Ivory Ghosts (5 page)

I opened the door of my baking-hot VW, rolled the window down, and jumped in.
“Damn it!”
The scalding vinyl seat seared the backs of my legs. I jumped up, grabbed an old shirt from behind the seat, and placed it under me. I sat back down, slammed the door, and started the engine.

I had said all the wrong things in that office and needed a conversation with Craig to clear the air. My next stop would be the cellphone shop to purchase a new phone.

The Beetle bubbled to a noisy start and bumped through the deep potholes and out onto the main dirt road, which looked to be in a perpetual state of construction. African music pulsed through boom boxes, while women washed laundry along the side of the dusty road. Others carried bundles of firewood on their heads. Oxen tended by small boys pulled sleds along the sandy track next to a small section of tarred road. It seemed that the modern world hadn't come knocking on this rural door just yet—except, of course, for the radios. And the abundance of litter—faded soda cans, rusted-out tins, old tire rubber, and an inordinate number of empty plastic bags. The beginnings of a cash economy blew about in the breeze.

I banged my hand on the steering wheel in frustration. Meeting Baggs was the wake-up call I'd needed. It was clear that he didn't want a nongovernmental organization such as WIA interfering in his elephant business. He had to be pretending that he didn't know how bad things were.

The center of Katima boomed and throbbed with African music, as if welcoming all of those paychecks that would be spent over the next two days. I found the cellphone store in a freshly built mall with a Pick 'n Pay and many storefronts with signs announcing that they were “coming soon.” The phone store was closed. It was three o'clock and stores were supposed to stay open until at least four. The sign on the door read “Closed for month's end. Stock taking.”

I couldn't spend the entire weekend without communication. I was going to have to find a working radio.

As I drove on, I saw a sign for a deli and was curious to see what they sold. It was tucked behind a second grocery store in the older part of town, the cancerous new sprawl budding out from the edges of the old center. The town was growing so quickly that there were no signs indicating which cluster of shops was which, or how to navigate the sandy track in order to find buildings that were behind buildings behind yet even more nondescript cement buildings.

I parked in front next to a short, portly Portuguese man scolding a boy in tattered clothes. He seemed oddly slow in manner, but he managed to grab the boy and duct-tape him to a pole outside the shop. He hung a sign on him with the word
THIEF
penned angrily in red.

The man sensed me behind him and turned around. His mood changed immediately from rage to intrigue. “Sorry, ma'am, just doing my part to keep the streets clean and the people honest.” He reached his hand out to me. “Alvares's the name.”

“Hello. Catherine Sohon.” I reluctantly shook the man's hand, trying not to seem flustered by the struggling youth in the background. “Is the deli in this building?”

“Right through here.” The man led me through the entrance. “Just opened up last week, in fact. The doc has everything flown in fresh from Italy.”

I thanked him and went off down an aisle, listening to him complain to the woman at the cash register about the robber he had just apprehended.

An inordinate amount of dust had already collected on the week-old shelves. I picked up a bag of tortellini and my mouth watered at the prospect until I saw that the bag was riddled with beetle larvae. I dropped the pasta and left the deli empty-handed.

Alvares called after me. “You should come around Hippo Lodge over the weekend. Nice lady's rump on special.” He smiled.

Remembering Baggs's recommendation, I turned around and smiled. “What qualifies it as a ‘lady's' rump?”

“Eight ounces instead of twelve. Excellent quality here in the Caprivi.”

“Thanks, I just might stop by,” I said, knowing that would be the last thing I'd want to do over the weekend. But given my one opportunity to call Craig, I knew I'd make an appearance there eventually—maybe after my reconnaissance flight first thing in the morning, since there wasn't anything urgent I could report from the crime scene, other than what Gidean had told me about the witch doctor's potential involvement. That and the fact that I may have some samples for genetic analysis, pending Baggs's approval.

Outside, across the small sandy mall parking lot, was a giant, almost empty warehouse called the Dollar Store. As I entered I was greeted by what looked like several generations of a Chinese family. They were busily stacking shelves with merchandise of all kinds.

Plastic trinkets of dubious quality lined the vast shelving. Craig had told me that Chinese merchants were sprouting up successful businesses everywhere you turned in Africa and asked me to keep an eye on the Dollar Store shop owner. Although clearly profiling, Craig told me that the Namibian Major Crimes Directorate, or what he called the MCD, were suspicious of all Chinese shop owners and exporters, but they didn't have any evidence of ivory smuggling to act on yet.

