Hieroglyph (69 page)

Thinking was hard. This was nothing like the simulated attack from training, which had been a man with a gun and a jeep she had been able to see coming. She tried to ignore the chaos for a moment, to let her brain breathe and review.

Poachers would know their trap had sprung.

The elephants were in mortal danger. She had been taught they would want to stay with the injured.

One of the babies approached the elephant on the ground, touched her with its trunk. Probably
her
baby. It made Francine want to cry or scream or both.

She sent her drone up high, spotted the dust blossoms of at least three vehicles.

The mahout struggled atop the matriarch, holding on to an ear with one hand and twisting to stay in the saddle as the elephant screamed a complexity of emotions.

Francine took the drone as close as she dared, using the smallest of movements so as not to startle anything or anyone. It took three tries before she got close enough to whisper, “Wasps,” into the girl's right ear.

The girl turned and nodded, dark eyes wide. Francine flew higher and watched the rider touch a button on her belt. A swarm of autonomous drones the size of fingernails spread out behind the girl. The drones created sounds too low for humans to hear and harried the elephant.

Her rider hunkered down.

The matriarch trumpeted, stamped her feet, swayed, and stamped again.

Francine fretted.

The elephant began to lope. When the others—even the calves—caught up, she sped up.

Francine remembered her training and began to rotate the drone in all directions, watching the plumes of dust resolve into dusty jeeps. She recorded who came, and watched, still and horrified, as five men in shimmering active camouflage severed the elephant's wide trunk near her eyes and used carbon saws and chains to force the long, curved tusks free of the flesh.

She witnessed the moment the life left the elephant's eyes and was skewered by it.

Three more plumes of smoke appeared. A fourth. Angels, the drone indicated. They would already have her recordings.

She could go.

Francine hovered for a moment, torn. She wanted to know what happened next, but every delay opened more distance between her and her herd. Still, she hesitated. Would the poachers get away? Would there be a fight?

The world exploded.

A lens of one camera remained intact and fed her glasses, tumbling fast through blue on blue sky to green grass and resting near the bloody gray body. Francine had barely registered the new point of view, barely comprehended that she had been shot from the sky, when the last of whatever powered the camera flashed away.

Araceli lifted the glasses from Francine's head and turned them off.

Francine blinked away the silent dark of the drone's death and stared at her granddaughter. Tears fell down her cheeks. Araceli had seen what she saw. Francine's hand shook as she extended it and took her granddaughter's more slender hand in hers. “I lost my herd.”

Araceli nodded. “Fucking poachers,” she said.

“Don't use that word with me.”

“Even now?” Araceli grimaced and wiped Francine's cheeks dry. “Let's get you some food.”

Francine had been immersed in late afternoon, in summer. It shocked her to return to a winter morning. She shivered and pulled her blanket closer. She had failed her herd, failed in her new job.

Lost a drone.

Francine's body demanded attention, shaking softly with sorrow and postadrenaline crash.

Her granddaughter brought her oatmeal and half a slice of toast. The warmth infused Francine so she felt strong enough to ask, “What happens now?”

Araceli glanced at the lights on the body monitor Francine wore on her wrist. She was more adept at reading them instantly than Francine, and she said, “You rest. I'll stay with you today. You have another shift tomorrow.”

“I need to know about the poachers. Did they catch them? What about the little mahout?”

Araceli nodded. “I'll find out while you rest.”

“I want to know now.”

Araceli obliged her by looking through the Elephant Angels webmesh until she found information. “The other elephants are safe. There is a fresh observation drone flying in now. They caught one poacher but not the others. There's a watch for the ivory through all local ports.”

MAKENA TURNED ONTO HER
belly and slithered down behind Delba's ear, clutching the neck rope until she could push off and scissor out away from her charge's huge side. She landed lightly on the calloused balls of her feet and regarded the herd. Delba seemed undecided. The matriarch stared back the way they had come. If a look could undo the past, hers would. Then she turned toward the calves, let out a long, low rumble, and trundled into the watering hole Makena had led them to. The other two adults waited for the calves and then followed.

