They’ll be here soon. Young Somali men hired by gangs in Mogadishu to kill for ivory. Tonight, they will walk along this leaf-littered path. Their rifles cradled like babies in their arms and machetes strapped to their legs. They will talk of the money they will earn from the ivory, the food they will eat and the women they will sleep with. It is the talk that will kill them.

The scent of rotting vegetation is strong as we lie in the jungle. Above that, a sweet, sickly smell, from a flower we call the ‘devil’s scent’. The flower is beautiful but it smells like rotting meat. My father was a game warden too. We lived in a village on the reserve. My mother would make his food and wrap it in calico. I would peer over the kitchen table and watch as she would wrap the meat and then the cheese and fruit. My father would be gone a week or two hunting poachers.

The Somali hunters are poor. They make their way in the world with knives and guns. I do not hate them. I lived in Nairobi as a teenager. I know what it is like to be hungry. To be alone and invisible. All of your pain and suffering is nothing. The Bible and the Koran are nothing when you are hungry. When I have a full stomach, in my mind I reach out my hand and say, ‘here, boy, put down your gun. Here is food. Do not kill the elephants.’ I smile and pat them on the head. When full of food, I am the hand of kindness and beneficence, not a killer.

I cannot think like that. It will make me slow when the time comes. The slow die here under the rubber trees and become hyena food. My wife says I am slow in the head. It is true. Other people know more than I do. The white men back at the reservation office with their clean pressed uniforms and books and papers, they know more than me. But out here, I am king.

There are five of us but I doubt there is much fight in Mugambe and Akinesa. I fear they will run when the shooting starts. They are young and untested. Akinesa is newly married and his mind is not on the job. The poachers come in gangs of ten or twelve and they are heavily armed. It is the noise of the weapons that make men frightened. The heart races and the fearful panic. A man who stands and runs in the moonlight gives his position away.

They will run because they don’t want to die for $60 of pay a week. They will run because their wives and girlfriends are beautiful and young and want them home. The dreams of the women are tied to the men. It is a knot of love and fear. They will run because an elephant is just an elephant. As children, we had to shoo them away from the crops and livestock. They trampled everything. We’d hit their grey, wrinkled hides with sticks but they’d come back and eat all of the corn and trample the vegetable gardens. Who wants to die protecting something so stupid?

Why don’t I run? Because these skinny men killed my father. His arms and legs were hacked off. That is how the wardens found him. Five elephants were killed and their tusks cut away. The ground was thick in the blood of men and elephants. I do not call it revenge. It is too hot a word, too passionate. A word like that can get you killed too. You do not think straight.

My wife would be asleep now. How can it be that this moon shines on her and on me? When she sleeps, her lips part and she goes ‘pppt, pppt’ like a tiny bird. It is only something I know. She has a dream that comes many times. She is a child and her mother is a lioness who tickles her feet in bed with her whiskers. Only I know that too.

I am worried about the full moon. One shiny belt buckle and we are dead. I have got up twice from my lie and walked along the path where the poachers will come but we are well hidden. There is no glint from gun or buckle. I put myself in the eyes of the poachers. I walk with their eyes. They will be used to the night. The path is well lit until it turns a under a giant rubber tree. It will be dark until they walk through a shard of moonlight, where a branch has fallen. It will take their eyes a moment to adjust. That is when we will kill. Two of my oldest wardens are on the flank. They will not run. If we catch them unawares, if Mugambe and Akinesa do not run, it will go badly for the poachers.

My grandfather remembered the men going off to hunt, armed with bow and spears. He taught my father some of the ways of the animals. How a springbok will turn to the left in a chase or how a lioness will communicate with her sisters in a hunt. I know only a little of the old knowledge but I know the poachers are coming. The animals and birds have fallen silent now. The men from Somalia know nothing of the jungle. For them, it is an exotic garden; strange and magical. I make a bird noise to tell the others that the poachers are coming.

