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One gorilla group will deliberately seek out another and provoke
a conflict.  The resulting battles between gorilla tribes are furious.  One
of the bands that Fossey followed was led by a powerful silverback, an
enormous male who left a skirmish with his flesh so badly ripped that
the head of an arm bone and numerous ligaments stuck out through
the broken skin.  The old ruling male, whom Fossey called Beethoven,
had been supported in the fight by his son, Icarus.  Icarus left the battle
scene with eight massive wounds where the enemy had bitten him on
the head and arms.  The site where the conflict had raged was covered
with blood, tufts of fur, broken saplings and diarrhetic dung.14  Such is
the price of pre-human war in the Virunga mountains.
Gorillas are not the only sub-humans to cluster in groups that set
off to search for blood.  In the early '70s, Jane Goodall had lived
fourteen years among the wild chimpanzees of Tanzania's Gombe
Reserve.  She loved the  chimps for their gentle ways, so different from
the violence back home among humans.  Yes, there were simian
muggings, beatings and rage.  But the ultimate horror--war--was
absent.
Goodall published a landmark book on chimpanzee behavior--In
The Shadow of Man--a work which to some proved unequivocally that
war was a human creation.  After all, the creatures shown by genetic
and immunological research to be our nearest cousins in the animal
kingdom knew nothing of organized, wholesale violence.15
Then, three years after Goodall's book emerged, a series of
incidents occurred that horrified her.  The tribe of chimps Goodall had
been watching became quite large.  Food was harder to find.  Quarrels
broke out.  To relieve the pressure, the unit finally split into two
separate tribes.  One band stayed in the old home territory.  The other
left to carve out a new life in the forest to the south.
At first the two groups lived in relative peace.  Then the males
from the larger band began to make trips south to the patch of land
occupied by the splinter unit.  The marauders' purpose was simple: to
harass and ultimately kill the separatists.  They beat their former
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