The chimpanzees got a bad rap in my previous novel, Endangered. I couldn’t help it — compared to the peaceful, matriarchal bonobos, they seemed like abusive villains. But that was before I read the gorgeous memoirs of Jane Goodall. Vivid and specific and lovely, Goodall’s nuanced accounts turned chimps in my mind from brutes to delicate, poignant creatures full of wants and needs, who live in a more hardscrabble social world than the comparatively bourgeois bonobos. Our two closest relatives serve as a terrific double lens through which to examine our own human natures. Chimps, like bonobos, share 98.7 percent of our DNA — making them closer to us than they are to gorillas. Our kinship is about a lot more than numbers, though. In their book Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson point out another startling similarity between our two cultures:

Very few animals live in patrilineal, male-bonded communities wherein females routinely reduce the risks of inbreeding by moving to neighboring groups to mate. And only two animal species are known to do so with a system of intense, male-initiated territorial aggression, including lethal raiding into neighboring communities in search of vulnerable enemies to attack and kill. Out of four thousand mammals and ten million or more other animal species, this suite of behaviors is known only among chimpanzees and humans (24).

Like science fiction can provide a way to isolate and examine the realities of our everyday world, Goodall’s accounts of chimp behavior provide a new way to examine our own tendencies to destroy, and the benefits and costs of in-group, out-group aggression. Chimps would recognize the pattern, so common to human cultures, of a young wife joining her husband’s village. They’d recognize the male-generated violence of humans who fixate on vengeance and go to long lengths to hunt down their betrayers. Chimps would understand, too, the caring side of human nature: In them we find deep compassion and intimacy and a selfless devotion that looks a lot like love.

There is no actual Baedeker’s Guide to Civilized Life in the Jungle. The Baedeker guides existed, and led many a turn-of-the-twentieth-century tourist on cautious travels around the globe. But those tourists never had a guide to Gabon, and even today those who visit Gabon from abroad generally do so because of logging or oil, not sightseeing.

I titled this book Threatened in order to distinguish it from Endangered, but make no mistake about it: Chimps, too, are endangered animals. They’re doing marginally better in Gabon, however, than elsewhere. Gabon’s deepest jungles are home to roughly sixty thousand of the world’s chimpanzees, thought to be the largest concentration of the imperiled species.1 Gabon is also one of the least populated countries on Earth. With only 1.6 million residents in a country the size of Colorado, it averages only two people per square mile outside of its urban centers.2 There are areas of the country, it’s said, where no human has set foot. Because of the revenue coming into Gabon from oil and logging, the president in 2002 was able to afford to set aside an unprecedented amount of the land for national parks — 10 percent.3 Gabon is a reservoir of endangered species and forms a positive note in ape conservation and a caution to those who too readily lump all the varied stories of Africa into the single tale of a doomed continent. In Gabon you can find gorillas, hippos, and forest elephants on the same beach. What better place for an animal story?

One unattractive trait Gabon does share with the United States, though: Of all the countries of the world, ours are the only two that still sanction medical testing of chimpanzees. One of Gabon’s major primate testing centers, the Centre International de Recherches Médicales, is actually in Franceville. No great medical advances have ever come from the testing of chimpanzees, and yet research chimps are isolated in tiny chambers with barely enough room to stand or turn around, spending decades without sunlight or trees or even solid ground under their feet as they undergo hundreds of painful medical procedures.4 If we choose chimps to test because they’re so similar to humans, it follows that their very person-ness also means that we should make every attempt to eliminate their torture and distress. At the very least, mustn’t we provide these highly social creatures with the comfort of fellow chimps? Strides have recently been made toward ending medical testing of chimps in the United States, but we’re not out of the woods yet.

Of course, one reason some scientists support the idea of medical testing of chimps is that we can use them to find a solution to some of our most dangerous viruses: hepatitis and HIV. It’s an irony that chimpanzees hold out (unrealized) hope for breakthroughs in diseases — particularly HIV — that have ravaged the very human populations pushing chimps to the edge of extinction.

There are over fifty million AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa: over three hundred for each of the estimated 150,000 remaining wild chimpanzees.5 Outlooks for both of those populations are grim. Forty percent of Gabon’s people are under fifteen, in large part because AIDS decimated a generation of adults.6

In 2001 Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, articulated the magnitude of the crisis facing the great apes: “The clock is standing at one minute to midnight.” At the rate their habitat loss is going, creatures that have been on Earth for millions of years are heading into their final decades. To Luc, chimpanzees were humans caught out after midnight. But what will happen at midnight to the chimpanzees?