oddlers burst into tears and flee at the sight of me, a white, female stranger. Happily, they are used to Sarah Elkan. It helps if I'm with her when I make my way through the village, though the children still edge away and eye me distrustfully. Sarah trades greetings, jibes, and belly laughs with half the people we pass, effortlessly skipping from English to French to Lingala, the regional Bantu language. One afternoon, as I vainly attempt to soothe a sobbing three-year-old, Sarah notices someone she doesn't recognize. She immediately confronts the man and begins to question him. He's evasive and won't meet her eye. She doesn't like this, and her mood changes. She plies the rest of the lane with queries about the newcomer, but I can see that their answers don't satisfy her.

A new arrival in town means another mouth to feed, most likely with bushmeat, but unforthcoming strangers can also mean trouble. The reason becomes clear later in my visit, when Sarah leads me into a bolted storeroom on the edge of the Kabo landing strip. The room is filled with contraband confiscated by ecoguards on patrol in the Kabo hunting area. She points first to a pile of dombolo, 12-gauge shotgun shells that have been pried open and refitted with metal segments (often from tractor treads), an enhancement that makes the bullets even more lethal. Next she holds up a rifle with a plate dagger inserted into the barrel. The dagger's flat, squared-off business end turns the rifle into an ingenious device for felling elephants in one shot -- though the marksman must be boldly well positioned to take aim at the animal's underbelly. Finally, Sarah kicks at a flossy mass of wire cables, or snares. These appear benign next to the other items spread before me, but they are by far the deadliest. Snares were once made of liana, which would rot before snagging too many animals; large mammals could chew their way out. Wire snares are as good as forever. Throughout west and central Africa, they arbitrarily lay waste to untold quantities of wildlife. Animals are often left to rot in the snares, because they were not the intended prey. In 1999 in Kabo, ecoguards seized thousands of wire snares that had been planted over the years. In 2000, combing the same territory, they collected around 30. By 2001, they found none.

t's hard to see wildlife in the rainforest. The trees are in the way. Unlike the savannah, with its sweeping vistas and galloping herds, the rainforest conceals its contents. In two weeks, I have flown over the forest, tunneled through it on logging roads, and gazed upon its fortresslike flanks from the river's edge. But the interior remained a cipher to me. So I make a point to visit the park, the million-acre beating heart about which all the fuss is made. I am conveyed by pirogue along a tributary to the Sangha River. Two men stand at either end of the vessel and guide it with long stavelike oars. Orchids and other sculpted blossoms overhang the silent black water as it slides and curls through the jungle. The forest here is so thick that the bathroom at the Nouabale-Ndoki gorilla research base camp is, in fact, a cubed clearing cut from the trees, as if from a mound of clay. Elephants chisel the forest too, creating boulevards as they crash and eat their way along. Nouabale-Ndoki National Park is an outside place that feels like an inside place, with Colobus monkeys swinging from the rafters, tarantulas waiting in corners like obedient house pets, and butterflies thick as confetti on the ground. It's a grand and intimate environment, where a gorilla can pound its chest and holler and shake a tree not three feet off my path, yet remain invisible to my desperately probing eye. The gorilla's authority feels unimpeachable here, but it melts away at the unmarked borders of the park.

In logging areas just beyond those borders, the wildlife can be skittish, so you have to get lucky to encounter apes -- and I was. A gorilla crossed my path. The forest disgorged him to the side of the logging road as a researcher and I approached in a vehicle. We slowed to a stop. The gorilla glanced our way, then loped across the road like a neighbor on an errand. Next he showed us his silver back, and the forest gobbled him up again. A gorilla on a logging road in central Africa is a vulnerable gorilla. Although apes, including chimps, represent only 2 percent (by weight) of the bushmeat for sale in markets, they are disproportionately affected by the trade because their numbers are comparatively low to begin with. And they are hard to replace: Their slow reproductive rates typically produce only one baby every four to five years. Along thoroughfares like this one, the beasts wind up in parts, with price tags affixed to their wrists or their ears. Until recently, logging companies tacitly encouraged the slaughter, not just of apes, but bushmeat in general. After all, with no effort or cash outlay from the logging company, workers could feed themselves. And why should a logging executive object if some enterprising employees used company vehicles to transport bushmeat down the road a piece to sell it and supplement their wages?