Environment : Rwanda’s Parks May Be Another Casualty of War : Gorillas in the rain forest have been spared so far. But a crush of humanity and cattle threatens another preserve.

A tragedy averted and a tragedy under way: that is the tale of two national parks and the diminishing frontier between Africa’s splendors and sorrows.

At least so far, Rwanda’s raging violence has bypassed the most famous of its wild preserves. Surviving, perhaps even thriving, in the high-mountain rain forest of the northwest is a significant share of the world’s mountain gorillas.

But Rwanda’s war and now its aftermath have encroached deep into the savanna of Akagera, another national park to the east, the country’s largest, where humans, wildlife and livestock compete for food that the land cannot possibly provide as the desperate dry season approaches.

One year since the internecine genocide of as many as 1 million Rwandans, with the nation still grasping for stability, the wild lands are only now beginning to receive the attention they require.

Before the war and the refugee exodus of last year, this Central African country was the world’s most densely populated agrarian nation. It is called the land of a thousand mountains. Virtually every peak, and the bottom land in between, is precisely terraced into banana gardens, sugar cane squares and potato patches, webbed with foot trails and dotted with small mud houses, one after another, border to border.

That such a crowded country has parks at all is noteworthy. And parks on a grand scale have always been one of tiny Rwanda’s biggest surprises.

A visit begins in the northwest, above the town of Ruhengeri, in the velvet jungle forest of Volcanoes National Park, covering the border where Rwanda meets Zaire, once known as the Congo.

It is pouring rain. Water cascades down the beveled shanks of the volcanoes. There are few trails, just dense and shadowy bamboo, shivering eucalyptus and drooping vines, with ghost-like clouds drifting along the ground. The undergrowth is fresh with the scent of camphor, mint and decomposing vegetation.

Sometimes a bird cries. Otherwise the only sound is the splash of rain and the sucking of boots through oozing mud. Then a horrible scream from the bamboo just ahead. Leaves shake as though a tractor might be moving through the thicket. Then, whack-whack-whack! as a male gorilla announces himself by slapping his chest.

There are only 630 mountain gorillas in the wild, and 330 roam this forest. At five feet away, it is possible to smell this one’s wet, woolly coat and see the steam of his breath.

“The gorillas, they were not attacked during the war. And they didn’t leave. They were not afraid of war. The shot of thunder is bigger than the shot of a gun,” explains Gatana wa Biso, a spokesman for the Rwandan tourist office.

To the east of Volcanoes Park is Akagera, on the border with Uganda and Tanzania. Here, the visitor encounters a different landscape and a different story.

This is drier, flatter land, but also classic Africa: rolling plains, umbrella-shaped acacia trees, epic sky. It is home to zebras, gazelles, lions and 50 other savanna creatures. On maps, this single park comprises one-seventh of all Rwanda.

But the maps lie. Today, the park is shrinking by the hour. In an African migration equaled only by the movement of wildebeest across Tanzania’s Serengeti, Akagera is being by invaded by cattle--700,000 head, or maybe even a million, driven here by 150,000 human homesteaders who are coming back to Rwanda from exile across its borders.

The cattle graze on knee-high grass. They have pushed much of the wildlife from the northern end of the park and advance deeper each day. The main road into Akagera is slick with dung from these great herds of the arch-horned Ankole cattle, which are prized not for meat or milk but as a symbols of prestige.

Months ahead, however, disaster waits. Deep into the dry season, the Akagera will turn brown and the water will dry up and the grass will shrivel. The cattle will collect at the one remaining year-round river. Eventually, they will eat everything near the water. They will not be able to feed and drink in the same day, and they will start to die. Before it’s over, they may poison the remaining water on which people and wildlife downstream depend.

About this, there is agreement.

“These cows will be dying by the thousands. In August, you come here, there will be cows dead everywhere. It will be horrible, I tell you,” says Chris Kille Kigezo, one of the new homesteaders.

The government and relief agencies are lobbying the settlers to reduce their herds. Agricultural scientists say that this land where 700,000 cattle now graze can support only 30,000 in the dry season.

But these settlers are part of a culture that measures itself by its cattle. A man with 1,000 of the big-horned animals is rich, a man with 200 is respected when he speaks, and a man with 20 will be told to sit down and shut up.

“Something has to be done, and fast, which is very difficult,” says Tom Glue of the World Food Program.

Behind this mass migration of cattle and people is Rwanda’s long history of ethnic conflict. The rebels who won last year’s civil war and are trying to run Rwanda’s government are primarily Tutsi people. One of their first decrees was to welcome home the children and grandchildren of other Tutsis who fled Rwanda in 1959, also a time of troubles.

Descendants of these ‘59ers began streaming across the border from Uganda last autumn. Lacking land to accommodate them, the government opened the northwesternmost one-fifth of Akagera Park for homesteading. Within a few months, returnees not only filled that space but began to settle elsewhere in the park. If 150,000 or so have come already, perhaps 250,000 or more are believed ready to join the migration.

How much of the park will be sacrificed in the end, the government cannot say.

“Our principle is people first,” Rwanda’s deputy rehabilitation minister, Christine Umutoni, says. “We love the wildlife, and the park means money from tourists. But it depends on how many settlers come. . . . I’m optimistic that by the time we’re finished we will not need all of the park.”

At least not yet. Conservationists fear that this resettlement is the beginning of the end of Rwanda’s wild spaces. Consider the math: About 1.3 million Rwandan refugees still live outside the country, and the government wants them all resettled. The population is predominantly young, its birthrate unrestrained. At present, perhaps 800 people are squeezed into every square mile.

“I’m very, very pessimistic. Before, it was challenging. Now it’s almost desperate,” says Jose Kalpers, the renowned naturalist and coordinator of the International Gorilla Conservation Program.

Back in the mountains of Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda’s gorillas are doing better than its people.

After the war, thousands of refugees fled the country through this forest. On the other side of the ridge, they are encamped on the park’s boundaries, desperate for firewood. Bandits are believed to roam portions of the park. Some of the park guides have been killed.

In all the years of fighting in the area, there has been only one known gorilla casualty. It stepped on a land mine in 1992. That is a better record than in the mountains of Uganda, the other sanctuary for the endangered mountain gorilla. In March, four of 280 gorillas in Uganda’s Bwindi National Park were killed by poachers apparently trying to capture an infant.

Today, desperate for foreign exchange, Rwanda is resuming its tourism program in the gorilla sanctuaries, although typically the only takers are off-duty U.N. soldiers, relief workers and foreign journalists--people accustomed to strife and not unnerved when an army patrol is sent to protect them from bandits. No protection is needed against the gorillas.

Right now, the young male in the bamboo thicket has relaxed and, with lips puckered, is stripping a branch of its leaves, like a martini drinker pulling olives off a toothpick.

Behind this one, another gorilla is feeding. There is a female with her tiny, wide-eyed infant, two young adults and the old silverback who leads this growing family. They grunt and squeal and squirm in the wet growth. And they watch as the visitors watch them.

Many others have remarked on the wonder of sitting peacefully with such huge, powerful creatures. Today, it is equally as wondrous to realize that this is Rwanda.