Now the elephants know— they have learned the high places where green forest walls form a calyx around them, hiding the sky (even the sky). So still in the dim brush, their gray bulks shift shape to shadow, pierced leaf-light. They fade in the gloom and hide like the sky. For thick on thick air: the sulfurous storm stink, windborne, the blood scent, far thunder, a portent of days red with men. The hard hail that kills, the hard eyes that see through the tangle to sky, and even the elephants, even the elephants die.