Leaving Lake Paradise. Photo by Chris Fletcher.

It rained again last night for the third night in a row, an indication that the “little rains,” as they are called, have begun. It is time to leave.

I saw Pete yesterday afternoon. He’d come to the Tribe Hotel where I am staying to pick up the gear he’d left when we began the trek to Lake Paradise. It was a little awkward seeing each other. I’d cut out early from his friend’s camp in Samburu and now he was canceling his reservation, which I’d made, at Tribe and staying on with the Douglas-Hamiltons in Nairobi. Neither one of us really knew what to say to the other.

“We good?” he asked me as he grabbed his gear.

“Yep.”

“You sure?”

I shrugged. “It was a mistake to go to Elephant Watch Camp,” I said. That could have started our argument all over again but he let it go. I was glad he did.

All I’d done since I’d gotten back to Nairobi was sleep. But I was still tired. I thought about going to the Maasai Market and buying gifts to bring home but couldn’t bring enough enthusiasm to the mission to make it happen. Besides, I didn’t really want to spend the afternoon haggling with Nairobi Maasai over badly carved wooden elephants and beaded bracelets. I didn’t want any of that stuff anyway. And I knew that just being at the market would depress me. It didn’t have anything to do with Kenya. Not really. I’d seen Kenya. I’d gotten her red dirt thick into my hair and under my nails so that even now when I showered it flowed like blood down the drain. Her smoky scent was in my nostrils, the sounds of her night noises filled my head. What did I need with tourist trinkets?

I slept in the afternoon and then I got up and took a long, hot shower and dressed and went down to the bar and ordered a whisky but there was a large screen TV next to the bar and a soccer game on and I didn’t want to sit there and listen to people cheer and the non-stop prattling of the announcers so I took my drink and went outside by the pool, which was empty, and sat in a wicker chair, slowly sipping my drink and taking deep breaths of the cool, smoky air.

After awhile I went into the restaurant and asked for a table and the hostess, who was tall and lean and very attractive, asked me if someone was joining me and when I said no, she frowned and said, “I’m sorry.” I wasn’t. It was my last night in Kenya, my last night in Africa, and the last thing I wanted to do was make small talk with someone, even if it was someone I liked. What I wanted to do was exactly what I was doing: To sit at a small table in a corner of the restaurant and order a second whisky and not look at the menu, not think, just let the thick, moist air wash and the white noise of the restaurant wash over me and not think of anything. Not think of anything at all.

I ordered dinner—I can’t even tell you what—and a bottle of South African Shiraz and took my time over dinner, not thinking about the food, whether it was good or not or if I was enjoying it, just eating it and sipping my wine and trying hard not to think of what it was like to sleep under the stars at Lake Paradise or hear the cough of the leopard in the cliffs above us or the sound, felt in your chest, of a herd of buffalos running out of the forest, or the copper taste of fear when you come up a rise on a trail and an elephant is standing just yards away from you or the taste of Julius’ camp pancakes when the cold is still in your bones or how really wonderful a whisky tastes at the end of the day when you’re hot and tired and sweaty and you’ve spent all day stalking wildlife in a cloud forest.

I tried very, very hard not to think of any of this. And then I paid my bill and, a little wobbly, went back to my room and slept soundly until the desk clerk called me at 4:15 to wake me and tell me that a car would be waiting for me at five to take me to the airport. I showered, packed, paid my bill, and a few hours later I was on the Virgin flight headed for London, Africa behind me, almost as if it had all just been a dream.

The Cottar family home in Nairobi. Photo by David Lansing.

The drive to Nairobi was hot and dusty. Our trusted Land Cruiser, which had done so well in getting us to Lake Paradise, seemed as tired as we were. On the long uphill climbs we crawled along at 20mph or less. At first Calvin thought it was just the weight of the trailer we were pulling and the grade, but when we stopped in Nanyuki for lunch, he had Eddie take a look at things and it was decided that the fuel pump was clogged. Probably from the nasty gas we had to buy in Marsabit before heading south.

