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Orphans of the slaughter

Orphans of the slaughter

EDITOR'S NOTE: Commercial hunting is driving apes into extinction in Africa. In September, Blade science writer Jenni Laidman traveled to Gabon, in Central Africa, to document the toll of the bushmeat trade. Her three-part series tells the stories of the people struggling to save baby gorillas, orphans of the slaughter.

MPASSA, Gabon - The toddler wakes with a start and a scream.

His is a panicked, curdling cry, and Linda Percy has no choice but to hold the infant and wait for the moment to pass. The youngster tries to bury himself in her chest. His arms grasping, his legs pushing, he drives his head into her with desperate force. He's unconscious in terror.

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Every night. Night after night. Every few hours. It's always the same: the same panicked cry, the same rooting for comfort, the same 18-month-old that will not be consoled.

Could it be memory, Linda wonders as she scoops up a bottle she hopes he'll accept. This can't be hunger. More often than not he refuses the milk she prepared for him.

Maybe it's sickness, strange parasites slicing away at his insides. He has hardly known a healthy moment since the day she brought him home to the forest.

She can't prove it, but she's convinced the small gorilla holds a nightmare.

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Tormenting him is the memory of the slaughter of his family, the days of starvation that followed, the rope that wore infected ruts into his hips.

Ivindo remembers, Linda believes. She holds the sick youngster tighter and waits for exhaustion to quiet him.

In the tradition of the adventure stories that first revealed Africa to westerners, the continent is gripped by a new tale of man against beast. But this is one never imagined by the big game hunters and swashbuckling explorers who saw themselves conquering an untamable wilderness.

In this battle, gorillas, chimpanzees, monkeys, and scores of other species are the ones fighting for survival as traditional hunting practices are perverted into a growing commerce known as the bushmeat trade.

Many scientists believe that some of the species caught in this relentless battle will pass into extinction.

"I think the bushmeat trade could seriously mean the end of the game," says Heather Eves, director of the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force, a nonprofit conservation consortium dedicated to the elimination of illegal commercial hunting.

Research by Caroline Tutin and Michel Fernandez, who have studied chimpanzees and gorillas in Gabon since 1983, concludes that hunting is a larger threat to these great apes than even habitat loss.

Because the reproductive rate of great apes such as gorillas and chimpanzees is slow, their populations could disappear with hunting pressure.

But more is involved here than the future of endangered species and the forests where they live. Also at stake are Africans making a living the best way they know how: by the hunting and selling of wild animals for food.

Animals like Ivindo.

Finally, Ivindo sleeps.

In the African night, a riotous choir of insects muffles his whimpers.

Across the river from where Linda camps, 15 young gorillas slumber unperturbed. The older ones are high in the trees, resting in nests no one taught them to make. The youngest sleep piled in a cage. They cuddle together, providing for one another the warmth each once knew from a mother.

All but one of these 15 gorillas are orphans of the bushmeat trade. They now live at the Project for the Protection of Gorillas in southeast Gabon, where they learn to live again in the wild.

Little Ndjima was found clinging to her dead mother. Her mother was caught in a snare and either chewed off her own foot or pulled until it was sliced away by the wire trap.

Ngoma was so small when he arrived, he couldn't walk.

Mboundou's mother was eaten the day before the baby was brought here.

Hunters said they found Boumango sitting alone in a tree. His family was killed by a leopard, they said, or maybe his family left him behind.

Liz Pearson, the American who's in charge of this orphanage in the bush, believes Boumango's family was killed by hunters.

"I've seen gorilla mothers carry dead infants for three days," she says. "Gorillas don't abandon their young."

Jacqueline Ntsame raised eight children in the house she built from the profits of the bushmeat trade. Her youngest is 9 years old and still in school. Her oldest lives in France.

There are no gorillas or chimpanzees in the market this Sunday morning. Mrs. Ntsame works near the back of one of the smaller markets in Libreville, the capital city of Gabon. In this shaded aisle, the equatorial sun doesn't punish all day, and the meat stays fresh just a little longer, although by midmorning, the sweet-sour stench of decay is already cloying.

At the stalls around Mrs. Ntsame are dead crocodiles and monkeys, animals that look like rabbits without ears called cane rats, and runty brush-tail porcupines. There are forest antelopes called duikers, and even birds of prey. On the street in front of the market, men carve flesh from the upturned shells of two giant turtles.

