Before being escorted out of Mikeno, I talk to a dozen of Nkunda's foot soldiers. They are at least nominally knowledgeable about and respectful of the animals. One young man who says he's 25 but can't be more than 17 tells me privately that they are under penalty of death not to disturb the gorillas—perversely ironic, given the agonies some of Nkunda's soldiers have perpetrated on innocent humans.

Brent and I manage one other excursion into Nkunda's territory, this time to Bunagana. Once the staging area for cash-flush tourists heading in to see the gorillas, Bunagana is now a bleak, war-ravaged village patrolled by adolescent soldiers stroking their AK-47s. We are met by Pierre Kanamahalagi—"Kana" for short—a former ICCN ranger with a fluorescent green shirt, who installed himself as the new warden of the Mikeno sector when Nkunda took the region. He assigns three rangers to accompany us.

We find a gorilla family just inside the park. The silverback is rolling backward down a hillside, like a gigantic bowling ball. Two young males are wrestling with each other; a female, nibbling on leaves, is tucked into the foliage away from the ruckus. These gorillas, too, are safe. We learn that this is a family that has crossed into the park from Uganda; what's more, tourists from Uganda, the first in more than six months, will be arriving in just three hours.

"All of the gorillas in the park are now safe and healthy," Kana says triumphantly when we return to Bunagana. He claims to have 32 rangers working under him. When Nkunda routed Congolese and Hutu forces from Mikeno, he says, the wildlife service removed all the other rangers—"It was a political act." The rangers he has left were those brave enough to stay and protect the gorillas.

Rangers outside Nkunda's territory had told me a different story. They said that rebels ransacked their patrol posts, stole their uniforms, boots, rifles, and GPS's, and gave rangers the option of joining Nkunda's forces or running for their lives. One ranger I spoke with, accused of collaborating with Congolese forces, was bayoneted through the hand, beaten with clubs, then thrown into a pit with 12 other accused civilians. Each day, he said, three prisoners were dragged from the pit and beheaded. After four days, the ranger was the only one left. His life was spared because a rebel suggested he might make a good tracker in the jungle.

When I relay all this to Kana, he objects. He tells me the rangers I interviewed are liars. "The ICCN is corrupt," he says. "They were taking money from gorilla tourists and putting it into their own pockets. All the top ICCN officials in Virunga must go to jail."

Kana acknowledges that he has restarted gorilla tourism without the sanction of the ICCN. Th e agency has stopped paying the salaries of the rangers, and he needs the money to pay them. Kana says he wants to work with NGOs that have gorilla experts, like the International Gorilla Conservation Program, which is already providing rations to his rangers. He insists that Nkunda’s soldiers have all been “sensitized about the mountain gorillas,” and that his rangers are doing a far better job protecting them than the wildlife agency ever did. He then intimates something I’d heard when interviewing the ousted rangers myself.

“Who killed those gorillas last July?” Kana challenges me. “Who? Ask anyone. It was not soldiers.”

I try to remind myself that not everything a dishonest man says is a lie.