Geometric elephant head tattoo

The elephant came down through the birches again last night, the one with the patterned ears, and stood at the edge of the bean rows until the dogs gave up barking. Ma says it is an old bull who lost his herd on the far side of the ridge, and that he has been walking the forest's rim for three seasons looking for the way back. I did not believe her until I saw the light come up behind him and his ears lit like the quilt on her bed, every triangle and diamond gone gold at the edges.

I walked out with the lamp this morning and he did not move. His tusks curve like the new moon in your drawings, and the trunk hung down to the wet grass and curled there, as if it were thinking something over. I counted the chevrons across his forehead the way you taught me to count stitches, and lost my place at forty. He looked at me with small eyes, and I thought of the grey cloth you sent from the city, the one with the dotted patterns, and how I wrote back that nothing out here looked like it.

Ma says to leave him be. Mr Okafor from the mill wants him shot before the harvest, and I told him to try. Nobody here has the nerve, least of all him.

The last thing: when the sun cleared the trees, he lifted his trunk and pressed it against the lamp in my hand, very gently, as if checking whether I was real. Then he turned and went back into the birches, and every pattern on him seemed to shift with the light, like a cloth being folded away. Come home at midsummer. I will show you where he crosses.

Your sister, Ilse