Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts Read online

  The referee’s arms shot straight up. On the ground in a pile of tangled players, Fraley heard the crowd erupt with joy. “Touchdown!” Gumbel shouted. “The Eagles put some points on the board for the first time this season, and take the lead.”

  Fireworks exploded overhead, and a great guttural roar shook the stadium. The state-of-the-art sound system blasted out the Eagles’ fight song. Staley danced off with the ball, and the cameras and announcers celebrated him. Fraley pulled himself off the pile and got ready to block for the extra point. The kick sailed between the uprights, and the center trotted off the field, unnoticed and elated. He was greeted with high fives on the sidelines, and McNabb slapped him gleefully on his helmet. The team knew Staley hadn’t scored by himself.

  This proved to be the high point of the afternoon for the Eagles and their fans. The Patriots went on to score two touchdowns in succession, taking a 17–7 lead by halftime. As the sun began to set behind the upper tier of the stands, its light replaced by the gentler glare of stadium lights, the Eagles’ hopes were fading. Their offense not only wasn’t scoring but was continually failing to manage even a first down. The boos grew louder and louder.

  On one third-down play late in the game Fraley hit his man, fell to the ground, rolled, and saw the ball drop a few feet away; an attacking linebacker had knocked it from McNabb’s hands. Fraley leaped for it. Deep in a pile of wrestling big men, scrambling for the loose ball, he grabbed hold of something and pulled. It turned out to be the helmet of a Patriots player. In the melee he did finally get his hands on the football. It’s not unusual for the ball to change hands several times at the bottom of such a seething pile before the referee can untangle the players and declare which team has legitimate possession. Often possession falls to whoever has the ball last. Fraley gripped the ball tight. Patriots defensive lineman Richard Seymour reached under Fraley’s jersey and grabbed a fistful of his ample flesh (he would have a purple welt after the game), trying to force him to release the ball. There was punching, kicking, gouging. “You don’t want to be there,” Fraley would say later. By the time Fraley saw daylight again, the referee had concluded that the rightful owner of the fumbled ball was Patriots defensive end Willie McGinest, and was shouting “Blue ball! Blue ball!”

  “Aw, ref,” Fraley complained. “He never even had it.”

  It was an omen. The Patriots scored another touchdown. The Eagles managed a field goal in the fourth quarter, closing the gap to 24–10, but all hope died when a McNabb pass was intercepted by Bruschi, who ran it back eighteen yards for another New England touchdown.

  Down by three touchdowns with only five minutes left to play, the Eagles were still battling. Their pride was on the line—as were their jobs. When a player stops trying, even in the hopeless final moments of a loss, it will be obvious on the game tapes. To be branded a quitter is a quick ticket to waivers. Very few pro football players feel any sense of job security. For all the affection of his coaches and teammates, and despite his generous contract extension, Fraley always feels he’s only one or two bad games away from being on the bench—or even out of football altogether. Letting down also brings the risk of injury. In the final minutes of a blowout the winning team’s defense often turns up the intensity, seeing a chance to run up its stats. A sack, a tackle, or an interception in the final minutes of a rout looks just as good on the score sheet as one earlier in the game.

  Reveling in success, seeing the disappointment on the faces of the Eagles, some of the Patriots tried to further demoralize them.

  “You suck!” one linebacker repeatedly shouted at the Eagles’ offensive line. Others joined in: “You guys are overrated!” “Y’all have lost a step—you’re getting old!”

  The incorrect holding call at the beginning of the game continued to haunt Fraley. “Cheap-shot artist!” a linebacker shouted at him again. At the end of one play the whistle blew in time to stop a charging linebacker from blind-siding Fraley at the knees. “Hey, sixty-three, you know I was coming for you,” the player taunted.

  Long before this, Eagles fans had started leaving, and wide expanses of empty seats expressed the hometown’s disgust. The final minutes of the 31–10 disaster were attended by only a few thousand spectators, most of whom appeared to be staying in order to heckle and jeer.

