Part 7
The first version of the incident report used the word guarded.
Neema found it in Asha’s draft that evening, after the equipment had been cleaned and the severed cable sealed in an evidence bag. She read the sentence twice before carrying the laptop into her mother’s office.
“We can’t say this.”
Asha looked over her glasses. “Which part?”
“‘The collared male guarded the elephant until the response team arrived.’ We don’t know that.”
“He displaced three hyenas.”
“He may have been defending access to a potential carcass.”
“He also intercepted the lioness.”
“Which could have been dominance, feeding priority, or irritation.” Neema turned the screen toward her. “If anyone else wrote guarded, you’d cross it out.”
Five years earlier, Asha would have turned the correction into a longer argument. Now she reached for the keyboard.
“Then give me the sentence.”
Together they wrote what the record could support.
An anomalous GPS cluster from LM-12 prompted the search that located E-17. Collar data placed LM-12 within 110 meters of the point where E-17 was later found, for approximately fourteen hours. During four hours of direct observation, LM-12 displayed no feeding behavior, displaced three spotted hyenas, and blocked one adult lioness’s approach to E-17. After E-17 regained his feet and emitted his characteristic two-note rumble, LM-12 oriented toward him, remained still for several seconds, and moved west.
The cable had probably been set for buffalo, but it carried no identifying marks, and no one was arrested. Over the next week, Juma’s patrol removed eleven more snares from the drainage and shifted two foot patrols north.
Three months later, rain had covered the drag marks in the ravine. Neema brought Asha a provisional offer to lead a two-year movement study in the Ruaha corridor, contingent on a current field-director endorsement. Asha asked when she would leave, found her a driver who knew the northern road, and sent the endorsement the next morning before Neema asked for it.
On Neema’s final field day, Asha went with her and Juma to check the western cameras. Rain had softened the road, and the equipment cases for Ruaha were already packed behind the back seat. Near a rain-filled pan, Juma slowed and pointed through the windshield.
Baraka came out of the green grass alone. The wound had left a dark band above his right foot. He favored it for the first few steps, then crossed the open ground without help and stripped bark from an acacia while they watched from well back.
“Three frames should be enough for the file,” Neema said.
Asha nodded. She did not ask Juma to move closer.
In Neema’s last photograph, Baraka had already turned away. His blunt right tusk showed in profile, and the V in his ear stood out against the bright water. His tracks crossed the wet margin of the pan; no smaller paw prints lay inside them now.
They gave him the road.