THE BOY SMELLED of so many things. Adrenaline exuded from him like a fog, threatening to obscure everything else. Beneath it was the smell of his unclean body: stale sweat and unwashed clothes. There were the local smells, too, from the dust and pollen on his clothes. But under all of that, the smells that had accrued in the pores of his skin, in his clothing, the lingering smells, were the smells of Damira’s own people. Of their food and the way they lived. The hint of hair products, soaps familiar to her, that pulled at strands of memory.
The boy walked beside her, and spoke almost continuously. He was, she understood, hysterical with fear, and likely still in shock.
She had thought she would never hear another human speak to her, in this way. As if she were still one of them. He told her of how he had found out about her, of what he knew of Dr. Aslanov, of the other hunting party. Perhaps he thought he was exchanging this information for his life. As if he had to keep talking or she would reconsider, and crush him to death as she had intended to do before.
But as Damira walked, in the dawn light, she was only half-listening, only half-present. She knew she should be concentrating on what Dr. Aslanov was doing here, but she was drifting, distracted.
The smell of him, past the fear, was so much like the smell of her uncle Timur, just come back from his month-long shift in the Timan-Pechora oil fields. He always smelled like this—unwashed, tired, his clothes saturated with the cigarette smoke of other men, though he was not a smoker himself. So Timur was there, walking beside her. But the boy also smelled of fire, and the print of fire in her mind brought Wamugunda to her side. The boy smelled of cooked rice and fish. Cooked rice and fish was the smell of Damira’s mother, and she joined them on their march. Something in the soap he must use brought back summer camps, and Alexei, the first boy she had kissed. His dirty hair smelled exactly the way her own had, camped by the Ewaso Ng’iro, when she took off her cap to wash her hair in a bucket.
The boy walked beside her, and she breathed in the layers of smells, and remembered. He walked, and he was not one person—he was an ever-shifting crowd. Timur, Wamugunda, her mother, Alexei from summer camp, her own human self, and then Musa, Yelena, a teacher from elementary school who must have used the brand of soap the boy washed his hands with. And then the man who ran a little convenience store down the street from where she lived as a child, whose jacket always smelled of old tobacco. People drifted out of and returned to the composite mass. People became other people as one memory linked itself to another, and another, and another.
The other mammoths also approached the boy, stroking the ends of their trunks on his clothing, on his face.
For the youngest among them, the ones born on the steppe, these were new smells. The older ones, Damira knew, would be remembering keepers at their enclosures. Remembering lives that were more comfortable, more ordered—but also more constrained.
Her reverie was interrupted by a thought:
They think they can kill us for profit. They think they can use us to pay for this place—tear our bodies apart, use our bodies for funding.
When she turned to look at the boy she saw Musa, his rifle over his shoulder. Musa looking up into the white-blue 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.”
“Yes,” Wamugunda said from the crowd, the angles of his face shifting, as if in firelight, though it was already dawn. “Our day will come.”
Did the boy understand something? See something in her eye? Now he stood there alone. The herd had come to a stop.
“I can find them,” the boy said.
Damira raised her trunk and sniffed at the air. Could she smell them? Dr. Aslanov and the others? No—there was nothing. They were downwind, perhaps. Or not close enough.
“I can help you. Look.”
The boy sat down and opened his pack. Two of the younger calves came up to him and stroked at his arms and the bag as the boy drew out a smaller bag, and from it an object Damira recognized from a former life: a control headset for an observation drone. And the insectile drone itself, nuzzled in its charging slot.
“I can find them—and we can stop them.”
Looking past the boy, Damira saw Kara, walking slowly up to him, her trunk stretched out, smelling. Damira knew what she was smelling, because she had smelled it herself—faint, buried in the other smells the boy was composed of. Koyon’s blood, fear-tainted with adrenaline like the boy’s, the smell already mixed with decay.
The smell of the boy’s guilt.
Kara came up behind the boy, and raised one of her forelegs. He did not see her, but Damira watched.
Revenge. She had taught them this. We could crush this human boy like he was nothing, grind him into the earth, trample him until he barely held the shape of a human anymore. Until no one would recognize him.
He could be made to pay for what he had been a part of. For Koyon. For Yekenat.
The raised foot was like a question.
Damira did nothing.
You must decide, Kara. His death belongs to you.
Damira could smell the temporin streaming from Kara’s glands. The smell of sorrow, but also anger.
You must decide.
The boy, not knowing how close death stood to his frail body, said, “I can find them with this—and maybe we can stop them before they kill any more of you. Do you want me to do that? To help you find them? If so, you can touch my hand with your trunk.”
Kara stroked the end of her trunk over the boy’s clothes, brought it into her mouth. Abruptly, she turned away.
Mercy. Well, that was not something Damira had taught them. She wondered if it would last.
Damira brought her trunk to the boy’s hand.
“Good. They aren’t far from us,” he said. “And they don’t know what happened to the poachers. Not yet. We can surprise them at their camp. We can come up with a plan. I can help you … confront them. We can stop them.”
She touched his hand, then touched her trunk to the top of her mouth. Again the boy in front of her blurred, became so many people she had known. And she was among them, on her knees by the Ewaso Ng’iro, washing her hair in a bucket, in the days before the river was fouled with the corpses of her elephants.
“I want to help,” the boy was saying. “I want to make things right.”
Yes, that was what she had always wanted as well—to help. To make things right.