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Our flight left in thirty-five hours from Ouagadougou in Burkina, three hundred miles away. I had left everything too late. But then the man grabbed my hand and led us out the station door to the highway where a bush taxi sat low on its haunches, piled high with cargo and packed with people. Our man argued with the ticket seller and came out smiling with two tickets. We climbed into the back of the covered pickup, over legs and chickens and sacks of roots, and squeezed ourselves into place. Issa came to the window in his purple tunic. We looked into each other’s eyes. I saw his sadness and desperation. I felt none of that pain from before, the separation I’d always had to bear when leaving yet again for another year. I felt a kind of solemn truth.

On the Bandiagara Pass the hazy band of the Sahel spread below us, luminous sands dotted with thorn trees, blue distance. We came down through the red cliffs. The Fulani man beside me was asking me the way as if I had lived here all my life. In Koro a battered white van was waiting in the heat. The owner said he now had four passengers including us, but he was waiting for ten more to make it worthwhile. Or did we want to pay the extra fare? My mother sat defiantly on the hard bench to wait it out, the sun burning the sands at her feet.

Dusty, windblown Koro. We left on the red road in an old white mini bus without windows, seven of us, the two smiling Dogon men with their sacks of onions, the Sorai in his striped tunic and white turban and sacks of salt, a young boy in lime green head cloth, and a speckled chicken at our feet. We wrapped scarves over our faces and hung on to the metal frames of the windows, bumping on the hard benches that were not fixed to the floor, as the bus rattled along and the smoke swept in and veiled us. We traveled among the great gesturing baobabs and bristly thorn trees blooming yellow flowers. We went with the camel running down the embankment, head held high, with the spotted goats moving in the bushes and a herder boy standing still against the sky. I saw my mother’s face of pure joy. This was her element and mine, traveling free. The sun was setting in Mali, that golden amber sphere burning into dust.

Erika Connor is an artist and writer from rural Quebec, Canada, with a love of animals, nature, myths, and culture. She has taken care of wild birds and raccoons in rehabilitation centers, worked for the Humane Society’s “visiting dogs in hospitals” program in Canada, traveled by white horse both in West Africa and Mongolia, observed wild horses in Mongolia, lived with the Fulani and Bambara people of the Sahel, and continues to lose herself between the worlds.

MARCIA DESANCTIS

One Day, Three Dead Men

Oh Russia.

THE CONCIERGE TOLD ME IT WAS THE HOTTEST JUNE DAY on record in Moscow. In front of the National Hotel, the air was thick with a million floating seeds from the poplar tree. The Russians call it “summer snow,” and in the heat, the white fluff stuck to my neck, shoulders, and legs as I drifted through the streets of the city I once had known well but now, barely recognized. I was back in Russia after a long absence and after three days, I was still hopeful I would see what I had traveled all this way to find.

It was a homecoming of sorts. Twenty-eight years had passed since I first traveled to the then-Soviet Union. I had arrived there in June of 1982 with Mom, Dad, and a brand new degree in Russian Studies. I was a wide-eyed Cold War baby who had spent the last four years reading deeply—very deeply—into the tortured Russian soul. It had been an obsession since tenth grade, when I won a school essay contest. I have no memory of the topic, but I do recall the prize: a collection of novellas by Dostoevsky. It beats me what a fifteen-year-old public school cheerleader found in The Gambler, but I began to devour those dark tales, and soon began to study Russian during weekends and summers.

I spent my college years in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, a daylight-free warren of classrooms occupying the basement of