Mrs. Ntsame is the president of the bushmeat sellers' union. She mediates disputes among the other sellers. Like the women who sit at the front of the market, she once sold vegetables. The profits were poor, a strained living compared with the one she enjoyed before the post office let her go.

Bushmeat changed that. She contracted with a hunter and began trading. But while it's profitable, it's not easy.

Periodically, policemen or government officials raid the market to put a stop to any illegal trade in bushmeat.

"When we try to stop them from taking it away, they just beat us up," she says.

Three years ago, the bushmeat sellers went to the police station to protest a confiscation. They found the officers divvying the meat among themselves.

"They gave the best meat to their chief. We screamed at them, 'How shameful!' she relates. "The policemen, what they did is, they shaved our heads."

In a place where police shakedowns are common, it seems plausible. Outside of the capital's biggest market, Mount Bouet, police officers flag down a parade of autos. They cite drivers for worn windshield wipers, failure to carry reflective triangles, or other minor infractions. The "fine" is paid on the spot.

One morning, a French businessman is stopped twice on such pretenses. He avoids handing over money both times by insisting on a receipt. The police refuse. They play a waiting game. Finally, the policeman gives in and waves the driver on.

A French banker says he always pays. The police make so little money, he says. They're just trying to make a living.

The hunters who sell baby gorillas are trying to make a living too.

Linda Percy and Paul Aczel drive nine hours over red-dirt roads to take possession of a baby gorilla that a Peace Corps worker rescued.

Linda is a Michigan woman who came to Africa first as a tourist, then as a tour guide. For the last few years, she has devoted her energies to animals.

Paul was born in Hungary, where he worked at the Budapest Zoo before immigrating to the United States at the age of 19. He taught himself English, jumped a fence into the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, and talked himself into a job. Eventually, he came to Africa to work with animals.

This trip to pick up a gorilla is their first good look at Gabon. Linda recently arrived from Cameroon, and Paul spent most of his time in the Republic of the Congo.

The truck joggles through African towns with names like percussive music - Otalla, Opounga, Ngoma. Back home in the bush, there are gorillas named for these bedraggled villages. Each village has given an orphan gorilla back to the forest. Now the orphans bear the names of the towns.

Across Africa, shelters for baby primates spring up and fill to overflowing as commercial hunting grows. While the adults are food, the orphaned primates sell as pets, although gorilla babies often don't survive the loss of their families.

The drive to rescue this latest orphan is exhausting. But the day is about to grow more tiring. Instead of finding one infant at the end of the road, the Peace Corps worker hands over two: A 6-month-old baby with a funny granny face and a terrified 18-month-old, his head and shoulders spackled with something black and sticky. It's Linda's first glimpse of the gorilla that will drive her to exhausted desperation in the coming weeks: Ivindo.

Linda and Paul check into a forlorn hotel. The hot water doesn't work, but the bed is clean. Still, Linda expects little sleep. She'll have both babies in bed with her. Ivindo has been clinging to her or the other baby since the moment she met him. When she tries to diaper him for bed, he bites.

The night is a circus.

Around and around the mattress the two gorillas scoot. The fearful Ivindo holds the little one as though she is his own small doll. She struggles free of his smothering grip, only to be captured again. Through the night, she flees, he pursues, and Linda tries to keep them both from falling to the floor.

About 4 a.m., Linda drifts to sleep. But not for long. There's a slam and a yowl, and Linda groggily scrambles around the dark room until she finds the howling baby on the other side of the bed.

The howler with the granny face is Belinga, named for the hotel and a town to the north. Ivindo is named for the beautiful river that runs beside the hotel.

In the morning, Ivindo refuses to take a bottle. He has diarrhea. Linda and Paul put the gorillas in the pickup truck and begin the nine-hour drive to Franceville, the closest city to the gorilla orphanage, the Project for Protection of Gorillas, established in 1998 by London millionaire-businessman John Aspinall.

An hour into the trip, Ivindo is sick. Within two hours, he's vomiting every 30 minutes. Yesterday, Ivindo's belly was distended. The Peace Corps worker said he'd been eating nonstop. Perhaps his illness is a result of gorging after starvation, Linda thinks. Or maybe he's carsick. It's a rough ride to the city.

They stay an extra day in Franceville. Maybe the delay will help stabilize Ivindo's health, Linda hopes. It doesn't. They head out onto the savanna toward home. Only the forest will save him, Linda believes. Even the sickest gorillas seem to feel better in the forest.

