My first impression of Africa is that I have stepped into the middle of a civil war.

Our first few days in Johannesburg do nothing to dispel my expectation of trouble. Less than a week has passed since Chris Hani's assassination, and everyone is tense. At one point I hear chanting in the street and see military helicopters overhead. I keep wondering what the bloody hell I have gotten myself into.

At last we are ready to leave for Songimvelo Game Reserve. There, at Gold Field Training Center, we will participate in a laser-sight training school, where wildlife officers learn to use new equipment in their unending war against poachers. It will be rough-and-tumble, no-holds-barred SWAT exercises designed to keep these men alive in the field.

We arrive at Songimvelo in the dark, after a long ride on an unpaved road. Washboard roads are the same all over the world. I still have seen nothing of Africa that I respond to. Though Johannesburg is a lovely city, it could be a city anywhere. And as for washboard roads, I have plenty of them at home.

In the morning, everything changes. Last night I couldn't see the mountains that surround Songimvelo, rising above the bush in blue-gray silence. These are ancient mountains, as worn and weathered as my grandmother's hands. Tattered early-morning clouds cling to their peaks, and I stand on the step and look up at them and tremble. These mountains saw life begin, saw the first primate stand erect to look over the long grass, watched us stumble our way up the treacherous slope of evolution.

The laser-sight training is everything I expect it to be, though the group turns out to be small. One officer is away on a poaching operation; another was killed by an elephant yesterday.

It is a good course. The first afternoon we go to the shooting range, where I shoot a fully automatic rifle for the first time. Later, during target shooting, the training officer tells two game scouts, "The lady is showing you how to shoot."

That night, we do a house-clearing. On the first run-through, I'm one of the poachers in the house. The officers come in shooting, and somehow overlook my hiding place. The training officer steps into the room where I am crouched in the shadows. I fire the ancient Mauser and he collapses into an ungainly heap on the cobbled floor. It is all good fun and games and play-acting, but it is also deadly serious. If I had been a poacher with live rounds instead of blanks, he would be lying in a pool of his own blood, not getting up and dusting himself off and grimacing at how he has twisted his knee. We have become friends these past two days, and I hope he will remember his mistake the next time he goes up against real poachers with real bullets.

The next night is even more grueling. We begin at dusk with a live-fire exercise. Each of us walks through the bush lane, a narrow gully where cardboard-cutout snipers wait. Our job is to shoot them before they shoot us.

Later, we play the same game for real. One team sets up along a road; the second team walks into the ambush. Staccato gunfire rips the soft South African night as we engage in one mock firefight after another.

The commitment of these men to South Africa's wildlife overwhelms me. Each of them is willing to lay down his life to save a rhino or an elephant or even a cycad. Rumor has reached us that the officer who was killed three days ago had a rifle and could have stopped the elephant bearing down on him. Instead he held fire, believing the animal was making a mock charge, giving it every chance to turn aside. He waited too long.

I wonder if I have ever been that committed to anything. As I think about my cozy, comfortable life back in the States I realize how much we all take for granted. That commitment to an ideal, that willingness to stand firm on what you believe in the very face of death is what takes the measure of a man, or of a woman. The officers know this; the great beating heart of the world that is Africa knows.

Two days after the training session ends we go our separate ways. The officers have gone back to their postings. Part of the training team has returned to the States. The rest of the group, except for me, has left for Mozambique to go fishing.

I'm alone in a bush camp at Mahushe Shongwe, with no phone or electricity. The only other person for kilometers is an old man who looks after the place. In the morning the Professional Hunter will come and we will hunt for impala and blue wildebeest and kudu.

In the two weeks that I have been here, the landscape has changed from exotic to weirdly familiar. I recognize buffalo thorn trees and kudu lily; I know which tree makes a poisonous smoke when it burns, though I can't pronounce its name. I know the nightjar's bubbly call and the kudu's raspy bark. I've even learned to say zebra with a short e, and thank my Afrikaans hosts by saying "dankie." Africa has dug its fingers into my soul.

Beyond the fire, I can hear the impala rams rutting in the darkness as they have for millennia. I wonder what will become of Africa's wildlife. Will the political upheaval that tears at this part of the world spell the death of the cycads and the rhino? Or will a handful of dedicated men turn back the poachers so that both live on in the bush?

Now I understand why the officers are willing to risk everything to stand between the rhino and the poachers. As long as the rhino roams free on the veld, Africa will remain truly wild, the last place we can find the intimate connection that binds us to our primeval past.