Of course, you don’t go on an expedition like this without at least two of every crucial piece of equipment and Calvin had brought an extra fuel pump so while the rest of us ate burgers at Bernard’s in the Nanyuki Airport, Eddie spent an hour or so doing repair work. When we started up again, the car was running much better. “I should have done that hours ago,” Calvin said.

Initially we’d hoped to arrive into Nairobi around sunset but because of all the delays getting out of Samburu, that wasn’t going to happen. Calvin thought we’d be lucky to arrive by midnight. Which added to our anxiety. You don’t really want to be driving into or around Nairobi late at night.

Since we were getting into town a couple of days earlier than expected, I didn’t have a hotel reservation. Calvin graciously offered to let me stay over in their guest cottage at their compound in the Karen neighborhood. We were silent for a long time and then we talked non-stop for hours driving through the highlands south of Mt. Kenya until about an hour or so out of Nairobi when Calvin said I’d have to excuse him as he needed to get into his “Nairobi driving mode,” and then we didn’t talk at all as he fought and bulled his way through the dense Nairobi traffic as if he were a Formula One driver trying to gain the lead with just a few laps left.

It was dangerous and frightening and all you could do was let yourself go, knowing you had no control over anything that might happen, and be amazed at how he was able to out-maneuver mini-vans and buses and trucks and all the smaller, lighter, faster cars that, sometimes, he just pushed off the road in order to take control where two lanes became one or we fought to enter a round-about.

Shortly before midnight we pulled up to the metal gates in front of his compound just down the road from the old Karen Blixen farm, for which the neighborhood is named, and a small window in the gate was pulled back so that the night watchman could see who was there and we were let inside. His wife Lou, who has long worked for the United Nations as a negotiator and was just back from a mission to Sudan, was up waiting for us. We had a cold dinner of chicken and potato salad and a Tusker and then Calvin showed me to the cottage in the back. It was cold and damp, having rained earlier in the evening, and the cottage, which had been shut up for awhile, smelled stale and slightly moldy. An old fridge in the kitchen made such a rattle that I unplugged it. And then I pulled back the bedspread and fell into bed, not even bothering to undress, and for almost 12 hours slept dreamlessly for the first time since I’d come to Africa.

I took this photo of elephant skulls outside Iain's research center as the two old bulls inside clashed. Photo by David Lansing.

Last night at dinner I told Pete that I was going to leave Elephant Watch Camp in the morning. Calvin and the boys arrived last night, having driven down from Lake Paradise, and there was just something here that wasn’t sitting right with me so I thought it best to move on. Pete was supposed to drive back to Nairobi with us but since he wasn’t ready to go, he’s had a conversation with Iain and will now hitch a ride back with him on his plane in two days. Pete has been up in the air with Iain before and knows it’s risky business, but he’s very close to the Douglas-Hamiltons and doesn’t get to see them very often and is loathe to cut his visit short, even if it means having to hold his breath while Iain flies them to Nairobi. (I mentioned before that Iain has a less than stellar history flying planes but didn’t mention that the current Cessna he pilots was given to him by the late Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands after Iain collided with a zebra several years ago; the zebra obviously got the worst of it, but Iain’s plane was destroyed as well.)

Frankly, things just haven’t gone right since the moment we arrived here. I’m turned off by Iain’s sanctimonious arrogance and disgusted with the legions of mini-vans scampering around Samburu chasing the wildlife. It’s just not what I expected. And every time we’ve tried to get a jump on the masses with an early start there’s been some sort of a delay that’s forced us to either abandon plans or get a late start. I feel like we’re simply not able to do or see what it is we’ve come here for. So best, I think, to leave.

