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