No, Kruger was not the norm, but rather a cross between an ark and a fortress. It was one of the few outposts where nature was waging its final stand. It was, as soldiers like Cobus knew all too well, the front line in a war where the stakes were not just life and death, but the death of life itself. And the fortress walls were now being breached daily by marauders looking to cash in on the end of the wild.

Basani stood off to one side of the rangers, quivering as she wept. She had grown up in Malelane, just outside the park. She met Oupa when they were both training to be field rangers, and they had fallen in love while fighting together on the front lines of the poaching wars. Oupa and Basani made plans that at the end of the dry season, she would put down her rifle and they would try to start a family. Now those dreams were shattered.

Cobus wrapped his heavy arms around her shoulders. Basani was a physically strong woman, able to hold a five-kilo rifle in the low ready position for hours on end. But today she felt frail, her bones shifting loosely in his embrace.

“Oupa was family to all of us,” he said to her. Basani sank into his arms, unable to bear her own weight. She heaved with grief, wetting his uniform with her tears.

Cobus was surprised, and concerned, at how quickly Basani returned to her work as a field ranger. He suggested she take more time to grieve, but Basani told him she didn’t want to be alone. Although Cobus was one of Kruger’s twenty-two section rangers, which meant he was technically her boss, that hierarchical construct had not survived the intimate realities of living and fighting side by side on the front lines in the bush. Cobus and Lawrence and the other rangers at Kruger were her family—her only family now.

In the weeks after Oupa’s death, Cobus and Basani spent several late nights at the dive bars in White River, knocking back Carling Black Labels as she tried to make sense of her pain. Cobus could see she had been ground down by the futility of the poaching war. It affected every ranger in the park. No matter what they did to reinforce the border—fences, drones, motion-sensor cameras, crime scene DNA analysis—nothing seemed to stem the tide of death. Every year, more rangers and animals were being gunned down by shoot-and-scoot poachers who came from Mozambique to try their luck in the “Big Smoke,” as Kruger had come to be known. Making matters worse, Cobus and several of his colleagues were beginning to suspect that the poachers had moles inside the park, who would tip them off to the locations. How else could the marauders locate, in a matter of hours, animals that even trained park guides might not find for days at a time?