phalanx of girls sits cross-legged in the market, sorting and grooming coco, an uncultivated rainforest staple. Coco looks like long, green hair, luxuriant and tangly. The girls cluster around vast piles of the stuff, combing and pampering it, then wrapping it into bundles and securing it with twine. I pause to watch. The pretty scene contrasts sharply with the larger setting of casual carnage surrounding them. This is where shoppers peruse row after row of blood-soaked tables displaying the perfectly legal market fare of brush tail porcupine, blue duiker, and greater spot-nosed monkey, hacked and stacked into neat, affordable mounds. I see one table selling whiskery catfish flown in from the sea, and another that offers chicken parts from birds raised experimentally in nearby coops -- for now an exotic and expensive alternative to bushmeat, the local comfort food. I notice a wheelbarrow piled with dry, barely respiring dwarf crocodiles -- illegal bushmeat, my companion tells me brusquely, but this is not a fight he will pick today. I am with Paul Elkan, an American wildlife conservation biologist who agreed to bring me only reluctantly. The market here in Pokola, northern Congo's largest logging town, is "hot," Elkan tells me. Which is to say, emotions are running high.

Earlier in the year, during a raid, an ecoguard killed a suspected poacher with the butt of his rifle. An accident, the guard insisted, as police led him off to jail. Elkan's colleague, a government officer in charge of the ecoguards, pulled his patrol teams out of the forest and back to headquarters to wait for the atmosphere to cool. Elkan hasn't visited the market much since the incident. The open-air stands are a locus for those in the hunting trade, and some among them may be feeling confrontational, in the mood to close ranks. The boundary that separates legitimate hunters from poachers is distinct but porous. More than a few of the ecoguards are ex-poachers themselves. What's more, the very notion of regulating the trade can still rankle. Elkan is something like a sheriff showing up in a town that didn't know it needed one.

Later, on the veranda of the riverside bungalow Elkan shares with his wife, Sarah, he tells me about an encounter he had a few years back in Ouesso, a town 37 miles upriver from Pokola. Ouesso is home to northern Congo's national airport, which a few planes use to fly back and forth to Brazzaville, the nation's capital. Not long ago on this run it was commonplace for poachers to transport bushmeat in luggage holds. Passengers would sometimes have their mid-flight read or reverie interrupted by blood seeping from the overhead bins, raining into the aisle, then streaming down the length of the plane -- carry-on bushmeat. Nowadays these flights rarely transport sacks of dismembered gorilla, though stains on the carpets remain to tell the story. Anyway, back when blood spilled freely on flights from Ouesso to Brazzaville, back when the ecoguards were new in town, an incensed bushmeat trafficker once grabbed Paul Elkan by the collar during an airport patrol and shoved him up against a wall, barking, "Who the hell are you to tell us what to do with our wildlife? Look what you did to your bison!" He had a point. The 19th-century destruction of the bison population throughout the Plains states of North America reduced 40 million head of the massive ruminant to something like 1,000 in a few short decades. A similar onslaught of industry and commerce imperils the fauna that is native to the dense mahogany forests of the Congo Basin. The man with Elkan's collar in his fist was demanding the right to take his turn, to capitalize on a market all the more irresistible because it would be fleeting.

It's not hard to fathom the motives of a bushmeat entrepreneur in a country like Congo, where unemployment hovers around 85 percent. What's hard is fashioning a response to the bushmeat crisis that does not ignore the circumstances that produced it. Conservation methods once targeted isolated species and steered clear of thorny political issues; these days strategies are increasingly geared to the overall health of ecological and social systems -- what's known as community-based conservation. In the buffer zone of Nouabale-Ndoki National Park, Paul and Sarah Elkan and their many collaborators are not only working with the community but also attempting to engineer its future.

This is probably not what the couple had in mind for themselves when they first arrived in Congo on research assignments in 1996. Sarah was studying bais -- swampy, mineral-rich forest clearings that attract big mammals. Paul was investigating bongos -- large, handsome ungulates with spiral horns and deep red coats scored with white dorsal stripes. But three developments in Congo radically altered the focus of their work: an acceleration of the logging activities in the concessions near Nouabale-Ndoki National Park; the explosion in the bushmeat trade; and the emergence of the park as one of the most important intact wildlife habitats remaining in the Congo Basin.