But our departure this morning turned out to be overly complicated. The idea was to leave at the break of day and maybe do a little game-viewing on our way out of Samburu, but first we had to wait for the Douglas-Hamiltons to come down for breakfast, which wasn’t until after eight, and then Iain insisted that we pop over to the Save the Elephants research camp a few klicks downriver. Which would have been fine if that’s what had happened. Instead, both Iain and Calvin rather hijacked the morning by getting into a long, protracted argument about wildlife conservation and hunting. It was interesting for about the first 15 or 20 minutes but then these two bull elephants just started stomping the ground and trumpeting as loudly as they could while the rest of us sat around waiting for the test for dominance to end. It was a silly contest and I think both Iain and Calvin realized that. Calvin was never going to get Iain to say that he thought hunting should play a role in managing Kenya’s wildlife, and Iain was never going to get Calvin to agree that the hunting ban had, at the very least, saved the elephants. It was like a debate between a devout Muslim and a born again Christian over whether a mosque should be built at Ground Zero in New York.

After about an hour of the two slamming their tusks into each other, I finally got up and walked out of the research center and went for a walk along the river. I was as angry and upset as the vervets had been the day before at the baboons. I was angry that this visit to Elephant Watch Camp had gone so wrong and I was upset that I had allowed Pete to twist my arm into shortening other parts of our itinerary to come here. It had been a mistake. And I wasn’t sure he realized his role in all of it.

Leaving the Elephant Watch Camp in Samburu. Photo by David Lansing.

Finally, sometime around noon, the two bulls exhausted themselves in battle and broke it off. We all made our farewells and thanks with lots of insincere handshakes and waves as we pulled away from camp. As we bounced over the dusty road, Calvin half-apologized, admitting that there was nothing to be gained from his argument with Iain. “He means well,” he said, “and we both want the same thing. We just come at the solution from different angles.”

I tried to get over my anger but it wasn’t easy. It sat on my shoulders pressing down on me like the weight of some very large, dark animal. As an exercise, I started thinking of all the things that had been wonderful about Kenya up until our stop in Samburu. Spending an afternoon watching cheetah hunts; flying over the Mara and witnessing the astonishing wildebeest migration; a morning with the elephants at Sarara; my first view late in the afternoon of Lake Paradise. It has been an astonishing trip and, I told myself, it was silly to let all this nonsense at Elephant Watch Camp ruin it. I had very little time left in Africa. It would be a long, hideous drive to Nairobi and then a couple of days there before heading back to London. I needed to enjoy these last few days. Still, I couldn’t help but feels a sadness inside of me and a feeling that the trip was all but over.

Vervet monkeys groom each other after the war. Photos by David Lansing.

War has broken out between the baboons and the monkeys at Elephant Watch Camp. Yesterday morning at breakfast I noticed dozens and dozens of baboons moving downriver along the south bank of the Ewaso Ngiro River, marching in single file, one after the other, the way an army troop might move if they were positioning themselves for battle.

The vervets, with their little round faces and long ratty tails, picking acacia pods in the trees overhead of our camp, seemed nervous and upset. They made little squeaking noises and danced from limb to limb looking anxiously across the river.

Baboons gathering along the river. Photo by David Lansing.

The baboons appear to be a nomadic troop, opportunists who, like the shiftas that trouble this area, look for a weakness in local defenses, steal what they can, and then move on. They are quite shifty and know how to act in concert, like con men; if you’re eating out in the bush, one baboon will slowly approach you and if you are foolish enough to get up to shoo him away, two or three other baboons will come out of nowhere to quickly steal whatever you’ve left behind.

Not that the monkeys are much better. They’re also quite accomplished thieves. Yesterday morning a Samburu came by my tent shortly after dawn with a tray with tea and fruit and rolls. I was still lazing in bed and told him to just leave it on the table outside my zipped up tent but he wouldn’t do it. Said the monkeys would steal it the minute he put it down. And even if I took the tray into my zipped up tent, they might have a go at it if I walked away to take a shower or go to the loo. “They will unzip your tent,” the Samburu told me. “They are very clever, these monkeys.”

