THE SMELL OF FIRE.
As a mammoth, Damira had discovered a world of memory the human Damira never had. When she was human, memories were sometimes awakened by scent—but those memories were often nothing more than a feeling, or a flash of something, a fragment of a past event, dim and half-present.
She had once seen a bull elephant touch a bolus of dung left by another elephant with the tip of his trunk and bring the smell of it into his mouth to taste. Then he stood there, his eyes closed, a low vibration issuing from him into the earth. Remembering.
And now, as a mammoth, she knew what that meant. For an elephant, smells did not conjure feelings, fragments of scenes. No—they brought memories back whole, as material as glass beads on a string. One memory chained to another, and another, and another. Memories as complete and rich as the world of now.
The smell of fire. She remembered her first mammoth seasons—leading Kara and the others away from a brush fire. Nudging them into line. Teaching them to move away from the smoke smell, ford streams to find safe pasture.
Later in that first, brutal winter she had thought they would not make it—any of them. They had moaned and wandered, confused and half-starved, not understanding yet that they were built for this place, that their bodies were expecting it, that their genes had come home to here. They were still thinking like captive elephants, with the shattered culture of their elephant foster mothers, themselves raised in captivity, and the squalid, constrained mentality of the enclosure.
She broke those habits. She showed them how to clear snow from the grass and tear it out. She taught them that, although the world looked empty, there was sustenance—as much as in the summer, if you knew where to look for it. She taught them not to fear the cold and the snow. She knew their hemoglobin made red blood cells that excelled at moving oxygen through their massive bodies in the winter. That their hair would keep them insulated, that their metabolisms were designed for this environment. To think like the mammoths was to survive. To know this was not some alien world. This was their place, and they had come home to it.
Some of the skills she taught them were elephant skills, skills she had observed in the wild over her years among the elephants—her human years. She now tended the wild births in the warm season, taught her herd to form a square around the calves when they were under threat—although until the poachers came, there had been no real threats to them here. There had been no predator, in this world, that could bring a mammoth down.
Some of the skills she had learned from the elephants, and some of the skills she taught them were learned from books she had read about mammoths. Learned knowledge and book knowledge—she put both to use, and led.
The smell of fire.
The chain of memories wound back, past the mammoth years. Back, into Damira-as-human. And it was strange that now, in this body, she had access to those human memories in a way she never had when she lived in human form. She traveled back there. She was present, again, in her own past. She was present in the elephant way, inhabiting a past as real as this moment—as physical, as complete. All of that neural circuitry had been there, in her human mind, but human recall was inferior: it skirted along the pathways and brought their contents up garbled, fragmentary. It mixed things up, moved too easily from one loop of association along a branch into another. It was fallible and partial.
Not now. Mammoth memory was transportation to the past.
The smell of fire, and she was there again …
WAMUGUNDA SAT IN front of the small fire they had made. The air had grown cool with the sunset. He had seen Damira shivering, and then gathered wood. She had wanted to protest—but they had no tent with them, no sleeping bags, no shelter but the Land Rover.
Their Land Rover had broken down while they were driving a transect in search of a herd. Here, the elephants were not tagged: they roamed free and unmonitored. The rangers did not trust the tags and drones still being used in the other parks. Tagged elephants, they said, were found by the poachers first. Herds sighted by monitor drones were attacked. So here, they found the elephants the old way—they went out and looked for them.
The biologists and rangers tracked the elephants by finding fresh dung, the raw wood of branches they had broken and stripped, the depressions of their padded feet at the watering holes. It was safer. But when their front axle broke, Wamugunda and Damira found that the car’s electrical had failed as well, including the fuse for the charging station. Their terminals were dead.
They were alone, and it would be a long walk back to the camp the next day. But there was enough food and water, and they knew the way—so they were not worried. Their pleasure in studying and watching the elephants had already been scarred by the poachers’ incursions into the park but it was not yet the worst of times, when the rangers and the biologists themselves would be targeted. The price of ivory was spiraling out of control, but the ivory wars that had already wiped out populations in Sudan, South Africa, and the Congo had not yet come here.
There was still some degree of innocence, which turned this mishap on a routine transect into an adventure. An unplanned camping trip; a welcome diversion from their mounting problems.
Wamugunda was telling her about his days as a student in Hong Kong. On scholarship, on an island, studying species preservation in the most densely human-populated place on earth.
“Nowhere,” Wamugunda said, “could there have been a world that was more human, more urban, more different from rural life here.”
Wamugunda’s father and grandfather had both been rangers in the park. He had never been an urban Kenyan, and before his student days, had never even traveled to Nairobi.
“My urban metaphor was termite mounds. That was what Hong Kong seemed like to me—towers like termite warrens, of steel and glass instead of red earth. You always looked at people from above, or saw them in crowds that made them faceless. Too many people, and they become identical.
“I grew up here, where you learn every animal and person by name—their qualities, their capacities, where they fit in. You learn to identify them from far off—by their gait, their silhouette. But in Hong Kong everything was compressed, anonymous, tangled. Everything was the crowd, the mass. And I was always on the outside.
“It was not the color of my skin—though that was a part of it—or my scholarship status—though that, too, played a role. It was the way of life. The density of the population. And its lack of connection to nature. To anything outside of the endless canyons and towers of man.
