committed to conservation. His enterprise, which he labeled the Megatransect, was a two-thousand-mile biological survey, on foot, through the wildest remaining forest areas of Central Africa. He took data every step of the way, recording elephant dung piles and leopard tracks and chimpanzee sightings and botanical identifications, tiny notations by the thousands, all going into his waterproof yellow notebooks in scratchy left-handed print, while the crewmen strung out behind him toted his computers, his satellite phone, his special instruments and extra batteries, as well as tents and food and medical supplies enough for both him and themselves.
Fay had already been walking for 290 days by the time he reached this part of northeastern Gabon. He had crossed the Republic of the Congo with a field crew of forest-tough Congo men, mostly Bambendjellés (one ethnic group of the short-statured peoples sometimes termed Pygmies), but those fellows had been disallowed entry at the Gabonese border. So Fay had been forced to raise a new team in Gabon. He recruited them largely from a cluster of gold-mining camps along the upper Ivindo River. The hard, stumbling work he demanded, cutting trail, schlepping bags, was evidently preferable to digging for gold in equatorial mud. One man served as cook as well as porter, stirring up massive amounts of rice or fufu (a starchy staple made from manioc flour, like an edible wallpaper paste) at each evening’s campfire, and adorning it with some sort of indeterminate brown sauce. The ingredients for that variously included tomato sauce, dried fish, canned sardines, peanut butter, freeze-dried beef, and pili-pili (hot pepper), all deemed mutually compatible and combined at the whim of the chef. No one complained. Everyone was always hungry. The only thing worse than a big portion of such stuff, at the end of an exhausting day of stumbling through the jungle, was a small portion. My role amid this gang, on assignment for National Geographic, was to walk in Fay’s footsteps and produce a series of stories describing the work and the journey. I would accompany him for ten days here, two weeks there, and then escape back to the United States, let my feet heal (we wore river sandals), and write an installment.
Each time I rejoined Fay and his team, there was a different logistical arrangement for our rendezvous, depending on the remoteness of his location and the urgency of his need to be resupplied. He never diverted from the zigzag line of his march. It was up to me to get to him. Sometimes I went in by bush plane and motorized dugout, along with Fay’s trusted logistics man and quartermaster, a Japanese ecologist named Tomo Nishihara. Tomo and I would pile ourselves into the canoe amid whatever stuff he was bringing for the next leg of Fay’s trek: fresh bags of fufu and rice and dried fish, crates of sardines, oil and peanut butter and pili-pili and double-A batteries. But even a dugout canoe couldn’t always reach the spot where Fay and his crew, famished and bedraggled, would be waiting. On this occasion, with the trekkers crossing a big forest block called Minkébé, Tomo and I roared out of the sky in a Bell 412 helicopter, a massive 13-seater, chartered expensively from the Gabonese army. The forest canopy, elsewhere thick and unbroken, was punctuated here by several large granite gumdrops that rose above everything, hundreds of feet high, like El Capitan standing out of a green ground fog. Atop one of those inselbergs was the landing zone to which Fay had directed us. It was forty miles due west of Mayibout 2.
That day had been a relatively easy one for the crew—no swamps crossed, no thickets of skin-slicing vegetation, no charging elephants provoked by Fay’s desire to take video at close range. They were bivouacked, awaiting the helicopter. Now the supplies had arrived—including even some beer! This allowed for a relaxed, genial atmosphere around the campfire. Quickly I learned that two of the crewmen, Thony M’Both and Sophiano Etouck, had roots in Mayibout 2. They were present when Ebola virus struck the village.
Thony, an extrovert, slim in build and far more voluble than the other fellow, was willing to talk about it. He spoke in French while Sophiano, a shy man with a body-builder’s physique, an earnest scowl, a goatee, and a nervous stutter, sat silent. Sophiano, by Thony’s account, had watched his brother and most of his brother’s family die.
Having just met these two men, I couldn’t decently press for more information