Rhinoceros Summer

by Jamie Thornton

  With ropes, sticks, and bed nets, they erected a makeshift cover to keep most of the insects out for the night.

  “Stay tucked inside your sleeping bag,” he said to Lydia before going to bed. “You get scared or something bothers you, just yell. I’ll be right there.”

  She looked at him with skepticism. He could almost hear her thoughts—why trust him to rush to her call? Why would he be more honorable than any other man here? But she didn’t say anything, just nodded and crawled into her sleeping bag and made a moat around herself out of camera equipment.

  Upon waking the next morning, Caleb immediately looked for Lydia’s sleeping bag. She seemed intact. He saw Jack still sleeping as well. The humidity of the dew created a layer of dampness that pressed on him. The faint glow of the rising dawn on the horizon strengthened.

  He looked over to Lydia’s sleeping form again and then around the tarp. All sleeping, except for Paul. He was smoking in his sleeping bag. Paul turned his head on the pillow, caught Caleb’s gaze, then turned away and let out a long spiral of smoke that drifted over the other sleeping bodies, forming a layer of fog that slowly escaped through the netting above them.

  Once everyone was up, they had a light breakfast of fruits, nuts, and soda. Paul called them around for a quick pep talk. “Now, what we’re going to do is act out a scene that’s been a part of human history since it first began. We’re gonna hike to the herd and test ourselves against a beast more powerful than us.” He nodded to Jack. “Damn straight.”

  “Damn straight,” Jack echoed.

  Paul motioned Juja and M’soko to start out. Everyone carried a gun except for Lydia. “Safety on, Jack. Safety on till we get close.”

  It took twenty minutes to trek back to where they’d last seen the herd.

  A loud boom sounded, unlike any noise an elephant might make.

  “What was that?” Jack said, his hands covering his ears.

  Paul took out his binoculars.

  Even though the herd was still over a mile away, Caleb didn’t need binoculars to see the plume of smoke rising from the ground. Caleb held his rifle out with one hand to make it easier to run to the smoke.

  He knew he wasn’t being smart, knew the men probably had AK-47s, but he couldn’t stop.

  He heard the old mother’s trumpeted warning.

  He began running, knew it was stupid to run towards men who had guns and more, but he couldn’t stop, not until he knew for sure.

  He strained to see individual elephants in the grass. Strained to see anything in the black smoke. He was getting close, gun in one hand and video camera in the other. Then, on top of the old mother’s call, he heard a low sucking noise and a sharp boom that threw him to the ground.

  The ringing in his ears couldn’t drown out the elephant cries. His eyes ran with water as he scratched to get the dust out. Cries told him, the smell of charred flesh told him. Caleb rose from the termite mound the blast had thrown him against.

  Men in jeeps hiding among the acacia trees.

  Caleb knew he could easily become one of the dead laid out on this field. He kept running. Drew his gun up to his shoulder.

  Ran so fast, but he couldn’t block out the cries of dying elephants. Ran so fast, but he couldn’t block out the image of the old mother lying on her side with her belly split open. Her trunk sensitive enough to hold a single stalk of grass, blown off and lying several feet away. He ran past the uninjured elephants making their escape, crying out their grief and rage.

  He ran to the trees to catch the animals who’d obliterated an entire genetic line of elephants. Who’d killed a family. He let off a shot.

  “Caleb!” Paul shouted.

  Caleb kept running.

  6

  “How could this have happened? Why are poachers with grenades in your hunting bloc?” Caleb shouted at Paul next to the Land Cruiser, out of sight from the rest of the group. “What were they doing here?”

  “This is not my fault,” Paul said.

  “Really.” Caleb spit in disgust. His heart still pumped adrenaline through his body. He’d gotten to the trees in time to fire a couple warning shots and had seen the look of surprise on their faces. White faces.

  He’d practically run into the middle of a war zone. They had guns with them but hadn’t the stomach for killing humans—yet. They drove off without the tusks. If David ever found out how he’d risked himself, Caleb would be in for a long shouting match. “Who did you sublease your bloc to? I want names, phone numbers. I want answers. They won’t get away with this once the Department finds out.”