After poking around the rather uninteresting aisles, I decided I wasn't likely to stumble upon anything of note at that moment. I needed to get to the hardware store for a bag of nails so I could hang things in my barracks. Nothing fancy like expanding screws or hooks, given the condition of the walls. Nails would be enough to hang my mugs to deter the cockroaches and keep my wet towel off the floor.

As I prepared to leave, I couldn't help noticing Alvares standing at the back of the store talking to a Chinese man next to a door marked “Manager's Office.” My eye was drawn to the heated exchange. The Chinese man was shaking a finger at Alvares. They both appeared very angry, but the Chinese man seemed to have the upper hand.

I casually sauntered down one of the side aisles, slowly approaching the office in the hope of catching the gist of their conversation. But just as I got close enough to hear, the two were interrupted by a worker. They went inside the office and closed the door. I ended up buying a straw hat and quickly leaving, heading to the hardware store.

At the hardware store, a cheery salesman reported that nails had been on back order for over a month. He suggested checking back in two weeks, when the next delivery truck was scheduled to arrive from Johannesburg. I made do with some screw hooks, hoping the rotting vinyl-covered pressboard would tolerate the three turns on the hooks. If so, they would be better than nails anyway.

When I left the building, I passed a lumberyard where a bustling assembly line was hard at work. The banging and clapping of nails into pine filled the air. I looked closer and got a chill when I realized that the assembly line was making coffins—many, many simple pine coffins of all sizes. Hence the run on nails. I couldn't help wondering why so many coffins would be made all at once like this. Surely only one or a few coffins would be needed at any one time.

I checked my watch as I got back into my car. It was still early enough to stop by the airport on the way back to the ranger station. I wanted to check out the WIA airplane that was supposed to have arrived that morning. I had flown plenty of Cessna 182s but I wanted to see what condition it was in. And I was eager to see the area from the air the following day. I didn't like to fly a census without doing a reconnaissance first.

After an uneventful night and morning, I went to Mpacha airstrip and did a preflight inspection on the WIA Cessna. I walked around the plane, checking the tires, wings, struts, prop, and fuselage. I was pleasantly surprised that it was in pretty decent shape.

I pulled a stack of documents from a clear pouch that was attached to the cockpit wall. I scanned the airworthiness certificate, the radio station license, and made sure the registration certificate was current. There was a pink temporary registration, good for ninety days as of the previous week. Given the meager budget, I was surprised to see that Craig had just purchased this aircraft from a private tour operator based out of Maun.

I reviewed the operating limitations in the pilot operating handbook, as well as the document showing the current weight and balance settings of the aircraft. In a small aircraft, these settings were especially important, particularly in the wildlife business. I learned this when I had to carry the tusks from Shingwedzi, a big tusker that was one of my study subjects in Kruger. I hadn't seen him in some time and assumed he had passed away, as he had been getting thinner and thinner. We ended up flying over his carcass during a census. We were able to land in an open area nearby to collect his tusks.

He appeared to have died of natural causes, and based on the fact that he was on his sixth molar, I estimated him to have been about sixty-five. His tusks added what we estimated to be an additional two hundred pounds of weight to the aircraft, more at the back than front, and I had to recalculate the weight settings in order to take off and land safely.

I sat in the pilot seat and checked all the switches in the cockpit to make sure they were in the right position and switched the battery on to check the fuel gauge. Outside, under the wing, I used a small clear syringe to draw a little fuel from the wing-mounted tank and check the fuel quality. Once I was confident that everything was in order, I bounced down the runway and took off on my reconnaissance mission at one o'clock, a little later than I had expected, but I spent the time I needed to in order to get comfortable with this new set of wings.

Flying over clusters of reed-and-thatch villages surrounded by crops nestled within large tracts of forest, I realized just how few people lived in the region next to the park; most of the dwellings stood alongside the road and along the river with very little in between. From this height, I could also see the narrow swath of cleared vegetation that functioned as an international border ahead to my right—the cutline for Zambia.

I descended and banked left when I reached the shimmering river. The Kwando looked as though it wound on forever, flowing from Angola in the north down to the infinity of the delta in Botswana. Under the hot, cloudless sky, I followed the snaking river south for a bit, passing an oxbow lake with a herd of buffalos drinking along the sandy shoreline.

I descended farther and banked north as a large hippo lunged out of the water at me, displaying his formidable canines. After passing over more floodplain and open woodland, I came to a dense grove of acacia shading groups of elephants dozing in the heat of the day. There were so many elephants, I was counting in batches of twenties and fifties and got up to several hundred before the forest opened up and I was out over the floodplain again.

