Nunkie, as I have said, gave new perspective on how numbers change within groups, which may range from five to twenty individuals. During his first month in the study area, Nunkie snatched away a young female from Beethoven's Group 5. He dropped her in a few weeks. Over the ensuing months a phantom wanderer, suspected of being Nunkie, seized three more females from Group 5 and was thought to have killed an infant during a violent interaction.

About a year later Nunkie seemed to realize that Uncle Bert, the dominant silverback of Group 4, was inexperienced. He kidnapped two females, Papoose and Petula, from Uncle Bert's family. They have remained with Nunkie to this day. Petula, lowest ranking female in Group 4, had been sexually neglected by Uncle Bert since giving birth to her first offspring, Augustus.

Silverbacks at times neglect subordinate females in favor of the more dominant and senior ones. Petula may, indeed, have been wasting breeding time in Group 4—and if I have learned anything about wild gorillas, it is that they are marvelously controlled by internal, or instinctive, clocks that warn them of interference in natural cycles of reproduction.

Nunkie bred immediately with Petula, and after 11 months she gave birth to the first offspring (a female) that he sired within the Visoke study area. Ten months later Papoose produced Nunkie's second offspring, a male. Building his new family, Nunkie in just eight years has sired six infants among half a dozen females taken from at least three other groups.

We found Nunkie, as his harem and responsibilities grew, spending a lot of time high on Mount Visoke. This was not an area where food was plentiful, but the choicer terrain in the lush saddle between Mounts Visoke and Karisimbi was preempted by established groups—increasingly so as vigilant patrolling curtailed poaching and resistance grew to the human encroachment of land clearing and herdsmen. The higher slopes gave Nunkie's group a fixed, dependable home range, essential for the stabilization of a family group.

Nunkie's phenomenal rise to power gave me once again three main groups habituated to my presence. Two of four groups I had regularly contacted since 1967 had disintegrated by 1978. Of those, Group 9 split up after its dominant silverback died, and Group 8 fell apart because of the death of its aged leader, my specially cherished Rafiki.