Chapter 21
Sarah
I eased out of bed in the dark. Donovan was on his side facing the wall, one arm tucked under the pillow. I found my clothes by touch and pulled them on without turning on a light. I eased the door shut behind me.
The compound was still. I walked past what had been Alyson’s and Daniel’s cabins and let myself into the vet facility before the first light broke the horizon.
The overhead fluorescents buzzed when I hit them. I pulled the whiteboard toward me, uncapped the marker. Three columns across the top, and my initials were the only ones left. I’d erased the other two the second morning and written mine across all three. Now every row was mine to fill out.
I started with the charts and worked fast. The eland’s recovery notes from yesterday needed closing. Water samples needed logging before the results degraded. Parasite slides Alyson would have prepped the night before. I prepped them myself.
The tray of empty vials was sitting at the end of the counter where I’d been collecting them for recycling.
I reached past it for the sample log, caught the edge with my elbow, and the whole thing went over.
Glass hit concrete and shattered. A week’s worth of empties in pieces across the floor.
I slammed my palm on the counter hard enough to sting.
Fuck.
I grabbed a brush and dustpan to sweep up the pieces, cursing myself the whole time for my clumsiness.
Moved on to the next item: the limping impala Zayn had flagged two days ago.
That meant a field trip, darting, sedation, and hands on the animal while it was under.
I had to use today for other tasks, though.
I wrote it into tomorrow’s column. The rangers could monitor another day.
I pulled the next chart.
“You left early.”
Donovan stood in the doorway with two mugs. He crossed to the counter and set one beside my clipboard.
“Couldn’t sleep. Figured I’d get ahead of it.”
He leaned against the counter and drank from his own. His hair was still damp and he hadn’t shaved.
“How’s the eland?”
“Good. Weight-bearing, sutures holding. Another few days and we can talk about release.” I picked up the coffee. “Thank you.”
“What else is on the board?”
I walked him through it. The parasite slides on the warthogs. Logging yesterday’s water samples. The supply rotation I’d been putting off. He listened without interrupting, and I talked because the talking kept me in the list where things had edges.
“And the impala Zayn flagged?”
“I think it can be put off to tomorrow.”
He looked at me over the rim of his mug. He didn’t push it.
The light came through the facility windows in long, pale shafts. Donovan leaned against the counter with his coffee, and I sat on the stool with mine. For at least a few moments with him there, the world didn’t seem so out of control.
Zayn came whipping through the door suddenly, his radio in one hand, sweat already on his forehead.
“We have a problem. One of the bull elephants. He has got a deep tusk wound. The overnight patrol found him about an hour ago.”
“How bad?”
“Standing, but barely. He separated from the bachelor group overnight. The wound looks infected.”
A bull elephant with a tusk gash gone septic.
Another bull’s tusk, from a fight. Males in musth drove at each other and the damage went deep, and most of the time the hide and the immune system handled it.
When a wound turned septic anyway, the gash had reached tissue that couldn’t fight the infection alone.
A high-value animal with a life-threatening, treatable condition. Squarely inside my mandate. And there was no one to hand it to.
“How far?”
“Forty minutes. Open ground.”
“Tell Baraka to grab two rangers and meet us at the trucks. I’ll pack the kit.”
Zayn was already keying his radio.
Donovan set his mug on the counter. “I’m with you.”
I grabbed my field bag and started loading.
Dart gun, darts, drug kit. Xylazine for induction, reversal for recovery.
Surgical pack: debriding forceps, irrigation syringe, antiseptic, gauze.
Long-acting antibiotic. I ran the sequence aloud as I packed.
“Antiseptic first, debride the necrotic tissue, flush, pack, antibiotic.”
Donovan held the bag open while I loaded the last of it.
We took two vehicles. Zayn drove the lead truck with me beside him, Donovan in back. Baraka and two rangers followed. Nobody spoke on the drive.
I saw the bull before Zayn pointed him out.
He stood alone in the open grass, separated from the bachelor group by several hundred meters. His posture told me everything before I raised the binoculars. Weight shifted off his left side. He was showing clear signs of agitation, most likely from whatever pain he was dealing with.
Through the binoculars, the wound was worse. A ragged tusk furrow along his left shoulder, the edges swollen and dark with infection. Fluid wept from the lower margin.
“He has to be all the way under before anyone can touch that,” I said.
Every person in both vehicles knew what this was. The same sequence—dart, wait, approach, hands on—that had put Alyson in a Nairobi hospital.
I opened the drug kit and loaded the dart. Calculated the dose against the bull’s estimated weight. Checked it. Checked it again.
“Zayn, place your people. Baraka and one other with loaded backups, positioned to cover. One set of eyes on him at all times. If he moves, I need to know.”
Zayn gave the orders. The rangers moved into a loose arc around the wounded animal. Baraka loaded a backup dart and braced the rifle against the vehicle door. A second ranger took position to his left.
Everything by the book. The same steps that had been followed the day Alyson had gone in on the lion. The dart had been placed correctly. The backup had been loaded and ready. The approach had followed every protocol. And it had happened anyway.
Nobody joked. Everything got checked twice.
Donovan stayed on me. He was the one going in at my side, and his position beside the vehicle said so.
I fired.