  After the game a cloud of gloom hung in the steamy twilight of the Eagles’ locker room. The team’s big-name players lingered in the showers, hoping that the waiting horde of reporters and cameras might thin or give up entirely. In a corner Fraley slowly pulled on his big boxer shorts and then his blue jeans. He was bruised, stiff, and tired. His thigh hurt, he had a purpling welt on his side, and he had strained something in his ankle when he fell over in the first quarter.

  “I’ve got to get that checked out,” he said glumly.

  After a victory offensive linemen can get trampled in the locker room by packs of reporters chasing down the players who made the big plays. But though the star players speak for the team in victory, in defeat sometimes the big, easygoing linemen are the only players willing to stare down the cameras and take the questions without rancor. By the time Fraley had his pants on, the pack had gathered. His face was still pink from the shower, and he squinted in the bright camera lights.

  “How does it feel to start off losing two in a row?” one reporter asked.

  “I don’t think we’re doubting ourselves,” Fraley said, stiff and serious. “If you doubt yourself, you start to panic, and if you panic, you don’t play well. We just have to execute on offense.”

  He was asked about the poor offensive showing, and about the second subpar performance by Donovan McNabb. More lights flicked on. Fraley mopped the sweat off his brow.

  “I’m just going to have to look and see what I can do better,” he said, diplomatically avoiding passing judgment on his teammate.

  When the reporters realized that Fraley was too self-possessed to say anything remotely newsworthy, they abruptly clicked off their lights and headed for Chad Lewis, who had dropped a couple of big passes.

  Fraley was left to finish stuffing his bag with his gear. After glancing up over his big shoulder at the reporters, he winked at me and smiled.

  “Man,” he said, “am I ever hungry.”

  (Despite the depths of doubt and disbelief reached by the team’s fans and the media after these two opening losses, the Eagles won nine of their next ten games.)

  RHINO

  FEBRUARY 1982

  Gene Roberts just wandered up to my desk in the newsroom one afternoon and said, “I want you to write me some stories about the rhino.” He let that sink in, and then added, “I want you to go where the rhinos are.” That was all he said, but it launched me on a project that was my first international assignment and the most ambitious reporting and writing project I had ever undertaken. Roberts had been to Africa on a vacation safari, and while there had learned that the black rhino, the World Wildlife Fund’s “Animal of the Year” the previous year, was considered the most endangered large mammal in the world. He was concerned about the animal’s plight, but he was also curious to find out what had happened to the millions raised by the WWF all over the world. Ever since these stories ran, they have been cited, usually disparagingly, as Exhibit One of Roberts’s eccentricity and excesses, and are unvaryingly referred to as the “White Rhino” series (drawing on the analogy to a “white elephant”). When my friend Paul Taylor wrote an article about The Inquirer for the Washington Journalism Review, he referred to the “six-part” rhino series. I wrote to him that it might have seemed like six parts, but was actually only four. I think the rhino series is Exhibit One of what made Roberts a great newspaper editor. It certainly is a prime example of how he changed my life. For many years I was convinced that it would be the lead in my eventual obit. This is my favorite of the four parts.

  Luangwa Valley, Zambia—They are twenty men. They have been at their dangerous, impossible task for two years, patrolling for poachers in this pristine Africa
n valley. They expect to be at it one more year. After that, the World Wildlife Fund money will be gone.

  Led by Phil Berry, a sturdy former Zambian game warden, this force received almost 40 percent of the $2.3 million raised in the fund’s 1980 “Save the Rhino” campaign. They are a brave crew, waging a losing battle in one remote location to stem the slaughter of the rhinoceros.

  Ten years ago, estimates of the rhino population at Luangwa went as high as 10,000. Today, Berry’s men hope to save the fewer than 4,000 that remain. This is believed to be the largest black rhino population left in the world.

  Until Berry’s men went to work, Zambia was a free zone for elephant and rhino poaching. Government game guards went unsupervised and often unpaid. The old colonial wilderness parks were ravaged by poacher gangs who lived unmolested in large camps throughout supposedly protected areas. Often, government game scouts acted as middlemen in the brisk elephant-ivory and rhino-horn trade. The country’s rhino population was falling at the rate of one per day.

