“Wow,” he said, nodding. “That’s far away...but you’ll be happy.”
His blasé attitude made Jane illogically angry. It was her choice to leave, to go as far away from home as she could. She was the one leaving him, leaving Lance and the new wife. He should be angry, or sad. But he didn’t seem to care, and he didn’t beg her to stay. She’d always be just a small, annoying shadow in his smoky study, or a child with grief so big it made his new wife uncomfortable. Jane wasn’t surprised by his reaction, but the vicious rush of anger and the grief she tasted on her tongue stunned her. She’d almost forgotten it was there, secret tinder she kept hidden away.
“Before one, two years ago...this was green,” Muthega, the Kikuyu guide hired by the Elephant Foundation, told her when he parked the Land Rover and fumbled for the keys to her new front door. He’d waited on the airstrip of the tiny Narok airport for her plane to land, and he was standing there, in a khaki shirt with the foundation’s logo emblazoned on the chest pocket holding a handwritten sign with her name on it, when she’d disembarked. It made Jane laugh; there was only one other passenger on the little plane.
“Are you sure you’re here for me?” Jane had joked, but Muthega just nodded solemnly and hoisted her suitcase onto his shoulder.
Jane’s house in Narok was a two-room building, low and squat and slapped together with rough, gray concrete. Just to the south were the dusty streets and the warren of other flat-topped concrete buildings of Narok, but north was nothing but dry grassy savannah edging the Maasai Mara game reserve, and the distant line of trees that clung to the bank of the Mara River. The yard space around the house was bare dirt, with a little dry scrub grass and one lone pink bougainvillea that climbed the wall next to the front door and grasped the earth below it in a constant struggle for water.
Now Jane looked around the dry patch of land that was her new yard. The high concrete wall surrounding her plot of land distracted her. It was at least six feet tall, and the top edge glinted with shards of broken bottles.
“For thieves,” Muthega said, following her eyes with his own. “It can be dangerous for you here.”
Jane thought of the dingy little town they’d driven through to reach this house. It seemed quiet and charming, in a dusty way, not particularly dangerous. Anyway, she’d keep the gate locked, she told herself, and better to be safe than sorry. She didn’t dwell on the thought; she was desperate to get out into the bush.
Muthega’s job was to drive her to where the elephants were. He did his best to track their movements. Elephants are creatures of habit and in the dry season their daily range is somewhat limited. Once Jane tracked them long enough, she could calculate the specifics of different groups. And once she and Muthega had figured that out, they’d situate bush cameras in the areas the various elephant groups were likely to congregate. Timing was critical; once the wet season came, the elephant groups would migrate much farther afield and be nearly impossible to track. Muthega smoked cigarettes that smelled like burning rubber, but Jane was glad to have him around because he had watched the elephants in this area for years, and because he wore a rifle slung over his shoulder. It was for people, not game, he told Jane. It was the people who made her uneasy; it was people who she was here to combat. The presence of Muthega’s gun was comforting.
The foundation’s war on poaching was waged in three ways: the collection of DNA samples from elephant dung, which would help other researchers pinpoint sources of illegal ivory; the logging of traps, poacher sightings and slaughtered elephants on a GPS; and the placing of elephant cams in areas most heavily used by the animals. The foundation hadn’t tried the cameras here before, but there had been a successful pilot program in Sumatra, where faces of three poachers were caught so clearly on the cameras that within days of posting Wanted posters promising financial rewards, they’d all been jailed. Jane brought ten remotely operated cameras with her from the foundation headquarters in Washington. She was responsible for safeguarding the expensive equipment, and because the elephant cameras would bring a high price if stolen and sold, Muthega’s gun was necessary.
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 b
lue 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, and tears and snot were soaking the bandanna. Flies, awakened by the rising sun and attracted to the smell of blood, buzzed in waves around her head, settling on her arms and cheeks, licking thirstily at the tears hung in the corners of her eyes. Jane waved her arms fruitlessly. It was getting hot, and the meat was beginning to smell. Muthega’s cigarette smoke caught in a gasp of the breeze and mixed with the smell of meat. Her stomach rolled over in her belly and she bit her lip, forbidding herself to vomit.
Sweat dribbled down her forehead, and when she rubbed it with her hand, a flake of dirt fell in her eye. It hurt and she cursed and cried out. Muthega hunkered and smoked, just watching her. She hated him then. The way he just sat there, emotionless. He didn’t care, Jane thought, and she wanted to smack him, to see him feel pain, to watch him cry. She felt the flicker of that angry ember she had forgotten was in her, and the rage spilled out like blood.
