Just out of jail after a three-month sentence for illicit ivory trafficking, Jean is already all set for his next elephant hunt in Odzala-Kokoua National Park.
Like most locals in the vast, wild 13,500 square-kilometer (5,200 square-mile) reserve in the extreme north of this country in central Africa, Jean officially tills the soil.
But because of an utter lack of passable roads, he cannot take his crop to market. So for him, as for the other men of Mbomo, the illegal ivory trade has become sheer economic necessity.
"If there were jobs here people wouldn't go off hunting and they wouldn't land in jail," he said.
By his description, elephant hunts are no picnic. There is a lot of trekking to do: "You have to have a lot of guts and strong lungs," he said.
When they have killed their quarry, the hunters cut up the meat, paying particular attention to the trunk, and sell it off quietly at the Mbomo market.
The ivory stays in the forest, well-hidden from the prying eyes of park warden patrols.
The tusks are later sold off via middlemen who take them up to Brazzaville, capital of the Congo Republic, the smaller state west of the vast Democratic Republic of Congo in the heart of Africa.
Prices depend on quality but are usually about †11.50 ($16.50) per kilo, or about †5 a pound.
Jean says he uses the money to buy soap and medicine. But a friend admits that the boys also spend some of their funds on liquor or women. "Very few of us think about getting organized and maybe building a house or buying furniture," said the friend ruefully.
But the profit motive is not the only reason that drives Jean and the other ivory hunters into the bush.
There is also the call of the wild, the freedom of not having to obey the whims of a boss or a timetable.
This explains the culprits' willingness to take the consequences of repeated lawbreaking, says the head of the environmental group Ecofac, the European conservation program managing the park.
The villagers accept the risk of losing their rights in the territory. "But on the other hand they don't have any paid employment," Roland Missilou-Boukaka said.
The only ones who have official jobs are the ones hired by Ecofac as poachers turned gamekeepers, he said.
The game wardens are there to deter poaching but in the end they are ineffective because of the park's sheer size.
"The people are not sufficiently involved in conservation", said the head of an anti-poaching team of only 30, who are supposed to watch over a territory larger than the West African state of Gambia.
The team has so far arrested 30 offenders this year, seizing 37 sets of elephant tusks, the largest weighing 20 kilograms (44 pounds), plus 700 cartridges and 20 guns.
Just a drop in the ocean in a park that is home to probably the largest bush elephant population in the whole of central Africa.
"To stop poaching, people need to get a job," said Mikiko Hagiwara, a young Japanese researcher studying the destruction of local village plantations by Odzala elephants.
Some locals are quite outspoken about who they think are the real culprits in the illicit ivory trade. "It's not the petty poachers that ought to be arrested, but the big-time Congolese, the Chinese [the locals' word for all Asians], and the whites in Brazzaville," one said.
© 2004 Agence France-Presse
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