  Berry’s rhino-protection force is hopelessly small. Combined, the north and south Luangwa National Parks cover 6,000 square miles. The whole valley, a largely unspoiled wilderness in northeast Zambia, is closer to 20,000 square miles.

  “That’s one man for every 1,000 miles,” Berry said with a bitter smile.

  Despite this, he and his men have slowed poaching rates in the valley. They have given Luangwa’s rhinos perhaps a few more years. Poaching gangs no longer squat brazenly inside park territory, stringing up skins to dry, stacking their haul of horn and ivory in the open. Berry’s patrols average about ten arrests per month. Another small antipoaching unit in a different part of Zambia, funded from other sources, has a similar record.

  But the gangs still prowl Zambia’s national parks, moving with stealth and speed. Berry’s men encounter slaughtered elephants and rhinos more often than poachers. Even poachers they catch have little to fear. Many draw fines far below the value of the horns and tusks they sell.

  “What we’re doing is, at best, a way to buy time,” said Berry. “The only way to really stop the rhino killings, even in this valley, is to stop the rhino-horn trade. But we can’t do that here. What we can do is make it bloody difficult for these poachers. And we’ll be doing that as long as the money holds out.”

  One morning in August, five of Berry’s scouts assembled for a typical four-day patrol. Each scout took a bolt-action, World War I–vintage rifle and ammunition. Their five bearers, barefoot young men clad in tatters, packed food and bedding into big canvas sacks they would carry on their heads. The food consisted of mshima, or “mealie-meal,” the airy white maize powder that is the staple of the Zambians’ diet, and twisted strings of dried elephant meat.

  It was dry season, African winter, when the air smells of dust through 90-degree days and long, cool nights. Berry huddled over a faded map with Abraham Phiri, who would lead the patrol.

  Abraham would march his men north for two days to the Luwi River and then south into higher, rockier ground where grasses were shorter, trees more numerous, and the nights much colder. On the fourth day they would walk out of the hills, down to the Mushiyashi River, where Berry would retrieve them in his Land Rover.

  Berry’s men spend as much time in the bush as in their home camp of round, tin-and-mud huts. They walk in corners of the vast valley where paid informants send them, keenly sensitive to signs of a poacher’s presence: a distant swirl of vultures, a vaguely defined footprint in the dust, a pattern of snapped branches or reeds at man-height.

  Walking through the bush for years accustoms the ear to soft sounds of birds, water, and wind, so the sudden slam of a rifle shot jars these men many miles away. Patrols often find abandoned poacher campsites. What they seek are direct confrontations.

  Two years ago a squad of Berry’s men was ambushed by poachers. The attackers grabbed one of the scouts, Tryson Mwandila, a clever, cheerful young man, and paraded him before the others with the barrel of an automatic rifle pressed to his temple.

  “Poor Mwandila was trembling in his boots,” Berry recalled. “Thought he was dead for sure. But one of my other boys shot his rifle off into the air and the poachers, including the one who held the gun to my bloke’s head, took off running. They exchanged fire, but nobody hit anything. That was before I’d had time to really work with my boys. That sort of thing wouldn’t happen today.”

  Poachers are not the valley’s only dangers. The scouts always carry a loaded rifle, their only protection against Luangwa’s lions, leopards, and cheetahs. And they are alert for the sudden charges of elephants or rhinos. Last year a charging cape buffalo rammed one of Berry’s men, fracturing his hip and tearing off part of his ear. He was left with slight paralysis.

  “The buffalo appeared unhurt,” Berry wryly noted in his report of the incident.