Makena turned into the grasslands to find a place to pee while there was no drone to record it. There would still be watchers via satellite, but she would be small to them. She had insisted on seeing what the Elephant Angel watchers saw after she took the job and passed her six months' probation. Mostly they saw things in big pictures, on maps with moving dots that identified various individual animals. They saw weather and monitored the location of safari tourists from a distance. The drone was the only constant nag on her own privacy. She hated it even though it had saved her and the elephants at least three times.

A new person flew the drone today. She had been told that at the start of her shift. The pilot hadn't been clever enough to give a warning, although she
had
reminded Makena to loose the wasps.

She shouldn't have panicked. She stepped over the bones of a rhinoceros, long since picked clean, and looked back at the herd. The adults' trunks roamed the calves' sides.

Makena did not remember explosives ever being buried so close to trees. The area had looked normal and smelled good to Flower, which didn't seem right. Elephants could smell storms a day ahead.

The poachers had been clever.

She returned to the water and washed her body and her face carefully and slowly in the watering hole. The water barely felt cleansing.

Luis's voice in her ear. “Makena?”

“Catch them.”

“I will. Are you okay?”

“After you catch these people, I will be fine,” she told him.

“I'm sorry this happened.”

“Stop talking to me and catch the poachers.”

He broke off. Good. She didn't want to talk to anybody, not even handsome Angels from foreign lands. Not even sexy Angels, maybe especially not those.

Usually the watering hole was a happy place where the herd played and relaxed. Not this afternoon. They had run far, and their movements were as slow and unhappy as Makena's own.

They mourned.

Flower was dead. Makena had hated the name, bestowed by some fat American a decade ago. Donors bid big money to name African elephants, and in her few bitter moments, Makena supposed she was lucky none of them had paid to name
her
.

She had not hated Flower herself. Only her name. Flower had been strong and willing, and good at looking out for the babies.

Makena walked out into the water and stroked Bee's back. Flower's small son had nearly stopped nursing. He might live even after losing his dam. If he didn't die of a broken heart. She slopped water over his leathery skin and found herself crying. She had not cried since her mother died of AIDS a year ago, and the tears surprised her and then overtook her, so that she leaned on Bee with half of her weight and spilled her tears over his back.

He curled his trunk and touched her shoulder softly with the tip.

Before they came out of the water, Makena climbed back onto Delba's back and shimmied to her spot on the elephant's neck, her legs spread wide behind Delba's huge ears. She signaled the matriarch forward. Delba led the little band out of water and toward the closest stand of acacias.

Cicadas hummed and birds called back and forth to each other in the not-yet-cooling afternoon.

Makena used her wrist-phone to call Saad. “Be careful,” she told him. “The elephants are restless and there is one less. Flower was killed.” She told him the rest of it, and he asked her if she had a video and she told him no, even though she was sure she could find one if he wanted it. She did not want to see it again. “You are bloodthirsty,” she said.

“No,” he said. “But I am sorry.”

Mollified, she settled into worrying about whether or not it would be safe for him to come.

The slanted early-evening sun had started to edge the savanna's grasses and trees with gold. Flower would not see another sunset, and so Makena found it hard to drink in the normal peace of this last moment before the evening hunting started.

The sun hung just barely above the horizon when Makena's little brother sent her a message. “I am near.”

She chewed her lower lip, watching the way the elephants walked and held their ears and trunks and how close they were to one another. She had no wasps left, but Delba was under as much control as the matriarch ever granted her. Generally, Delba did Makena's bidding, but she never gave up veto power. She seemed docile enough now. “Okay,” she said. “Come out.”

Saad stood where the herd could see him and where the wind would bring his scent to them.

