EARLY ONE MORNING I rode along on a moni-
toring mission with Achille Diodio, the young
man charged with keeping track of Garamba’s
55 Kordofan giraffes. Soon after we got into good
giraffe habitat—open savanna punctuated with
acacia and other trees they can browse—Diodio
spotted a head on a long neck towering above
the scrub on our right. From his folder of ID pho-
tos, he confirmed that this was GIR37F, an adult
female, first sighted four years earlier. She was
fitted with a transmitter, but it had long since
stopped working, and Diodio was glad to see her
now, alive and apparently well.
Diodio is the sort of rising young talent AP
needs. He’s Congolese, born and raised in a
small town near Garamba, and lucky to comeAnguezi, a towering Congolese major who serves
as head of law enforcement. Anguezi is a straight
arrow—incorruptible. “It would be harder for us
if we didn’t have Pascal,” Elliott said.
At the training ground we met eight exhausted
rangers who were just finishing a 48-hour training
ordeal. A full day of drills yesterday, fitness work-
outs last night, little sleep, a run this morning,
and now they were dodging through the bush
in teams of four with their rifles blazing. These
were move-and-fire drills, two men always firing,
providing cover, while the other two ran ahead.
At the end of a charge, the team hammered their
fire into a torso-shaped target on a tree. The real
point here, Elliott explained, was to see who still
had grit and discipline when exhausted.
Garamba National Park
DRC
Garamba’s vast forest
and savanna areas are
so flat that a gentle rise
called Mount Bagunda
serves as an observa-
tion point for rangers.
Camped here beneath a
communications tower,
a team can watch for
fires, patrol for poach-
ers, and relay timely
information to base.
128 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC