With the ever present grey clouds brooding overhead, we venture further afield from Nkuringo to a local pygmy village, clinging to the rain-soaked hills off the main road just outside the Park. The pygmy community in this corner of Uganda is called the Batwa, and together they make up less than one percent of the local population, which is dominated by the Bakiiga ethnic group with over 90 percent, and the Bafumbira peoples, at just over nine percent. The local Batwa were lured out of Bwindi’s thick tangle of vines in 1991, when Bwindi was officially designated a national park and off limits to human habitation. Their integration into the wider community continues today, with 87 in this tiny village eking out a living with starchy banana (“matoke”) and passion fruit groves, and a growing honey production business. Clouds lodge and the NCDF encourage the women to produce colorful baskets and gorilla woodcarvings, which are sold at the NCDF shop.

As the ominous clouds finally open wide, we head up the hill across from the Batwa village searching for Mugisha. We find him cocooned into his small hut on the ridge, made entirely from branches, leaves and mud from the forest. Mugisha steps out of the tiny egg-shaped dwelling with his two sons to greet us. He is the last of the forest pygmies, and tells us he is happy living off of, and in, the forest. Inside the tiny smoking vessel he proudly shows us his eating plate, made from a local calabash, tin cooking pot, spear and machete. While the wife is out fetching water, I ask if he uses salt to cook the sweet potatoes he begs from the local market. He says he begs that as well, with the rest of his family’s diet coming from birds and whatever else he can hunt nearby. He often has to leave for more than a day in search of food, during which his young sons are placed high up in a nearby tree, safe from wandering animals and spirits.

The next morning, the mist and clouds are still hanging heavy as James Busiku, the stoic but smiling local Park warden greets me in a sharp black suit and printed tie rather than his usual forest-green fatigues. He is on his way to elections in the nearby village of Rubuguri, where a new NCDF board will be chosen. Today each village will chose its representative for the board, which will then be charged with collectively deciding where gorilla tourism money goes. I wish him luck as he wishes me luck, my thoughts turning to slipping through Bwindi’s dense underbrush, monkeys chattering overhead as we look for clues – a broken branch here,

a chewed stalk there – to the Nkuringo gorilla groups’ early morning movement. My guides, Alfred the tracker and Alfred the porter (“Freddy T and Freddy P” I dub them) warn me that the path to the forest is steep, but they are not far. “They are just over the hill,” a local mama shouts out as we pass above the tiny enclave of Kahurire, a smattering of resettled forest dwellers’ mud houses in the valley near the trees’ edge which appears as though it will soon be swallowed whole by Bwindi’s monstrous green wave. My jungle adventure will have to wait. Halfway to the forest, a few spindly trees on the exceedingly steep path reveal huge black balls of fur. Munching fur, which is breaking off branches at an alarming rate and snorting contentedly. “They are going to destroy those trees,” laughs Freddy T. “You are very lucky to see this today.”