Makena stopped Delba and waited until she was sure the elephant saw her little brother, now only a head shorter than her, but still clothed in the slenderness of boyhood. She helped him climb up onto Delba's back and seat himself right behind her. He handed her a bag of antelope jerky. “Poaching?” she asked him.

“Harry Paulson is.”

She grunted but took the meat, which was tough and salty and tasted like heaven.

“I am an Angel,” he teased her.

“Not yet.”

“I will be.”

“Maybe.” Saad had been accepted as a courier for the Angels, allowed to bring Makena parts or supplies from time to time. He wasn't supposed to ride, or even touch, the elephants, but they took advantage of any times the drone wasn't around. “If you are taking jerky from poachers, how do I know you won't succumb to bribes for ivory?”

“I will not.”

“You should stop talking to any poachers about anything.”

“You are eating the jerky.”

She wished she hadn't taken it, but it tasted fabulous.

“I will ride elephants when you go to the city.”

“Maybe.”

He stuck his lower lip out and she laughed softly at him. “I love you, little brother. When I have earned enough to go to Pretoria, I will tell them you should take my place. But that will not be until you are older. I'll have to wait.”

“You can do that for me. Then you can be my Angel, too.”

“I am already your Angel,” she said.

“Truth, that.”

Much later, Makena and her grandfather sat on their wooden verandah. The dusky time of hunting animals had passed, and the evening quiet had settled around their small house. Her grandfather had raised her and had taught her of elephants and zebras and lions and hyenas and white rhinoceros. He had been a ranger at Dzanga-Ndoki before he retired, and she hoped he would understand more than Saad had. “They took an elephant from me today,” she told him. “I have never lost one.”

The faint and flickering light of a low lantern illuminated deep wrinkles around his dark eyes. “Tell me.”

She did.

“You are lucky
Delba
did not step on the IED. You might have lost the most important elephant.”

His way of saying she could have been hurt herself. “I failed. It's unthinkable to lose even one.”

“I lost a whole herd once. We let a monster storm drive us all inside, and the poachers were not so afraid of floods as we were. Rain and wind kept us inside for a day and a half. The tractor flooded and wouldn't start. We had to patrol on foot the next day. I found seven dead elephants. Two of their babies died over the next two weeks. We were only able to save the oldest.” He sighed and stared off into space for a moment, as if he could still see the dead elephants. “All that because we did not want to be wet.”

She spoke softly. “How were they killed?”

“Elephant guns. In my day we fought poachers with guns, not eyes and websites and satellites. They don't even give you a gun.”

“I know.” He had encouraged her to take his, but she had told him no. She would be fired if she were caught with a personal weapon.

He sipped his nightcap, a mix of tea and brandy that smelled so sour it made Makena's stomach light. “There are twice as many elephants now. Maybe more.” He smiled at her. “There is more land for them, and more of them. There is progress.”

“I know.” She drank her water. “I still feel sad.”

“Look up,” he told her.

“Why?” But she did, and drank in the deepness of stars overhead, like a carpet of pinpricks in the nearly moonless night.

“My grandmother lived in the first bush, the wild bush. She told me that when an elephant dies, a star falls. Perhaps if we watch, we will see Flower's star.”

Makena wrapped her arms around her knees and kept staring upward. The sky looked close enough to touch even through the mosquito nets. “What would your grandmother say if she knew the wildest elephants were ridden every day?”

“As long as she knew you were doing it she would be pleased.”

“You're lying,” Makena said.

He stood up and kissed her forehead with his cool, thin lips. “She would be proud that you are caring for the family. Are you coming to bed?”

“Not until I see Flower's star.”

SAAD SMELLED OF ELEPHANTS.
He lay on his bed and watched a Chinese professor with passable English stalk the stage, back and forth, using expressive hands to illustrate the economy of the commons. The class itself was
in
the commons and he could pay a little bit and take a test if he wanted the credit. An Oxford class. He expected to get an A even though he was only thirteen and living in resettled Africa. The commons was easier for him to understand than international trade or the physics of space elevators.