Ivory Ghosts by Caitlin O'Connell Read Free Book Online Page A

around the plane, checking the tires, wings, struts, prop, and fuselage. I was pleasantly surprised that it was in pretty decent shape.
    I pulled a stack of documents from a clear pouch that was attached to the cockpit wall. I scanned the airworthiness certificate, the radio station license, and made sure the registration certificate was current. There was a pink temporary registration, good for ninety days as of the previous week. Given the meager budget, I was surprised to see that Craig had just purchased this aircraft from a private tour operator based out of Maun.
    I reviewed the operating limitations in the pilot operating handbook, as well as the document showing the current weight and balance settings of the aircraft. In a small aircraft, these settings were especially important, particularly in the wildlife business. I learned this when I had to carry the tusks from Shingwedzi, a big tusker that was one of my study subjects in Kruger. I hadn’t seen him in some time and assumed he had passed away, as he had been getting thinner and thinner. We ended up flying over his carcass during a census. We were able to land in an open area nearby to collect his tusks.
    He appeared to have died of natural causes, and based on the fact that he was on his sixth molar, I estimated him to have been about sixty-five. His tusks added what we estimated to be an additional two hundred pounds of weight to the aircraft, more at the back than front, and I had to recalculate the weight settings in order to take off and land safely.
    I sat in the pilot seat and checked all the switches in the cockpit to make sure they were in the right position and switched the battery on to check the fuel gauge. Outside, under the wing, I used a small clear syringe to draw a little fuel from the wing-mounted tank and check the fuel quality. Once I was confident that everything was in order, I bounced down the runway and took off on my reconnaissance mission at one o’clock, a little later than I had expected, but I spent the time I needed to in order to get comfortable with this new set of wings.
    Flying over clusters of reed-and-thatch villages surrounded by crops nestled within large tracts of forest, I realized just how few people lived in the region next to the park; most of the dwellings stood alongside the road and along the river with very little in between. From this height, I could also see the narrow swath of cleared vegetation that functioned as an international border ahead to my right—the cutline for Zambia.
    I descended and banked left when I reached the shimmering river. The Kwando looked as though it wound on forever, flowing from Angola in the north down to the infinity of the delta in Botswana. Under the hot, cloudless sky, I followed the snaking river south for a bit, passing an oxbow lake with a herd of buffalos drinking along the sandy shoreline.
    I descended farther and banked north as a large hippo lunged out of the water at me, displaying his formidable canines. After passing over more floodplain and open woodland, I came to a dense grove of acacia shading groups of elephants dozing in the heat of the day. There were so many elephants, I was counting in batches of twenties and fifties and got up to several hundred before the forest opened up and I was out over the floodplain again.
    The ramshackle military buildings at the ranger station to the left of the river looked a lot better from the air than they did on the ground. It had only been two nights and Susuwe was already wearing on me. I needed to be patient, but the horror of my introduction and the unsettling treatment by the local staff was a hard welcome. Gidean was the only warmth the place had to offer.
    As I headed farther north, I noticed a haze in the air and a few flecks of ash. Even though the wet season hadn’t technically ended, patches of fire weren’t unusual; the sporadic rains left spotty dry areas. Fire made sense, considering how dry parts of Botswana had