INTRODUCTION
ome years ago a woman whose family had
been entrenched for several generations in a comfortable en-
clave of tile suburban Northeast asked me， with startling blunt-
hess， \"Why do you keep going to these awful places?\" I hope
that this book will go some of tile way toward answering her
question. Both of the trips described in it were undertaken after
two-year book-writing projects， in an effort to get back in shape
and in touch with the natural world. They were taken to rain
forests because 1 find them particularly fascinating. The trips
are presented in reverse order: Benoit Quersin and I went up
the Nhamundfi in the summer of 1984， and the trip across Zaire，
at the end of which we first met， took place three years earlier，
in the spring.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation gener-
ouslv supported this project with a fellowship， while Benjamin
T. Kernan， who also has the woods in his blood， gave me the
use of his cabin in the Adirondacks. The lepidopterist John C.
1)owney helped me with the African butterflies but because of
inexcusable oversight on mv part was not acknowledged in the
New Yorker excerpt. Thomas E. Lovejoy explained the oropen-
dula-cowbird-wasp-botfly interaction. The huge debts I owe to
Anna Roosevelt， Robert Carneiro， Richard Wrangham， and
Robert Bailey will soon be evident.
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