by Stuart Gibbs
“Healthy as can be.” Doc flashed a smile, looking as happy as I’d ever seen him.
It was ten in the morning. I should have been at school, but when word got out that Rhonda was in labor, Mom had called my teacher and said I was having a special educational experience at home. After all, rhinos weren’t born every day.
Dad was already inside the rhino house, documenting the birth with a video camera. The rhino keepers were gathered outside with us, waiting for the chance to see the newborn, as were Pete Thwacker, Kristi Sullivan, and a few other PR minions. J.J. McCracken was also there, though he didn’t seem as imposing as he normally did. Instead, he was giddy with excitement.
Summer was there too.
I hadn’t seen her much in the week since World of Reptiles. Although she wouldn’t admit it, I was pretty sure she’d been avoiding me. The dozens of texts she normally sent me every day had dwindled to nothing, and instead of eating at our regular table in the cafeteria, she’d been AWOL at lunchtime. She’d also blown off the basketball game the previous Friday, as well as pizza afterward with all our friends.
It was all very frustrating. After everything that had happened at World of Reptiles, I was desperate to talk to Summer, but she obviously had the opposite reaction.
And now that she was here, she was keeping some distance between us as well, staying close to her father. Although every once in a while, when I looked her way, I got the sense that she’d just been looking at me herself.
Around the rest of the Asian Plains, everything looked almost exactly like it normally did. At the front of the park, the gates were being replaced (although Pete had argued against this, as it was excellent elephant damage), and work had begun to replace the chain-link fence along SafariLand with a hunter-proof wall, but both those projects were so far away we couldn’t even see them. All around us, the various Asian antelope grazed the same way they always did, oblivious to the birth of the rhino nearby. Every few minutes, a monorail cruised past, full of tourists equally as unaware. No one even looked at the small crowd of people gathered around the rhino house. They were much more interested in the rhinos they could see out in the plains.
The hornless rhinos still looked odd to me, though Pete and Kristi’s disinformation campaign had been a success. “Rhinoplasty for Rhino Awareness” had made the national news, and plenty of stories about how endangered rhinos were had run across the country. Almost no one, even at FunJungle, knew the truth about why the rhinos had really been dehorned—or that the park had nearly been swindled out of them. I figured the story would probably blow up once Athmani and Hondo went to trial, but Pete seemed confident he could keep a lid on it. J.J. didn’t seem to care. “I don’t give a dang how bad it makes the park look,” he’d stated. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure those con men go to jail for a long, long time.”
“Can we see the baby now?” Summer asked Doc.
Doc’s smile faltered a tiny bit. There were probably lots of people he would have preferred to let into the rhino house first, but he couldn’t say no to the daughter of the park’s owner. “All right,” he said. “But there are some rules. The mother and her baby are bonding right now. I need you to keep your distance and stay quiet. Not a word. And you can only stay in for a little bit. When I signal you it’s time to go, you go—got it?”
“Got it,” Summer agreed.
“Ditto for me,” J.J. said, then looked at me expectantly. “Care to join us?”
I pointed to myself, surprised. “Me?”
“Of course. I think you’ve earned this, given all you’ve done for our rhinos. You too, Charlene.” J.J. waved for Mom and me to join him.
I wasn’t sure if J.J. was doing this because he really thought he owed me or because he was trying to make a good impression on my mother after forcing me to investigate a crime behind her back, but I wasn’t going to turn down the chance. I hurried into the rhino house.
Mom followed me. She was still on crutches, but the cast was supposed to come off in a few days.
Summer seemed a little uneasy that her father had asked us to join them, but once we were inside the rhino house, she seemed to forget all about me. In truth, I forgot about Summer, too. For a few moments, at least.
The newborn rhino was adorable and awe-inspiring. She was slightly pinkish with enormous eyes, and like all the other rhinos at FunJungle except for her mother, she didn’t have a horn. However, her rounded hornless nose looked cute, rather than strange. The remnants of her umbilical cord still dangled from her belly button. As we entered, she was getting to her feet for the first time. Rhonda helped her, nudging her lovingly, and then the baby took its first few wobbling steps.
Summer gasped with excitement beside me.