For the moment, Gabon still has plenty of forest.

A recent study by the World Resources Institute reports 60 to 80 percent of Gabon's forests remain intact. But that's not expected to last. At current logging rates, half of Gabon's forest will disappear in the coming century. Two-thirds of its forest are either already logged or allocated for future logging.

Oil money helped preserve this country on the western coast of Africa from the clear-cutting taking place in other parts of the continent. Its population is small, about 1.2 million people in a nation 21/2 times the size of Ohio. Its terrain is generally rugged. That difficult geography kept loggers at bay. Oil profits made them less necessary.

But oil failed to make the Gabonese wealthy. While oil supplies 50 percent of the government's revenue - and makes up 75 percent of its exports , few individual Gabonese benefit from this wealth, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. More than half the population lives below the poverty line.

Given the government's dependence on oil for revenue, new reserves will be crucial to the stability of the country. If they are not discovered, the timber industry could rise again in economic importance.

At one point, 70 percent of Gabon's gross domestic product stemmed from logging, said Marc Louis Ropivia, a historian at Omar Bongo University in Libreville. Then oil was discovered in 1957. Its importance grew yearly.

Forestry fell from its leading position in Gabon's economy until, between 1975 and 1985, it represented less than 5 percent of the gross domestic product. But that's not to say the lumber industry went into decline. The World Resources Institute reports that wood production doubled in the last decade.

Although lumbering creates jobs, it hasn't created wealth for Gabon's people. More than 90 percent of the timber is shipped as raw logs, not the plywood it will eventually become. The nation has little capacity to process its own raw materials.

"We still have a hunting-and-gathering economy," Dr. Ropivia said.

"If one looks at the indicators of social well being, education, and health, I would say we are far off the mark."

Gabon has failed to develop even a network of roads to complement its export economy.

"We have more landing strips than roads," Dr. Ropivia said. "The government did not make an effort to correct that imbalance."

Forest cutting is more than erosion of prime habitat. It's linked directly to the bushmeat trade.

Logging roads provide access to forests once too remote or too rugged to traverse. Logging trucks help carry bushmeat to market. Loggers often depend on bushmeat and sell it to supplement their income. While some forestry companies are cooperating in efforts to curtail bushmeat hunting in their concessions, efforts are limited.

The World Resources Institute reports that 1,200 employees of a single logging camp in central Gabon consumed 80 tons of bushmeat in one year. In addition, selling bushmeat can contribute up to 40 percent of a logger's income. One estimate suggests that the value of the bushmeat trade in Gabon is some $50 million in U.S. dollars. Combined with illegal ivory sales, the sale of wildlife products in Gabon is equivalent to 2 percent of the nation's gross domestic product.

In truth, Gabon is at a crossroads, conservation experts agree. If it is to save its forests, savannas, and wildlife, it must act now, while the economy is stable and the forests still exist.

But for people like bushmeat seller Jacqueline Ntsame, it's a matter of balancing the fate of wildlife against the fate of her children.

"If they want to save these species, they have to find jobs for us," the market woman says. "We know a lot of the species we are selling are disappearing, but we have to live too."

Linda's bond with Ivindo forges fast and fierce under the relentless savanna sun as she brings him home. Tossed in the pitch-and-yaw of the slow-traveling truck, her attention rivets on the miserable infant in her lap.

The sun cooks vomit on her clothing. Ivindo is soiled and stinking from nausea and diarrhea. Anything more than a teaspoon or two of liquid comes back up.

His eyes roll back into his head.

"Paul, I'm scared we're going to lose him," she tells Paul Aczel as he navigates the truck across the rolling plateau.

"No he's not. Just hang on," Paul says. "We're going to get there."

The road is little more than paired ruts in the sand. It's easy to get stuck or scrape the chassis when tire tracks turn into ditches.

Linda whispers to the failing infant. It becomes her prayer in the following months, her almost daily declaration of faith: "You're going to make it. You're going to get there. You're going to have all these friends. You're going to go in the forest," she repeats.

For four days, he's kept nothing down. Now he won't let Linda go. If Belinga, the second baby, tries to crawl onto Linda's lap, Ivindo bites her. Thank goodness Belinga's willing to just sit quietly beside her, Linda says later. What would she do with two sick babies? She tries again to feed Ivindo. He struggles. He doesn't want food.

