The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

Author:Ray Nayler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

* * *

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.