  Paul ran a hand through his hair. “Did those fancy government offices and that Wildlife College make you forget how it is out here in the real world? You think I want them taking out my trophies? I don’t have the money to send guys out on patrol. I don’t get paid for all those dead elephants. Useless. A useless waste.”

  At least half a dozen members of the herd were dead—the old matriarch and big bull among them. Those on the outer fringe, the adolescents, had managed to run off. Caleb knew from their spoor that many were bleeding. He’d taken his samples where he could.

  His tests and lab results would help construct the case. He would test stress hormones, testosterone, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, rate of wound healing. He didn’t know for certain what the results would show, but based on the behavior of the elephants alone, he was pretty confident the various tests would parallel that of what was seen in humans. Prove their social interdependence. Prove their animalness, their humanness. Their right to not watch their babies stolen or their parents slaughtered.

  He had some hard decisions to make. Whether or not Paul had known about the elephant poachers, there would be an investigation. But there was still the rhino, and now there were the surviving elephants to track down.

  Paul handed over his satellite phone without argument.

  Caleb contacted the local game officer and outlined the situation. It had taken many minutes and many transfers to get permission to burn the ivory. Usually the tusks were confiscated and stored in some government facility. But Caleb wanted them gone, wanted it impossible for anyone to profit off the ivory.

  Caleb handed the phone back to Paul.

  “We’re burning the tusks,” Caleb said.

  “Except for the big bull. We’ll let that be Jack’s trophy.”

  Caleb was about to argue, but then shut his mouth. He’d have to talk with the Department again but this kind of thing wasn’t unheard of. Better the tusks from a dead elephant than let Jack go out and kill another one. “Think you can talk him into it?”

  Paul didn’t bother answering.

  “Why did it take so long to find these elephants? What were you playing at?”

  Paul considered Caleb’s question, then shrugged his shoulders. “I knew I could get more money out of him.”

  7

  It was disgusting work, hacking out the tusks. It made Caleb feel like a poacher himself, working his way through the bodies, cutting off their heads to access the tusk roots.

  There would be mounds of paperwork for him to fill out. How many lives had those poachers destroyed today? How many elephants with their seventy-year memories had they traumatized, made psychotic so the next time they saw humans it would turn them into murdering beasts?

  Lydia stood near him as he worked, her pale face sick with concentration as she snapped her pictures.

  “You can wait in the car, you know.” Caleb forced the blade of his saw into another dead elephant face. Blood ran up both his arms. He felt it on his cheeks too. They’d had to put one dying mother out of her misery, too far gone to save. The bullet had nicked an artery, spraying him during her last breath. Lydia took pictures of the whole thing.

  “I want to be here. I…” She lapsed into silence. “This is important to document. This wasn’t right. How does something like this happen?”

  He stopped working long enough to see M’soko and Juja adding tusks they’d just cut out to the
burn pile. He returned to his work. “Safari operators purchase rights to hunt a certain quota of animals on an area of land for a certain amount of time. They’re called hunting blocs. That’s the legal kind of hunting.” Caleb steadied his hands on the saw, ready to rip it through the flesh. “Game preserves make up more than twenty-five percent of Tanzania, land that local tribes covet as their populations increase. One elephant straying too far from the parks could destroy an entire village’s crops in one night, leaving them to starve. So sometimes the locals poach. But this wasn’t by the locals. This was done by foreigners, greedy people who like to destroy things.”

  “Will the poachers come back?”

  Caleb looked up into the huge glass lens that stood in for Lydia’s eyes. She hadn’t put that thing down for a second. Smart of her, he guessed, since the video camera he’d lost during the explosion was long crushed under some dead elephant.

  “They’ll be back. And if they don’t come back, the elephants who survived will return to grieve and we gotta get the tusks out before then.”

  “Why?”

