<<Poachers>> Razor said. He had been one himself, and so he understood their modus operandi.

They moved on. Croon began to feel (as he usually did after three days of pulling leaches from his boots) that this was all a bit of a needle in the haystack situation, and that there might not be a pot of gold waiting at the end of this particular rainbow. To complicate matters, someone had lost the booze. He kept replaying the scant leads that he had, over and over again in his mind: the serial butcher in his prison cell, the mutated elephant in the karaoke club, fragments of McCumbie's headlines. The zombies and the antiglobalists. It just didn't make any sense.

Another day later, in a copse of mutilated trees, the party saw their first gorilla: dead and castrated. The guides stood over the noble carcass, waving fists at the savages who could commit such an atrocity. The ape's tag denoted it one of the last nine living in the park.

It was around about this time that Croon blew his top: <<All right, this is bullshit. I'm sick of this snooping around; I want a fair fight. Let's track these bastards, and then let's nail them.>>

Trouble was, the track led more or less directly towards the President's summer palace at Goma. The guides got a little nervous; the Tutsis were more battlehardended after decade of genocidal war. <<I don't give a damn about the president>> Croon said. <<Geopolitics don't concern me. For God's sake, I'm an nature documentary maker!>>