In an Eastern Congo Oasis, Blood Amid the Greenery

Still, because of the gorillas, and because having a job in Congo, even a dangerous unpaid one, is better than not having one at all, the rangers continue their work.

"Congolese people live on hope," said Ngobobo, who has received more death threats than he can count. "They always think tomorrow will be better, and the day after tomorrow will be better, and soon, years and years have passed."

Virunga National Park was established in 1925 by the Belgians. It had intermittent heydays: There were royal visits in the 1950s, and during the 1970s, the zoologist Dian Fossey and others brought world attention to Virunga's mountain gorillas before leaving to work in Rwanda.

A rather eccentric kind of tourism flourished for a while during the 1980s, as backpackers and other adventurers trekked in to see the gorillas, recalled Serundori, who has worked in the park for more than 25 years.

"Sometimes tourists would spend a month here," he said. "People from Australia and England. . . . It was very good."

Then came the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when hundreds of thousands of armed Hutu militiamen and refugees fled across the border and into the park. The Rwandan army and the rebel forces of the future Congolese president, Laurent Kabila, on their way to overthrow Congo's longtime dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, chased after the Hutus, unleashing a decade of fighting.

Though a peace agreement was signed in 2004, and Congo's first multiparty elections in four decades were held last year, the detritus of war has remained, especially here in the east.

In the past year, various militia groups have been essentially living off the park -- establishing ragtag bases there, eating or selling the animals or harvesting trees for charcoal. The 500 or so rangers who occupy run-down posts throughout Virunga have been forced to evacuate several times.

Despite the persistent insecurity, WildlifeDirect, a swashbuckling conservation group, and the Frankfurt Zoological Society managed in January to become the first conservation organizations to set foot in the park since fighting began in 1994. Members built a small, tented camp on a site occupied until recently by one of the most notorious militias in eastern Congo. They set up a satellite dish and began distributing boots, radios and other equipment to the beleaguered rangers, some of whom have begun blogging from the wilderness.

"This is Noela," Ngobobo wrote recently under a photo of a young gorilla lollygagging in dirt. "She was born on Christmas Day. . . . She spent yesterday playing with two backblacks, Congomani, who is 8, and Mukunda, who is 10."

Some rangers have spent their entire working lives patrolling the park. They have named all the gorillas, mostly after their fallen comrades -- Resi, Matuko, Gashangi, Janga -- and one after the recently elected president, Joseph Kabila, son of Laurent Kabila.

When they are not dodging bullets or being ambushed or kidnapped, the rangers spend their days hacking their way into the forest with old, rusted machetes. They climb muddy slopes, hop over logs and slide down grassy gullies tracking gorilla families that appear first as a tremble of leaves and grunts and at last like so many furry, black miracles in the dense tangles of green.