he Elkans are in their mid-30s, both with wiry, youthful builds. Paul has a purposeful stride and owlish brown eyes that look at the world without a trace of sentiment. Sarah, freckled and efficient, narrates liberally and assesses on the spot. She is intuitive and demanding. The couple is employed by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), with headquarters at the Bronx Zoo in New York City and field operations throughout Asia, South America, and Africa. They are in charge of a WCS initiative called the Project for Ecosystem Management in the Periphery of the Park (Progepp -- an abbreviation derived from the original French), which aims to restrict commercial bushmeat hunting and protect endangered species in the nearly 5,000 square miles that are attached to the southern and eastern borders of the park. This territory comprises the Kabo, Pokola, and Loundougou forestry management units, where Congolaise Industrielle des Bois (CIB), a German logging company, holds the concession rights.
The Elkans possess a quality that might have been hard to name ahead of time, but has doubtless proved indispensable on the job: a canny intuition for compromise. Progepp is a confederacy of the WCS, the logging company, and the Congolese forestry ministry. Conservation, industry, and government rarely back the same side of an argument, let alone collaborate. Conservationists revile loggers because they destroy habitats, sponsor the bushmeat trade with incessant road building, and deny or ignore the ecological outlay that underwrites industry profits. Loggers scorn conservationists for their narrow view of an ecosystem that may resemble Eden but also harbors a timber resource poised to fulfill a destiny in which conservation plays only a part. The question for wildlife advocates is, how large a part? Timber is second only to oil as a revenue producer in Congo, and, with its labor-intensive operations, the logging industry supplies the most jobs by far. With the exception of the government, CIB, with some 1,600 workers on the payroll, is the largest employer in the country.
The Elkans' office is based at Kabo, an outpost of the company's logging operation. The town is embraced by a soft bend in the Sangha River, which also marks the regional border between Congo and Cameroon. The river interrupts the forest and gives it dimension, relieving its otherwise monolithic mass and density. At dawn, mist steals from the water's surface and lazes in the trees, but then, as if summoned, coils up through the rainforest canopy and is gone. Fishermen and hunters ply the Sangha in low-slung vessels, angling toward Kabo's sandy beach port. The town itself is amiably disheveled, a warren of packed-earth streets lined with identical mahogany shacks. Its lanes are clogged with frolicking goats and children, women lugging frozen cuts of duiker, men drinking palm wine or lathing mahogany pirogues. There is a market square, a school, some shops, a police house, and a dispensary -- in addition, of course, to the logging operation. Kabo is a company town.
On its edge sits the sawmill, a sprawling, denuded patch of land colonized by shifting pyramids of felled hardwoods hauled in from logging sites an hour's drive away. Whining machinery trims the logs to uniformity. Forklifts and king-size flatbeds balletically traverse the zone, readying the stems of sipo and sapelli for the voyage to the coast and overseas, where the wood will meet its fate in the door frames and garden furniture of northern Europe.
Nianga Franck would love to work at the sawmill. But the coveted jobs are scarce, so he hunts instead. He goes out at nightfall twice a week, arriving back in Kabo at dawn with duiker, aquatic chevrotain (a small hoofed mammal), or porcupine bound at the ankle and slung on a pole. Nianga is 28 years old, the son of a logging employee. He hates hunting. He hates the dark, the snakes, the overnight chill. And he's not very good at it, either, he tells me in a soft, even voice. As a Christian, he cannot use animist fetishes to enhance his luck, he explains, and the fetishes bring in the meat for most of his fellow professionals.
On top of it all, Nianga is bound by hunting regulations designed to reign in the hunting free-for-all brought on by increased logging and the accompanying spikes in population. "When we came in here, meat was being systematically exported to Ouesso, Yaounde [hundreds of miles north in Cameroon], and beyond. Our first priority was to shut down the export," says Paul, who arrived in Kabo in 1998 with Sarah and two other staff members. After careful collaboration with the community, in which researchers learned as much as they could about local land-use conventions, Progepp divided the territory under its jurisdiction into 12 zones in four categories: subsistence and legal commercial hunting; nonhunting traditional use, such as Pygmies foraging for coco; protected areas -- sections set off-limits to any kind of human interference because the turf was judged to be relatively pristine and therefore critical to wildlife reproduction; and, briefly, safari zones, in which bongo, sitatunga (a marshland antelope subspecies), and forest buffalo were the quarry. Soon, however, the Congolese government outlawed trophy hunting, and safaris are now designed with cameras in mind rather than guns. The program also issued five essential regulations: no hunting of protected species; no hunting in protected zones; no hunting outside one's designated zone; no selling across zones (exporting bushmeat); and no hunting with snares -- this last because snares kill animals indiscriminately and in great numbers.
"I always understood about elephants and gorillas," Nianga says to me. He sits slumped on a chair with his rifle across his lap, his weary eyes at half-mast. "But now I know we need to be careful even of the rats."
