At first light Sarah lifted her camera, painfully conscious of each sound she made, each crackle of twigs and click of the shutter. The elephants turned towards the thicket where she crouched behind her lens, and for a moment she wondered if they would now become angry and dangerous. But they stood their ground quietly, the smallest ones in the centre, protected by the larger cows, all of them facing her as she recorded their vigil. When the first slanting beam of sunlight touched the trees, the survivors turned and melted away in grey silence, into the bush. Sarah and Erope waited for some time before emerging from their hiding place, marvelling at the phenomenon of courage and faithfulness that they had shared. Sarah squatted on the sand, taking pictures of the mounds, wishing she could have photographed all the events of the night. She felt they had known she was there, had allowed her to remain as a witness to their funeral rites. When she was finished with the camera, she left her own reverent offering of acacia blossoms on each of the graves.

Erope’s face was grim. In the car she saw his anger in the way he hunched forward and wrapped his jacket around him, muttering words of distress in his own language, pounding his fist on the side of the door. There was no tolerance in him for the senseless butchery and greed they had seen. He was an extraordinary mixture of cultures, and she admired the way that he moved across the boundaries between the two areas of his life, employing the same fluid, unobtrusive tactics that he used when he was tracking an animal.

He had been educated at a mission school, and his research records were neatly written and orderly. When he was not in camp at Buffalo Springs he returned to his manyatta, leaving his uniform behind and living, as his people had done for centuries, in a dwelling of mud and wattle, dark and pungent with the smell of goats and cattle dung and wood-smoke. He had worked for a time in Nairobi, before the Briggses found him. But he had no wish to return there, he said. Despite his education and his exposure to the Western way of life, he retained the ancient skills needed to survive in the arid region that was his home. Sarah envied the grace with which he moved through his chosen world, understanding what was required of him in the diverse arenas of research camp and manyatta.