The husband and wife are picking at each other again. My fellow gorilla trekkers. I dub them the Bickers. They stand close to me on an eighteen-inch jungle path like a couple of thistles I have picked up in the brush.

“You were supposed to bring the extra battery. You screwed up.” Mr. Bicker says. He is tall and trim and wears a very nice gold watch. It tells you the time in London, clocks your fifty-yard dash and is submersible to 100 meters.

“No, you’re the one who screwed up, it’s your camera,” says Mrs. B. She is short and trim and wears a very nice wedding ring with a diamond perched on top like a white radish. The two stand toe to toe. They have eyes only for each other. I clutch my walking stick. I relax my grip.

I click another picture and have just lowered my camera when I hear a sudden stomping and thrashing. I turn. Tree tops neatly part to the left and right, as if an invisible comb is at work on the jungle’s leafy green scalp. The responsible party, not a comb and not invisible, is the largest known gorilla on the Virunga Massif. He has decided that our uninvited visit to his family group is over. Good bye, strangers. Time to go.

“We go now,” my head guide says. And we do. Triple time down the tangled machete-cut trail, down and down off the mountain.

The Bickers must be joggers; they manage our fast trot over uneven terrain without missing a snipe.

“Now we’ll never get the shots. I hope you’re happy,” he says.

“I am not taking the fall for this, you ass,” she says and falls into a muddy rivulet she tries and fails to hop across. The lead guide, Michael, helps her to her feet. She shakes him off and barely misses a beat. “If our vacation is ruined, you’re the ruiner.”

My little band of trekkers and guides pop safely out of the jungle. Here ends the Volcanoes National Park’s mountain gorilla preserve. Here begins the intricate, urgent tapestry of terraced subsistence gardens that etch the rolling hills of Rwanda.

Down below us, I spot the teeming streaming ever-present Rwandan crowds on the single rutted road that leads to the village, crowds that keep to the roads, always to the roads, because the precious hills must be cultivated, tilled, weeded, coddled and begged to yield one more thin meal, one more crop to barter.

I lean over and put my hands on my thighs to catch my breath. I check on the one-room ramshackle hut just below us. It sags like a worn-out spectator watching a parade that marches on and on. I see the black shadows in the wood-framed entry that has no door. The black squares in rough pocked walls without windows. I see the solemn little girl still standing down there in the dirt, in her torn, too-big lavender dress, her head shaved. She cannot be older than eight or nine. She carries her baby brother on her back in a red, blue and yellow striped sling. I wave to her. She waves shyly back.

The Bickers sit down, too close to me. They stare at the ground, a pair of circus clowns with their smiles on upside down.

I think of those somber giants in the leafy hills above me. The mother hoists her fuzzy-headed baby on her back, the two boisterous youngsters roll in a tangled heap, the big guy, the one who routed us, lounges against a tree trunk and lets a little one play with his toes. They eat bamboo, always eat bamboo, in the single place they can still find it.

The government says the gorillas will bring tourists who will bring money which will bring prosperity. Few Rwandans see this money. They see mountains that could be coaxed into crops. Gorillas. Rwandans. Or. And. Ampersand.

The Bickers worry aloud about their blisters, their battery, their booking on to Cairo.

The silverback has not followed us this far. I am unharmed and can afford to be charmed by our hasty retreat. I plunk down in the grass and share a word with Michael. My bum knee, the one for which I require the walking stick, begins to quiver. I ignore it. I pick little white worms out of my socks. I open a sealed bottle and gulp down warm but welcome water.

“We’ll get a stupid battery in Kigale,” Mrs. Bicker says.

“And you can pay for it out of your stupid trinket money,” Mr. B answers.

There is that poverty and then there is this poverty, I think.

I am suddenly much too warm; pain knifes my knee; my stomach lurches; I must get to my feet and away from the group and I must do it now; I rise in a rush; my knee buckles; I stumble and fall helplessly toward the Bickers, like a waterfall newly created, tumbling toward the unsuspecting rocks; I hold my walking stick before me; the stick plunges onto Bicker heads; I whoosh down behind it. I break my fall on the convenient chest and defensive hands of Mr. B. My water bottle bounces off Mrs. B’s shoulder and onto her cream-colored slacks.

“Sorry,” I mumble, “very sorry.” The Bickers stare at me. Much like two lemurs might, I think, if a television set had just dropped onto their lemur noggins and rolled to a stop in their lemur laps. I grab the water bottle and begin the awkward ascent. I restore myself to the upright, all my weight on one leg. Michael hands me back my walking stick. I smooth down my khaki shirt.

“It’s hard to keep your balance here,” I say.

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