  He almost asked her to get that impersonal object out of his face, but he held back. She was under enough stress without him adding to it.

  “Elephants take just as much care of their dead as humans do. They’ll visit an elephant’s bones for years. They’ll stay with it for weeks, caressing the trunk, the tusks, the body, as if they could bring it back to life. The only way to get to the dead elephant is to kill the living one.”

  He looked over the bloody field. “There’s been enough of that today. We have to make it so there’s nothing to come back to. We’ll burn the ivory and the smell of smoke will keep away the elephants so they don’t become repeat targets for returning poachers.”

  Caleb wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. He needed to concentrate on the job in front of him, not philosophize about things he couldn’t change.

  “We gotta get the tusks out so there’s no reason for the poachers to come back for them,” he said to Lydia’s big glass eye. “If the elephants come back and see these tusks still here, they’ll destroy the ivory—smash it against some trees or something. They’re smart. They’ll know that’s why these ones were killed.”

  Once the work here was done, he’d open up files for each elephant that survived. Full descriptions and coordinates estimating the likely direction each had taken. Some were wounded—all were most certainly traumatized and likely to cause trouble for a nearby village. “I’ll need a copy of your pictures to go in my report,” Caleb said.

  “But why…” Lydia’s voice sounded muffled behind her camera and she dropped her voice to a whisper. “Why do you have to cut the face off?”

  Caleb swung the axe down one more time before speaking. “Elephant tusks are like human teeth, with deep roots. I have to chop off the trunk and surrounding face bone to cut out the roots and get the tusks out.”

  A crunching noise made Caleb spin around, axe in hand.

  Paul stood to the left of Jack, arms folded across his chest. “You almost finished?”

  Caleb nodded. “Two more left. Give us another hour.”

  Jack pushed his belly out over his belt. “I heard what you said about the elephants. I think that’s goddamn ridiculous. Right, Paul?”

  Paul didn’t turn, just flicked his gaze to Jack and then to Caleb’s blade as it went to work on the old bull’s head. “Don’t underestimate these creatures. That kind of talk will get one of us killed.”

  Jack raised the gun he still carried in his left hand.

  “Safety on?” Paul asked.

  “What? Yeah…yeah.” He stomped to the car. “When am I gonna hunt a live elephant, Paul? We’re not gonna find a goddamn one standing around these dead things.”

  “M’soko.” Paul called out. “Stay with the one Caleb’s working on and keep the tusks separate from the ones he’ll burn. Bring it back to base camp but keep it out of sight.”

  “Why?” Lydia whispered to Caleb.

  “Why what?”

  “Why is he taking these ones?”

  He jerked his finger back to where Jack sat twirling his rifle butt in the dirt. “He’s a dude if I ever saw one.”

  “Dude?”

  “It’s what we call a man who’ll take credit for a kill he didn’t make.”

  8

  Back at Owl Point that evening, Muna threw together a feast to celebrate the end of the safari. The staff pulled away the canvas walls of the dining tent to allow a view of the African sunset. The big bull’s tusks leaned upright against the main tent pole. Paul requested everyone dress in his or her finest to make this last night special. He didn’t say a word about the massacre that had taken place in his hunting bloc.

  Caleb walked between two poles, not bothering to use the tent entrance since the canvas was down. The tent looked like a skeleton of its former self, bleached bones of wood, flesh long rotted away. He saw both Paul and Jack already seated at the table. They’d set the satellite phone between them, one wine bottle already empty, another halfway gone.

  “You should have been there, Mary.” Jack had the satellite phone in his hand. He leaned over the table, his cheeks flushed and his eyes shining in the slanted sunlight. The receiver crackled as Mary gave her response but Caleb couldn’t understand her from where he stood.

  Paul took the phone from Jack. “He’s a damn fine hunter. One of the old kind. We fended off those other elephants trying to take the tusks from us—”

  The phone crackled as Mary’s words cut through. “Sounds dangerous.”

  “Yeah. We’ll be back at the resort tomorrow to give you the full story,” Paul said.

