Two of Bernard’s rangers waited nearby. The Green Guardians were a privately funded counter-poaching force made up of Samburu warriors. Bernard’s men looked the part. In addition to their desert fatigues and tan boots, they wore their hair in long, ocher-dyed braids pulled back severely from their scalps, adorned with feathers and narrow, brightly beaded headbands. Beneath their uniforms, the men’s lean ribs were tattooed with chains of coffee-bean-sized scars representing bravery. Like their Maasai relatives, the Samburu were nomadic pastoralists. When not on duty, Bernard’s men—Goodson Ltumbesi and Moses Lelesar—tended their animals, lived on milk and blood drained from the necks of their cattle, and warred over livestock with neighboring tribes. With their hair tied back, their dark eyes, and their cheekbones as sharp as cracked shale, they resembled a pair of young eagles swiveling for prey, with well-oiled and well-used HK G3 battle rifles for talons.

Bernard was a contrast. The Samburu warrior had gone to boarding school in England. He wore his hair short, sported a closely trimmed goatee, and carried a baby’s arm of fat around his middle. When Klay had first met him, years ago, Bernard was working as a fixer, taking journalists to difficult locations throughout East Africa. He emerged shirtless from his hut wearing an orange-and-black-checked shuka over one shoulder, multicolored bead necklaces that wrapped his neck from chin to chest, tire-rubber sandals, and a gold belt adorned with tiny dime-shaped metal circles dangling on gold chains. A thin chain stretched from one ear, under his lower lip, and over the other ear. He jingled when he walked, like a child’s toy.

“You always dress up like this?” Klay had asked.

“Like what?” Bernard had replied.

Bernard took Klay up in a rented Cessna 172 to look for elephants. It was the first time Klay saw Kenya’s largest living elephant, a local tourist attraction named Voi. The super-tusker was standing among a group of five males on the west side of a low hill. All six were big elephants, but Voi was mammoth, with tusks so long they rubbed the ground. Bernard pointed him out, then banked the plane to take a second look. “Watch!” As the plane came around, the five male elephants looked up, then quickly encircled Voi. Brandishing their tusks, they shook their heads violently, while Voi turned his back to the plane and lowered his head.

Klay was astonished. “Like they know,” he said. Bernard tapped the earcup of his headset to indicate he couldn’t hear. Klay bent the mic closer to his lips and shouted again. “Like they know,” he repeated, “it’s because of his tusks . . .”

“Of course they know!” Bernard had replied. “We say, ‘An elephant is born carrying two gravestones: One for himself. One for his species.’” Klay had included the line in his article. “The Last Great Tusker,” he’d called it.