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Thompson and I had arrived in the dead center of the DRC's interior three days earlier after a short bush flight from Kinshasa. We were joined by our photographer, Rob Ross, a former real estate investment banker from New York who had chucked it all, and Thompson's consigliere, Lubuta, a high official with the DRC's national parks department (ICCN). Touching down in a grassy field in the village of Anga, home to ICCN's Salonga National Park Headquarters, several hundred villagers ran out to greet us in the searing heat, shouting over the roar of the prop, "Ya-yo, ya-yo Madame Jo!"

Salonga Park Headquarters is little more than a cluster of a dozen mud-and-thatch hovels set off behind bamboo fencing. The compound houses half of the Salonga's 120 guards, each one paid $3 a month to protect the wildlife from poachers in a park larger than Belgium. The plan called for us to sleep here for two nights, arrange porters to haul our half ton of gear—a good portion of it Ross's camera equipment and extensive array of foodstuffs and designer toiletries—and begin our 110-mile (177-kilometer) trek into Iyaelima territory.

As we neared the huts, an officer goose-stepped before 15 guards aligned in matching green fatigues, all provided courtesy of Thompson. In fact, most everything the guards wore—boots, laces, belts, socks, bush hats—had been purchased by Thompson, using money from grants, small fundraisers, and her husband's already depleted retirement account. The officer drilled the group hard in stentorian French, marshaling them right, left, and at arms—the latter being the most difficult maneuver, as only three guards had weapons, and those were rusted-out AK-47s. The most senior men wore old-lady eyeglasses that Thompson had bought at a Wal-Mart in Colorado, making them look like a strike force of aging librarians.

As three handpicked guards hoisted the DRC flag in a dyslexic masterpiece, flying the colors upside down and backward, Lubuta stepped forward. The lanky 50-year-old officer has served as Thompson's official government liaison, travel companion, and translator since 2005. As a sign of their friendship, the DRC native and ex-boxer named one of his newborn twins Jo-Jo (the other was saddled with "Don King"). Cutting an imposing figure, Lubuta exhorted the group with the gruesome details of a Salonga guard who had been butchered by poachers and of five rare mountain gorillas machine-gunned by Rwandan Hutu rebels in Virunga National Park in the eastern DRC. "So have courage for Salonga!" Lubuta commanded in Lingala, the DRC's common language. "Have courage for the bonobo! Have courage for Madame Jo!"

"Courage!" the guards shouted, apparently up for the challenge. "Courage!"

Watching Lubuta, Thompson never saw the stubbly old poacher slip out from behind a banana tree and sidle up beside her. Like a hustler moving Rolexes in Times Square, he peeled open his tattered windbreaker to reveal the dangling pelt of an endangered Congo clawless otter. The moment neatly summed up the Alice in Wonderland, down-the-rabbit-hole quality of working in a place like the DRC: Here was a poacher peddling the pelt of an endangered species to a rabid conservationist in front of 15 park guards. Thompson confiscated the skin, poking a finger through one of its dime-size bullet holes, and said, "Welcome to my world."  

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