Outside the truck, the savanna is jittery with life. Thumb-size dung beetles maneuver like little spaceships. Grasshoppers with giant orange wings bloom as Paul aims the Isuzu around sand traps and animal burrows.

He notices the smell of smoke and looks around for fire. It's common on the savanna, often set intentionally to keep back the forest.

Flames shoot out from beside the stick shift. Smoke pours from under the truck. Paul slams to a stop, jumping from the truck with a cry to Linda in the backseat. All he can think about is the extra tank of fuel he's toting. He starts pulling at the weeds smoldering under the truck. Then he sees Linda struggling.

She's gathered the babies and their supplies, but she can't get out the back door. She reaches through the window, hoping to pull the door from the outside. Paul grabs the door, and Linda stumbles out with the babies in her arms.

Stunted trees, wizened like impoverished bonsai, offer little shade for Linda to shelter the infants. She is pinned in place with them, waiting in the hot sun, as Paul pulls burning grass from the truck's undercarriage.

She and Paul were being led by a second truck. That driver had been reluctant to let them go on alone. Food and supplies are transferred to his truck. Linda, Paul, and the babies crowd in and finish the two-hour ride across the savanna.

Finally, they reach the Mpassa River and the boat that will take them the last leg of the journey. Ivindo clings to Linda as the boat speeds along, but Belinga sits with her face to the wind. Her mouth hangs open and her tongue lolls out. Linda's torn between laughing at Belinga and crying for the sick gorilla on her lap.

For two hours, they speed toward the baby gorillas' new home, a place in the forest called Mpassa, named for the river that runs through the Project for the Protection of Gorillas.

As Paul and Linda come upriver with Ivindo and Belinga, Judy McConnery is watching an infant gorilla die. The Canadian gorilla project worker brought him to Mpassa only days ago. Severely dehydrated and wracked by a fungal infection, he rallies for hours at a time before failing again.

But the people who work for the Project for Protection of Gorillas have all seen worse.

Hunters tried to sell Sebe, a baby gorilla, to researchers in Franceville. The scientists refuse to buy. Buying gorillas only encourages more hunting, gorilla project people say. Instead, researchers tell the hunters to come back the following day. And they call the gorilla project. The hunters don't return.

The next afternoon, a student finds a baby gorilla in a ditch. The infant is covered in mud. Ticks have worked their way up his nose. His eyes are sunken. He has a lung infection. He dies in a month.

Shad is a chimpanzee brought to the Jane Goodall Institute in the Republic of the Congo. She lost an eye. She had rope burns. A shotgun pellet was lodged under her skin; her flesh was speckled from stubbed out cigarettes.

"She'd been tied up in a village for who knows how long," says Liz Pearson, who worked with Shad at the Goodall facility. Shad lived.

Paul Aczel worked at another Congo project where orphan chimpanzees were prepared to return to the wild. A chimp there had such a severe leg infection that the limb was amputated. She went on to become a dominant female in her group.

So many orphan animals flood into sanctuaries, orphanages, and zoos that many must be turned away.

Linda Percy managed a zoo in Cameroon for a year and a half before joining the gorilla project.

"I cried myself to sleep many nights. I had to turn away two chimps and a bag full of baby monkeys. I knew they were going to die, but we just didn't have the room or the resources. I mean, I was putting my own money into the project at the time too. And the animals had to eat. The staff had to eat. I just couldn't do it.

"Gorillas, if they come in bad shape, and they don't want to make it, they won't. They're real emotional that way. Chimps will just live through anything, horrendous conditions. When you turn a chimp away, you know it's going to suffer. If we could just euthanize them at the time, I would rather do that. I know that's very controversial, but we do it for dogs. We do it for cats. I don't know."

Then there's Djembe and Kongo.

Both orphan gorillas lived at a zoo in the coastal Gabon city of Port Gentil. Djembe was a star attraction, a happy little gorilla that zoo visitors - usually Americans and Europeans - would take from the cage for photographs, said Isabelle Jourdan, the gorilla project employee who found him there.

Kongo was another story. He curled into a ball at the bottom of the cage, his hands covering his head. A machete scar marked the 1-year-old's skull. He was terrified, biting anyone who tried to pick him up.

Isabelle often confiscated primates from the pet trade with the help of the Gabonese Water and Forestry Ministry. A steady stream of wild animals shared her home in Libreville before they went to projects that teach them to live in the wild. Her three dogs play with the baby gorillas and chimpanzees. Two of the dogs are rescued orphans as well. She has photographs of Wonga, a ferocious and battle-scarred German shepherd she took from the streets of the capital, snuggled up with chimp and gorilla babies.