“But after a while, I began to see: Hong Kong, too, was connected to nature. Yes—I saw that. But what I saw, I did not love. It was connected to nature, but only to draw it into itself. To consume it. Hong Kong was a vortex: the ships came spiraling into the port from all over the world, dragged in by a tide of extraction, the cranes pulled containers off of vessels that were like enormous floating buildings, filled with everything the world had to offer. What I saw was a flow of things—manufactured things, yes. But also plants—vegetables, fruits from the mainland, from all over the world. Cut flowers even from my own country. Our coffee, too. But also—ivory.
“It cropped up here and there, at first: a chess set one of the students had, passed down from his parents. An old set of mah-jongg tiles in a shop window. Once I began to see it, it was everywhere. In offices—a tusk in a case, beautifully carved, transformed into a world of its own, worked by human hands into a chain of elephants walking trunk to tail. Beautiful, lifeless elephants carved from the destruction of an elephant, hacked into what had once been a part of a body, a tooth, a tool. A part of a life.
“Among the skyscrapers, there were also older places—little streets of cramped shops, survivors from another Hong Kong. Marginalia that had been missed by the eraser of progress. And there, in the shop windows, so crammed with clever things, there it was. My eyes found it over and over again. Ivory. Ivory jewelry, ivory stamps used to sign decrees that were meaningless now, ivory game pieces of every kind. Ivory turned into useless gewgaws, dripping with the blood of my home. It could be carved into any lovely shape they wished, but all of it began in killing. No—more than that—all of it began in killing that took place far away. That took place somewhere the people who thought of ivory as a material could not see. Killing that took place in an extraction zone.
“This was the beginning of my political life. It was a strange place for the political life of a Kenyan man to be born—among antiques shops crowded with bric-a-brac, on scholarship in a world I could spend a lifetime in without understanding. But there it was. I saw the system: cities like Hong Kong and New York and London at the center, vortexes into which the currents of trade accelerated, into which goods from all over the world were pulled. Places where things became materials. Where things became commodities. And on the other end of all of that, the places people like me were from—the extraction zones where the tug of all this displacement began. I saw the slave ships then, moving like shuttles in a loom across the sea. I saw the sugarcane fields and the cotton plantations. I saw the taxidermized bodies of our African animals in Western museums. I saw the rare earth metals in every terminal in every hand in Hong Kong, London, New York. I saw everything that was torn from its natural environment to become a material, to become anonymous, denatured. I saw all of that.
“But for some reason—perhaps because I grew up here, among the elephants, what caught my eye, always, was ivory. It stood out, white and gleaming among the other objects in every display—like maggots in a wound. And I understood: I know what it is like to be from an extraction zone. What it is like to grow up in the place where the taking begins. But an elephant knows what it is like to be an extraction zone. That is their history. The elephant is enormous, but it is not as gigantic as the history of human exploitation.
“I knew, then, that I would be a ranger. I would take my education back with me, and use it to put a stop to this. My parents had imagined a different future for me. They imagined me, I think, in a lab coat so white it hurt the eyes, with a patient smile on my face. They imagined me in glasses. With a pen in my pocket. They imagined me away from here—and away from here is always imagined as some kind of heaven. A place of order and well-tended gardens, where things are bought with the touch of a terminal or a nod, in stores that play quiet music. But I could no longer imagine myself in that place, knowing what I knew.”
Sparks from the fire formed brief constellations in the cold air, against the more permanent constellations above them. “And that is my story. That is why I am here, Damira.” Wamugunda paused, then asked, “But why are you here?”
Damira remembered how that question had cut into her. How she had carried it with her for weeks, trying to answer it. How it had festered, bringing doubt with it that was only really drowned when the war spread into their park, and there was no time left for thinking.
But at the time, she had just laughed: “My uncle bought me a toy elephant.”
Wamugunda laughed as well. “But surely this is not the future your parents imagined for you.”
“I don’t think they ever imagined a future for me. So I guess I was free to choose my own.”
“Ah.” Wamugunda was silent for a moment. Damira watched his face, which the fire turned into shadows and planes of orange and yellow against the dark. The deepest lines of that face were rivulets, unlit canyons leading back into the night.
She returned to this memory—this place carved from oblivion—often. But sitting here across from him, warm by this fire, she was a traveler. She came from a time in which she knew he was dead. In which she knew that she had also died. She wanted to tell him, wanted to reassure him: I do not forget, anymore. I will not forget you, so long as I move across this earth. We will always meet here, Wamugunda. This is our place.
Wamugunda pushed an ember back into the fire. “Well, Damira—I think there are people who come from somewhere, like me. And there are people who come from nowhere, like you. And there is power in both.”
THE SMELL OF fire, linking back even further, to memories of her childhood, of a biology book open on the kitchen table. Of looking up from her studies to see one of the other ancient wooden houses across the street, burning brightly despite the drifting snow.
But there were links that were broken as well. That no longer led to other memories. Were those memories still there, disconnected but whole, like planets that had escaped the gravity of their systems to drift forever in the darkness between the stars? Or had those memories dissolved over time, dissipated to relieve the neurons of the task of maintaining that connectivity?
There were memories even her mammoth mind could not retrieve from her past. So much was lost forever.
The smell of fire grew stronger. She padded forward quietly. The others sensed her effort at silence, and imitated it.
Close, now.