Chapter 3 — Where Old Elephants Rest

Three days after the unfinished conversation with my father, a light yellow envelope with the Hoang Kim Group logo was sent to the camp via the district post office. Ha Lam held the envelope in her hand, her finger skimming over the embossed words in the left corner — "Dear to: Owner of Chu Rinh Elephant Sanctuary" — before tearing it out to read.

The content of the letter was quite polite, even a bit too welcoming compared to what she had imagined. Hoang Kim Group expressed its "appreciation for the domestic elephant conservation work" that her family has carried out for more than thirty years, and also offered to have a meeting to "discuss the possibility of cooperation for sustainable regional development", along with an invitation to attend an introduction of the Dai Ngan Safari project to be held in the district center at the end of the month.

There was not a single word in the letter mentioning the purchase of land, but Ha Lam read between those beautiful lines and still clearly felt the true intention. She brought the letter to the porch and showed it to her father.

Mr. Thach wore old glasses and read each line slowly, his face not showing any obvious emotions, but Ha Lam noticed that his fingers tightened on the edge of the paper when he read the part about "sustainable development".

"They're smart," he said when he finished reading, placing the letter on the table. "Don't say directly that you want to buy land, but invite me to listen to their presentation first, so that I can see for myself the benefits and be satisfied."

"Should I go?" Ha Lam asked.

Mr. Thach thought for a moment, then nodded. "You should go. If you don't go, you won't know what they plan to do, and you won't be able to prepare anything to deal with it. But when you go, you have to be alert, don't get carried away by their promises."

While waiting for the day to attend the project introduction, life at the camp continued with its usual rhythm, although in Ha Lam's heart there was always a vague worry. Mun was still limping despite being given medicine, causing Ha Lam to decide to find a way to invite a specialized veterinarian to examine her more closely, because her and Bay Kinh's knowledge, despite their extensive folk experience, was still limited when it came to the complex diseases of this giant animal.

One afternoon, while cleaning out an old veterinary medicine warehouse filled with long-expired bottles, Ha Lam accidentally dug out a small wooden box hidden behind a corner of the shelf, covered in dust. She opened it, and inside was a stack of yellowed black and white photos and a few leather-bound notebooks with frayed edges. She turned the first few pages of the top notebook, her father's familiar handwriting appeared, but the handwriting was younger, more shaky than his current handwriting.

"March 14," the first line reads, "Today, old Ama Rin took me out to meet the Morning Star for the first time. It stood in the middle of the beach, much taller than I imagined, but its eyes were gentle, not like what people say about ferocious forest elephants. Old Ama Rin said, this elephant belongs to your family, send it to me to watch for a while, because your family is in trouble and cannot afford to feed it through this lean season."

Ha Lam sat stunned, her hands trembling as she turned to the next page. The name "Ama Rin" made her heart beat faster — it was Ama Not's father, the current village elder of Chu Rinh village, the person Bay Kinh mentioned the day before as the master who passed on the profession to her father. And the sentence "send it to me for a while" — that phrase was like a small needle pricking straight into the place where she had been vaguely doubting for the past few days.

She intended to continue reading, but Bay Kinh's call from the beach startled her. She quickly closed the notebook, put it in a wooden box, and put it back in its original place. It wasn't that she wanted to hide it, but she felt like she needed time to calm down before facing what that notebook might reveal. There are truths that, once known, will never return to the state of not knowing.

That night, lying in bed, Ha Lam tossed and turned, unable to sleep. She remembered every story her father told her as a child about Sao Mai — always the story of an elephant abandoned in the deep forest, weak, starving, and whom he found and saved. He never mentioned the name Ama Rin, never said that Sao Mai was originally an elephant from another family, entrusted rather than abandoned.

Is the story "saving abandoned elephants" just a version told to make it easier to hear and more acceptable to the narrator's own conscience? Or is there a much more complicated question behind it, a question that she, as a child growing up in her father's complete love, has never had any reason to doubt?

The next morning, Ha Lam decided not to ask her father directly, but instead, she went to meet Bay Kinh earlier than usual, bringing two packages of black sticky rice bought at the market as gifts.

"Mr. Bay," she sat down next to him on the stone bench under the tree next to the barn, "I found your old notebook in the medicine warehouse. In it, there was a mention of old Ama Rin, saying that Sao Mai was an elephant kept by the old family. Is that true?"

Bay Kinh sighed deeply, his calloused hands rubbing his knees. He was silent for a long moment, long enough that Ha Lam almost thought he would dodge again like always, but then he spoke, his voice low and slow as if he was searching for a memory that had been hidden for too long.

“That's right,” he said. "Back then, in the year of great crop failure, our whole village was starving. Many families had to sell buffaloes and cows. Some families even had to send their elephants to someone else to keep because there wasn't enough food to feed them through the lean season. Old Ama Rin's family had three elephants, so they had to send one less. At that time, Mr. Thach had just come here to work for a few years, and had learned a little about how to take care of elephants since he was old, so he trusted him to send Sao Morning to him."

"So why did Sao Mai later become the elephant of our camp, instead of returning it to old man Ama Rin?" Ha Lam asked, her voice shaking slightly.

Bay Kinh looked at her, his eyes both pitiful and somewhat heavy as if he was considering what to say. "That story, it's better for Mr. Thach to tell you himself, daughter. I'm just an outsider, I know a part but not the whole story between the two families. But I tell you the truth, Mr. Thach is not a bad person, has never been a bad person. It's just that at that time, things were much more complicated than you think now."

That answer both comforted and made Ha Lam more confused. She didn't know where to start to find out the full truth, while her father was in poor health and seemed tense every time he mentioned the past, and Bay Kinh always chose to speak half-heartedly and push the responsibility to someone else.

That afternoon, while feeding Sao Mai, Ha Lam stood for a long time next to the old elephant, placing his hand on its massive body covered with wrinkled skin. "You know everything, don't you," she whispered, "you know everything, you just can't tell me."

Sao Mai seemed to understand something in her voice, gently lowered her trunk, gently touched Ha Lam's shoulder, a familiar comforting gesture that it still gave her whenever she was sad. Ha Lam closed her eyes, leaned her head against the warm faucet, and let the tears suddenly flow for no apparent reason - out of love for her father, out of confusion at the incomplete truth, or out of a vague fear that what she knew was just the very small tip of an iceberg still hidden underneath.

Late in the afternoon, when the sunlight was turning pale yellow on the forest canopy, Ha Lam received a call from a strange phone number. On the other end of the line was a young woman's voice, introducing herself as an administrative staff member of the Vietnamese Elephant Conservation Fund, announcing that the fund was reviewing the application for long-term funding that the camp had submitted many months ago, and would send a veterinarian to conduct a field survey next week to assess care conditions before making a final decision.

That news, right at a time when the camp needed a more stable source of funding to cover veterinary costs and food for the elephants, should have made Ha Lam happy. But while her heart was still filled with unanswered questions about her father's past, about the threat from Hoang Kim, she only felt a new pressure on her shoulders - now she not only had to protect the camp from those who wanted to annex the land, but also had to prove to a stranger that this place deserved to continue to exist.

She stood in the yard, looking out at the elephant field fading into darkness, four familiar massive figures moving slowly among the trees, and told herself that no matter how many trials came at once, she would not let anything — not the Golden King, not an untold family secret, not the judgment of an approaching stranger — shake the place that her father, and now she, had devoted their lives to preserving.