An Inconvenient Elephant Read Free

safari. It’s a lot more wild than anything you’ve probably seen.”
    I supposed that was nice, if I wanted to see more of Zimbabwe. The thing was, I didn’t. I had come here almost a year and a half before to help rescue Margo, a badly wounded elephant, and her calf, and the country had broken my heart. I had never seen such hunger, such deprivation, such desperation, such shortages of everything, and all due to a depraved and indifferent government. Families were living in the streets, huddled under tarps for warmth, digging through garbage for scraps of nonexistent food. Dogs and cats and goats and cows dropped in the streets from starvation.
    We had managed to save Margo and her baby by capturing them in the Zimbabwe bush and flying them back to a wildlife sanctuary in New York, but I had vowed I would never go back.
    â€œSo why don’t you stay on in Zimbabwe instead of goingto New York?” I asked Diamond. “Or do you have family waiting for you?”
    â€œNo family left,” she replied, her face suddenly becoming serious. She scraped her flaming hair back, twisting it into a loose knot, and stared off through the restaurant windows at the black African night. “I was raised in Manhattan by my aunt, but she died,” she added. “So I guess I’m returning to my native habitat—getting my bearings, you know—before I push off again. Most animals do that.”
    â€œNo ex-husband? Ex-boyfriend?”
    Diamond’s face clouded and she looked down at her fingers. My eyes followed her eyes, and I noticed a pale band of skin where a ring had been. She caught me looking and folded her hands in her lap.
    â€œThat’s okay,” I said quickly. “I have one of each, and it only means you still have no one to come home to.” I thought of Tom. We had broken up a year earlier.
    â€œI was married for seven years,” Diamond said softly, “but the jungle took him.” She gulped the last of her coffee.
    â€œTook him?”
    Diamond gave me a sad smile. “The jungle takes everything,” she said. “Eventually.”
    I wondered at her words, then thought she was right, in a sense. The jungle had taken my heart. And all the plans I had made for a conventional life.
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    By mid-morning, we were finally on the charter to Victoria Falls. I peered sleepily from the window of our small plane at the green-and-gold savannahs and blue gorges below. The sky was filled with sponged white clouds, and I could seethe shadow of our plane following us across the thick green treetops below like a faithful puppy.
    An hour later, we landed in a town churning with tourists and filled with tiny roadside stands selling illegally captured, bedraggled-looking wild parrots and cheap African mementos made in China.
    â€œNow what?” I asked Diamond.
    â€œWe could visit the falls,” she said. “They’re only about eighteen miles away, and we have three hours to kill before the transfer van.”
    She led me to a waiting taxi bus. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll keep ourselves busy.”
    â€œWe don’t need to keep ourselves busy,” I retorted, following her. “We are busy. Busy trying to get home.”
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    Mosioa-Tunya, the falls are named.
    â€œThe smoke that thunders.”
    Which perfectly describes the white streaming pillars of water that plunge three hundred feet into an abyss that becomes the Zambezi River, sending up an enormous veil of vaporized, billowing spray. It was a wall of white. A world of white. White sound, white foam, white air from white clouds of water, crashing and hissing on their way to join the river, reverberating with such force that I imagined the sound could reach the floor of heaven. The water was alive, possessed with its own life force, with an energy and animation that was mesmerizing.
    I stood enthralled, too overwhelmed to move, the roar thrumming deep into my chest,