Anyway, sometime during the night there was a battle royal between the nomadic troop of baboons and the resident vervets. The sounds of battle echoed across the camp throughout the night. It sounded horrific. When I woke up this morning I half expected to see the baboons, which are much larger than the vervets and have such awful canine teeth, triumphantly marching around the camp, but there were none to be seen. The vervets were sitting in the branches of the large sausage tree in front of the mess tent, grooming each other and munching on pods in the trees. Evidently they’d survived last night’s battle. But I have a feeling the war isn’t over.

A view of the Ewaso Ngiro with clustered minivans fighting to view the lions. Photos by David Lansing.

We were driving along the banks of the Ewaso Ngiro River very late in the afternoon. The sun had already fallen behind the hills and the air was suffused with a golden duskiness that put an ethereal sheen on the water so that it looked like a river of gold. A troop of baboons marched across the far bank, the totos riding on their mother’s backs. Several egrets stood in the shallows just yards away from the raised heads of crocodiles.

We had maybe half an hour of light left before it would be too dark to see anything but Simeon was on a mission. He’d heard from another guide that a pair of lions was roaming along the riverbanks somewhere around here and he was trying to find them. At a point that stretched out into the river where it made a sharp right turn, he stopped the Toyota and got out the binoculars, scanning the banks downriver.

Lions along the Ewaso Ngiro. Photo by David Lansing.

“Lion,” he said. “Two of them.” They were sitting in brush on a raw bank of the river that had been eroded during the flood in March, serenely gazing out on the scene before them. They didn’t look to be hunting. Just catching the last rays of the sun and enjoying the passing of the river.

Simeon gunned the Toyota and we hurried over the rutted river road, the vehicle bouncing and jostling us about as he sped through potholes and over rocks. About fifty yards short of where we’d seen the lions we came to a Y in the road. Coming up one part of the Y towards us was a white mini-van with five or six tourists in it. They’d also either seen or heard about the lion sighting. Simeon floored the Toyota, trying to cut off the mini-van before we both reached the point where the two roads merged into one, but the other driver was quicker and pulled ahead of us.

Within minutes there were two, then three, then four other game lodge mini-vans, all headed for the same destination. By the time we got to where the road ended at the river’s edge, there were six different vehicles all pushed up against each other, heads sticking out of open roofs, cameras clicking away. Simeon tried to maneuver the Toyota off-road so that we might have an unimpeded view of the lions, but every time he shifted position, one or two of the other vehicles did as well. Everyone was trying to get in the front of the pack, as close to the lions as possible. It was ridiculous. It felt like we were all a pack of hyenas, snapping and nipping at each other. Here we’d made a special trip to come to Samburu because Pete was afraid that the Masai Mara would be touristy and full of mini-vans and it hadn’t been the Mara where we had freeway jams of mini-vans but in Samburu.

We told Simeon to forget about jostling with the other vehicles and to move on. We backed out from the river and drove further down the road to a high point that looked back at where we’d been. The two lions, annoyed by all the activity, had left their restful perch over the river and were slowly ambling along the banks upriver, away from the vehicles. We stayed just long enough for Pete to shoot some photos of the beautiful golden river at sunset and the clusterfuck of vehicles gathered along the banks.

It made me realize how fortunate we’d been on this trip. We’d traveled from the Tanzania border almost all the way to Lake Turkana and this was the first time we’d been out game viewing where we actually had to hassle with other mini-vans and tourists. Everywhere else we’d been, from Cottars 1920s Safari Camp to Sarara to Lake Paradise, we’d practically had the place to ourselves. We’d been spoiled. But it just goes to show you that when you come to Africa, you need to due your research. Or you’ll end up fighting a dozen mini-vans to get a look at a couple of lions. And that takes all the pleasure out of the experience.

My tent room at Elephant Watch Camp. Photos by David Lansing.

