After several hours, we reached the top of a viewless hill. "This is where we stop and rest whenever we are here," Gamaembi informed me. He spread out a few handy mangungu leaves for me to sit on, while Baudouin tore a square from an old, khakicolored mangungu leaf, sprinkled Tumbaco and bangi on it, and rolled himself a joint. The leaf had the body of thin sheets of paper etched with tough little fibres. M angungu seemed to have a thousand and one uses.

We were sitting in a grove of hundred-and-fifty-foot strangler figs, The species, Ficus thonningii, is partial to high, well-drained sites. Each tree had started as a seed dropped by a bird in the crotch of a different species of tree which had originally occupied the site. Like wax melting down the side of a candle, the roots had descended from the seed, mingled and merged, and eventually smothered the host tree out of existence. At the same time, usually about thirty feet from the ground, a trunk had ascended from the seed and shot up for a hundred feet or so before finally branching into a crown. Gamaembi cut into a huge buttress of anastomosed fig root with the edge of an iron arrowhead, and a sticky white latex bubbled out. "Along the rivers, we line traps with the milk of this tree and bait them with seeds," he said. "Birds walk in and get stuck," He said the tree was called popo and was one of those whose inner bark the Efe and some of the older BaLese pounded into loincloths.

As we sat eating peanut butter with our fingers, Gamaembi told me how the BaLese and the Efe first met each other: "One day, an Efe wandered into one of our shambas, smelled the sweet, small bananas, ate some, and fell asleep. A villager found him and, thinking he was a chimpanzee, was about to shoot him when he saw that he was two-legged and his eyes were different. The Efe awakened and asked the villager for some more bananas to take to his wife. A few days later, he returned with some meat and honey to give to the villager. The two men became friends. The villager and his wife did not know how to have children, so the Efe made love to her, to show him how. The woman had a boy. The Efe made love to her again, and she had a girl. Now the Efe men complain that they can't have our women; we take theirs, and it was they who taught us about sex."

WHEN we started walking again, Baudouin pointed out on the edge of the path a bent-over branch with a noose on the end of it for snaring little forest antelopes. Most of them are duikers, six species of which inhabit the lturi Forest. The smallest and most abundant, the blue duiker, is not much bigger than a dachshund. There are also Bates's pygmy antelope and the water chevrotain, a diminutive relative of deer which has some affinities with pigs. Of these, the wildlife ecologist John Hart, who has spent five years in the forest, has told me, only the pygmy antelope, which frequents the edges of shambas, subsists on leaves. The rest subsist on fallen fruit, seeds, flowers, and mushrooms.

There are very few deep-forest leaf-eaters in the lturi. All the monkeys (except the colobuses), and even the forest elephants, are frugivorous. The reason for this may be that here the cost to a tree of losing its leaves is tremendous. Most of the trees are not deciduous, and because they do not flush a new set of leaves each year their foliage is heavily protected-in most cases by toxic or indigestible secondary compounds, but sometimes by thorns or prickly hairs or by sophisticated symbiotic relationships with stinging insects. A few species have evolved extra-floral nectaries, which attract fire ants; no one would want to brush against these leaves, let alone try to eat them. Life for a tree in such a forest is not easy. Many trees spend years, or even their whole lives, no more than a yard tall, waiting for a gap to open in the canopy, and at this stage they are most vulnerable. When an opening does present itself, they shoot up with amazing speed.

Gamaembi picked some white-gilled mushrooms with light-gray caps and foot-long taproots. He said they were called imamburama and were good to eat. That evening, we ate them sauteed in mafuta with rice and sardines, and they were good. We would sleep on mangungu pallets in a lean-to on the Afande River which two men from Opoku had recently built as a fishing and trapping camp. After supper, I tried one of Baudouin's joints. The bangi was very smooth and relaxing, but it wasn't conducive to clear thought, and when I got up to poke the fire back to life I discovered that it made tedious demands on motor coordination. Gamaembi didn't touch the stuff. "For me, life is already wonderful," he explained.

He and Baudouin were fascinated by the color plates in Jean Dorst and Pierre Dandelot's "Field Guide to the Larger Mammals of Africa," which we pored over with a flashlight. I wrote down the Swahili and KiLese names of the animals they recognized. I asked about leopards. Gamaembi said that a day in from the road they were quite common-especially along rivers. "We can hear him sing, cry, etre dans la folie pour rien, purr happily after killing an antelope," he said. He told me that you could hit a giant forest hog with a hundred arrows before it died, but that with a spear it only took once or twice. I asked about butterflies. The B"Lese have many names for bees, but for butterflies they use only the general Swahili word, kipepeo. "Butterflies are bad for us, because we have no use for them," Gamaembi said.

"To me, the butterfly is the insect that climbs trees and eats the leaves," Baudouin remarked.
"Butterflies are metamorphoses," Gamaembi said. "We eat the caterpillars but not the butterflies."

"I love the forest, monsieur," Gamaembi said a little later, as we lay in the darkness. "To know its situation, to find all the marvellous little things and the mountains in it."

Late in the night, it started to pour, but the roof was good and we stayed dry. In the morning, the river was muddy and swollen, way up over the rocks and prostrate trees I had walked out on the evening before. "Friday the 27th. The quality of our drinking water has taken a turn for the worse," I entered in a journal I was keeping. "We can look forward to a day of gray dampness." The river was now as wide as the trees along its bank were tall. If one of the trees had fallen over, it would have been just long enough to cross on. I noticed several pendulous socks hanging in a tree on the other side. They were the nests of malimbe weavers and looked much like the nests of the yellow-rumped cacique of the Amazon. The malimbes were already off somewhere, perhaps flocking with greenbuls, bulbuls, and flycatchers. Africa has at least ninety kinds of weaver. A few days earlier, I had watched a noisy colony of Vieillot's black weavers-a savanna and villagedwelling species in the same family as malimbes-in an umbrella tree near Opoku. There had been dozens of nests, shaped like inverted cups, among the large, splayed leaves, and at the bottom of each nest a male weaver clung and flapped in some sort of display. The entrance hole was underneath and was indented in such a way that the eggs would not fall out. But malimbes are less gregarious, at least in their nesting habits.

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