Bernard drove fast, the Land Rover shuddering over a dry and broken landscape. In the truck were the three rangers, the politician, the software engineer, a monitor from the Kenya Wildlife Service, and Klay. Their route traced the Ewaso Nyiro River. The river’s seasonal ebb and flow had lately been accelerated by the earth’s rapidly changing climate, floods in dry season, droughts in wet. It was late November, time for the short rains, but none had come. They crisscrossed the river’s desiccated bed, plunging down and then up its steep banks, dodging fallen trees, spinning in deep sand, crashing through thornbush.

Standing behind Klay, Bernard’s rangers scanned the landscape for threats, barely touching the truck’s roll bar despite the vehicle’s bucking. Klay did not ride as easily. At each jolt his thick knees punched the back of the politician’s canvas seat.

Klay didn’t fit well into the truck’s second row. He didn’t fit well into most places. He was a large, broad-shouldered man. With his amber eyes and graying brown hair, he was still handsome enough, but etched now, salt overtaking pepper. The same applied to his personality. More than one grade school teacher had described young Tom Klay as troubled. Now, in middle age, he was a hardened brooder. He ground his molars. He spoke sparingly, in a voice so low it often sounded as if he were talking to himself. He carried himself in a way that suggested any number of past careers, not one of them journalist. If you were a boxer, you might recognize the forward roll in his shoulders and the slight tuck of his chin. If you had law enforcement experience, you might notice his tendency to stand with one hip forward, the other canted away. He was best appreciated in geologic terms, a cairn of irregular boulders stacked above a very active fault line.

“Tuskah!” the politician shouted over his shoulder, too fat to turn. He held a bottle of beer above his head. “You like it, right?” he called to Klay. “Tuskah?”

Klay ignored Lekorere and looked out over the savannah, two fingers balancing the Mauser’s barrel against his thigh. A male lion dozed beneath a tree in the late-afternoon sun.

He wasn’t here for the animals, or for the conversation.

“Doesn’t it get to you?” readers asked him from time to time. “The killing . . . all those poor animals?”

The question surprised him the first time. “It’s not easy,” he replied, “but I grew up in a funeral home, so I guess I was born for this job.”