The Ranger's Notebook

Near the middle of the park, Polly found a small research post: a tin roof, a radio mast, and one ranger drinking tea at a wooden table. On the table, a tablet showed a map alive with slow-moving dots. Each dot was a lion wearing a GPS collar. Polly landed next to the screen and studied it, head tilted, her round black-rim glasses sliding down her beak. The ranger laughed and moved his cup so she could see better.

Stacked by the wall lay a pile of rusted wire loops. Snares. Poachers hide them in the grass, and a snare does not choose what it catches. Teams of rangers walk this enormous park and have pulled tens of thousands of them out over the years, one by one, by hand. It is slow, unglamorous, walking work, and the whole migration passes safely through because somebody keeps doing it.

Nobody knows exactly how old the great migration is. There is no record of it beginning, and no person alive, nor their grandparents, nor anyone in any book, has ever seen a year without it. The rangers are not protecting a place so much as a path, a circle the animals have drawn on this land more times than anyone can count.

Before she left, Polly walked across the ranger's open notebook, leaving two neat lines of footprints in the margin. The ranger did not brush them away. Instead he wrote, under the day's lion numbers: one green parrot, round glasses, very curious. Then he drew a small sketch of her. It was, Polly felt, a fair likeness.