“Goddammit, Muthega! At least get off your ass to get the fucking measuring tape! There’s one in my bag—in the trunk. Sample collection jars, too. Jesus Christ!”
“Okay, Miss Jane, okay,” he said laconically.
Jane pulled her small digital camera out of the pocket in her shorts and pointed and clicked, pointed and clicked through her tears. First she photographed Twiga, what remained of him, for the foundation’s records. Then she pointed the lens at Muthega as he rummaged through the trunk of the car for the measuring tape. He’d placed it on Twiga’s hind leg, and then he’d sat down again. She would go to her boss in Nairobi. She would have Muthega fired for not even trying to trail the poachers, for avoiding the responsibility of helping her get the information they needed from the body. Jane snapped picture after picture of him hunkered there, in the dust, a calm look on his face and smoke circling his head.
He smiled up at her as she clicked and cried. He said in a voice so calm it made Jane want to kill him, “Anger will not bring Twiga back to life, Miss Jane.”
Then he stuffed the end of his cigarette into an anthill and stood up. “If you have finished with the work, we can go now.”
Jane watched the body as they drove away. The vultures and the storks slipped back through the sky and began their feast. There would be nothing left soon, Jane thought. “Take me home again, Muthega,” she said. “I need to deal with the samples.” She wanted to be alone now; she didn’t want to have to talk to Muthega or watch him sucking on his cigarettes. She didn’t want him to see her crying.
That night she climbed into her little wooden bed early. She wanted sleep to blot out the day. It was late when the smell of them woke her, the African smell of wood fire and meat, dust and sweat. She kept her body still but cracked one eye. Her front door was open and she could see the sky, a shade lighter than the dark of her room. She heard the low murmur of their voices through the dark. They’d come for the cameras, she thought. She kept them in a tin trunk locked with a padlock. Her heart choked her and panic took over. She wished she had Muthega’s gun.
In a single movement, Jane pulled herself from under her sheets and ran. She had no desire to fight or to defend the few things she kept in the house; even the cameras weren’t worth her life. She made for the open space beneath the sky. She thought the air might save her, or the land. The wall around her garden was tall and too smooth to climb. She turned and ran for the gate.
Jane was halfway across the bare yard before she was caught. Dry, calloused hands jerked her forearm and she fell. The voice attached to the hands grunted and spoke rapid-fire Swahili, and then she felt fingers around the back of her neck, pressing her face into the ground. She couldn’t understand the Swahili. It was too fast and her vocabulary too small. Jane thought there was a familiarity to one voice, though, a growl, a shudder of smoke in the throat.
It seemed like hours before they were gone. She heard them rumm
aging through her little house, going through her things. She heard the smashing of glass—the outdoor elephant cameras, she knew—on her concrete floor. But why had they broken them? The thought occurred to her that they’d be of no value to sell now. So, what did they want? There was nothing else to steal. Even her little digital camera, which would bring the men a couple of hundred dollars in the market, wasn’t in the house. It was in the truck. Jane kept it in the glove compartment so she’d have it if she ever needed it. Finally, they crossed the yard to leave. One voice spoke to Jane in halting English. “Next time we kill you, too.” Jane lay there for a long time. She was terrified that if she moved they would come back, or that if she looked up, she would see nothing but the flash of a blade slicing toward her.
The light came in the Kenyan way—quickly, like a shade pulled up. Jane finally sat up. Her whole body hurt. She wondered if she was bleeding. There was a puddle of her own saliva in the dirt where the men had pressed her face. Jane felt bits of dirt on her tongue.
Jane pulled herself up, knees cracking as she bent them straight. She focused only on her next step. She thought of nothing else. She was frozen and terrified that, if she stirred her mind in any direction, what had happened would crush her.
Luckily, there was space on the afternoon flight from Narok to Nairobi. When the plane landed, Jane took a taxi from the airport directly to the Elephant Foundation’s main office on Wayaki Way. She focused on reporting Muthega to the regional director, a large Kenyan man called Johnno, famous for his lifelong dedication to elephants and his harsh indictment of poachers.
Jane hated that she cried, again, when she told Johnno the story.
“Muthega and his friends, they were the ones,” Jane sobbed.
The Brightest Sun Page 7