Chapter 10
Sarah
The water source was a forty-minute hike from camp, and by the time the three of us reached it, I’d already sweated through my shirt twice.
Alyson crouched at the bank with her phone angled low, filming the waterline. Daniel stood six feet back with his hands in his pockets, looking at the mud like it had personally offended him.
“This is disgusting,” he said.
Once again, Daniel not happy about his job. No news there.
“It’s a water source.” I pulled the testing kit from my pack and knelt at the edge. “They’re not decorative.”
“The last one we checked was half this size and twice as clean. This one looks like something died in it.”
“Something probably did. That’s why we’re here.
” Routine water quality checks—bacterial levels, parasites, anything that could sicken the herds.
The animals drank from these sources whether we cleared them or not, so the job was knowing what they were drinking and flagging it before an outbreak started.
Alyson panned her phone across the bank without looking up. “For the record, I’m documenting, not complaining.”
Daniel rolled his eyes.
I uncapped the first vial and dipped it below the surface. The water was murkier than last time, the level noticeably lower. I checked the mark I’d scratched into the rock on our previous visit. The line sat a full hand’s width above the current surface.
“It’s down,” I said. “A lot. More than it should be for this time of year.”
Alyson looked over. “Already? We’re weeks out from when it usually drops.”
“I know.” I filled the second vial and held it up. Sediment swirled through it, heavy and brown. “If it keeps going at this rate, we’ll need to move the herds out of this zone early. Shift them west before the grazing dries out completely.”
“Fun,” Daniel said. “A three-day cattle herd move in the heat. Can’t wait.”
I didn’t respond. Yeah, it was hot, dirty work. But the Ankole cattle with their giant horns were pretty amazing in and of themselves. I sort of looked forward to moving the herd twice a year.
I labeled the vials and packed them into the kit. Alyson had put her phone away and was taking her own samples from a different section of the bank, quiet and efficient.
Daniel, meanwhile, had found a rock to sit on. I ignored it. I’d found out months ago that ignoring the problem was less time-consuming than confronting him about his work ethic.
I pulled the pH strips from the side pocket and ran three of them. Alyson came over and we compared readings, heads together over the color chart, while Daniel watched us from his rock.
“You know what would make this faster?” he said. “If we had the portable spectrometer that’s been sitting in the supply room since February.”
“You could have brought it,” I said.
“Nobody told me to.”
Alyson straightened. “Nobody told you to sit down either, but here we are.”
He looked at her, and the expression that crossed his face was quick and ugly. “I’m sorry, are we taking work advice from the woman who spent the first twenty minutes filming content for her twelve followers?”
“Fourteen thousand,” Alyson said.
“Same thing.”
I watched Daniel lean back on his rock and pull out his own phone, done contributing for the morning.
He’d been like this more and more lately.
The charm was still there when he wanted to use it, but underneath that veneer, he was becoming someone I didn’t enjoy being around.
He did the least. He complained the most.
Why was he even here if he hated it so much? And I had no idea why Alyson stayed with him.
We worked through the rest of the assessment. Alyson and I did anyway. Daniel carried the pack when I asked him to and otherwise stayed on his rock. By the time we’d finished, the sun was high and brutal and my knees ached from crouching.
“That’s it.” I stood and stretched. “Let’s head back along the south bank. I want to check the drainage before we lose the light.”
We followed the bank south in single file, Alyson behind me, Daniel trailing. The brush thickened as we moved away from the clearing, acacia scrub pressing in on both sides, and I was watching the ground for animal tracks when something at the edge of my vision stopped me.
I held up my hand.
“What?” Alyson said.
I didn’t answer. I stepped off the bank and pushed through the scrub toward what I’d seen, and the closer I got, the worse it became.
The wire came first. A snare, crude but effective, anchored to the base of an acacia and pulled tight in a loop that had closed around something with terrible efficiency. The wire had cut deep, and what it had caught wasn’t going anywhere.
A plains zebra. Or what was left of one.
The meat was gone. The hide was gone. What remained was the head, tilted at an angle the neck would never have allowed in life, and the lower legs below the knee where the tendons were too tough or too thin to bother with. Flies had found it. The ground around the carcass was dark and churned.
“Oh God,” Alyson said behind me.
