Something stung the mother’s neck, and she dropped like a stone, unable to feel her body or legs. As she lay in the dirt, she looked into the eyes of her calf. She watched as a fly crawled across her daughter’s brow and walked to the center of her open eyeball. With every ounce of strength remaining, the mother thrashed until she could use her trunk to snort the offending pest away. The mother collapsed her cheek back against the dirt, and she could then clearly see that whatever spark or animating force had always burned within the child’s eyes had departed.

If there were gods in Africa, they did nothing to spare the mother’s agony. The apes emerged from the trees and set upon the mother with their rusty saws, carving into the seam where her tusks met her snout. Unlike rhino horn, which was merely dead cells like hair or fingernails, elephant tusks evolved from teeth and bore all their characteristics, including nerves.

The apes dug through the enamel first, then the dentine layer. That was when the mother felt the most electrocuting physical pain she had ever endured. She bucked, knocking the ape back and leaving his hacksaw half buried in the tusk. Another ape unleashed a swarm of loud cracking insects that stung the mother’s head, finally offering her the relief the gods had denied.

The mother’s tusks were then removed and lashed to the backs of two of the apes, who carried them through the jungle, to a road where the tusks were eventually loaded into the back of a truck, to begin a long journey to Tanzania under the watchful eye of American spy satellites.

Along the way, this particular ivory would be sliced into disks, which (because the ivory was hollow) would make natural bracelets. These bracelets would then be painted brown and labeled as artisanal wooden bracelets “Made in Africa.”

The boxes of bracelets would arrive in Macau days later, alongside a shipment of macadamia nuts inside a shipping container aboard the Wan Hai 212. The container would be taken off the deck by a large loader and placed on a container handler that looked like a giant forklift. The handler would in turn load the container on the back of a truck, and the truck would drive to the Sun Yee On triads’ warehouse, where it would back into the loading docks.

Wan Koi’s men would unload the bracelets and immediately begin chipping away at the veneer of brown paint that camouflaged the Boko Haram ivory. Nearby, hundreds of plastic packets of rhino horn powder with dragon stamps were awaiting distribution as well.