Chapter Three
That there was an ivory poaching and smuggling ring entering into the state of Victoria worried me a great deal. I worked for the Australian Animal Welfare Strategy Commission, and part of our purview was to investigate illegal poaching. Ivory was making a resurgence, and leaving dead or suffering elephants and rhinoceroses in its wake. I couldn’t sit by and do nothing.
It was by pure chance that I stumbled across a photograph of an elephant’s tusk on the blogosphere. It was in the trunk of a car on a street I was familiar with in Brighton, and that was what led me there that day. I went for a walk-about, asked local vets, animal shelters, and the SPCA office if they had seen or heard anything.
But nobody had. As far as I could tell, the trail had gone cold. A photograph w
