ONE
DAMIRA FOLLOWED THE blood down the hill. The ground here was soft with upwelling water. Rivulets reflected the sun through blades of grass. Her feet sank a few centimeters into the upper layer of soil before meeting the spongy mat of root web.
She could not see much blood, but the pathway of blood-scent was clear. Touching her trunk to the Jacobson’s organ in the roof of her mouth conjured the mammoth she called Koyon—his shy, lumbering form, his tattered right ear, his mournful, hairy head.
Koyon’s eyes were amber, not the dark earthen color of most of the others. Beautiful eyes, long lashed and soulful. Damira remembered when the herd drove him off two summers ago. For weeks, he had trailed them at a distance, trumpeting desperately when any of them turned to look at him, winding his trunk through the scent-path of mother and kin. She had not seen when he finally turned and went away. She had tried not to look in his direction too much: it only prolonged the agony of the driving off, of the necessary separation of the males from the herd that was a part of their adolescence. Some wandered off themselves, some had to be charged, butted, shoved away by the matriarchs into their solitary adult lives.
The next summer season she saw him with Yekenat, the oldest and largest of the bulls. Yekenat was massively tusked, tall and thick through the chest, tawny pelted. Koyon trailed the larger male at a respectful distance, watching his mentor tear grass from the steppe. When the matriarchs and his shaggy cousins passed, he swung his trunk to trace their scent on the wind.
But he did not approach. He, like the others, had come to understand the proper order of things.
Damira heard the flies. The sound was weaker than it had been on the banks of the Ewaso Ng’iro …
* * *
DAMIRA HEARD THE sound of the flies and smelled the stench of death in the air. She hesitated at the base of the hill, shifted her rifle from one shoulder to the other. Wamugunda halted beside her. They had seen the vultures in the sky. They knew what was over the red earth hill. Neither of them wanted to see it for themselves. But the sound was almost worse than the sight: the enormous buzz of death. The hum of destruction. A hot exhalation of rot hit them. Wamugunda gagged. He spat in the red dirt, unashamed.
Damira did not gag. She would not let herself. If she did, she would vomit.
She pushed forward, over the crest of the hill.
There were eight of them here. There were six adults, all females. There was an adolescent bull that must have been only a season or two away from being pushed out of the herd. And there was a calf, no more than a few days old.
The flies swarmed the mutilated faces of the matriarchs and the adolescent bull. Their trunks were hacked away, their tusks gouged out, their feet chopped off.
Musa was already there. He stood with the farmer who had found them, both of them smoking. To ward off the stench. And to give them something to do while they waited, besides staring at the slaughter.
“Shot from the air,” Musa said. “Probably an ex-military drone—a flying machine gun, radar cloaked and silenced. They came in later on ATVs to harvest the tusks. It’s one of the big operations. Well-funded. They set a booby trap, by the way, for us. An IED—tripwire in the brush there next to the adolescent bull. Mortar round. So, they send us their regards. There may be more IEDs around. I checked best I could, but be careful.” Damira stood at the edge of the destruction, looking down at the last of the victims.
The pink calf lay, untouched by poachers, as if she had fallen asleep. Her rosy ears were still translucent. She had stayed with the buzzing ruins of her mother and her clan, and lay down to die just a few days after coming into the world.
The individual elephants slaughtered were lost in the numbers—the elephants butchered by the thousands, cut down by ivory hunters until there were almost none left in the wild. Seeing the individual acts of butchery was a reminder that every killing of an elephant was, like the elephant itself, enormous. A towering act of human cruelty.
But the numbers were not what Damira thought of when she later remembered those years of struggle along the Ewaso Ng’iro. And the mutilated adults and adolescents were not what she thought of, either. What stayed with her most was the baby, pink and newly born, that had remained with its mother until the end.
The elephant calf became a symbol for her of the entire lost war against the poachers, and against the system that supported them. Whenever she needed a reason to continue, the calf was there, behind the lids of her eyes.
And she did not give up. None of them gave up. Not her, and none of the rangers who fought the poachers.
Musa looked up into a sky already turning white-blue with the heat of late morning.
“Our day will come, and the corpses of the poachers who did this will be scattered by the banks of the Ewaso Ng’iro, covered in flies.”
“Yes,” Wamugunda said, “our day will come.”
“Our day will come,” Damira said. But when she spoke the words, her voice was too faint to be heard over the buzzing swarm.
In less than a year, Musa would be dead, killed by a sniper at base camp along with three other rangers.
Two years later, Wamugunda would be killed at the wheel of his Range Rover, by an artillery shell IED placed along one of the national park’s dirt roads.
And Damira was murdered a year after that.
* * *
THE TRAIL OF blood wound around the base of a kurgan and into a slight depression fanned by rivulets of glacial meltwater. Yekenat and Koyon lay side by side, no more than fifteen meters apart. The flies swirled up and then settled again on what had been the heads of the two mammoths. Only their tusks had been taken, but the cutting away had been done in haste, their skulls hacked open to get every inch of ivory. There was nothing left of Koyon’s mournful face, or Yekenat’s powerful head, the tusks growing thicker at the base as he, one of the first mammoths to be reborn, entered into his middle years.
