The place looked all the more beautiful from above in the early morning light—the glistening oxbow lake of Horseshoe teeming with elephants. Pods of hippos dotted the bends in the river, bobbing up and down in objection to our presence as we flew over at one hundred meters. It felt great to be up flying a census again. Jon was counting furiously from the backseat, sitting next to Natembo. Gidean was in the front adding the numbers on a chart. After three hours of census flying, I was pretty exhausted. But the place was littered with elephants, which made the time fly by. All morning we had counted groups of several hundred that extended all along the Kwando heading south from Susuwe, and seeing this many elephants was breathtaking. “This is unbelievable!” I said, leaning over to Gidean and speaking loudly through the airplane headset. Gidean nodded, holding his stratified map of coordinates and elephant numbers on a clipboard. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” He leaned over to take a photograph.
