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It was a relief to enter Iyaelima territory on our third day in the Salonga. The tribe has created an arboreal superhighway by hacking out five feet (two meters) of forest on either side of the game trail. The farther we walked, the more the forest came alive with golden-bellied mangabeys, red colobus monkeys, and African gray parrots. We found fresh tracks of leopards, duikers, and red river hogs, as well as spectacular evidence of where a forest elephant had crossed the trail, smashing a tunnel of broken branches and brush that looked as though a fully loaded Hummer had blasted through.

We made good time to Luapa, the easternmost of eight Iyaelima villages. Thompson, Ross, Lubuta, and I found seats beneath a thatch canopy in the patrol post outside the village. The custom called for us to await a formal invitation to enter Luapa proper and meet with the village kapita, or headman. On her first visit, Thompson had spent five days here cooling her heels. She now insisted neither Ross nor I insult the Iyaelima by entering Luapa before being invited. "I'm sitting here to show respect to these people because no one else does," Thompson said, guessing our wait could be a week. She added the not altogether welcome news that the Iyaelima have no traditional sense of time, with the word for "yesterday" being the same as the word for "tomorrow."

"Why doesn't that surprise me," said Ross.

In some respects, the Iyaelima are like other regional tribes: The men make the decisions and hunt, and the women do nearly everything else. Each family lives in a one-room mud hut and grows mostly cassava, sugarcane, and rice on half-acre plots cleared by slash-and-burn. The mile-wide band of lush secondary forest draws a variety of wildlife—mangabeys, colobus, hogs, even forest elephants. The Iyaelima gladly hunt and eat all of them if given the chance, slaughtering the ancestral beasts in a sacred ritual on an etuka, or public altar, shaped like a small soccer goal. But they will not kill a bonobo.

Nearly all Iyaelima spend their lives entirely within Iyaelima territory. Those few who do venture out, mostly a handful of coffee traders, are forbidden to form close relationships with other tribes. The Iyaelima still live in a world of dead ancestors, spirits, sorcerers, and wizards. If properly fed and respected, the ancestors protect the Iyaelima from a Stephen King–size menu of evil spirits ready to inflict sickness, famine, and death. Added protection comes from sorcerers, men of common birth who learn witchcraft that they can use for both good and ill. A sorcerer can never kill an evil spirit, although a powerful sorcerer can thwart its curse. These beliefs imbue all aspects of Iyaelima life, from the sacred village hunts, called djita, to the practice of burying the dead near and sometimes even directly under the family hut. As late as the 1970s the Iyaelima practiced cannibalism to feed their ancestors, although exactly when, or if, that practice was renounced is not known. 

Something must have changed since Thompson's last visit because, instead of a week, not an hour passed before a crowd of a hundred Iyaelima rolled out of the bamboo forest that separated the post from Luapa proper. They were led by their etoschi, a council of wise men. "This is awesome," Thompson said as she stood. "It's a huge gesture of respect that they are coming to us first."

Though formidable by reputation, the Iyaelima, like most forest peoples, are slightly built and short, the men standing on average 5'4" (2 meters), with high cheekbones and narrow-set eyes. Perhaps naively I had expected this lost tribe to be dressed in native clothes, if dressed at all, but most wore the sub-Saharan uniform of cast-off T-shirts and threadbare trousers. Several men carried spears and bows and arrows.

The kapita presented himself. Wearing soiled pants and a Hawaiian shirt, he had gray hair, ritualistic scarring on his face, a civet pelt pancaked on his head, and a wooden staff in hand. His deputy stood to his right, his cheeks drooping like a hound dog's. He wore a tattered T-shirt that read "Die Hard with a Vengeance—1995." After shaking hands, careful to cup our own forearms as a sign of respect, we took our seats; the etoschi, numbering 12, sat opposite us.

For the next two hours we sat in silence while a hundred or so Iyaelima pressed in around us under the thatch canopy. The Iyaelima believe one's skin turns white upon leaving for the spirit world, meaning that for the more faithful in the crowd they were looking at ghosts. Women and kids, many with distended stomachs, reached out to touch the hair on my arm very, very cautiously, as though petting a leopard. A little boy tried to give me his pet cockroach, a huge specimen he had tied to a stick. Thompson, meanwhile, quietly jotted down notes, soaked her aching feet in a bucket, and thrilled the crowd by presenting a doll to the mother of a nine-month-old girl named Madame Jo, born while Thompson was last in Luapa.

Around 5 p.m. Thompson and the kapita finally began their exchange; Lubuta and a young Iyaelima with a groovy soul patch and wraparound sunglasses translated in a mix of Lingala, French, and Ki-Iyaelima, the native tongue. "Tell the kapita and the others that we are here to honor their ancestral traditions," Thompson began. When Lubuta translated, the etoschi grunted. "And now tell them," Thompson said, "we have come to put in the phonie for the good of the park but also for the good of the Iyaelima people. For everyone. And we ask their permission, the etoschi, the kapita, and the ancestors."

The etoschi and the kapita conferred, grunting in unison every time one of them spoke. The kapita then summoned a young Iyaelima who held a horn fashioned from the antler of a large duiker. The youth brought the narrow end of the instrument to his lips, turned the business end westward in the direction of the seven other Iyaelima villages, and blew a booming message. The kapita then called for a bottle of palm wine, a local moonshine made of fermented pine nuts that could substitute, in a pinch, for paint thinner. He swilled a
shot, gargled, and spit the lethal concoction into the sandy dirt. The entire crowd now groaned, "Ummmmmmmmmmmm!"

"He's feeding the ancestors," Thompson explained. "He is asking for good luck and wisdom for what is about to happen."

The patrol post then instantly transformed into a whirling beehive of machetes downing trees, boys digging, men shimmying up a pole to lace antennas, and park guards fiddling with sockets and cords. It took hours, but near dusk the phonie was assembled. A shaman blessed the occasion by ripping off the head of a chicken and dumping the twitching, blood-spurting mass into a hole. Ten men then slid a tree trunk turned antenna tower into the same pit, and a park guard switched on the contraption in a hut. Scores of Iyaelima gathered outside, leaning in to listen like wheat bent in the wind.

There was a faint hiss, a crackle, and then a voice that called out from a patrol post hundreds of miles to the east. "Tell the Iyaelima congratulations and we look forward to sharing news with them," the radio operator said in French. Once translated, the Iyaelima erupted in celebration, jumping and cheering; the men slapped each other on the back while the women, usually segregated and silent, sprang to their feet, ululating in a singsong pitch that hurt the ears. As the celebration waned, a man in a torn blue shirt raised his fist in the air. "Our children must commit this date to memory," he commanded. "They must learn of it in school, and every year we will celebrate this day."

"Ummmmmmmmmmmm!" the Iyaelima collectively agreed.

"But never must this thing be used for evil!" the man added, shouting directly at the seated etoschi. "It is only to be used for good, for the work of the park, to evacuate the sick in an epidemic, and not to pass lies to the outside! If someone does that, they must be punished!"

"Ummmmmmmmmmmm!"  

A young Iyaelima boy armed with a machete then knelt before the pole and carved in the date.

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