THE MEMORY OF AN ELEPHANT

An aged African elephant bull travels from Zambia to his homeland in Kenya’s Tsavo West National Park to say his final goodbyes in a debut novel that melds reality and fantasy.

It is 1964, and Kamau Matiba, a young teenage Kenyan, is taking his rite-of-passage walkabout when he hears gunshots. A local band of especially vicious ivory poachers has just slaughtered an entire herd of elephants. When Kamau investigates, he discovers a 2-year-old elephant calf lying beside the body of his mother. The detached blade of a machete is protruding from the wounded animal’s forehead. When Kamau gently strokes him, the calf opens his eyes and looks at him. He is the lone survivor of the massacre. Kamau knows of a place where he can find help, Salisbury Hill Farm, just outside the refuge park. There he enlists the aid of Russell Hathaway, a hunting guide, and his wife, Jean, who runs a small, wild-animal orphanage for helpless offspring. Together, they nurse the calf back to health and name him Anaishi, or “Ishi,” for “He lives.” So begins a tender, sometimes heartbreaking saga that spans three continents, five decades, and a more than 1,000-mile journey by the elephant back to the Tsavo wildlife refuge, his birthplace. The narrative consists of two parallel tales, one tracing the lives of the Hathaway family (Russell, Jean, daughter Amanda, and son Terence) and the other tracking the events in Ishi’s life. They are told through two distinct voices—one, a third-person narrator, the other the “voice” of Ishi, the narrative’s only fully developed character. The book follows the major events in the lives of the “two-leggers,” as Ishi calls them, but never quite makes you feel them. Ishi, however, expresses a depth of love and emotion that is sure to bring more than a few tears. He describes the pain the herd feels when they lose clan members to the poachers: “Every season we would return to the places where our friends had fallen and visit their bones, turning them over and over, remembering their owner, and hoping to find a life force in there somewhere.”

A vivid and timely depiction of the sentience of elephants and the cruelty of ivory poaching.