Chapter 3
Sarah
My boots were by the door where I’d left them, laces still caked with red clay.
I pulled them on in the dark, and they were shaped well to my feet after a year of wearing them every day.
The leather was cracked and the soles were thinning, and I loved them more than anything I’d packed in the suitcase for Paris.
I sat on the edge of my bed for a second and listened.
I could hear a bird somewhere close. Followed by a dozen more answering it, then the whole reserve opening up at once, and there it was: the wildlife of Kenya reminding me why I’d come here in the first place.
The Laikipia Plateau waking up sounded nothing like anywhere else on earth, and after four days back, I still caught myself holding still just to hear it.
My cabin was small with a shower that barely worked, and the camp generator had opinions about when it wanted to run.
I didn’t care. This place was home. I’d tacked photos above my desk and let a stack of veterinary journals take over the chair I never sat in and kept alive—barely—the little plant Alyson had given me when I’d first arrived.
This was the first place that had ever felt like mine. Not my parents’ farm, not the dorm at Iowa State where I’d shown up at sixteen on a full ride and a roommate who’d decided I was a snob before I’d finished unpacking, not even my apartment in vet school.
But this place was mine.
I’d built this life one red-clay morning at a time, and coming back to it after a week of busy streets and hotel sheets that were somebody else’s idea of comfortable was like exhaling for the first time in days.
I crossed the compound in the half dark, past the other cabins still shut up tight, past the dining tent where the cooks were already moving around inside.
The vet facility sat at the far end of the cluster, the largest structure in camp, with concrete block walls and a tin roof.
It was the only building that felt permanent.
I let myself in through the side door and went straight to the recovery pen.
The Grévy’s zebra was already standing, which was a good sign.
She let me lift her hind hoof without a fight, and that told me more than the wound did.
Fewer than two thousand of these zebras were left in the wild.
When one let you handle her without sedation, she was telling you she felt safe, and that meant she was healing.
I crouched in the straw and turned her leg toward the light coming through the open door.
She’d come in four days back, the morning after we’d flown home, with a gash down her cannon bone that had gone deep and dirty over a stretch of leg with almost no soft tissue to spare.
There’d been no closing a wound that filthy, so I’d cleaned it, packed it, and left it open to mend from the inside.
I’d spent the first two nights sure we’d lose the leg and the animal with it. She’d torn it wide on a splintered branch when she’d gone down, running from something.
Most of the time, that was a death sentence we had to watch be carried out. You didn’t intervene on every injured animal in a conservancy. You often had to let nature do what nature did, even when it was brutal, because that was how the system worked.
But a Grévy’s zebra wasn’t most animals. With so few left, every single one mattered more, and losing her to this when we could have treated it felt too much like negligence. So we’d fought.
Now the wound was clean. It had a healthy bed of new tissue where the worst of it had been, the swelling was down, and she could put her weight on the leg evenly. She stood for me, ears turning, more interested in my braid than in what I was doing to her.
“You’re going home,” I told her. “You hear me?”
I set down the hoof, and the zebra flicked an ear at me. I smiled at her.
“One day, I’m going to beat you here,” Alyson said from the doorway.
“I’ll believe it when it happens.”
She came in with two mugs and held out one over the rail of the pen. “Daniel says he’ll be here in ten. I give it twenty.”
“That’s generous.”
“I’m a generous person.” Alyson leaned on the rail and looked down at the zebra.
She had her phone in her free hand, already angled, already filming.
I’d stopped trying to have a conversation with Alyson that didn’t also include her phone about six months ago.
It was just part of her, the same as the coffee and the way she could make a stranger on the internet care about an animal they’d never touch.
“Oh, she looks good. Really good. Say something medical for the internet.”
“No.”
“Sarah, my followers have been watching this animal’s vitals since she came in. They are emotionally invested. Give them something.”
“She’s granulating well and bearing weight evenly.”
“Boring. Accurate, but boring.” Alyson tipped the phone toward the animal and dropped her voice into the bright, warm register she used for anyone who wasn’t standing in front of her.
“When she came in, we didn’t think she’d make it.
Look at her now. That’s our Dr. Calloway.
” She lowered the phone and looked at me over the top of it.
“You should let me put your face in one of these sometime. People would lose their minds.”
“People would scroll right past.”
“That is genuinely the saddest sentence I’ve ever heard a beautiful woman say, and I’ve heard a lot of them.
” She took a sip of her coffee and looked at the zebra again.
This time, it was a professional assessment, not filtering for social media content.
“She’s weight-bearing well. Are you thinking we’ll release her today? ”
“If her group’s somewhere we can reach. She’s not going to mend any faster in a pen.”
“Agreed. Grévy’s do worse the longer you keep them in. I’d get her out before she starts pacing.” Alyson put her phone in her pocket and looked at the leg properly. “She looks ready.”
“Listen to you. Letting go.”
Alyson put a hand to her chest. “Growth.”
“It’s medicine, not a breakup.”
“For you, those are the same thing.”
I ignored that, mostly because she wasn’t exactly wrong. Saying goodbye was hard.
Daniel came in a few minutes later with his shirt half buttoned and his hair doing something optimistic. He crouched at the rail to bring his eyes level with the wound before he said anything.
“That’s granulating better than I thought it would,” he said. He tilted his head, not touching her. “You keeping her on antibiotics?”
“Long-acting shot when she goes out. Covers her through Thursday, then she’s done.”
“Nice work.” He straightened, found Alyson’s coffee on the rail, and drank half of it before she could stop him. “So can we release her somewhere with a view? Everybody deserves a nice morning. Where’s her group?”
“Wherever Zayn’s got them this week, which I think is pretty far out.
