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

been as I drove through.
    The brown contrasted against the green vegetation where the rain had fallen and reminded me of a comment one of the policemen had made as I passed through the border patrol to the East Caprivi that morning. When I asked how his crop was doing this year, he shook his head and said that his neighbor had been witching him. That was the only way he could explain the fact that his neighbor’s field got plenty of rain and was doing well, while his was dry as an old elephant bone.
    After a short while, I could see the cutline of Angola to the north and banked left to keep within the Namibian border. I hadn’t seen elephants in some time. In the distance, a major forest fire raged on the Angolan side and had crossed into Namibia. Maybe the elephants had moved south to avoid the fire.
    The only trees standing in this scorched landscape were the giant leadwoods—silvery gray trunks topped with dry orange leaves. Not all of the fire was new; there were a few areas with verdant patches of green grass that had sprouted up among the char. A small elephant family ran through the grass kicking up soot with their feet. Their skin was charred gray with papery wrinkles, their bleach-white ivory offsetting their ashen coats.
    The smoke moving out from the origin of the fire was too far north for me to see how it might have started. I pulled up on the yoke to gain elevation and banked back to the right to get a closer look. The cockpit was getting hotter.
    A sudden explosion below me rocked the plane with a wall of turbulence. A dead tree had spontaneously combusted from the heat of the fire. The flames transformed into voracious orange tongues, hungrily consuming the charred wood. I clutched the yoke, steering away from a series of white ash dust devils filled with orange leaves as they churned across the black smoldering earth.
    I quickly gained elevation as a few more trees exploded. With the wind blowing south, smoke was billowing right toward me, making it impossible to see to the north. Not having permission to fly over the international border meant I had to be careful to stay south of the cutline.
    I banked farther right and leveled off, pushing the throttle in to speed up, keeping south as something red caught my eye just over the border. The wind suddenly changed directions, expanding my view and allowing me to see a scattering of what looked like huge mounds of flesh bleeding out into the sand. They were butchered elephant carcasses—fifteen or more.
    Large slabs of raw meat smoking on top of wooden racks. Judging from the range of sizes of the carcasses, it had to have been a family group.
    I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The audacity of it all—poaching a whole group in broad daylight. And cooking the meat out in the open? How could they get away with this?
    I aligned myself perpendicular to the cutline and pulled way back on the throttle, making the nose of the airplane very heavy as I tried to get a final look. Craning my neck to the right, I saw a few people clutching tusks and running toward a Cessna 182 sitting on a freshly slashed airstrip. Just at the end of my line of vision I thought I saw a symbol on the airplane—a red shape, like the Red Cross symbol.
    As much as I wanted to circle around to get a better look, it would have given me away. I had to keep on my current course—to fly on, as if I hadn’t seen anything unusual.
    I couldn’t hold back the fury as I turned away from the billowing smoke so as not to be seen. Fighting to stay level, I tried to calm down as the world closed in on me.
    The ground wasn’t moving fast enough beneath me. Imagining the cries from elephants being gunned down, I screamed at the top of my lungs as I pushed the yoke in. “Goddammit!” All I could think about was landing and getting myself to Hippo Lodge to call Craig on the radio. I headed southwest, then south over Malombe Pan and east, back to Mpacha airstrip.
    Even though the radio wouldn’t