DAMIRA FOLLOWED THE blood down the hill. The ground here was soft with upwelling water. Rivulets reflected the sun through blades of grass. Her feet sank a few centimeters into the upper layer of soil before meeting the spongy mat of root web.
She could not see much blood, but the pathway of blood-scent was clear. Touching her trunk to the Jacobson’s organ in the roof of her mouth conjured the mammoth she called Koyon—his shy, lumbering form, his tattered right ear, his mournful, hairy head.
Koyon’s eyes were amber, not the dark earthen color of most of the others. Beautiful eyes, long lashed and soulful. Damira remembered when the herd drove him off two summers ago. For weeks, he had trailed them at a distance, trumpeting desperately when any of them turned to look at him, winding his trunk through the scent-path of mother and kin. She had not seen when he finally turned and went away. She had tried not to look in his direction too much: it only prolonged the agony of the driving off, of the necessary separation of the males from the herd that was a part of their adolescence. Some wandered off themselves, some had to be charged, butted, shoved away by the matriarchs into their solitary adult lives.
The next summer season she saw him with Yekenat, the oldest and largest of the bulls. Yekenat was massively tusked, tall and thick through the chest, tawny pelted. Koyon trailed the larger male at a respectful distance, watching his mentor tear grass from the steppe. When the matriarchs and his shaggy cousins passed, he swung his trunk to trace their scent on the wind.
But he did not approach. He, like the others, had come to understand the proper order of things.
Damira heard the flies. The sound was weaker than it had been on the banks of the Ewaso Ng’iro …
DAMIRA HEARD THE sound of the flies and smelled the stench of death in the air. She hesitated at the base of the hill, shifted her rifle from one shoulder to the other. Wamugunda halted beside her. They had seen the vultures in the sky. They knew what was over the red earth hill. Neither of them wanted to see it for themselves. But the sound was almost worse than the sight: the enormous buzz of death. The hum of destruction. A hot exhalation of rot hit them. Wamugunda gagged. He spat in the red dirt, unashamed.
Damira did not gag. She would not let herself. If she did, she would vomit.
She pushed forward, over the crest of the hill.
There were eight of them here. There were six adults, all females. There was an adolescent bull that must have been only a season or two away from being pushed out of the herd. And there was a calf, no more than a few days old.
The flies swarmed the mutilated faces of the matriarchs and the adolescent bull. Their trunks were hacked away, their tusks gouged out, their feet chopped off.
Musa was already there. He stood with the farmer who had found them, both of them smoking. To ward off the stench. And to give them something to do while they waited, besides staring at the slaughter.
“Shot from the air,” Musa said. “Probably an ex-military drone—a flying machine gun, radar cloaked and silenced. They came in later on ATVs to harvest the tusks. It’s one of the big operations. Well-funded. They set a booby trap, by the way, for us. An IED—tripwire in the brush there next to the adolescent bull. Mortar round. So, they send us their regards. There may be more IEDs around. I checked best I could, but be careful.” Damira stood at the edge of the destruction, looking down at the last of the victims.
The pink calf lay, untouched by poachers, as if she had fallen asleep. Her rosy ears were still translucent. She had stayed with the buzzing ruins of her mother and her clan, and lay down to die just a few days after coming into the world.
The individual elephants slaughtered were lost in the numbers—the elephants butchered by the thousands, cut down by ivory hunters until there were almost none left in the wild. Seeing the individual acts of butchery was a reminder that every killing of an elephant was, like the elephant itself, enormous. A towering act of human cruelty.
But the numbers were not what Damira thought of when she later remembered those years of struggle along the Ewaso Ng’iro. And the mutilated adults and adolescents were not what she thought of, either. What stayed with her most was the baby, pink and newly born, that had remained with its mother until the end.
The elephant calf became a symbol for her of the entire lost war against the poachers, and against the system that supported them. Whenever she needed a reason to continue, the calf was there, behind the lids of her eyes.
And she did not give up. None of them gave up. Not her, and none of the rangers who fought the poachers.
Musa looked up into a sky already turning white-blue with the heat of late morning.
“Our day will come, and the corpses of the poachers who did this will be scattered by the banks of the Ewaso Ng’iro, covered in flies.”
“Yes,” Wamugunda said, “our day will come.”
“Our day will come,” Damira said. But when she spoke the words, her voice was too faint to be heard over the buzzing swarm.
In less than a year, Musa would be dead, killed by a sniper at base camp along with three other rangers.
Two years later, Wamugunda would be killed at the wheel of his Range Rover, by an artillery shell IED placed along one of the national park’s dirt roads.
And Damira was murdered a year after that.
THE TRAIL OF blood wound around the base of a kurgan and into a slight depression fanned by rivulets of glacial meltwater. Yekenat and Koyon lay side by side, no more than fifteen meters apart. The flies swirled up and then settled again on what had been the heads of the two mammoths. Only their tusks had been taken, but the cutting away had been done in haste, their skulls hacked open to get every inch of ivory. There was nothing left of Koyon’s mournful face, or Yekenat’s powerful head, the tusks growing thicker at the base as he, one of the first mammoths to be reborn, entered into his middle years.
There were boot-prints in the soft earth. No tire tracks, but strange hoof-like imprints where the grass was thin. And, of course, the brass of the shells, littering the steppe. It was all recent: this had happened today. The corpses had barely begun to rot.
When Damira returned to her clan they sniffed at her, drawing their trunks over the smell of death that saturated her pelt, walking in slow circles as they touched the death-smell to the tops of their mouths. The calves moved closer to their mothers, nuzzling their sides and grasping with their trunks at their parents’ hairy pelts.
Kara, Koyon’s mother, stood and swayed, her eyes closed. The others stroked their trunks along her sides and comforted her with low rumbles.
But Damira felt no sadness. None at all. There was no room for it in her. All she could think of was Musa looking up into the sky.
“Our day will come, and the corpses of the poachers who did this will be scattered by the banks of the Ewaso Ng’iro, covered in flies.”
Damira’s furious trumpeting startled the others out of their mourning. But soon, they all had caught the feeling, pacing and flapping their ears, mock-charging as if the poachers were there around them.