Animals: Congo

One November day in 1935 a babbling, excited band of pygmies pranced into the Catholic Mission at Buta, in the Belgian Congo, carrying with them a baby okapi, scarcely a dozen days old. They had captured him 90 miles away in the surrounding Ituri Forest, a jungle so dense that only a pygmy can penetrate it. Delightedly the Buta brothers caught up the little animal.

The okapi was a rare find. His species lives only in the Ituri Forest and was unknown to Europe until 1900. That year Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston, British explorer,...