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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.

CHAPTER 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."