Jane and Muthega followed the elephants by tracking their footprints in the dust. Often they saw them at the edge of the Mara River, where the water was low and groggy and ran thickly, more solid than liquid. The edges of the river were gray with silt, and the elephants had to lumber farther and farther from shore to find spots deep enough to settle into and drink from during the hottest hours of the afternoon. This left them exposed for Jane to count and study, but exposed, also, to the poachers.
Smaller streams and tributaries, and the springs far from the river, had dried up to nothing more than trickles. The last good rainy season was two years ago, and now crowds of eland, gazelles, zebras and giraffes migrated off their habitual feeding grounds, away from their usual watering holes. The river teemed with game in numbers it couldn’t possibly sustain, and daily Jane and Muthega saw the dead—gazelles dropped in their tracks, bony and starving, set upon by hyenas and eaten alive, their bones and gristle left behind, fodder only for the vultures and the marabou storks who held their ground as Jane and Muthega drove by.
Muthega and Jane didn’t talk much. He smoked constantly, and scanned the horizon. It kept him busy, and to make conversation, Jane felt, would be too distracting. She told herself he needed to keep his focus on the signs of elephants and hints of poachers. Jane put her feet on the dashboard and studied the unfamiliar landscape. When they did speak to each other it was brief exchanges about the land, the animals they saw, how the lack of water affected the game, and the dead. The dead, always the dead, in little leather piles of hoofs and bones, the only parts left after the feasting and the incessant sun.
Jane had a cistern at home, filled up biweekly by a water truck. She had no idea where her water came from, and never wondered. She conserved it as much as she could, bathing only every two days. It never occurred to her to ask Muthega about his family, if they had enough, or if the people in the town worried about the endless drought. Jane only thought of the thirsty, skeletal game. She saw the women of Narok clustered daily by the drying river, washing clothes and filling up cans and buckets and calabashes to carry home. Often when they crossed the river at the low, wooden bridge closest to town, Muthega slowed the Land Rover for the women who thronged there. They gathered in groups, their heads weighted with basins of clothes to rub with bricks of lye and then rinse in the sluggish river. There were always tiny children with them who splashed in the water and flickered like dark flames in the mud. Muthega greeted the women in Swahili, his smile breaking open and his tongue clicking his teeth to punctuate his words. The throngs of women around the car made Jane uncomfortable. They watched her during the exchanges, and sometimes they gestured at her, and Jane knew Muthega was answering questions about who she was and why she was here. None of the women spoke directly to Jane. They just watched her.
Sometimes, when they crossed the river in the evening, returning to town for the night, Muthega stopped and let some of the women climb up in the back seat with their basins of laundry, which smelled like the sun, and the buckets they’d filled. It felt too crowded then. The women pushed and laughed behind Jane, their knees bruising her through the back of her seat and their joking, singsong voices saying things Jane couldn’t understand. She wanted to tell Muthega not to pick up the women, but she didn’t know how to phrase it in a way that wouldn’t seem unkind. How could she explain that the women made her feel unseen all over again, or that watching the toddlers walk home in the care of older siblings made her sick with guilt? It was seeing these little children take care of each other that made her guilt unfurl. She’d flown halfway around the world just to escape her family, her obligation to care for her brother.
One morning, less than a month after she arrived in Narok, Muthega tapped the Land Rover horn outside Jane’s gate. He always came early and today was no different. The sun hadn’t risen. It was a navy blue dawn, cool and clear.
“The poachers were nearby last night. The dead one is just by the river. I will show you,” Muthega said.
The sky lightened as they drove, silently, into the scrubland on the opposite side of the river. But still, when Muthega waved his hand to indicate the body was nearby, Jane saw only a dusky gray, curved rock. It looked like a boulder lying there in the flat grassland. Then she saw the carrion. Vultures circled the sky and marabou storks stood by, as still as fence posts but for the way they tipped back their heads to swallow their mouthfuls of meat. They didn’t scatter when the truck rumbled up next to them, but merely stepped back a few paces on their backward-kneed legs, more annoyed by the presence of humans than afraid. The sky-hung vultures retreated to the upper branches of the nearest acacias. Muthega jerked the Land Rover into Park and reached behind him to pull his rifle from the back seat. He double-checked it was loaded and climbed out. Jane assumed he suspected the poachers were still close.
“Coming?” he asked, slamming his door. “We must gather the evidence.”
The flesh that burst from the bloody hacked holes in the animal’s face was bright pink. Against the sullen brown of the earth it looked unreal, plastic. The dead elephant was young, Jane could tell instantly, in the prime of his life. Likely he’d only recently left his family clan to find a mate. He’d been shot first and then hacked through with machetes to harvest the parts poachers would sell—tusks, tail and feet. The rest of him was left for the feeding frenzy of hyenas, jackals and wild dogs that slunk out of the underbrush, and the rancid-beaked vultures and storks that floated in from wherever they’d been lurking to feast on fresh meat.
Muthega climbed up onto the elephant’s shoulder and pulled the giant ears up to search for a tag.
“This one I think is Twiga,” he said.
They had seen Twiga just days before, feeding on the bark of a baobab tree a few miles to the north of here. When Muthega told Jane his name that day, she had laughed. “He’s named ‘giraffe’?” she asked.
Muthega complimented her on a new Swahili word learned, and told her that when Twiga was younger, still in his mother’s clan and unnamed, he’d been seen stretching his trunk as far as he could up the side of a nearly bare tree to pull down the few remaining leaves.
“Like a twiga!” Muthega explained.
Jane closed her eyes and pulled her bandanna from the pocket of her shorts. She tied it tightly around her nose and mouth. The flesh wounds on the animal were fresh, the blood on the ground still sticky, and the iron smell of raw meat hung in the air.
Muthega laid a calloused hand with wide, flat fingernails on her upper arm.
“Miss Jane,” he said slowly, as if she hadn’t been trained in this already, “you must photograph the body for the records, collect samples for the DNA and measure him.”
Then he let go of Jane’s arm and left her standing, dizzy, next to the body. She watched him walk out into the surrounding scrub bush so, she assumed, he could look for tracks or evidence of the people who’d killed Twiga. But instead he set his gun down under an acacia and hunkered on his heels. He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket.
Jane glanced down at the raw place where Twiga’s face used to be and it felt like looking at someone she once loved. She’d seen photos of poached elephants before, of course, and had worked on collecting DNA samples from elephant dung and tusk fragments during an internship in Sumatra. But this, the reality of a healthy, beautiful animal in the midst of the drought that was killing so many others...felled by the brutal force of humans, stunned her more than she thought it would. A rage swelled up in Jane. “Goddammit!” she muttered. “What the fuck is wrong with these people? What kind of abhorrent subhuman asshole does this?”
Jane reached down to pull a tiny flake of severed tusk from the ground. She placed it carefully in a plastic vial. She gathered a skin scraping and a marble-sized piece of dung. She took measurements to determine the rough age of the animal and the size the tusks might have been. She did her work—what she’d come here to do. She could feel that her face was twisted and hot,