Though the park is designated a World Heritage site, more than 175 park rangers have been killed here in the last 25 years. The photograph, shot by Brent Stirton for Newsweek, appears in newspapers and magazines around the world, awakening others to the issues the park rangers know so well: the need to protect the gorillas’ habitat, the bloody battle for resources (gold, oil, charcoal, tin and poached animals), the destabilizing presence of armed rebel groups as well as the Congolese Army inside the park’s borders. In a solemn procession, the dead gorillas are being taken to the rangers’ field station. Now, here on their home range, on the slope of the Mikeno volcano in Virunga National Park in eastern Congo, many of them have been murdered by armed militia members trying to scare away the rangers and gain control of the old-growth forest for charcoal manufacture. (The American primatologist Dian Fossey was instrumental in studying the complex dynamics of these family units.) They’re a troop habituated to humans: gentle, curious, playful and often pleased to greet visitors, tourists and the rangers who protect them. The gorilla’s name is Senkwekwe, and he’s well known to the pallbearers, many of them park rangers who call him “brother.” He’s the alpha male of a family named the Kabirizis. Though we can’t see this part, some of the men are weeping. He’s 500 pounds - a black-and-silver planet amid the green. The photograph seems like the end of a movie we don’t yet know the beginning to. His prodigious belly is belted with vines, too, and his mouth is stuffed with leaves. The dead gorilla is lashed with vines to secure his arms and legs. We see the body of a gigantic silverback mountain gorilla hoisted high on crisscrossed branches carried aloft by at least 14 men through the bush.

The image goes viral, or as viral as possible in the summer of 2007.

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