I have given short shrift to Oria Douglas-Hamilton (nee Rocco), the other half of the Save the Elephants/Elephant Watch Camp team. Oria grew up along the shores of Lake Naivasha where, of course, the wildlife filmmaker Joan Root lived and was murdered five years ago this January. As Oria writes of herself, in the early ‘70s she had “a whirlwind courtship carried on via small aircraft and irregular messages” with Iain before the two married and moved to Lake Manyara in Tanzania where Iain was studying elephants.

Everyone I talked to about her told me she was her own force of nature and just as much a spitfire as her husband, and I’d have to agree with that. She’s a very strong woman, as one has to be to survive out here and run a successful business (or several of them; in addition to running Elephant Watch Camp, Oria also runs Olerai House and Sirocco House on the shores of Lake Naivasha).

What I have found most amazing during my stay at Elephant Watch Camp is the realization that the whole thing was destroyed back in March and Oria had to rebuilt it from scratch.

From a press release by Save the Elephants on March 4: “Early this morning Save the Elephants research facility and Elephant Watch Safari Camp located in Samburu National Reserve, Kenya, were completely destroyed by unexpected flooding of the Ewaso Ngiro River, along with seven other neighbouring lodges. At approximately 5 a.m. this morning, a wall of water akin to a tsunami surged through Elephant Watch Camp, catching tourists and staff unawares and sweeping away tents and facilities. It has been confirmed that camp owner Oria Douglas-Hamilton and guests managed to escape to safety by climbing to higher ground. Several members of staff were trapped in trees until the water subsided later today.”

Painted shower buckets at Elephant Watch Camp. Photo by David Lansing.

Yet here we are and the camp looks wonderful. The photo above shows my room which, like all the rooms, is built around a tree (I have to remember to duck my head when using the loo as a very low branch cuts directly through the entry way). A thatched roof covers a sandy area covered with sisal mats and behind that is the tented bedroom with mosquito netting. What you can’t see behind the netting are the colorful streams of fabric hanging from the ceiling like billowing sails “to celebrate,” as Oria puts it, “the soul of nomads.”

Oria is very insistent that everything be as ecologically green as possible and so there is solar heating of the water and solar electricity and the lights in my tent use rechargeable batteries. Although there’s a river just feet away from the tents, the water is too muddy for anything other than damping down the sandy soil and washing. Drinking water, as well as water for washing and showering, comes from a deep well that was dug for the camp. When you want to take a shower, you let someone know and a bucket of solar-heated hot water is brought to your tent and poured into a colorfully-decorated pail that has a shower nozzle attached to the bottom. No lollygagging here, for when the water is gone, it’s gone. Which can be a real problem if you haven’t gotten all the soap out of your hair. But it certainly makes you appreciate how precious water is in this dry part of the country.

Iain and his smashed truck. It took a lickin' but kept on tickin'. Photos by David Lansing.

I just had to run this photo of Iain Douglas-Hamilton standing next to this smashed Toyota pickup. There’s a story here, of course.

An elephant’s life expectancy is about the same as a human’s, and just like us, you can pretty much divide it into three parts. For the first twenty years or so, they are just growing up and trying to figure things out. For the next thirty years, a male elephant is in his breeding prime. And then for another twenty or twenty-five years they grow old and grumpy and die. As Robert Ruark wrote of this stage, “There would come a day when another bull would challenge him and defeat him and drive him off from the herd, and he would then roam about with his own acolytes, growing older and sourer and fuller of malice toward everything. His feet would hurt and his teeth would ache from decay in the mammoth nerve, and ants would crawl up his trunk and drive him mad. He would run amok and trample native shambas and crush in the water holes, and finally somebody from the Game Department would come along and shoot him and take his tusks back to the D.C. in Isiolo.”

So, two researchers from Save the Elephants were out in the field doing their thing when they came upon one of these old, bad-tempered rogue elephants (I think Iain told me it was Pretty Bom Bom, but I can’t remember for sure). Probably his feet hurt and his teeth ached and he was undoubtedly in a foul mood for, without provocation, he  charged the researcher’s Toyota. You see that little crease on the door just to the left of the Save the Elephants logo? Well, that’s where the bull first hit. His tusk glanced off the door and went through the window and came out through the roof. Then he rolled the Toyota.

