The matriarch leads her family along the path. Wet season has given way to dry, as she remembered it would, and they march north. She recalls a place of grass and shallow pools, through the jungles, over the hills, that way. So she walks in front, and the herd follows.
To navigate, the matriarch does not imagine what might lie ahead. Rather, she lays images from her perfect memory over the landscape before her. Piece by piece she rebuilds the path, adjusting her recollection to fit the next trip. Age adds weight to her steps and certainty to her course.
Even when she had never trod this path, she knew it, as do the young straggled out behind her. Locked in their blood, the histories of their ancestors remind them of this trail. True, elements of the journey have changed with time. Yet the elephants remain constant, feeling earth’s guidance as they feel the shift from wet to dry season.
Soon, they encounter a wooden fence. The matriarch pauses, for it both matches and contradicts the pictures in her mind. They had met the same fence last year, had crushed it into the ground. Beyond had been farms, where humans with rocks had harassed them till the elephants passed.
Trumpeting indignantly, the matriarch flattens the new fence and marches on. Foolish humans should have known better, should have remembered the year before. As creatures who construct their present from echoes of the past, elephants never prevent. But wily humans, always looking toward the horizon and imagining the future – they should have thought around this encounter. Build what barriers or fences they wish, the trail remains.
One day, the path might fail, memory and reality clashing so much that now will abandon then. The matriarch, however, has always trod this path. She does not understand how to blaze a new trail. It will take another to walk that strange future. Until then, she leads, the herd follows.