There were boot-prints in the soft earth. No tire tracks, but strange hoof-like imprints where the grass was thin. And, of course, the brass of the shells, littering the steppe. It was all recent: this had happened today. The corpses had barely begun to rot.
When Damira returned to her clan they sniffed at her, drawing their trunks over the smell of death that saturated her pelt, walking in slow circles as they touched the death-smell to the tops of their mouths. The calves moved closer to their mothers, nuzzling their sides and grasping with their trunks at their parents’ hairy pelts.
Kara, Koyon’s mother, stood and swayed, her eyes closed. The others stroked their trunks along her sides and comforted her with low rumbles.
But Damira felt no sadness. None at all. There was no room for it in her. All she could think of was Musa looking up into the sky.
“Our day will come, and the corpses of the poachers who did this will be scattered by the banks of the Ewaso Ng’iro, covered in flies.”
Damira’s furious trumpeting startled the others out of their mourning. But soon, they all had caught the feeling, pacing and flapping their ears, mock-charging as if the poachers were there around them.
TWO
“ONCE, WHEN MY Nenets mother was a small child, her family was moving their reindeer herd from one pasture to another. As they were fording a river, my grandfather saw something strange in the mud on the bank. Like a mass of hair, with great horns curving out from it. He took a closer look, and then forbade anyone in the family to go near it. But they all slowed their reindeer and stared as they went past. My mother told me how its teeth showed on one side of its hairy skull in a terrible grin, and the great horns came not out of the top of its head, but out of the front of its face.
“It was a mammoth, exposed by a spring thaw and floodwater cutting into the banks of the river. Later that night, after they had set up camp, my grandmother asked my grandfather why they were not allowed to touch it or even approach it. He told her it was a servant of Nga, master of the frozen underworld. It had tried to escape through a hole into the middle world, the world where we live, and had become trapped between. To touch it, or even to go near it, was bad luck—it would put a curse on the family. Many Nenets who had disturbed the creatures from the underworld ice died from disease or went mad, he said. Whole villages could be destroyed.”
“Did she say how big its tusks were?” Dmitriy asked. “I bet someone made a fortune off that ‘monster’—and if they went mad, it was in a Moscow banya surrounded by blondes.”
The mechanic who had been speaking, a man named Myusena, just shook his head and returned to his bowl of rice and fish.
Dmitriy nudged Svyatoslav. “We touched plenty of monsters from the underworld last year, without any madness. Right, son?”
Svyatoslav thought of the expedition he had taken with his father last year, hunting for mammoth tusks in the thawing permafrost along a muddy, freezing river. He thought of the wounds torn in the earth by the miners’ hoses, the men in rubber hip-waders crawling into the gaping holes, chipping fragments of bone, teeth, and skulls from the ice.
They had found no tusks, but at one point the melting ice ceiling of a hole collapsed. One of the men was buried forever in that filth. Afterward, the others realized they only knew his first name. Nobody could even remember where he’d said he was from. There was nobody to tell about his death.
The whole expedition had been a blur of drunkenness and chaos. On the way back downriver, one of the boats foundered and sank. The “team,” bickering and fighting the whole way, had to cram into the other boat and labor home, dangerously taking on water while the men passed a bottle around.
All they had to show for the trip was one complete steppe bison skull, which they cleaned and mounted on the front of the boat.
Later, while the men were drunk in some nowhere town and Svyatoslav was huddled in the hotel room with a pillow over his head to keep out the sounds of the things happening in the hallway and in the adjacent rooms, someone stole the skull. That left them with nothing to show for the trip at all.
“I think your grandfather was right,” Svyatoslav said to Myusena. “The creatures of the underworld are cursed, and terrible things happen to people who disturb them.”
Myusena looked up at him. Svyatoslav could not tell if it was a look of gratitude or suspicion or contempt: the six men in the tent were all drunk. Their slack faces in the colorless LED light of the tent’s lantern were unreadable.
Only Svyatoslav was sober. He never drank. This made him suspicious to everyone, almost feared. But the one thing his father did not press on him was alcohol. Throughout all of it, he’d never tried to pour Svyatoslav a glass.
“Here’s a toast, then, to curses!” Dmitriy said.
Svyatoslav did not hear the rest. Wrapping his plastidown blanket around his shoulders, he left the tent.
The drone mules were about thirty meters away. They stood with their stumpy heads lowered, completely motionless. Svyatoslav could never get used to the drone mules: every time he approached them, he expected them to shift their weight or twitch a tail, like real mules. But they looked nothing like real mules. And when activated, their movements were more spider-like than mule-like.
Svyatoslav retrieved his drone kit from one of the saddlebags. He found himself making a wide circle around the last mule, with its strapped-down load of four long, curving tusks, still spattered and smeared with blood.
The mules were Myusena’s—they were the only reason he was on this expedition. When Dmitriy and his hunting buddies were planning the trip, they had first thought of using ATVs, as they usually did. But ATVs were loud, and could be easily tracked. So they had found Myusena, the muleteer and mechanic, and convinced him to come along. The group had left their ATVs beyond the boundaries of the reserve, hidden in a copse of larch, under branches and needles, along with their terminals, shut off and cloaked in a Faraday bag.