Dad had a bunch of cameras set up on tripods around the room, though he was also recording with a handheld video camera. He turned away from his work for a moment to grin at Mom and me, then went right back to filming the baby again.
The little rhino staggered over to Rhonda’s side and began to nurse.
Doc signaled our time was up. Everyone seemed disappointed—I could have happily watched the baby all day—but we knew the deal and filed outside again.
“Well, that was certainly something special,” Mom told me, beaming. “But now, kiddo, it’s time to get you to school.”
“Teddy can ride with Summer if he wants,” J.J. offered.
Summer looked caught off guard, unsure what to do.
“You’re sure that’s okay?” Mom asked. She was still angry at J.J. for how he’d dealt with me, although she had promised Dad she’d try to keep her cool around him.
“Of course.” J.J. grinned. “Summer’s heading that way anyhow. We’re testing out a new bodyguard today.” He pointed to the hulking man who’d been hired to replace Hondo. “I think we can trust him. He can’t be worse than the last guy.”
It had turned out that getting the rhino horns had been Hondo’s idea from the start. In fact, he’d taken the job with the McCrackens only with the intent of figuring out how to get the horns; he had connections to a crime syndicate in Vietnam willing to pay millions for them. But while he’d figured out that it wouldn’t be hard to kill the rhinos, getting away with the horns was more difficult. Then he’d met Athmani.
Athmani’s job at FunJungle was only short-term. He knew that within a few months he’d be back in Africa again, and sadly, being on the front lines in the war against poachers was a rough life. It didn’t pay well, and it was extremely dangerous. More than a thousand African park rangers had been killed by poachers in the past few years, and Athmani was looking for a route to a better life. The enemy had approached him many times in Africa, but he’d always refused them because he didn’t want to harm any rhinos. Now, at FunJungle, he saw a way to get the horns while letting the rhinos live. With Hondo’s help, he could make more in a few hours than he would have in an entire lifetime of honest work in Africa. The money was too tempting to resist.
“Which is exactly why poaching is out of control right now,” Mom had told me. “You can’t stop the slaughter by merely going after the hunters. You have to stop the demand. You have to educate people that they’re paying millions of dollars and dooming animals to extinction for something that is medically useless. If we don’t, your children might very well grow up in a world without wild rhinos.”
Standing in the Asian Plains outside the rhino house, I could see two of the other Asian rhinos in the distance. Although they didn’t have horns, they were going about their lives as usual. The SafariLand monorail had paused near them, and the tourists were piling up to take pictures. It seemed to me that, for any one of those people, a world without rhinos would be a much sadder place.
I noticed Summer was watching the rhinos too, smiling at the sight of them.
“You’re cool with me riding with you?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. The first words she’d actually spoken to me in a week.
“You’re sure?”
/>
Summer bit her lip, then seemed to realize that she couldn’t avoid me forever. She stepped away from the adults, indicating that I should join her.
“I know I’ve been acting strange lately,” she said. “I just . . . I didn’t quite know how to handle things after the other night. It was all kind of, well . . . embarrassing.”
“It wasn’t your fault that you almost fell into the crocodile pit. We thought Athmani was trying to kill us.”
Summer shook her head. “Not that. I mean, that was scary and all, but . . .” She took a moment, trying to figure out what to say next. “I kissed you.”
Now I wasn’t quite sure what to say. So I didn’t say anything at all.
Summer continued. “I need you to know that wasn’t, like, a big deal, ‘I’m in love with you’ kiss. It was more like a ‘thank you for saving my life’ kiss. I was happy to be alive, and I didn’t really know what I was doing.”
“I’d figured as much,” I said. Although the truth was, I’d secretly been hoping that kiss was the other kind.
Relief descended on Summer. But she still seemed nervous around me. “Whew. Oh, cool. I was worried that you might have had the wrong idea there. I mean, I didn’t want to get in the way between you and Violet or anything. . . .”
“Me and Violet?” I asked.
“Yeah. In case you’re interested in her.”
“I’m not.”
Summer took a step back. “But she’s the head cheerleader. And she’s gorgeous. And she likes you.”
“I guess,” I said. “But I like you.”
The words hung there for a moment. I started to feel like an idiot for saying them, wishing I could take them back.
But then Summer blushed. And smiled a little. “You do?”
