Saena comes to life with the Earth. The first few rays of the sun streak across the vast grassland, bringing it to life. There are a few rumblings already in the herd, Saena isn’t the first, but she is among the first to wake up to the glorious sight of an African sunrise. With the shake of her head and a soft grunt, Saena ambles along the thin tall Savannah grass, making a soft rustling sound. Saena is forty two years old, and if times had been simpler, she would have been sure to live for another thirty odd years. But times are no longer simple and Saena is wise enough to understand that. She is one of the roughly 600,000 African elephants that remain on the planet, and while Saena hasn’t been informed so by experts, thousands of years of evolution have given her the instinct to know that her kind is endangered.
Saena is not the matriarch of the herd, but she commands a lot of respect from the younger elephants, primarily due to her heroics three years ago. Her herd remembers the day well, for elephants are cursed with the gift of a very sharp memory. Saena wishes she could erase some memories, but nature will not have it so. A few dark memories should remain within us for us to truly understand the value of good times perhaps. Saena moves further along until she reaches her two calves, one male and one female. They are still asleep, still in their childhood years and Saena looks at them lovingly for a moment. A rustling to her left reveals another advancing adult female elephant, Saena’s sister. Saena angles her body to face her sister, and inter-twines her trunk with her sister’s.
Having said hello to her sister, Saena is glad she has family around her. Family will protect her and her young ones from the new threat that is picking up pace along the grasslands. She strokes her young calves across their backs with her trunk, urging them to wake up so they can join the herd and head to the lake for their first drink of the day. The young elephants of the herd move their feet quickly to keep pace with the larger and wiser ones of the herd. Saena is seven and a half feet tall, about an average size for a female African elephant. She weighs a little over five thousand pounds and moves swiftly with the herd. The matriarch leads them to the large lake, a little over a mile away. Through her grunts and soft rumblings, the matriarch is able to direct the herd in the right direction if they go astray, but most of them are now familiar with the path they take for the lake every morning, what with the razor sharp memory and all.
Saena moves briskly along the right periphery of the herd and on reaching the lake, nudges her two young ones into the lake and sprays gallon after gallon of water on them playfully. She is able to store two gallons of water at a time in her enormous trunk, but does not need to fill it to full capacity just yet. The water reaches halfway up Saena’s tree trunk like legs, and with a little effort she is able to move within the like. As her young ones play, Saena slowly moves away from the lake after getting her morning’s worth of water. She slowly walks away from the lake and stops, scanning the horizon. The world has changed fast in the last few years, Saena and her herd have been introduced to a new and unusual kind of threat. Read More