But it's far easier to take unwanted dogs off the street than it is to take primates that bring profit. The zoo owner was happy to get rid of the morose Kongo, but he wasn't about to surrender Djembe.

"This was a fight for me for one year," Isabelle says.

The owner told her he had influence in government. He put her off, promising she could have Djembe ''in two months,'' and then two more months. Finally, he grew truculent.

"If you carry on this way, you're going back with four rabbits," Isabelle says he told her. "Then I can cook my gorillas for my workers."

By the time the zoo owner relented, Djembe's health had collapsed.

"The first day, he couldn't believe his luck," she says. He seemed delighted to be out of the cage. "The day after, he was terrible. He was stressed again. Each metallic noise would make him flinch and have diarrhea.

"He didn't survive," Isabelle says. "They succeeded in destroying his mind."

With so many accounts of orphan primates, it seems there should be a clear picture of the toll of bushmeat hunting, at least on primate populations. But there isn't.

Paul Telfer is a primatologist working in Franceville for the Tulane University Medical Center in Louisiana. He has worked in Africa about seven years, the last 21/2 in Gabon.

"One thing that's become clear to me is, we say we've got a bushmeat crisis, but let's see the data. To me, that's the real crisis.

"I know in my heart-of-hearts there's a problem. But what's the problem? Is it the villagers? Is it foreign hunters?"

While bushmeat statistics are not complete, they're sufficient for the moment, says Ms. Eves of the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force.'

"When you see entire villages starving because they wiped out all their animals for the bushmeat trade, how much more proof do we need?"

Few are willing to blame villagers, hunting to feed their families. But in Gabon, villagers are fewer all the time. Empty villages dot the road to the Mpassa gorilla project. Other villages seem home to no one but old people and babies.

In the meantime, bushmeat has become city fare. How much bushmeat is sold is an educated guess. Gabon is believed to have the highest per-capita consumption of bushmeat of any Central African nation at 37.5 pounds a person a year, according to the French nonprofit group, Veterinarians Without Borders. High bushmeat consumption could reflect the nation's relative wealth, with a per-capita gross national product of $3,800, compared with the neighboring Republic of the Congo, with a per-capita GNP of $680, according to World Bank figures.

But wealth is relative.

Thirty percent of Gabon's population will not reach age 40; of every 1,000 babies born, 85.5 will die, and 33 percent of the population has no access to safe drinking water, according to the United Nation's Human Development Report 2000.

Numbers

The only numbers Liz Pearson knows for certain these days are one-by-one-by-one: individual gorillas, saved one at a time.

That's why she's on a plane with a gorilla stuffed into her backpack. She hated to do it to Kongo. Who knows how long he spent in the sack of the hunters who brought him to the Port Gentil zoo? But she needs to get him to the forest without anyone discovering him.

Now he's more depressed. She reaches in to comfort him. He bites her. Malaria saps her own frayed strength. She breathes deeply, trying to calm herself. We'll be there soon, she thinks.

The first time Liz lifted Kongo from his cage in the Port Gentil zoo, he drew blood, then scrambled out of her arms. He toddled straight to an algae covered pond and vanished beneath the muck.

Liz ran in after him, hoping there were no crocodiles. The only thing that bit was Kongo, as she emerged with the green-slime-covered youngster.

So she left him in his cage and sat beside it. Day after day, she hoped he'd make a move toward the arm she offered. He did. To bite it.

Still, she arranged to take him back to Mpassa and the gorilla project.

The day before her flight, she brought Kongo to her hotel. He hid under the bed.

But she had no good way to take him home. She didn't want to take the chance of checking him as baggage, nor did she want to be seen carrying a terrified gorilla through the streets of Port Gentil. And she was sick: She could barely get out of bed. She couldn't eat. It was New Year's Eve. She welcomed 1999 in a hotel bed in a strange town, with a terrified gorilla cowering in dark corners and a fever stubbornly refusing to disappear with medication.

The next morning, it took 20 minutes of waving to passing taxis to catch a ride to the airport. It seemed longer. Kongo was in one pack, her gear was in another, and she carried a third large package in her hand.

The airport was a crush of people elbowing for the ticket counter. She joined the throng, strapping Kongo's pack to her chest and shielding it with her arms. The day was sweltering, the heat a presence of its own.