The dart hit the bull’s right hindquarter. He flinched. His head swung, trunk curling, and he took two staggering steps forward before the drug caught him. His legs locked. His head dropped. His body began its slow negotiation with the ground.
We waited.
I counted the minutes against my watch. His ears went still. His trunk settled into the dirt. The rise and fall of his rib cage slowed to a deep rhythm visible from where we stood.
“Test him,” I said.
Zayn moved in from behind. Tapped the bull’s hind foot with a stick. No response. Touched the tip of the ear. Nothing. He looked back and raised a hand.
I picked up my surgical kit and stepped out of the vehicle.
The distance was maybe forty meters.
For the first half of it, my legs worked. I was walking toward a sedated animal with my kit in my hand and the procedure mapped in my head. And for that first half, it was just a normal approach on just another normal day.
Then I got close enough to feel the scale of him. Thousands of kilograms of muscle and bone on the ground ahead of me, and all of it had to stay down.
My legs stopped.
Did I use the right amount of sedative?
I stood in open grass with the kit gripped in both hands and looked down at my fingers. The fingers I’d trusted for ten years. The ones the camp now relied on. The ones that had never once in my life refused a task I’d set them to.
They were shaking.
Not a fine tremor I could work through. A shake that ran from my wrists to my fingertips and turned the surgical kit into something I couldn’t hold steady. I tightened my grip, and the shaking got worse.
This wasn’t Gregory’s voice. Gregory had never touched this part of me. This was new, and it was worse for being new. I had always had control of my hands. Whatever else I doubted about myself, I had never doubted these.
My body had decided the animal ahead of me was already moving. Already surging up, and every step closer was a step closer to danger. My legs locked against the certainty of it.
I stood there.
The sun was on my back. The rangers were in position. Every indicator said the drug was holding. My body didn’t believe any of it.
I looked at the bull’s rib cage. The slow rise. The slow fall. The same rhythm it had held for twelve minutes. Behind me, Baraka had the backup braced and ready. Zayn was in position. Donovan was right here. Everything that could be done to make this safe had been done, and my legs would not move.
The animal needed me. There was no one else. No one but me.
Suddenly, I noticed Donovan was beside me. I hadn’t called for him. He was just there, close enough that his arm nearly touched mine.
He didn’t ask what was wrong. He didn’t tell me it was safe.
“Antiseptic first,” he said. Quiet, level. “Then the forceps. That’s what you said.”
My own words. The sequence I’d run through while loading the kit, spoken back to me in his voice.
I took a step. The ground held. I took another.
He walked beside me until we were standing over the bull.
I knelt.
Up close, the infection was worse than the binoculars had shown.
The tissue around the gash was necrotic, gray-green and slick, and the wound had deepened where the infection had eaten into the muscle beneath the hide.
I uncapped the antiseptic and poured. My hands shook, and some of it ran over my gloves instead of into the wound.
Donovan steadied the bottle. One hand over mine, just long enough for my grip to firm. Then he let go, and his eyes went to the bull’s head.
“Breathing’s steady. Ears haven’t moved. He’s out.”
He stayed at my shoulder and watched the bull so I didn’t have to.
Every shallow breath, every microtwitch of ear or trunk.
He read it and reported it, and I kept my eyes on the wound because his were on everything else.
When I needed gauze, he had it ready. When I reached for the irrigation syringe, it was already in his hand.
He didn’t talk except to tell me what the bull was doing, and what the bull was doing was staying down.
My hands shook for the first three minutes. Then they finally steadied.
I debrided the dead tissue, working the forceps into the margins where the necrotic layer met viable muscle.
I cut it free in strips. I flushed the cavity with antiseptic until the irrigation ran clear, then packed it with gauze.
The long-acting antibiotic went into the thick muscle of the hindquarter.
I checked the site once more. Wound clean.
Drainage running. The tissue beneath was pink and alive.
“Done,” I said and sat back on my heels.
We backed off. All of us, putting distance between ourselves and the bull before the reversal went in. I loaded the dart, and Zayn placed it from thirty meters.
Then we waited.
The reversal worked faster than the induction. His ears moved first. Small rotations, testing the air. His trunk twitched. One foreleg drew up beneath him.
We stood by the vehicles. Baraka had the backup rifle across his arm. Zayn smiled seeing the job well done. I stood beside Donovan with my kit on the ground at my feet, and my hands were finally still.
I turned them over. The gloves were stained brown with antiseptic and tacky with fluid, but underneath, the fingers were steady.
“Does it go away?” I asked. I didn’t look at him.
“The shaking?” He was quiet for a second. “It just takes time.”
“You say that like you’re sure.”
“I am.”
“How?”
He wasn’t searching for the right words. He had them. He was choosing how many to let go.
“Losing someone changes the way you move through the work,” he said. “There’s no going back to who you were before you lost them. But you learn how to move forward with the new weight.”
He wasn’t guessing. He wasn’t offering advice from a safe distance. He was speaking from inside something that had changed him, but I didn’t know what it was.
I almost asked. The question was right there. What happened to you?
Unsurprisingly, he didn’t answer the question that I never asked.
“You did good today. You kept moving forward,” he said. “That’s the part that counts.”
The bull got his third leg under him. Then the fourth. He stood, his ears flapping and his trunk sweeping the ground in front of him. He swayed a bit before finding his balance.
Then he turned and moved off. Slow and steady. One big, lumbering step at a time.