Gorongosa is a park of floodplain, woodland and lake at the southern end of the Rift Valley in central Mozambique, and the war that was fought across it left a mark on the animals themselves. Poachers shot roughly nine out of every ten large animals here for meat and ivory. The elephant cows born without tusks were the ones they left alone, so those cows lived to breed, and about half the adult females in the park now carry no ivory at all. The trait shows only in females, which means every tuskless adult you see is a cow, and the oldest of them lived through the shooting. Fewer than thirty lions were left when the fighting stopped; around two hundred live here now, and the researchers know most of them by name. Prides doze in the open floodplain grass with the bulk of Mount Gorongosa behind them.
Lake Urema sets the year. As it draws back in the dry months, waterbuck, reedbuck and buffalo pack onto the drying grass in their tens of thousands, and the plain is flat enough that the herds run to the horizon. There are so many waterbuck that survey teams gave up counting them by eye and photograph the herds instead, counting the animals off the pictures. The wetland edges are where the birds are: egrets, storks and grey crowned cranes working the shallows in silhouette; from a vehicle they read as white specks, and you need binoculars to get the show. A separate trek takes you out of the savanna heat and up Mount Gorongosa into cool boulder grassland and dripping montane forest, where the green-headed oriole calls above 700 metres and on no other mountain in the country. Farmers on those slopes now grow arabica in the shade of hardwood saplings they plant themselves, so every coffee bush is an argument for leaving a tree standing. The elephants have not forgotten any of it. They are still wary of vehicles, so a good guide cuts the engine and lets them decide how close to you they come.