The airport stunk. Liz gritted her teeth against the stench of smoked fish and bloody bushmeat. Her stomach heaved. She left the crowd to get air for herself as well as for the little gorilla stuck in her pack.

When she stepped back inside, she learned her flight was overbooked. Only 10 boarding passes remained. People dove over the counter to snatch them. They shouted and shook fists. A stranger looked Liz in the eye and snatched the airline ticket from her hand. Moments later, that stranger handed Liz a boarding pass. Why this woman intervened, Liz doesn't know.

Maybe it was "the look of horror in my eyes."

Liz briefly wrestled the backpack that held Kongo away from a stewardess and found a seat. She peeked at the gorilla. He seemed to be sinking fast. She worried he was losing his will to live. She'd seen it happen before.

"I knew I had to get him to Mpassa so he could see other gorillas and the forest as soon as possible. Maybe then he would decide to keep fighting awhile longer."

Willing herself calm, she listened to her breath rise and fall.

Her concentration broke with an announcement. The flight was diverted. There was a strike in the Franceville airport, her destination. Passengers would be taken to Libreville.

The only person Liz knew in Libreville was out of town.

She didn't even have money for a hotel.

Four gorillas await Kongo's arrival. They are the Gabon gorilla project's first residents: Sophie, Marco, Moanda, and Lekedi.

But they weren't brought to the bush in backpacks. They came in style: on the presidential helicopter under military guard.

The Mpassa Project for the Protection of Gorillas was more idea than actuality in August, 1998. There was a shower, but it was out in the open.

There were no walls around the hole in the ground that served as a toilet.

There was no satellite phone and no freezer. There were only a cage for gorillas too young to sleep alone outside at night and a few tents for the workers.

But there were three gorillas in Libreville, and a fourth in Franceville. It was time to move them out.

Sophie was owned by a French family until it left Gabon, then kept for several months by the Spanish ambassador. She was a precocious little gorilla and the first gorilla Isabelle Jourdan ever held. She was a contradiction, playing rough and destroying the places where she was kept, yet insecure, dreading to be put down, clinging to Isabelle with all her might if she thought Isabelle was leaving.

Marco was in a town called Bakoumba with a Frenchman working in conservation.

Moanda was so young when she arrived she had only two teeth and weighed less than three pounds. Her only hair was a Don King tuft at the top of her head.

She had been cared for by a man who had helped orphan animals before.

Lekedi was Isabelle's favorite. "She's the perfect gorilla." The young gorilla lived with Isabelle for three months, making fast friends with her pets.

With four gorillas to bring to the bush, it was bound to be a major effort.

At the suggestion of a friend, Isabelle and Liz contacted a leading figure in the Republican Guard, the president's personal military force.

"I was shaking talking to him," Liz said. But he was receptive to a suggestion that the military help them.

"It might work," he said. They needed permission from only one more man to secure a ride. This was the No. 2 man in the Gabonese military.

Liz talked Isabelle into calling, pleading that her own French wasn't up to the task.

"I'm going to say something wrong, or something stupid, and he's not going to understand what I'm asking," she said.

Isabelle called. His response? Sure. Why not.

The helicopter was on its way to pick up the wife of President Omar Bongo.

The men on the helicopter all posed with the young gorillas. The Gabon gorilla project was officially born.

Project

The project is almost two years old when Linda steps off the boat, carrying what will be gorillas Nos. 16 and 17 if both survive.

Tired and emotionally threadbare, Linda walks into camp. A veterinarian from England's Howlett's Zoo is visiting that day. He glances at the infant gorilla, now far, far gone in illness.

"Well, he's not going to make it through the night," he says.

Linda is shattered. She walks away from the others to the medical tent and cries. But she's determined to prove the vet wrong.

Tomorrow: Fear in one forest.

First Published December 10, 2000, 12:04 p.m.

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Ivindo
An example of bushmeat, a gorilla hand is roasted in the Republic of the Congo, being prepared for a meal.
A gorilla carcass is displayed for sale in a marketplace in what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Small and large animals are the day's specials in a Libreville, Gabon, bushmeat market.
Rescuer Linda Percy plays with Ivindo, named for a river. Sitting beside her, Belinga's attention is focused elsewhere.
Belinga, rescued as a 6-month-old baby and named for a hotel and a town, likes to be tickled.
In Gabon, Paul Aczel, hugs Marco at the Project for the Protection of Gorillas.
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