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These blood-feeders - Africa's conservation greatest ally, because they stave off humans and domestic cattle with the threat of sleeping sickness - patrol the beach, smelling out bushbuck, blue duikers, and me. Their serrated mandibles can penetrate buffalo hide; a bite feels like being stuck with a safety pin. (Later that night, my tsetse bites will erupt into itchy welts; thankfully, sleeping sickness is rare and I'll return to sleep as soon as the hydrocortisone cream kicks in.)
Over a candlelit dinner of grilled pork, coconut rice, and gingered carrots, I meet the two other guests: Keith and Helen Chapman, a couple from England who are wilderness-trekking fanatics. At seventy, Keith recently had both hips replaced. He and Helen have done the two-week Everest Base Camp Trail and marched half-way up the Andes. He had his operation so they keep on trekking, and the idea of penetrating remote African wilderness does not deter them.
Our Tansanian guide, Kabeth H. Kabeth, gives us the skinny of chimpanzee observation. Of the seven hundred or so chimps living within the 623-square-mile park, the fifty-nine-strong M-group - named after Mimikire, the original alpha-male - has been observed for more than forty years by scientists from the University of Kyoto and are habitated to dilettantes like us. However, continual contact with humans has carried a price. The M-group's population is down from more then one hundred in the mid-nineties; in 2006 alone twelve chimpanzees died of a flulike ailment almost certainly contracted from humans, who share more than ninety-eight percent of their DNA.
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