by Ed Finn
The elephant on the shirt was a savanna matriarch, which Francine wouldn’t have known a month earlier. The words ELEPHANT ANGEL had been hand-embroidered along the hem of the right sleeve.
“Try it on.”
Francine went into her bedroom and pulled on the shirt, which fit her far better than she deserved. It looked good.
She found Araceli in the kitchen, stirring the special tea into a hotcup. She looked up and smiled. “Now. Your first shift is now.”
“Really?” Francine’s mouth dried and she felt dizzy.
“Drink your tea.”
Francine took the cup to her easy chair and sat down. Araceli had mounted tiny speakers around the headrest, since earbuds tickled Francine’s hearing aids. A small table held her teacup, her VR glasses, a pad of paper, and a blue pen.
Araceli perched on an old love seat across the room, her long legs draped over the arms and her flimsy open and glowing on her lap as the screen powered up. Araceli would see what Francine saw and hear what she heard, but would have no control. It would be in 2-D, like a movie. Part of the training had put Francine in that position, the watcher of the watcher, and it reminded her of the days when movies were flat.
After the first few sips, the bitter tea began to brighten Francine’s senses, accentuating the tickle of the slender wires that rode her jaw and hooked behind her ears.
The last step was to drop her glasses down in front of her face and sip the dregs of the tea.
“Hello,” a human voice whispered. “All clear.”
“Thank you.” The other pilot winked away as soon as the exchange ended, the transition instant so that the two pilots wouldn’t crash in moments of confusion. As she’d been taught, she left well enough alone for a breath, trusting the expertise of the person she replaced to have left the craft on a stable trajectory.
The hot summer sun beat down, as if Africa kissed the Northwest.
Cicadas. Always the first thing she noticed, the sound so foreign to Seattle and so embedded in Africa. Wind sighed through trees, barely louder than the swish of the elephant’s feet through grass. She had entered close-in, her view almost that of the mahout. She snapped her fingers wide and flat and drove her hands up, telling the tiny machine half a world away to rise.
Flying delighted Francine. It was as simple as the video games she’d grown up with, where her movements told cartoon characters on the screen what to do.
The tiny drone gained height.
The matriarch marched in front of a family group of six—four females and two calves, one about two years old and the other one younger. Only the matriarch hosted a rider, long limbed and dark skinned and almost naked, swaying with the elephant’s steps. The girl had a slender waist, long legs, and barely formed round breasts. She wore long feathered earrings and looked as relaxed as if she sat in a beach chair instead of on an animal big enough to crush her with a single step.
Francine did her job and spun the drone 360 degrees. This gave her a slightly jerky view in all directions. Far off, a herd of giraffe walked with awkward grace. A kite wheeled through a dusty blue and cloudless sky. Nothing else obvious moved except for the elephants, although there were enough trees to hide all manner of birds, buzzing insects, and sleeping prey.
© 2013, Haylee Bolinger / ASU
Other Angels watched the satsites and evaluated data flowing from swarms of sensors as thick as the cicadas. Francine watched for the glint of sun on metal and listened for conversation or the interrupted call of any wild thing.
The elephants meandered. Twice they worked together to push over acacia trees and nibble at the tender, sweet tops. The rider stayed on the matriarch easily even as the big beast bent into the trees and strained. Even though Francine could hear and see the savanna, the only feeling she had was the sense of movement that came from the drone’s feed, sort of a vague up and down and sideways that felt like an echo in her bones, and a very slight sickness in her middle.
These were her elephants. Would be her elephants. This was so frightening that Francine shivered briefly. She had not been responsible for anything outside of herself for at least twenty years. Or jointly responsible, she reminded herself. Each herd had help on the ground, in the air, and remotely. A universe of Elephant Angels.
She hovered above the girl’s right shoulder, just behind the dangling feathers that touched her deep brown shoulders. Francine remembered the feel of skin that supple, remembered having joints that flexed and moved easily.
The matriarch watched the next biggest elephant lean forward and push against a tree almost as wide across as her wide, wide leg.
It exploded.
Not the tree itself, she realized. The ground around it.
It took a moment to recognize an attack. A rare thing, but the reason she flew a drone in Africa.
The drone sped away, up and back, a reaction to Francine’s unintended jerks of surprise. The elephants’ images grew small as the drone receded. Smoke from the explosion created a thin smudged line of white and black that rode the wind. Francine twisted her right hand and lifted her left, overcorrecting so that her cameras pointed at the sky and the ground and the far horizon in the wrong direction. She took a deep breath, and then tried again twice before the drone cameras yielded her the elephants.
The matriarch’s head swung back and forth, her wide ears flapping. She held her tail out away from her body. Her shoulders twitched.
Her rider clung to the neck strap.
The wounded elephant lay on her side, trunk writhing, the skin on her chest and front legs peeled away as if she has been flayed with giant knives. Pink flesh glistened in the cuts.
Francine realized she had been hearing squeals and trumpets, had failed to pay attention to sounds with the sight below her so awful and the drone barely under control.
She flew close to the fallen elephant, who struggled to stand, failing.
Messages blossomed across Francine’s glasses, and voices chattered with one another in her ears.
The elephants trumpeted again, the matriarch the loudest.
Pain. It was a sound of pain.
Or anger.
Francine felt what she heard in the animals’ voices, anger and dismay and the sharp shock of going from a placid afternoon to death.
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.”