I felt myself blushing as well. “Yeah. You didn’t know?”
“I thought you only liked me as a friend.”
Another silence fell over us. Neither of us was quite sure what to say again, though I felt a lot happier than I had in the last week, and at the moment, it had nothing to do with the newborn rhino. Before either of us could figure out what to do next, J.J. called to us. “Hey, you two! You can talk in the car! You’ve got school today!”
Summer and I headed back toward him.
As we did, Kristi Sullivan asked, “Does anyone know what we’re going to name the baby?”
“I think we ought to let Teddy have the honor,” J.J. said.
Everyone turned to me, seeming to like the idea.
Even Mom seemed to have forgiven J.J. For at least a little while. “Any ideas?” she asked.
I turned to Summer. “What’s your middle name?”
“Jade.”
“I like it,” I said, then looked to everyone else. “How about ‘Jade’?”
Murmurs of agreement rippled through the group. Mom looked from me to Summer, then smiled knowingly.
“I’m kind of partial to that name myself,” J.J. said. “Jade it is.”
Summer blushed again. “C’mon. The car’s parked all the way up by the front gates.”
We set off through the Asian Plains, walking side by side. Somewhere along the way, we started holding hands. And we stayed like that all the way through FunJungle.
Rhonda Is Not the Only Rhino in Danger
It’s not an exaggeration to say that rhinos could disappear from the earth in your lifetime. In the last fifty years, the number of rhinos on earth has declined dramatically. One subspecies, the northern African black rhino, has gone extinct, while there are fewer than one hundred Sumatran rhinos left in the wild—and fewer than fifty Javan rhinos. And in the year it took me to write this book, the number of northern African white rhinos dropped to five left in the entire world. Meanwhile, in recent years, cases of poaching have doubled in southern Africa. There’s a human cost too: More than a thousand park rangers have died fighting poaching in the past decade.
And the saddest part of all this is that the slaughter is pointless. It is funded by people who think that rhino horn has curative powers, when there is no scientific proof of that at all.
As I pointed out in this book, how to best protect rhinos is a complicated issue. There are advocates for legalized hunting, dehorning rhinos in the wild, educating people so they won’t buy rhino horn products anymore—and many other methods. But everyone agrees that the situation is critical. The rhinos need your help. Now.
For more information on what you, your friends, and your school can do to keep rhinos from going extinct, visit rhinos.org and savetherhino.org.
Sadly, the elephants discussed in this book are being poached in the wild as well. Nearly one hundred a day are killed. You can find ways to help them at sites like 96elephants.org and awf.org.
And if you’re interested in helping protect other animals as well as rhinos—or critical habitats—all around the world, check out the websites of these wonderful organizations.
World Wildlife Fund: worldwildlife.org
The Nature Conservancy: nature.org
Center for Biological Diversity: biologicaldiversity.org
Thanks!
Stuart Gibbs
STUART GIBBS is the author of Belly Up, Poached, Spy School, Spy Camp, Evil Spy School, and Space Case. He has also written the screenplays for movies like See Spot Run and Repli-Kate; worked on a whole bunch of animated films; developed TV shows for Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, ABC, and Fox; and researched capybaras (the world’s largest rodents). He lives with his wife and children in Los Angeles.
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
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Simon & Schuster
New York
Visit us at
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Also by Stuart Gibbs
The FunJungle Series
Belly Up
Poached
The Spy School series
Spy School
Spy Camp
Evil Spy School
The Moon Base Alpha series
Space Case
The Last Musketeer
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SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2015 by Stuart Gibbs
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Book design and principal jacket illustration by Lucy Ruth Cummins
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gibbs, Stuart, 1969–
Big game / Stuart Gibbs. — First edition.
pages cm
Sequel to: Poached.
Summary: “Someone is trying to hunt FunJungle’s Asian greater one-horned rhinoceros, and twelve-year-old Teddy Fitzroy is on the case.”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4814-2333-5 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4814-2335-9 (eBook)
[1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Zoos—Fiction. 3. Zoo animals—Fiction. 4. Rhinoceroses—Fiction. 5. Endangered species—Fiction. 6. Poaching—Fiction.]
I. Title.
PZ7.G339236Bi 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2014042145
