The Brightest Sun

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 blue 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 rummaging 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.

She described the smell of the bodies, the rough hands and the familiar phlegmy voice. She showed them the photos on the tiny screen of her camera. There was Muthega, how guilty he was! Just sitting there.

“It had to have been him,” Jane said. “He obviously doesn’t care about the elephants and he is in league with the poachers. He wanted the cameras destroyed.”

Johnno answered, “We cannot have criminals working for us like that. Sorry, so sorry we had to learn this way.”

Jane thought she would feel stronger when she reported Muthega, when she set in motion the wheels that would punish him for what he did to her, to the elephants. Johnno told Jane it had happened before—poachers bribing protectors to look the other way. Ivory was a lucrative trade, and it paid to hand out bribes for easier access to the animals.

“But Muthega,” he said, “Muthega surprises me. He’s been an excellent, trustworthy employee for years. We’ve only recently given him a substantial raise. This drought, though... Everyone is desperate. People’s children are dying.”

He shook his head, disappointed, as betrayed as Jane was.

Later that afternoon Johnno drove Jane to the US Embassy to file a report. The marine who inspected her passport looked like a boy from home. The carpeted hallways, the smiling portraits of the president and the familiar accents Jane heard around her made her dizzy with longing—how she wanted to go home.

It was a man about her age who helped her fill out the paperwork to lodge a criminal complaint. He was tall with dark hair, and when she told him what happened, his brow furrowed and he winced. Jane thought she heard him curse under his breath. When the paper was filled out, he pulled a business card from inside his desk and reached over to hand it to Jane. Under the seal of the United States was his name in gold letters—Paul O’Reilly.

“I don’t know if you were planning to go back to Narok to work, or back to the States, but you’ll have to stay around Kenya for a few weeks, maybe a few months,” he said. “Authorities will want to question you. Don’t worry, I’ll help you. Call me.” He smiled and Jane felt dizzy again. She slipped the card into her backpack.

Jane stayed in a hotel in Nairobi that night. She showered until the water turned cold, scrubbing and scrubbing and wishing to turn herself inside out to be able to clean every part of her of the memory of those men. Then she crawled into bed and she slept and dreamed about her mother. In the dream, Jane was an elephant and her mother was chasing her, and every time Jane turned around to see if her elephant mother was there, she saw the flash of a machete through the dust she’d kicked up behind her as she ran.

The hotel phone woke her.

“Muthega,” Johnno said immediately. “Are you sure he was among the men who assaulted you? Did you absolutely see him?”

“I heard him,” Jane said. “I thought I did.”

Jane remembered the smell of the men, meaty and smoky. She wondered if Johnno ever smelled that way.

“Is there any way, any way at all—” he said this gently, apologetically “—that you could be mistaken? You see,” he went on, “the Narok police have found a body. They think it may be him, but it’s too maimed to tell. Hacked with a machete the same way the poachers hack apart the elephants—face and feet and hands.”

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