  Jack said goodbye and Paul ended the call.

  Something bumped into the backside of Caleb, forcing him to break eye contact with Paul.

  “Oh, sorry.” Lydia’s voice.

  “My fault,” Caleb said, moving out of Lydia’s way. She wore a fitted shirt and a black, wispy looking skirt that fell to her knees, revealing the skin on her calves. She stared at the ground.

  “Did you know about their story?” Caleb jerked his head at Paul and Jack.

  Lydia shrugged her shoulders and avoided eye contact. “They were talking about it on the drive back. Paul said this kind of thing happens sometimes.”

  “He would.”

  She glanced briefly into his eyes, scaring him with the emptiness he saw. She went to the table and sat in the chair furthest from Jack. Caleb shook his head, ready to sit next to her so Jack couldn’t. Before Caleb took another step, Jack jumped up.

  “If you don’t mind dear, I’d like to sit next to you on our last night together.” Jack took a seat next to her and leaned in, his wine glass dangerously close to tipping into her lap.

  Caleb gritted his teeth and sat at the table opposite the two of them so that he could watch everything. He also poured himself a large glass of wine.

  “Would you like to drink tonight, Lydia?” Jack asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes,” she said softly.

  The crackle of the satellite phone cut through the tent.

  “What’s that?” She asked and stood up so quickly Jack’s glass tipped and spilled wine across the front of his pants. She mumbled a “sorry” but didn’t stop to help him wipe it up. Instead, she came around to Caleb’s side of the table and stood between him and Paul so that he could smell lavender on her.

  “They were just talking to Jack’s wife back at the resort.” Caleb emphasized the word, hoping it would put some shame into Jack. But Jack had already left to change his clothes.

  “Muna,” Paul yelled out, “light the lamps.”

  The sun had set so that even without the canvas walls, the tent felt small and enclosed. Muna came in with a long fire match and lighted both oil and heat lamps.

  Paul stowed the satellite phone away and returned to the table. He refilled both his and Caleb’s glasses. “Sure you don’t w
ant a drink? It’d help you relax.”

  Lydia shook her head and murmured, “No.”

  Paul glanced at Caleb then went to open another bottle of wine. “He’s just flirting, you know. Harmless.”

  Caleb’s anger flared but he tried to control it. “What’s this story about Jack killing that old bull? You’re not going to tell Mary what really happened out there?”

  “You pegged him for a dude same as I did.”

  “So you cheating clients out of their hunts now? That’s how you run a successful business?” Caleb knew his teeth were bared, as if he was an adolescent elephant making a play for dominance.

  “Shut your mouth. Don’t tell me how to do a job you didn’t want.”

  “Did you manage to fire a single shot these past fifteen days?”

  “He’s coming back to the tent. Now if you can’t keep your damn mouth shut, you best go to yours.”

  Caleb stood up from the table, knocking the chair backwards.

  Paul placed the wine glass onto the middle of the table and stood up. “This isn’t the place—”

  “This is exactly the place.” Caleb moved to an empty space of floor in the dining tent, but Paul did not move. “If you don’t get your ass over to settle this, I’ll come to you.”

  Paul remained silent and still.

  Caleb kept his hands fisted as he stalked over to Paul.

  “Please.” Lydia stood frozen in place, shock again on her face—the look he’d help put there so many times already. “Please,” she said again in a strangled voice. “He’s your father.” Her cheeks were flushed and she looked ready to cry. She looked as if all reason had abandoned her world. As if, for the first time, she realized she was in a wild place where animals were supposed to be more dangerous than humans but just the opposite was true.

  She held her hands so tightly together Caleb could see the veins stand out. The warm glow from the heat lamps cast a rose-colored light on her skin. His chest blossomed with anger. The silent laugh on Paul’s face made him want to scramble over the table, crash the wine glasses, tip the bottle so red liquid spilled across the table, knock the chairs over, break the tusks in half, bring down the wooden skeleton around their heads.