Now, Jacques Glennaze, director of CIB's Congo operations for the past 20 years, insists that the logging company wants to save wildlife. "Planning for it has become a way of life," he tells me from behind his imposing hardwood desk at company headquarters in Pokola. CIB is the largest and most pervasive among the half-dozen or so logging companies that are active in Congo. Loggers have long had a bad reputation, Glennaze, a laconic Frenchman, acknowledges, "but things are changing." Nodding toward Paul, he says, "We are happy to have a practical approach, rather than an emotional one." Which is to say, he is pleased that the WCS is willing to entertain solutions to the bushmeat crisis that do not entail the elimination of the logging industry. Certain wildlife advocates vehemently take issue on this point. They contend CIB was among the worst offenders when it came to sanctioning bushmeat traffic, and they do not trust its protestations of reform. Moreover, it galls them that loggers don't pick up the entire tab for turning things around. "They believe we're in bed with the devil," Paul says.

Others, however, are cheering on the enterprise. "The WCS took a risk and exposed itself to criticism, but it's a risk worth taking," says Jean-Gael Collomb, a forestry biologist formerly with the World Resources Institute in Washington, who has since joined WCS in Gabon. The danger, Collomb says, is in giving "green cover" to CIB -- that the WCS imprimatur might ease pressure on a company that still deserves scrutiny. But "logging is not going away, and it should be not be going away," he says. "The industry is crucial to development in central Africa."

Beyond Glennaze's window the 12,000 residents of Pokola -- a town that wouldn't exist without CIB -- go about their daily routines. The population has shot up from 2,000 in only a few years. "We have to manage this kind of demographic pressure," Glennaze says, meaning there's not enough bushmeat to go around. The logging company actively promotes the development of alternative protein sources, digging ponds for fresh-fish farms and stocking them, building and stocking chicken coops, buying freezers and importing frozen fish and chicken, even bringing in beef cows -- then providing the training to keep it all afloat. These are complicated initiatives, and for now domestic protein is more expensive than bushmeat, but the efforts are a start. The bushmeat crisis will not be eased unless residents can be weaned from their dependence on the forest for protein. Moreover, Paul says, no doubt with the program's critics in mind, CIB monitors its workforce for compliance with bushmeat regulations, supplies ecoguards with vehicles and drivers, and helps fund Progepp operations -- all unprecedented for a logging company.

ne by one, a clutch of eight- and nine-year-olds pretends to be gorillas on a patch of ground beneath a thatched roof along the edge of the Kabo landing strip. The kids daintily peel imaginary reeds to get to the imaginary nutrients inside. They scratch their ribs, loll on their backs, and fix classmates with scorching gorillalike stares. An audiotape plays a series of high-fidelity chimp hoots and screeches, and the kids answer back in kind. A billboard-size felt panel with a custom-made detachable rainforest scene leans against a table. This is a session with Club des Amis de Nature, an element of the program that developed under the careful guidance of Sarah and regional educators. The scene of delighted children might represent the most important thrust in a strategy to ensure that the forest will continue supplying apes for young people to imitate, not for them to consume.

"Basically," Paul tells me, "we are a laboratory for policy in Congo." The forestry ministry has instructed logging companies nationwide to bankroll and develop their own ecoguard programs. WCS researchers go camp to camp, village to village, canvassing residents on their protein consumption, taste preferences, and hunting strategies, then feed this information directly into alternative protein initiatives that are sponsored, in part, by the logging company. The ministry is using the scientists' wildlife data to help fine-tune hunting regulations. The government is testing a version of Progepp's grade-school education program throughout the Sangha region, with ambitions to follow up nationally.

Today the Elkans oversee a project with 100 employees, almost all of them Congolese. Their mahogany office compound, also near the Kabo landing strip, has some landscaping; a reception area to greet donors, regional governors, and logging executives; and handsome new research offices plastered with maps showing the locations of hunting camps and trouble spots. Push-pin charts reflect evolving survey data. CIB is beginning in earnest to exploit the Loundougou, a 1,500-square-mile logging concession running up the eastern flank of Nouabale-Ndoki. A trans-Africa highway in the works will link Loundougou, a remote region, to the rest of the continent. The pressure is on Progepp to expand its reach. This is good news and bad for two scientists who came to Congo to collect soil samples and examine bongo dung.

Recently, the WCS decided to move the Elkans to Brazzaville, where Paul will take up the new post of Congo Country Director, with a mandate to expand collaboration with government and logging. A search is on for replacements to handle day-to-day operations at Kabo. Paul hopes to begin work in the Moka logging concession, an area comprising hundreds of thousands of acres to the north of the park, which is run by a French company called Rougier. In Loundougou, researchers have begun surveying communities and wildlife in preparation for charting hunting zones. Roads and logging base camps need to be situated, logging practices spelled out, ecoguards recruited and trained. There is no horizon to the work. Unbridled hunting has already devastated species in nearby West Africa, where meat from small rodents is all that's available in many markets. Scientists and government policy makers throughout the Congo Basin and overseas are watching to see if the unconventional partnership between conservation, logging, and government can save wildlife in northwest Congo from the same grim fate. "The idea is to have a plan. We don't say 'sustainable,' we say 'improved,'" Elkan remarked to me once in reference to his goals for curbing the commercial trade in bushmeat. This struck me at the time as a modest ambition. But the head-down, plow-ahead approach might be the only way to reckon with the colossal task at hand: suspending the march to ecological oblivion.