I crouched next to it. My hands were shaking, but my eyes were working. The snare was wire, not rope—commercial, not handmade. The kill was recent. Two days, maybe three.
The cuts where the meat had been taken were rough but purposeful. Whoever did this knew how to butcher an animal.
“This hasn’t happened before,” I said. My voice came out flat. “Not here. Not at Ol Pejeta.”
“Are you sure?” Daniel had come up behind Alyson. For once, he wasn’t complaining. His face had gone pale under the tan.
“I’ve been here a year. The rangers have been here longer. We’ve heard about poaching in other conservancies, on other reserves. But not here. Not our animals.”
I stood and looked at the snare again. The wire glinted where the sun caught it.
Poaching. The word carried everything I knew about what was happening across Kenya, across the continent. The networks that moved ivory and horn across borders. The organized operations that slaughtered elephants and rhinos and left the carcasses to rot.
This was what poaching meant. This was what it looked like when the trade reached your ground.
“We need to get back,” I said. “Before we lose the light.”
Nobody argued.
We hiked back in silence. The sun was already dropping, the light going amber and then orange across the savanna, and by the time the camp buildings came into view against the horizon, the sky had turned the color of a bruise.
I found Zayn first.
He was coming out of the bunkhouse, and he read my face before I’d said a word.
“What happened?”
“Snare. At the southern water source. A plains zebra. Dead.”
His whole body went still. “A snare. Here.”
“Here.”
He was already moving. “I’ll get the others. Dining tent. Five minutes.”
It took closer to ten, but when we gathered under the canvas roof, everyone was there. Zayn and four of his rangers standing along the edges of the tent. Alyson and Daniel, still dusty from the field. Cole, Andrew, and Donovan, who’d come in from evening drills.
I told them what we’d found. Wire snare. Plains zebra. Meat and hide stripped, head and lower legs left behind. Recent kill, two to three days. Southern water source, right where animals came to drink.
The rangers went quiet. Not the restless quiet of boredom. The other kind. Zayn’s hand tightened on the chair back. Two of the younger ones looked at each other.
They’d grown up here. They knew this land. And poaching was something they’d heard about happening to other reserves, other people’s animals.
“Not here,” Zayn said. He shook his head once, slowly. “This does not happen here.”
“Never?” Cole asked.
“There have been incidents elsewhere in Laikipia.” Zayn shook his head again. “Not here. The ranger presence has kept the reserve clear. Even when the program wasn’t running well, we were still here. That alone was enough.”
“Which makes this worse,” Baraka said from the back. He was leaning against one of the tent poles, arms folded, and for once, his voice carried no swagger at all. “If we kept them out just by being here, and now they came anyway—”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.
The Citadel guys had gone still. Andrew wasn’t joking. Cole wasn’t leaning back. And Donovan had straightened in his chair, his whole body pointed at the problem.
“Where exactly?” he said.
I described the location. He and Cole exchanged a look.
“We should go tonight,” Donovan said. “Secure the site. See what we can read from the tracks before they degrade.”
“It’s dark,” Cole said. “And whoever set that snare is long gone. They didn’t stick around to watch it work.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We know they stripped the animal and left. That’s not someone camping nearby.” Cole turned to the rest of the group. “First light. We take a team out, work the site properly. Read the ground, check for other snares in the area, establish whether this was isolated or part of a pattern.”
Donovan didn’t argue. But his hands were flat on the table, and he hadn’t leaned back in his chair, and I got the sense that sitting still right now was costing him something.
“First light,” Cole confirmed. “Zayn, pick four of your best. Full kit.”
Zayn nodded. The rangers broke off into low conversation, Swahili mostly, with English threading through. None of them were leaving. Even Baraka stayed at his post by the tent pole, unmoving and serious.
I looked at the zebra in my mind. The wire. The empty ground where the meat had been.
Someone was killing our animals. And it hadn’t happened before.
The camp broke apart slowly. Rangers drifted toward the bunkhouse. Cole and Andrew went to talk logistics. Alyson touched my arm on her way past and said nothing, which was exactly right.
I stayed after the last of them had gone. The lamp above the table hummed. The camp sounds thinned out one by one until there was nothing left but the reserve beyond the canvas.
I couldn’t sleep. I tried but then gave up after a couple of hours tossing on my bed. That zebra was sitting with me, and it wasn’t leaving anytime soon.