Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
And then Roger returned, having gone to get his wife, a pretty young woman who followed him
in. He held up an infant boy by the armpits and told me that it was his son.
“I have five children,” he said. “She finally gave me a son.”
“Where are your daughters?” I asked.
“Somewhere else,” he said.
That night I slept in a room with cockroaches and gray spiders. From an open-faced building
just outside, where the women cooked, firelight flickered, shining through chinks in the mud bricks
and the gap beneath the roof thatch. Boys laughed in the next room over. I'd hardly fallen asleep
when Roger knocked. The gray dawn had replaced the glow of the fire.
Though we set out quickly, Roger stopped often to show me his projects, among them a nursery
for seedlings that he and his volunteers used to replant old fields. Then we left the motorcycle with
his in-laws because they lived closer to the conservation area, and he and I met up with three of his
trackers. We walked into the forest, and for two hours, the trail often passed through slash-and-burn
fields, some scorched and smelling of cinder, others with dozens of small freshly cut trees lying
crisscrossed, the foliage still drying, and yet others with manioc shoots reaching high above my
head.
We entered the gloomy older growth, into what the local community hoped would be the
Nkokolombo Bonobo Reserve. The path carved through the loam of the forest floor. Red or black
ants crossed it in narrow streams that flowed like liquid, or rivers dozens of feet wide. We'd run,
stomping our feet, then crush the biting ants on our legs with our palms.
At a clearing several hours in, Roger told me that this was where his village had relocated during
the war. One of his daughters was born there, and during those years, he learned much about track-
ing and wildlife. Later, when he'd heard about conservation efforts in Kokolopori, he was eager to
apply his skills. For three years now, he and his trackers had been volunteering, following a bonobo
group that repeatedly fled. Nkokolombo is closer to Djolu than is Kokolopori, and saw far more
hunting during the war, much of it by soldiers from areas without taboos against eating bonobos.
The surviving bonobos were extremely wary, and habituation had been slow. The trackers lost them
for days at a time, and Roger told me that he needed outside expertise. Then he started a line of
reasoning I had heard often, saying that I must return to the United States and tell everyone about
the forest and the Congolese who were protecting it, and ask them to come see the forest, too.
At Roger's signal, we paused in a camp with a single wattle hut, where the trackers cut sugar-
cane and a bunch of bananas. Tiny sweat bees clouded around us, burrowing into my hair, covering
my forearms. To my surprise, three women with babies tied to their backs arrived on the trail from
which we'd come. The first was Roger's wife, and holding bags of food and cooking utensils, they
glided effortlessly past us, chatting as they stepped one by one over a massive rotting log with a tree
growing from it, roots veining the decomposing wood.
We set out again, with the women this time. Despite their loads, they hardly appeared fatigued,
but we were soaked with sweat. Over the next several hours, we walked in streams as often as on
land, the water cool on my feet, the bottoms sandy. The current was red with the tannins of disinteg-
rating leaves. The one time I asked how much farther the camp was I got the answer I should have
known to expect: “
Kaka awa
.” Finally, after nearly eight hours, we passed beneath an immense
fallen tree, between two branches as if through an arch, and came into a clearing with five small
huts in an L formation. A row of palm trees grew along one side of it, and at a bench, in the shade of
a small tree, a man pounded cassava in a hollow log, white powder dusting the ground around him.