Pete McBride ready to go look for elephants. Photo by David Lansing.

Amazingly, it landed back on its wheels. But the old fella wasn’t through. He came back for a second charge and this time his tusk went clear through the back seat and came out the middle of the roof. You can see the entry and exit points and all you can think is, My god, those poor people inside the Toyota must have been smashed and bloodied.

But, no, they were not. Miraculously, neither researcher was hurt. And the bull elephant, having spent his anger, marched off.

But here’s the really remarkable thing: After the elephant left, the two quivering researchers wondered how in the world they were going to get back to the research center. Because they were crazy with fear and not thinking clearly, they tried to start the pickup. And it cranked right up. And drove just fine all the way back.

It still works. Iain told me that when they want to freak out Samburu tourists going around in minivans, they’ll crawl into the wrecked pickup and drive it around. “We always get a chuckle out of that,” he says.

So just for fun, I had the photographer, Pete McBride crawl into the Toyota so I could take his picture. It wasn’t easy. He had to carefully slip through the shattered windshield, trying to avoid all the rusty sharp edges of the smashed frame and then fight through all the cobwebs and insect nests. But it made for a great photo.

Simeon and our Samburu guide running into a family of elephants. Photos by David Lansing.

Late this afternoon Pete and I went out with Simeon and a Samburu moran looking for game. It didn’t take us long. Five minutes from camp we came across an open woodland where at least two families of elephants were feeding. Even though there were lots of totos in this group, the elephants weren’t the least bothered by our presence. We sat in our open-air vehicle while the cows with their calves passed within feet of us. Simeon was able to identify most of the elephants.

“They all have different characteristics,” he said. “Some are playful, some are cranky, some are mischievous.”

There is Baby Breeze, he told us. “Do you know Baby Breeze?”

We didn’t know Baby Breeze. Evidently Baby Breeze is almost as famous as Dumbo. Last year Iain Douglas-Hamilton and his daughter Saba were involved in a BBC documentary called The Secret Life of Elephants which shadowed several Samburu elephants and their struggle for survival. Two of the stars were Baby Breeze and his mother, Harmadon. Baby Breeze was born during the bad drought of 2009 and the question in viewer’s minds was, Would Baby Breeze survive? Well, he did. And now people come to Elephant Watch Camp just to see Baby Breeze and his mom, along with other members of the Winds family.

Is this Baby Breeze or Miro? Who knows.

I should explain about the whole elephant family thing. Iain and his staff at Save the Elephants have named all the elephants and put them into families. So there’s Chagall and her calf Miro who are members of the Artists family, Baby Oscar Wilde who is from the Poetics, and, of course, Baby Breeze who is from the Winds family.

This all makes me a little uneasy. I can see how, if you’re studying elephants or any other animal, it is necessary to distinguish amongst them, but anthropomorphism is always a slippery slope, particularly with wild animals. First we give them names, like Chagall or Breeze, and then we give them human characteristics, like this elephant is playful but not very bright and that one is a trickster, and then we turn them into cartoon characters and they stand up on their hind legs and start singing “Hakuna Matata” like Timon, the “no worries” warthog from The Lion King (Timon, by the way, is Swahili for “absentminded or careless”). And then they’re just like people, aren’t they? Or maybe they’re better than people because they’re “simpler” or “purer.”

How do you make rational policy decisions regarding wildlife once they’ve taken on human characteristics? An old bull elephant may be raiding the shamba of a Samburu manyatta and destroying the crops that feed an extended family of 100 people, but who is going to give the order to cull Pretty Bom Bom, a notoriously bad-tempered bull elephant in Samburu?

