In Search of Wild Elephants

Ramadhan is usually a time of compassion, reflection and self-discipline, not of searching for wild elephants. Even if you managed to wake up for the 4:30 a.m. sahur and drink your final sips of water until sundown, a few minutes in the midday Sumatran heat can be dangerous. It is not the time to scour the jungle’s border for wild elephants; yet somehow, I, a non-Muslim experimenting with fasting, found myself some 30 km outside of Stabat, North Sumatra, deep in a fern thicket to document a team of trackers in the field.

Ferns grow dense where the jungle has been disturbed, often due to illegal logging projects or the stalled development of new palm oil plantations. Without the microclimate generated by the old-growth forests — the shade provided by the canopy and the nutrient-dense soil held in place by ancient root networks — only ferns and a few species of particularly robust trees thrive. It’s eerie to take in a place like that: neither dead nor alive, an uncanny emulation of what used to be a thriving ecosystem. Wild elephants frequent these hills in search of food.

We followed the dry, sandy patch created by a mountain runoff. It had not rained for days, another sign of a forest in crisis. A pawprint stopped us in our tracks. “It’s from a…