private, probably by prior arrangement, and not be slabbed out at a public market.
Downstream from Moloundou, the last Cameroonian outpost on the Ngoko River is Kika, a logging town with a big mill that provides jobs and lodging for hundreds of men and their families, plus a dirt airstrip for the convenience of its managerial elite. There was no direct riverside road (why would there be? the river is a road) so we circled back inland to get there. Arriving in Kika, we reported promptly to the police station, a small shack near the river that served also as immigration post, where an officer named Ekeme Justin roused himself, pulled on his yellow T-shirt, and performed the necessary formalities for me and Max: stamping our passports sortie de Cameroon. We would exit the country here. Officer Justin, upon receipt of a fee for his stamp work, became our great friend and host, offering us tent space there beside the police post and help in finding a boat. He went off to town with Neville, the all-purpose fixer, and by sunset they had arranged charter of a thirty-foot wooden pirogue, with an outboard, capable of getting Max and me to Ouesso.
I was up at five the next morning, packing my tent, eager to turn the corner on this big loop and head back into Congo. Then we waited through a heavy morning rain. Finally came our boatman, a languid young man named Sylvain in a green tracksuit and flip-flops, to mount his outboard and bail the pirogue. We loaded, covered our gear with a tarp against the lingering drizzle, and after warm goodbyes to the faithful Neville and Moïse, also Officer Justin, we launched, catching a strong current on the Ngoko. We pointed ourselves downriver. For me, of course, this journey was all about the cut-hunter hypothesis. I wanted to see the route HIV-1 had traveled from its source and imagine the nature of its passage.
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Let’s give him due stature: not just a cut hunter but the Cut Hunter. Assuming he lived hereabouts in the first decade of the twentieth century, he probably captured his chimpanzee with a snare made from a forest vine, or in some other form of trap, and then killed the animal with a spear. He may have been a Baka man, living independently with his extended family in the forest or functioning as a sort of serf under the “protection” of a Bantu village chief. But probably he wasn’t, given what I’d heard of Baka scruples about eating ape. More likely he was Bantu, possibly of the Mpiemu or the Kako or one of the other ethnic groups inhabiting the upper Sangha River basin. Or he may have been a Bakwele, involved in the practice of beka. There’s no way of establishing his identity, nor even his ethnicity, but this remote southeastern corner of what was then Germany’s Kamerun colony offered plenty of candidates. I imagine the man thrilled and a bit terrified when he found a chimpanzee caught in his snare. He had proved himself a successful hunter, a provider, a proficient member of his little community—and he wasn’t yet cut.
The chimp too, tethered by a foot or a hand, would have been terrified as the man approached, but also angry and strong and dangerous. Maybe the man killed it without getting hurt; if so, he was lucky. Maybe there was an ugly fight; he might even have been pummeled by the chimp, or badly bitten. But he won. Then he would have butchered his prey, probably on the spot (discarding the entrails but not the organs, such as heart and liver, which were much valued) and probably with a machete or an iron knife. At some point during the process, perhaps as he struggled to hack through the chimp’s sternum or disarticulate an arm from its socket, the man injured himself.
I imagine him opening a long, sudden slice across the back of his left hand, into the muscular web between thumb and forefinger, his flesh smiling out pink and raw almost before he saw the damage or felt it, because his blade was so sharp. And then immediately his wound bled. By a lag of some seconds, it also hurt. The Cut Hunter kept working. He’d been cut before and it was an annoyance that barely dimmed his excitement over the prize. His blood flowed out and mingled with the chimp’s, the chimp’s flowed in and mingled with his, so that he couldn’t quite