Balloons at Dawn

On her last morning, Polly woke in the dark to a sound like a dragon clearing its throat. Out on the plain, great balloons were filling with hot air, their flames glowing orange inside the cloth so that they sat on the grass like enormous lanterns. She flew between them as they rose, one small bright bird among the giants, her round black-rim glasses catching the burner light.

From the height of the baskets, the whole week lay below her at once. The kopjes were grey islands again. The river was a silver wire. And everywhere, in lines and loops and slow-moving columns, the herds were still walking, the way they had been walking when she arrived, the way they would be walking long after she was gone.

The animals will cross into the Maasai Mara in the north before the season turns, and when the short rains come they will swing south again, back to the ash plains where every one of them was born. The circle will close and open and close again. It is the largest movement of big animals left on Earth, and it has never once needed an audience.

The balloon drifted, and the passengers inside it were quiet, because the plain at sunrise makes people quiet. Polly flew beside the basket for a while, then tipped her wings, banked east into the rising sun, and let the Serengeti fall away behind her, still moving, still grunting, still endless.