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We got off to a late start from Anga, descending from the mixed forest and savanna into the green haze of the Congo Basin at 11:30. That morning, as Lubuta struggled to assign loads to porters, Thompson dealt with the emotional fallout from a bit of bad news. The overseer of the Salonga and commander of its 120 guards had been recently ousted for moonlighting as the capo of a large-scale poaching syndicate. After his dismissal, The Snake, as he was subsequently nicknamed, stole most of the gear Thompson had donated to the Salonga guards over the years, about 50,000 dollars' worth. He left only uniforms, ten mattresses, and a few pairs of wick-away underwear that even someone called The Snake wouldn't steal. I found Thompson wrapped in her husband Craig's flannel shirt, a talisman she keeps handy for just such occasions. Thompson married Craig, a community development consultant, in 1987 and has seen little of him ever since. "He understands me and knows that this is what I have to do," she said. "The man is a saint."

We hiked several hundred feet down from Anga into a canopied rain forest of palm and fig that topped 130 feet (40 meters). The forest floor was a sunless steam bath thick with clawing vines, palms, thornbush, and rank pockets of methane. After ten hours we staggered out of the pitch-blackness and into an ICCN ranger camp, Patrol Post Iyamba, a 20-mile (32-kilometer) walk from the first Iyaelima village. Around a bonfire that night, Thompson—a light traveler who usually doesn't even carry a radio (we persuaded her to bring a Thuraya sat phone) and wears only Crocs—inspected her feet for chiggers while Lubuta set about coordinating our first bonobo hunt.

Tracking bonobos, as Thompson told us, is best done by sending pisters—park guards trained in locating the apes—into the forest to slip in under a group as they nest at dusk. When the bonobos fall asleep, the pisters return to camp and lead the main party back with ninja-like stealth. If all goes according to plan, the voyeurs arrive at the nesting site before the prime bonobo viewing begins at dawn. Tomorrow's excursion, according to Thompson, was a good test for the day when the ICCN would regularly welcome tourists in the park. Thompson opted out, however, telling us she had already seen her fair share of bonobos (a statement she would later modify).

The next morning, well after sunrise had come and gone, two machete-wielding pisters led Ross and me, not with predatory stealth, but by chopping and crashing through the forest like drunken elephants. A mile (two kilometers) after leaving Iyamba, we entered an area where a village once stood. There was an abrupt thinning of the canopy, permitting a secondary-growth forest with such bonobo delectables as tshake, a fleshy spiked fruit, and ginger plants. High in the cruxes of the trees I counted up to 20 large nests of branches and palm leaves left by our evolutionary brethren. It was obvious even to me that the apes had just been in the area: Nests were green, the jagged ends of snapped branches still white, and freshly chewed marantaceae piths littered the ground. Here the pisters halted us; one sniffed a pith. He nibbled on it, spat out the pulp, and pinched his nose, letting blow a mighty honk that threatened to shoot his brains out of his ears. The blurt mimicked an injured duiker, a small forest antelope—the bonobos' idea of a cheeseburger el gratis. We waited. The only sounds were insects and shallow breathing. The pister blew again. My heart started racing. And then again. After the fifth honk he shrugged and took a step. At that moment a bush not ten yards (nine meters) to our right exploded, and I felt the ground-thunder of an unseen bonobo charging away. It was the most thrilling rush I had had in years. Our genetic doppelganger had been right there watching us, even outwitting us.

Ross and I turned to pursue the beast. But in an act of pister sabotage that would inexplicably repeat itself throughout our expedition, our guides—schooled in ape tracking at Thompson's expense—tore off terrified in the opposite direction.

"The problem," Thompson told me by way of explanation after I returned to camp, "is the people who kill the bonobo aren't scared of them, but the ones out here protecting them are."

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