So here’s the dilemma people like Iain Douglas-Hamilton face: His organization depends on the generosity of donors, most of them Westerners and primarily from the U.S., to support his research. In order to get people to cut him a nice big check, he has to do more than just shout, “Save the elephants!” He has to make a Disneyfied documentary that gives elephants names, like Baby Breeze, and then write a heart-breaking narrative about the Winds family struggle for survival and accompany it with a moving score and the whole thing has to make you feel that if you don’t send a big check off to Save the Elephants today, Baby Breeze just might die.

Now if you do all that, and your funding depends on donors who are now invested in Baby Breeze and want regular updates on how he is doing, how do you ever make logical, scientific decisions that might call for the culling of some animals?

Here’s what Iain Douglas-Hamilton said to me: “I’m not universally opposed to hunting as a form of wildlife conservation in Kenya. I have to say that it depends. And what it depends on is whether it could be a controlled policy and with the proper profitable land use. But it could never be used with elephants because elephants are smarter than other animals.”

Are they? Or, in giving them names and families and human characteristics do we just like to imagine that they are? I mean, have you ever heard of the Save the African Wild Dog organization? Well they’re out there. And African wild dogs are much more endangered than elephants. They’re just not as cute. They have a reputation for being ruthless and vicious and pests. So they don’t get the financial support that Save the Elephants does. But are they really less worthy of our attention? Are elephants “smarter” than African wild dogs and should that really determine which species gets saved and which one doesn’t? Anybody up for Save the Hyenas?

David Daballen. Photo courtesy of Save the Elephants.

I should have mentioned that joining us for lunch yesterday was David Daballen, the chief field researcher for Save the Elephants. I know a bit about David. He’s a Kenyan who grew up near Lake Paradise on Mount Marsabit and last year he and seven other crazy individuals walked from Marsabit across the Kaisut Desert to the Mathews Range following a nomadic bull elephant named Shadrack. Actually, not all of the eight men walked across the Kaisut Desert; some gave up and had to be evacuated. But David Daballen, along with his brother Teteya, completed the trek.

So why did David walk across one hundred and thirty miles of Kenyan desert following an elephant? They wanted to see what it did when it crossed the road. No, that’s not correct. David and the others followed Shadrack because they were trying to learn something about the elephant’s habits. They wanted to learn how he knew where to go. And how he survived what David calls “streaking”—covering immense distances from one safe spot, like Marsabit National Reserve, to another sanctuary, like Samburu. As Iain told me, “Streaking is when an elephant runs like hell, usually in the middle of the night, over open land because he knows he’s not safe.”

David knew that Shadrack was a streaker because two years ago, they’d put a GPS collar around his neck and monitored the big bull elephant leaving Mount Marsabit in May and heading south, across the Kaisut Desert, traversing the same inhospitable stretch of lava fields, dry riverbeds, and thick bush we’d just covered from Lake Paradise before eventually reaching the elephant-friendly Ngeng, a river valley in the Mathews Range. He’d covered 129 miles in five days.

What David Daballen and the other researchers at STE wanted to know was: How did he navigate his way to the Mathews Range? Was he following some unknown and ancient elephant pathway? How close had he come to people? And they figured the best way to get those answers was to walk behind Shadrack. For as long as it took.

The only problem is that when elephants streak, they generally tend to sleep very little. In order to keep up with Shadrack, David and his team needed to cover over 25 miles of desert a day—for five days. Which, they discovered, just isn’t possible. “We could keep up with him during the day,” he told me, “but he’d walk all night long too. That’s where he lost us.”

Anyway, I mention all this because David was sitting down at the far end of the table during the somewhat heated discussion between me and Iain and a couple of times I looked down at his end of the table and tried to get him involved in the conversation, curious to know what a Kenyan who grew up near Lake Paradise thought about some of these issues on animal conservation, but each time I did, I’d see him look nervously at his mentor and then defer to him. I think he was afraid to speak up in front of Iain. Which was a shame. I really would have liked to hear what he thought about all this.