The ramshackle military buildings at the ranger station to the left of the river looked a lot better from the air than they did on the ground. It had only been two nights and Susuwe was already wearing on me. I needed to be patient, but the horror of my introduction and the unsettling treatment by the local staff was a hard welcome. Gidean was the only warmth the place had to offer.

As I headed farther north, I noticed a haze in the air and a few flecks of ash. Even though the wet season hadn't technically ended, patches of fire weren't unusual; the sporadic rains left spotty dry areas. Fire made sense, considering how dry parts of Botswana had been as I drove through.

The brown contrasted against the green vegetation where the rain had fallen and reminded me of a comment one of the policemen had made as I passed through the border patrol to the East Caprivi that morning. When I asked how his crop was doing this year, he shook his head and said that his neighbor had been witching him. That was the only way he could explain the fact that his neighbor's field got plenty of rain and was doing well, while his was dry as an old elephant bone.

After a short while, I could see the cutline of Angola to the north and banked left to keep within the Namibian border. I hadn't seen elephants in some time. In the distance, a major forest fire raged on the Angolan side and had crossed into Namibia. Maybe the elephants had moved south to avoid the fire.

The only trees standing in this scorched landscape were the giant leadwoods—silvery gray trunks topped with dry orange leaves. Not all of the fire was new; there were a few areas with verdant patches of green grass that had sprouted up among the char. A small elephant family ran through the grass kicking up soot with their feet. Their skin was charred gray with papery wrinkles, their bleach-white ivory offsetting their ashen coats.

The smoke moving out from the origin of the fire was too far north for me to see how it might have started. I pulled up on the yoke to gain elevation and banked back to the right to get a closer look. The cockpit was getting hotter.

A sudden explosion below me rocked the plane with a wall of turbulence. A dead tree had spontaneously combusted from the heat of the fire. The flames transformed into voracious orange tongues, hungrily consuming the charred wood. I clutched the yoke, steering away from a series of white ash dust devils filled with orange leaves as they churned across the black smoldering earth.

I quickly gained elevation as a few more trees exploded. With the wind blowing south, smoke was billowing right toward me, making it impossible to see to the north. Not having permission to fly over the international border meant I had to be careful to stay south of the cutline.

I banked farther right and leveled off, pushing the throttle in to speed up, keeping south as something red caught my eye just over the border. The wind suddenly changed directions, expanding my view and allowing me to see a scattering of what looked like huge mounds of flesh bleeding out into the sand. They were butchered elephant carcasses—fifteen or more.

Large slabs of raw meat smoking on top of wooden racks. Judging from the range of sizes of the carcasses, it had to have been a family group.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The audacity of it all—poaching a whole group in broad daylight. And cooking the meat out in the open? How could they get away with this?

I aligned myself perpendicular to the cutline and pulled way back on the throttle, making the nose of the airplane very heavy as I tried to get a final look. Craning my neck to the right, I saw a few people clutching tusks and running toward a Cessna 182 sitting on a freshly slashed airstrip. Just at the end of my line of vision I thought I saw a symbol on the airplane—a red shape, like the Red Cross symbol.

As much as I wanted to circle around to get a better look, it would have given me away. I had to keep on my current course—to fly on, as if I hadn't seen anything unusual.

I couldn't hold back the fury as I turned away from the billowing smoke so as not to be seen. Fighting to stay level, I tried to calm down as the world closed in on me.

The ground wasn't moving fast enough beneath me. Imagining the cries from elephants being gunned down, I screamed at the top of my lungs as I pushed the yoke in. “Goddammit!” All I could think about was landing and getting myself to Hippo Lodge to call Craig on the radio. I headed southwest, then south over Malombe Pan and east, back to Mpacha airstrip.

Even though the radio wouldn't be a secure line, I couldn't wait any longer to reach Craig. I had to report this as soon as possible, and there was no one else I could tell. Craig's voice echoed through my head: “Do not speak to anyone until we get a handle on the players in the region.” He was concerned about how much more ivory might be passing through the area than previously thought. But barbecuing the meat out in the open—and with a Red Cross plane? I didn't think he had any idea that the players would be that brazen. No one was patrolling the Angolan side of the border, and the poachers knew it.

I arched my back and pressed at the base of my spine, willing the rest of the flight away. As I neared the airstrip and prepared to land, I wondered who I could talk to about Red Cross activities in the region. There had to be logbooks of their missions, and of whose plane was where at any one time. It seemed extremely unlikely that someone interested in providing medical aid would have any connection to slaughtering elephants. Whoever owned that airplane may or may not be aware of what their pilot was up to. Either that or the plane had been stolen.