Page 38 of Duty Preserved

“That’s it.” I stood and stretched. “Let’s head back along the south bank. I want to check the drainage before we lose the light.”

We followed the bank south in single file, Alyson behind me, Daniel trailing. The brush thickened as we moved away from the clearing, acacia scrub pressing in on both sides, and I was watching the ground for animal tracks when something at the edge of my vision stopped me.

I held up my hand.

“What?” Alyson said.

I didn’t answer. I stepped off the bank and pushed through the scrub toward what I’d seen, and the closer I got, the worse it became.

The wire came first. A snare, crude but effective, anchored to the base of an acacia and pulled tight in a loop that had closed around something with terrible efficiency. The wire had cut deep, and what it had caught wasn’t going anywhere.

A plains zebra. Or what was left of one.

The meat was gone. The hide was gone. What remained was the head, tilted at an angle the neck would never have allowed in life, and the lower legs below the knee where the tendons were too tough or too thin to bother with. Flies had found it. The ground around the carcass was dark and churned.

“Oh God,” Alyson said behind me.

I crouched next to it. My hands were shaking, but my eyes were working. The snare was wire, not rope—commercial, not handmade. The kill was recent. Two days, maybe three.

The cuts where the meat had been taken were rough but purposeful. Whoever did this knew how to butcher an animal.

“This hasn’t happened before,” I said. My voice came out flat. “Not here. Not at Ol Pejeta.”

“Are you sure?” Daniel had come up behind Alyson. For once, he wasn’t complaining. His face had gone pale under the tan.

“I’ve been here a year. The rangers have been here longer. We’ve heard about poaching in other conservancies, on other reserves. But not here. Not our animals.”

I stood and looked at the snare again. The wire glinted where the sun caught it.

Poaching. The word carried everything I knew about what was happening across Kenya, across the continent. The networks that moved ivory and horn across borders. The organized operations that slaughtered elephants and rhinos and left the carcasses to rot.

This was what poaching meant. This was what it looked like when the trade reached your ground.

“We need to get back,” I said. “Before we lose the light.”

Nobody argued.

We hiked back in silence. The sun was already dropping, the light going amber and then orange across the savanna, and by the time the camp buildings came into view against the horizon, the sky had turned the color of a bruise.

I found Zayn first.

He was coming out of the bunkhouse, and he read my face before I’d said a word.

“What happened?”

“Snare. At the southern water source. A plains zebra. Dead.”

His whole body went still. “A snare. Here.”

“Here.”

He was already moving. “I’ll get the others. Dining tent. Five minutes.”

It took closer to ten, but when we gathered under the canvas roof, everyone was there. Zayn and four of his rangers standing along the edges of the tent. Alyson and Daniel, still dusty from the field. Cole, Andrew, and Donovan, who’d come in from evening drills.

I told them what we’d found. Wire snare. Plains zebra. Meat and hide stripped, head and lower legs left behind. Recent kill, two to three days. Southern water source, right where animals came to drink.

The rangers went quiet. Not the restless quiet of boredom. The other kind. Zayn’s hand tightened on the chair back. Two of the younger ones looked at each other.