ON A SUN-BROILED morning in central Mozambique, we headed 19 miles into the bush, our destination a shrinking stretch of soupy pool, one of the last remaining catchments in the withered river, where the hippos had hunkered down during the wasting days of a dry season that refused to end. Afterwards we would be choppering to other sites—remote wonders, unique to the area—although my attention had drifted when the itinerary was explained. The limestone gorge, perhaps, where Africa's Great Rift Valley arrived at its southern terminus? The lacy cascade of waterfalls off the westward escarpment? The cathedral-size grottoes housing countless hordes of whispering bats? Not that it mattered—bad luck, you could say, since we would never get farther than the hippos.

Because of the heat, and I guess for the breezy fun of it, Segran, the young pilot up from South Africa, unhinged the front doors off the R44, a Robinson-manufactured helicopter aviators call a "little bird," and we strapped in, the four of us, and ascended skyward from the small grass airstrip at Chitengo, the headquarters of Gorongosa National Park, considered among Africa's premier game preserves until it was destroyed by decades of unimaginably brutal war and savage lawlessness, its infrastructure blasted to rubble, its bountiful population of animals slaughtered, eaten, reduced to gnawed bones and memory.

In the copilot seat, with the panoramic sweep of the continent expanding out my open door—loaves of mountains rising like a time-lapse video of Creation Day, the veldt ironed out into a haze of plains spread east toward the Indian Ocean—I adjusted the mike on my headset and joined the conversational squawk behind me: the park's American co-director, Greg Carr, and his Portuguese director of communications, Vasco Galante, stuffed into the rear seats, already sweaty between doors that could not be removed, although they were dressed much more sensibly than me for the tropics, or what would have been sensible if the word malarial were not so lethally affixed to Mozambique's ecology.

Carr and Galante, it was becoming clear, were fearless, a matching set of muzungos—white guys—with a true affinity for the bush. Like Carr, the Boston philanthropist who's committed his time and considerable energy and $40 million of his foundation's money to the restoration of Gorongosa, Galante too was a successful business entrepreneur, a former pro basketball player who'd slammed the brakes on the life he was living, thrown away his map of old assumptions, made a U-turn, and gone to Africa.

Many of their sentences began, "During the rainy season," and I would be directed toward something that was not as it should be this deep into December—the evaporated Lake Urema, shrunk from 77 square miles to four; a wilting Gorongosa massif and its deplenished watershed; the cracked and burning floodplains of the savanna. What now expressed itself as terra firma would require boating skills during the approaching summer, when the park's bottomlands swelled with watery overabundance. Awed and exhilarated, I leaned out into the rush of air, watching the scatter of antelope below.

At Carr's instruction, Segran dipped the helicopter down into the high-banked channel of the Urema River and we roared along its downstream course at treetop level, my companions remarking upon the bed's sorry condition—black patches of dampness embroidered with a fringe of hoofprints, scum puddles churned by expiring catfish, and weed-clogged runs where the absent flow had encouraged a vibrant bloom of flora, the greenest thing in sight.

A year earlier, when 60 Minutes came to Mozambique to produce a feature on the 49-year-old Carr and his turnaround of Gorongosa—only three years into its 20-plus-year course and already the hottest conservation story in Africa—they had filmed the river from the air as scores of Nile crocodiles flipped one after another off the banks into its robust current. Maybe there were some crocs down there now, nestled in the mucky overgrowth, but we couldn't see them. Reedbuck and the occasional impala bolted across the golden sand into the cover of the jungle, but it was Africa's flamboyant birds that owned the desiccated river. Egyptian geese, grotesque marabou storks showcasing the ass-bald head and plucked neck of carrion eaters, graceful herons and lanky crowned cranes, majestic fish eagles. Then we were hovering over the upstream edge of the pool, the squiggle of crocodiles visible in the khaki-colored water, and Carr pointed to a grassy bar about a thousand feet back where he wanted to put down.