McKibbin stayed on at 109 Palace Ave.

until retiring in 1965 Her departure marked the closing the Santa Fe branch of the Los Ala mos National Laboratory. Struggling To Learn Ropes SADDLESTRING, Wyo. (AP) -Two women, separated in age by nearly half a century but bonded by love for their historic piece of the West, today boss one of America's oldest dude ranches. Neither Henrietta (Hank) Horton, 81, nor Margi Schroth, 34, knew much about horses, cattle or farming before they came to the HF Bar in northern Wyoming. Horton was a newspaper drama critic in Chicago when Skipper Horton swept her off her feet in 1936.

Two generations later, Schroth was working in public relations in Billings, when she met grandson Jack Horton and lost her heart to a man destined to break it. Both Horton men are dead now. Skipper Horton, the ranch founder and patriarch, lived a full life. Jack, the heir and dreamer, died of leukemia when he was 41. It has been four years since his ashes came back to the HF Bar.

Hank Horton and Schroth carry on, an odd couple who've come to care for each other as they preserve the legacy and beauty of the HF Bar, their men's parting gift. There are no handbooks or rules for running a dude ranch. It's all on-the-job training. "I've made a lot of mistakes," says Schroth, sitting in the circa-1921 house her fiance left her, the one he was brought to as a baby. "You turn around here and things fall apart, and mostly I didn't know how to fix them.

But you grow into a job like this. I've got a 10-year plan." Schroth is a tall, dark-eyed woman who mixes preppy and cowboy clothes to stride or ride her horse around the ranch. Jeans, sweater, down-filled vest and neckerchief are her uniform parts. It's a far cry from her days as a New York City magazine writer, or college life at Briar-cliff, where she earned an English degree. "Right now I want to get this place manageable," she says.

"We've had to rewire, we've trimmed 200 trees, put in a new water plant, refurbished the hay meadows, and we're just at the tip of the iceberg." Saddlestring is a 36-building settlement in the heart of the HF Bar. It's composed of guest cabins; a sprawling main lodge where the dudes eat; a circa-1931 swimming pool with the concrete held firmly together by 1,000 horseshoes; sheds; Horton's house; Schroth's house, and the Saddlestring post office. The most recent structure was built in 1921. It is an old-fashioned place that has never advertised its dude operation. Eighty percent of the guests are repeat clientele who want "their" cabin and horse from years past.

Often employees are friends or relatives of previous guests. Skipper Horton began building his great cattle ranch, once five times larger than it is today, in 1902. Nine while, Schroth is whizzing from kitchen to stables, or standing beside a broken pipeline trying to figure out what's wrong, or showing a thrilled youngster how to catch his or her first fish out of the north fork of Rock Creek, which roars through the HF Bar's front yard. "It's crazy here in the summer from May 15 through hunting season Mrs. Horton and I are married to this ranch," says Schroth, who learned how to stalk game from Jack Horton and is now one of only three licensed women outfitter-guides in Wyoming.

Dean Thomas has worked at the Horton spread for 55 years and owns some stock. As the hands-on foreman, he sees it all. And at 74, he's a little reluctant about change. Until this year, Thomas had annually cut 70 tons of ice from a nearby lake, packed it in sawdust in the icehouse, then delivered it daily to the guest cabins by horse and wagon throughout the summer season. But progress is making inroads at the HF Bar this year, for the first time, there's an ice-making machine.

Thomas, a man of few words like any good cowboy worth his salt, just scratches his head and says, "Margi's sure shakin' up the place." Schroth says even fewer words, "I hope it works." In 1978, Jack Horton wrote of his grandmother in The Western Horseman magazine: "Hank has been the overall manager, financial wizard, and tour de force behind the ranch since 1948. The success of the ranch and indeed the fact that we still have it are very much her doing. "She is both tough and very generous and has that wonderful flair for both understanding and entertaining people and bringing them together. Her presence here is that extraordinary blend of strength, character and dedication that together constitute the real institution that is Saddlestring today." When he died, Jack Horton handed the future of the HF Bar to Schroth, a woman of his generation who has his grandmother's spirit. tubs, gourmet food and three-day package deals.

But Hank Horton resisted the trend and kept the slower pace of the HF Bar. Meals stayed hearty, wholesome and downhome. The cabins remained rustic, the activities casual. There were trail rides and steak frys, square dancing and weenie roasts. But occasionally, Horton got discouraged with the effort needed to provide for 90 guests at a time, 45 summer employees and 160 horses.

"When Jack graduated from Princeton, I thought maybe we should get rid of it, since it isn't very-productive operating just two or three months a year. There's a terrible problem hiring help, and so much is invested in equipment and facilities and horses," says Horton, "but Jack said he'd just work until he could get himself another ranch. So we kept the place but then Jack died." Schroth was shocked when she discovered Jack had left his share of the ranch to her in his will. But she's used to the idea now, and she says Saddlestring feels like home. "She's a breath of fresh air, and she has so much stamina and energy," says Horton, who's had six hip replacement surgeries and can no longer ride horseback or walk long distances.

Increasingly, Horton has been relying on her partner's judgment and abilities. In the winter, Schroth stays on at the ranch except for holiday visits to family members. But Horton, despite her bad hip, travels all over the world. "I love to put my finger on the map and go there," says the slim, gray-haired woman. "I get terribly 'homesick' that means I'm sick of home.

I did China last winter, and I went to Grenada to see what was going on, but I got angry when I couldn't get a room because of all the congressmen and the Army." From May until October, Horton presides over the post office, zip code 82840; helps with the books, bills, supply orders and employee problems, and visits with the guests. Mean years later it was incorporated as a dude ranch, the second in Wyoming. The neighboring Eaton family was a year ahead of him, and they're still running their family operation. "The dude part started because so many of Skipper's friends wanted to come out West for a visit," says Hank Horton. "They'd live in tents, but pretty soon they'd ask my husband to build them a cabin and buy them a horse.

They'd pay for it all, even their meals. They'd draw plans for the cottages on the backs of envelopes or bags, or even napkins. That's why some of these places look so peculiar." The HF Bar's lopsided authenticity won for it the distinction of being named a National Historic District in 1984. Horton still marvels that she, the educated daughter of a Maine marine architect, wound up spending more than half her life in the middle of the Big Horn mountains 20 miles from the nearest grocery store. "When I met Skipper, the only thing I'd seen of Wyoming was from a Pullman car on the Union Pacific, and I couldn't stand the looks of it.

But finally I said I'd come and see." Traveling to Wyoming with a self-composed message in her pocket, the young newspaperwoman tried to send it to her editors in Chicago the day she arrived. But the telegraph office at nearby Buffalo was closed and there was no phone at the ranch. "After several weeks I returned to Chicago, the message still unsent in my pocket. It read: 'Send me a telegram telling me to return Soon afterwards, Henrietta Stuart of Chicago became Hank Horton, mistress of Saddlestring. Ten years later she became a widow, but stayed on in Wyoming to help raise her step-grandson Jack Horton and his sister Trudy.

As the years passed, postwar America boomed and the automobile and interstate came to dominate vacation plans. Their dude business changed to resorts with many guests who demanded tennis courts, hot.