We got up early and made our way down to the bai, hitting the biggest elephant trail I have ever seen in my life. It was 10 feet [3 meters] wide, 100 yards [91 meters] long. Palms lined the sides. It looked like the well-kept driveway of some tropical estate. There was evidence of elephant massacres of the past—three jaws from large males lay strewn alongside the trail, like some unthinking jerk would discard a beer can. (Hundreds of large elephants like these boys were killed in the Odzala area over the past two decades.)

Then we saw a fresh human track.

We arrived to find a white man with two guides gazing out into the bai. I had met him a few days earlier. It was his pirogue that we had hijacked to get across the Mambili River (see Report 27). He worked for a primate lab in France and was trying to collect gorilla dung from the bai for genetic analysis. He was having no success. He said even if the gorillas spend five hours in the bai that they don’t go. (Most dung you find is either at the outside edge of their nest or just behind a convenient perch, where there’s a log or root to lean over.)

The researcher soon left to go back south, and we were left to ourselves. We worked hard to get to Capitale Bai. He had boated in. We felt a bit like explorers who arrive to find a flag already firmly planted on some summit.

But seconds later the researcher was a distant memory. There were buffalo close by, and I could see about ten sitatunga (a rare forest antelope) in this enormous bai, about a kilometer long and two wide. We sat at the bai’s edge for a while. Then we went to find a place off the elephant trails and a few hundred meters away from the bai where my tent could be pitched and my various equipment stored.

I planned on spending three nights at the bai to see what came in and to explore by my lonesome the east side. The boys were going to make camp a few kilometers away on the Kokoua River and fish. We were very low on rations. Fish would supplement our meager rice rations until fresh supplies arrived in five days time with Tomo down on the Mambili River.

That first day I noticed that the buffalo and sitatunga just sat in the hot sun all day chewing their cud. These two species are grazers, not a great thing to be in the forest. But they survived well in these elephant bais that supplied everything they needed: sedges and salty water. They were content to treat the bai like a savanna. I counted a total of seven male sitatunga and eight females. Some of the males had beautiful racks. They walked around a bit in the shallows, sparred a bit, chewed their cud, but mostly just sat and waited for the next round of feeding at their home in Capitale bai.

At nightfall, I made it back up the hill in the dark to my perch under the wengue trees and crawled into my house, my four-man Eureka tent.

* * *

The next morning, I gulped down a few last cups of tea—saved in my little stainless steel Starbucks thermos, the smartest luxury item I brought on the expedition—and headed down to the bai for a morning of observations.

Breakfast wouldn’t arrive until 9:00 a.m. There were only a few sitatunga in view when I got there, and the buffalo were far off. No elephants. As the air warmed and the fog lifted other sitatunga started to appear slowly from the sedges to take their places on the moist sand near the creek running through the bai. Hartlaub’s ducks—a dark, ruddy forest duck, always in pairs and always in bais—were paddling around the shallows, just hanging out. Loud-mouthed hadada ibises passed over, alerting everyone that the day was breaking. A fish eagle gave a plaintive whistle in a huge dead tree overlooking the bai. He would be sitting on that perch for hours for a chance to swoop down on a school of fish (tilapia) that were abundant in the shallow pools of the creek.

At 9:00 a.m. sharp the Pygmies arrived with a meal of fresh fish and rice and—more importantly—fresh coffee! I spent a long, lazy day hanging out with the birds and the ungulates. I hoped that gorillas would show up. They never did. Dinner arrived early. I ate and prepared for a night at the bai: silk cocoon sheet (they are light and mosquito proof I have discovered), DAT [digital audio] recorder, flashlight, a spoon, and chocolate mousse saved from dinner.

I sat in the swamp under a bush on a dry hummock and waited. The sitatunga were still sitting around, the buffalo at the head of the bai chewing their cud. The moon was already up. I kept a lookout for the next seven hours. A few elephants ambled in from the east. I could hear them sucking water out of the ground from holes they dug (more minerals there than in the stream). The gray forms would just come into view along the creek, catch my scent, and re-exit the bai calmly but briskly.

The mosquitoes were thick and a light bank of fog started to settle along the creek. I put up the hood on my raincoat and started to doze. Around 12:00 a.m. I awoke to the croaking of the black and white colobus. These large, pied monkeys sound like giant frogs and often start vocalizing around midnight.

As I peered out toward the creek I caught a glimpse of something coming toward me out of the corner of my eye. Soon I could make out the silhouette of a hyena—the first one I have ever seen in the forest—making his way across the sand flat. I knew it was a hyena by that unmistakable form—haunches low to the ground, high shoulders, and a slumped-over head with a long neck. This dog-like giant civet cat is a strange animal. At night, in this isolated forest when you are all alone, he looks downright diabolical.

He was coming my way. If he kept on his track he would pass at about 50 feet [15 meters]. When he was just about abeam, he stopped and looked intently my way. I didn’t move. He stood there for some seconds. I wanted to get a better look. I flicked on the highbeam of my flashlight but was blinded by its reflection on the fog. The giant civet turned and ran for the hills! I sat for another 30 minutes but was dozing so badly that I decided to call it a night and retreat to my tent.