It was not hard to find the dead elephant.
The stench of the rotting carcass made it easy to track down in the sparse bush. A young male - barely four years old and still an infant by elephant standards - lay on its side in the sand by a river.
Around its feet, the sand had been cleared in small arcs - signs of the animal's thrashing as it struggled to stand and survive.
But there was nothing to eat. Nothing. On the ground, not a blade of grass existed, every green shoot had been stripped from the trees.
For Iain Douglas Hamilton, from the conservation organisation Save The Elephants, it was a heartbreaking sight.
"In all my 12 years here, I've never seen anything as bad as this," he said.
"The last long rains [in April] failed completely, and we haven't had a proper wet season for at least three years. If the rains fail in October and November, we'll go into total crisis. I can't even begin to imagine how awful that would be."
sad situation
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