He rotates the herds between grazing blocks so they don’t strip one section bare.
” I stood and stretched the crouch out of my knees.
“Which means somebody’s driving three hours out and three hours back, and I already know it’s me. ”
“It’s always you,” Alyson said.
“Because you two won’t do the far runs.”
“Because the far runs are three hours of nothing,” Daniel said.
“Not to mention, half the time it’s a coin flip on whether anybody’s awake to answer the radio at the eastern post. Last month, I sat out there for forty minutes saying ‘Come in’ like an idiot to a radio that had already decided it hated me. ”
“The radios are fine.”
“The radios are held together with hope and half a piece of duct tape.”
“You could come with me,” I said. “Both of you. We’ll make it social.”
Alyson looked at me like I’d suggested we’d skip all the way there. “You go to the middle of nowhere by yourself and talk to animals for six hours and you call it a good day. That’s not a personality trait we all share.”
“It is a good day.”
I meant it. I’d grown up in a house with two parents and five siblings who loved one another loud enough to shake the walls. I’d never had quiet until I’d come here, and now I couldn’t get enough of it.
“To you, it is. That’s what worries me.” She said it lightly, but she bumped her shoulder into mine when she said it.
We got the zebra prepped through the morning, the three of us moving around one another in the pen and the supply room with the ease of people who’d done it a hundred times.
Alyson handled the paperwork and narrated a caption she wasn’t going to post. Daniel carried what needed carrying and made himself charming to whichever cook brought us plates so we wouldn’t have to stop to go to the mess tent.
Zayn Kipsang showed up a little after ten.
The Kenyan government had put a dozen rangers at the conservancy a couple years back.
They were young men, mostly teens and early twenties, meant to protect the wildlife and keep poachers out.
Most of them had been handed a uniform and not much else and, consequently, rarely did anything.
Zayn was the exception and the ranger we talked to the most. It helped that he spoke excellent English.
He came through the door dusty from the knees down and already chewing the end of a piece of jerky, which meant he’d skipped breakfast again.
“There she is.” He came to the rail and looked her over with the even, assessing calm he had around animals. “Leg looks good.”
“Where’ve you got her group? She’s ready to rejoin.”
“Moved them again yesterday. There’s better grass in the low lands now that the rain came through.” He crouched, and the zebra came over to investigate him, which she did not do for everyone. “I can run you both out this afternoon.”
“The low section’s muddy after the rain,” I said.
“Bring the boots you don’t care about.” He grinned up at me.
“How’s your week been?” I asked him. “I haven’t seen you since we got back.”
“Long.” Zayn didn’t do weighty replies. He’d told me once, months ago, that there was no one waiting for him at home because there was no one left in his family.
Then he’d asked what my farm in Iowa was like and listened to the whole long answer without once looking away.
He liked other people’s families. He asked after mine every chance he got. “How about your trip?”
“Paris. It was…” I thought about the nightclub, the elevator, the vomit, before pushing it out of my mind. “Too many people and not enough open sky. I’m glad to be back.”
“The animals are glad you’re back too.” He stood and brushed straw off his knees. “Busy week, though. We’re getting some trainers.”
“Trainers?” Alyson was labeling the antibiotic dose for the release. She didn’t look up. “For what?”
“Security guys. Coming to work with us, supposed to teach us things.” Something moved under the easy surface of him, an eagerness he was trying not to show mixed with a wariness sitting right next to it. “One is already here. I’ve been showing him around.”
“You like him?”
“Yes. He’s learning the land. The rest are coming soon.” He flicked the straw away. “I’ll see you at three o’clock for the run. I’ll even bring the good truck.”
We all knew there was no good truck, only a less-bad truck.
He was gone before I could answer, off toward the bunkhouse with someone already calling his name from across the camp. The zebra put her head over the rail to watch him go.
The afternoon filled itself with work. Charts to close out, a supply count, the hundred small things that stacked up so quickly.
Somewhere in the middle of it, with my hands busy, I caught myself back in Paris again…
felt Donovan’s palm flat and steady against the small of my back, walking me through a lobby that wouldn’t hold still.
If only it had ended there. Then it would be a delightful memory of a handsome man who’d been such a gentleman and walked me to my room. Proof that there were still good men in the world.
Instead, the story ended with proof I couldn’t hold my liquor and me wanting to vanish into a hole even though I was a continent away.
I yanked down the lid on the memory.
By the time the light started fading, the zebra was back with her herd in the low lands. The rain that had come through in the week had pulled a haze of new green up out of the ground, and the herd had spread across it, tails swinging, heads down.
We let her out at the edge of it, and she stood a moment, ears twitching, taking in the open country after days in a pen. Then she was into the herd, a loose scatter of striped bodies closing around her, and I couldn’t have picked her out again if I’d tried, except for the wound.
I stood at the edge of the truck longer than I needed to. Zayn let me have the minute without saying anything about it. Then he drove us home over ground he knew better than any map we had. He dropped me at the cabins as the sky turned a deep, bruised blue right before night came down all at once.
I didn’t go in. I sat on my step instead, where I could see past the last cabin to the place the camp stopped and the savanna started, no fence, no line or marking of any kind, just the grass beginning and going on forever.
Something moved out there in it, big and lumbering.
I’d stopped flinching at that months ago.
Now I knew it was just the reserve animals doing whatever they didn’t want to do during the heat of the day.
This was mine. I’d chosen it, all of it, the six-hour runs, the bad radios, and the animals that came in broken and sometimes went back whole, but sometimes didn’t.
I would choose it a hundred more times. Over any number of skyscrapers or modern conveniences.
The generator cut out somewhere behind me, and the lights in the cabins flickered and held. Out past the grass, the reserve went on breathing in the dark, and I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be.