Gorilla Warfare

BY SCOTT JOHNSON
THE MEN HUDDLED UNDER
billowinggreen ponchos
and shouldered their
AK-47s nervously. Summer
rains drenched the plains
and canopiedjungle ofVirunga
National Park, a vast preserve
along the eastern borderofthe
Democratic Republic ofCongo
thatis home to an estimated 60
percentoftheworld's surviving
mountain gorillas. The men allowed
the rain to douse their
cigarettes. Then, in single file,
theybegan to move into the
forest. Through the din ofthe
storm, a shout quickly rose up.
The rangers found the first corpse less than a hundred
yards away, in a grove ofvines and crooked
thicket The mammoth gorilla lay on her side, a
small pink tongue protruding slightly from her
lips. She was pregnant and her breasts were engorged
with milk for the baby that now lay dead inside
her womb.
The rangers crowded around and caressed the
gorilla's singed fur. They shook their heads and
clicked their tongues with disapproval. One
grabbed her hand and held it for a long time, his
head bowed in grief This gorilla-whom the
rangers knew as intimately as they do all those who
live in their sector of the park-was named Mburanumwe.
Her killers had set her alight after executing
her. Now her eyes were closed, as ifin deep
concentration. "My God;' one ranger said in disgust,
"they even burned her." Nearby the rangers
found the bodies of two other adult females, all
from the same 12-member family. 1\vo infants had
been orphaned. A male would be found dead the
next day. The massacre, first discovered onJuly 23,
could be the worst slaughter of mountain gorillas
in the last quarter century.
Even the rangers-who live in a country where
more than 4 million people may have been killed in