  This land is among the unique natural wilderness areas left on earth, a kind of lost valley protected from human encroachment by annual floods and the tsetse fly. Luangwa is a branching fracture of the Great Rift Valley, a long break in the continent that stretches from Mozambique north to the Dead Sea. Snaking through the center of this wide, sunken region, far below the cliffs on either side, is the Luangwa River, a fast-flowing torrent when water spills down from the escarpments during rainy season but a river of sand spotted with still, pea-green pools during the long dry season. Stagnant lagoons, formed by the river’s ever-changing course, support the valley’s rich variety of wildlife.

  In just one year, Berry and his men have won a reputation throughout the valley and Africa that far outweighs their numbers or means. George Mubanga, an admiring wildlife expert in the Zambian capital of Lusaka, said, “Phil Berry? There are great men who live out their lives working in almost complete obscurity. He is one of them. Berry is a man of action. He puts the lie to the notion that one man can’t make a difference. We need ten more just like him.”

  The men set off in a Land Rover, leaving Berry behind at the patrol’s blockhouse headquarters, and rode north on dirt roads and fire trails until they ended. Eventually, the sturdy four-wheel-drive truck could proceed only in short hops, each turn of the wheels plowing into one deep rut or climbing out of another. There were miles of this pitted black clay, preserving the prints of elephant and hippo and rhino that slopped through it in the rainy season, when it was muck. Finally, walking was the only way to go on.

  Abraham led the column at a walking sprint, the rifle under his right arm suspended from a shoulder strap. With short, quick steps, shoulders erect, Abraham, who is fifty-one, moved over the scarred terrain so nimbly that the taller, younger men in single file behind him—four armed scouts and I—stumbled and half ran to keep up. Behind them walked the five bearers with the big bundles balanced on their heads.

  Each man concentrated on the next place to set his foot; a misstep on this uneven ground at Abraham’s rapid pace could snap an ankle. No one spoke. Poaching gangs are always afoot. They usually are heard before they are seen.

  After a half hour’s hard pace, the men were in a full sweat. As the sun rose, the day grew hotter. The pitted clay gave way to sand that shifted slightly underfoot with each step, slowing them. The patrol climbed down a small embankment to the surface of a dry streambed. Gnarled remains of trees, washed along during the February floods, lay sunbaked and withered on the sand. Dusty air dried our mouths and throats.

  Abraham halted before a slight impression on the sand. Bending, he traced with one black finger three curved prints arrayed in a tight arc.

  “Rhino track,” he said. “These are the three toes. One day old.” The spoor led to a narrow path up the embankment into grass. A poacher who wanted this rhino’s horns would only have to wait by this place. Judging by the worn footpath, the animal trudged by daily.

  Around a tight bend on the wide sand highway we saw an elephant standing under a tall winter-thorn tree on the opposite bank. It was an old gray female with small tusks, rhythmically thrashing against the ground a clu
mp of long grass clutched in its trunk. There were many elephants in this area, although this was the first the patrol had seen. Deep holes marked the sand where their trunks had dug down two feet or more for water. This gray old lady, upwind, appeared oblivious to the passing men, but Abraham, an old elephant hunter, took few chances. He led us back up the embankment into the cover of high grass.

  Five years ago, Abraham was nearly killed by a charging elephant. It bellowed and lunged full tilt.

  “If a man tries to outrun an elephant, the man will die,” Abraham said in his flat, matter-of-fact way. “The elephant runs very fast, but he sees very bad. A smart man does not run fast when the elephant comes. He runs slow. He watches to see which way the wind blows and which way the elephant runs. To escape he must run the right way. If the man runs with the wind on his back, the elephant will not know where to find him.”

  In Abraham’s case, the elephant was too close and the attack too fast for him to think of running. He leveled his rifle and put a bullet between the charging beast’s eyes. The elephant fell dead only a few yards in front of him.

  “I nearly died,” Abraham said.

  Elephant-control and antipoaching work, even with its hazards, is relatively tame for Abraham. When he was young, and Zambia was still a British colony, he served in the Queen’s African Rifles, a regiment that fought the Chinese in Malaya from 1948 to 1951. He recalled with genuine appreciation how the British had spread the word to the Chinese that black soldiers were cannibals.