I watch through the rifle sight as the moonlight falls on to the path. My finger on the trigger. The poachers always walk in a small bunch as if they are friends coming home from school. They are not trained. They do not walk in single file or have a man walk ahead to see if the enemy comes. They talk and laugh. The wardens on the flank have a machine gun mounted on a tripod. It cuts through jungle like a knife.

An ant walks across the edge of a leaf in front of my nose. It has a small object on its back. It is heading back to its nest. I have killed men before but it is not the killing that I think about. It is how everything afterwards returns to normal. A man lies dead on a path. The history of him stops. He becomes a memory for someone. But at the point of his death, the moon shines, the elephants trumpet in the distance and an ant carries food. It is good to remember this. Everything goes on as before.

I wait for a boy to walk in to the shard of moonlight. When I shoot all of the other wardens will fire. We have practiced this but Mugambe is not good at it. Many times, he fires before I do. It is the excitement. The blood rushes to his head. But if we shoot too early, we give our position away. The poachers will flee or go around and attack us from behind.

A baby male elephant about two years old has wandered in the light. He scratches his flank on the rubber tree. He shows no fear. We are upwind of him. I smile but I want the elephant to go. We cannot shoot or we will kill him. The birds and monkeys would not fall silent for a baby elephant. I want to leave my lie and push the elephant off the path but I cannot. They are coming. The baby elephant swings its trunk from side to side. A rock lands on the path. It is thrown by one of the wardens. They are trying to scare the elephant away.

A boy’s face appears in the moonlight. He is smiling. The face of a child maybe ten or eleven years old, framed in white light as I have seen of cherubs in medieval paintings with the light of God upon them. He sees the baby elephant and is yelling to the others behind him. First one passes in to the moonlight, steps back and then another. There are seven or eight of them. They are children. I aim for the first boy. The other wardens are waiting for me to fire. Even Mugambe will not fire. He will think of his young wife who is only four or five years older than these children. He will think of his young brothers and sisters. My son is only a few years younger than the children who are laughing and pointing at the baby elephant.

The elephant moves off the path, lifts its trunk and trumpets and the boys put their weapons on the ground and laugh. One boy trips another and they play wrestle. An older boy’s face appears in the moonlight. He barks an order at them and they pick up their rifles. The older boy has long hair and cut-off shirt sleeves. He wears a red bandanna on his head and smokes a cigarette. I can hear Akinesa move in the lie next to me. He does not know what to do. He wonders if these are really poachers or just children playing in the forest. He wonders whether all the wardens have left their posts. ‘I am alone’, he thinks, ‘should I run?’

The older boy hears Akinesa move and throws his cigarette to the ground. He pulls the bolt back on the automatic rifle and in a crouch, begins to move towards Akinesa. The boys are frightened now. The elephant has gone and the night and jungle surrounds them. Maybe now they notice how quiet it is. The birds have fallen silent. Maybe they notice how one moonbeam has carved through the canopy of the rubber tree, illuminating them like actors on a stage.

I fire and kill the leader. His head flies back and he falls to the ground. The wardens on the flank fire the machine gun and the boys panic and crash in to each other. Akinesa and Mugambe do not run. They fire their rifles as I have trained them. They fire slowly and purposely. In the shadow of the rubber tree, one boy fires his weapon aimlessly at the tree tops. He thinks we are in the trees. Then he runs out of the moonlight towards me, hoping to escape. I can see that in his face. If he runs now, he thinks, he will live. He sprays the jungle with rifle fire and runs. He is very brave. He is running at me with his teeth clenched, his legs moving fast until he in only 40 metres from me and I make my first mistake. I stand and yell ‘stop!’ in Somali but his eyes only widen and he lifts the rifle to his eye and Mugambe kills him and the boy falls to the ground.

We wait for a minute to see if any of the boys are still alive. There is no movement under the rubber tree. No sound. The machine gun has done its job. Amongst the tangle of arms and legs lies a soccer ball. Most did not have time to fire their rifles. There is no identification on the bodies.

In the distance, a female elephant roars a welcome for her calf.