Bursting through the exit, he checked over his shoulder to see the workers chasing him. Distracted, he didn’t realize he had exited onto the loading dock.

Knight toppled off the ledge at full speed, landing horizontally on crates of recently filled tiger wine bottles, which shattered under his weight.

With no time to waste, Knight rolled off the crates of broken bottles and scrambled. As he staggered away, he checked his forearm to find blood dripping from a cut. “Shit!”

The workers yelled at Knight from the loading dock as he fled back down the driveway, leaving a trail of infected blood in the dirt as he fled back to the Hyundai, which he hoped was still waiting for him in the jungle.

CHAPTER 35 THE LONG JOURNEY

CHAPTER 35
THE LONG JOURNEY

nki national park, cameroon

Unlike many elephants throughout Africa and Asia, the calf had never been named. None of the elephants in her herd had. Names were a human construct that did not exist in elephant culture, and these forty elephants had rarely crossed paths with humans. Occasionally, one of the older ones would wander off. The others would hear the crack of thunder in the distance, and the elephant would never be seen again, as if it had been reclaimed by the very gods who placed it on the Earth. This was the fate of the calf’s father and, seemingly, all fathers in the herd once they passed their prime.

As the calf’s mother drank from a shallow pond in a clearing, the calf approached and lifted her trunk, resting it against the warm, safe wall of her mother’s belly as she began to suckle. The sensation of the milk leaving her body gave the mother a sense of primal relief and calm.

The crack of thunder startled the mother. She had never heard it so close. Suddenly, her baby’s lips unlatched from her nipple, and the baby collapsed to the earth. The mother turned, horrified at the sight of blood pouring from the baby’s belly. The mother shrieked, and all the elephants came rushing to her side to see the source of her daughter’s anguish. That was when the thunderstorm started.

The booming came from the forest, accompanied by what seemed to be a swarm of invisible insects that loudly buzzed by, occasionally biting the elephants and leaving them with deep, searing wounds that gushed blood.

One by one, the elephants collapsed—first to their knees, then to the dirt—until the entire herd had been felled, their ten-million-year-old bloodline extinguished in a matter of minutes.