The mules were nearly silent, no louder than real mules on the trail.
But silence was in short supply. Listening to the drunken laughter of the men in the tent, Svyatoslav wondered how far that sound carried. The reserve was huge, and remote, and nobody had ever poached in it before that they knew of, but Svyatoslav looked up into the sky and expected to hear, from out of the starred dark, the buzz of a patrol drone. Nothing as valuable as the mammoths could be left unguarded. There would be camera traps—and worse.
But not yet. And maybe they would escape. Maybe they would get out. It was three days’ march to the edge of the reserve. To the ATVs. Then two more days, if the weather held, to where the battered old UAZ van waited beside an abandoned hunter’s cabin. Load the tusks in, sell them to a contact—the sum it was rumored they could get for them was unbelievable. The market was hot. The tusks of a mammoth brought back from extinction had never been sold before. But already, there were buyers waiting.
The prices were fantasy numbers. Enough for all of them to retire on, if it worked out. Enough to build a life on. In Moscow, sure—but even farther off, in places wreathed in fantasy. London. New York. Theoretical cities no one ever returned from. Places that might have been other planets.
It did not seem possible, to live through all of this. To actually get out of here. To leave this life behind. The stench of poachers’ tents, the smeared faces of drunken men, the crushed limbs and drownings and accidental gunshot wounds.
Svyatoslav was sixteen, and he had known nothing else for years now. Before his mother died, there had been none of this. There had only been the grim apartment blocks of the city—the dim stairwells full of chipped paint and trash, the flowers of frost blooming on the window of his bedroom, the rusty playground. And then his mother in the hospital, thin as if she were withdrawing into her own skeleton—thin as if her bones were breathing in her flesh and consuming it.
Up to that moment, his father had been a rare thing in their home—sweeping in loud and chaotic, accompanied by other men, by the corpses of animals. Scheming and oiling his rifle. Not a parent—a myth. An anticipation, an encounter, a departure.
He was thirteen when his mother died. After she went into the hole hacked in the frozen ground, he hunted with his father. He had nowhere else to go.
They said his father was the best hunter for a thousand kilometers, but all Svyatoslav saw was chaos, filth, destruction. Hunting didn’t seem like a skill: you armed yourself, you went out into the woods, and you waited. And then you killed something that did not have any of the tools you had.
The waiting was simple enough—wind direction, blinds, concealment. You could learn it in a season. The real advantage was the gun, and knowing how to use a gun was also nothing to be proud of. Any idiot could use one. Most of the people who used them were idiots. Svyatoslav had always known how to use one. During his father’s rare appearances in his early childhood, there had always been time to learn, pegging cans with the little gun his father had also learned on. Shooting was just muscle action, as easy as walking.
What was harder, for the hunters, was to stay sober. To stay alert and together, against the backdrop of endless taiga, the swarming mosquitoes and the swamps sucking at your boots, the slaughter of creatures for profit. To go to sleep at night, not stay up drinking and then stagger through the expedition in a destructive haze. It was because of the drinking that the expeditions ended in disaster, injury, death.
It seemed at first like they drank out of boredom—but really it was out of disgust. They drank to throw a curtain of intoxication over the filth, the stench of themselves, the violence of their actions, the futility of it all.
And it was futile. They were often robbed by gangsters—who were nothing but other desperate men. But even that wasn’t always necessary: they found other ways to lose it all. They invested what they gained in fraudulent schemes, blew it all gambling, dropped it out of a pocket on a bender, gave it to a lover who skipped town.
None of the poachers creeping through the taiga or the mammoth tusk hunters blasting gouges into the permafrost with hoses ever got rich: all of them went into the earth early, one way or another. All of them went into the earth with nothing to show for it.
Into the frozen underworld with Nga, perhaps. That explanation was as good as any.
Svyatoslav slipped the headset on and released the drone, a thing the size of a bumblebee, and no heavier, watching from its perspective as it spiraled into the air, looking back at the monochrome green thermal image of himself looking up at the drone. The mules barely registered, just thin bleeds of heat around their joints like spots against the darker earth, little hotter than the grass—but he could make out the grass, subtly warmer than the earth around it, and a thermal spring near the camp that they had not known about, heat-green veins along the ground.
Somewhere out there in the dark, in the green of this false sight, were the two mammoths they had killed. Svyatoslav wanted to see them, their bulk barely visible against the grass they had fallen onto. Their heat fading. They would be peaceful, seen from the drone’s perspective. They would be part, already, of the land around them.
And maybe that final sight of them, at peace now, would erase the memories of the kill in his head: the terrible trumpeting of the mammoths rearing in pain; the fear in the eyes of the smaller one as bullet after bullet thudded into him and he charged clumsily, uncertainly, in one direction and then another until finally he sank to his knees.
The older, larger one had caught sight of the hunter Sergei and charged him, and for a moment Svyatoslav had thought that was it for Sergei, who tripped and fell. Sergei scrambled to his feet and then tripped again, like someone running from a monster in a movie.
Copyright © 2023 by Ray Nayler
