The Devil's Horn

by David L. Robbins

  Neels had never cared how a dead poacher smelled.

  He stood behind Opu, with the photographer beside him. Stench pulsed from the carcass like flames. The animal’s face had been butchered by an ax, hacked deep into the sinuses to carve out the horns by the roots. Jackals and buzzards had mauled much of the meat away from the snout to reveal how the ax had gashed the bone many times.

  Opu fingered a bullet hole behind the rhino’s right eye socket.

  “Entry here.”

  On the other side, he pointed at a second, larger hole.

  “Exit here.” The bullet had flattened on entry, then blown away a large piece of the rhino’s head on the way out.

  “This.”

  He indicated a deep hack behind the rhino’s neck, the cut in the shape of a V as if to fell a tree.

  “And this.”

  Opu touched a finger to a fourth wound, a puncture drilled through the top of the skull. Someone had stood where Neels stood and fired that round.

  Neels growled.

  “I will moer the sons of bitches who did this.”

  Opu and the police photographer paid no mind, but Neels was glad to hear himself say this. He’d come along on the morning chopper ride to make himself freshly angry. His job was a hard one. Anger eased it.

  From his knees, Opu aimed the tip of the knife at him and the policeman.

  “Lift the head.”

  Both men dug hands under the chin. The rhino’s skin was coarse, but its bottom lip felt soft, like that of a horse. Short whiskers brushed against Neels’s palms. With the photographer he shifted the weighty head to the side so Opu could dig into a small tunnel in the dirt. With his long knife the old man pried out a spent round. He held it up for Neels, then nodded to the photographer. The Zulu cop got busy with his camera, shooting close-ups of the carcass, the holes in the head, the one in the ground, and the wreckage of the rhino’s face.

  Opu squeezed the bullet between his finger and thumb.

  “Three hundred grains. Maybe more.”

  Neels agreed.

  “H & H .375 magnum.”

  Opu sealed the round in a clear bag from his kit. He carved a small square of skin and flesh off the rhino’s neck and tucked that in another bag. The beast’s DNA would be recorded and cataloged. Later, if the horns were ever found, they could be typed back to this carcass. The same applied to the bullet; the ballistics would be checked against other poachers’ bullets to help spot a trend, a gang, a farmer’s stolen rifle, any clue.

  Neels reached down to help Opu to his feet. The old man dusted off his knees, then doffed his cap to draw an arm across his brow.

  “This one ran.”

  “Ja.”

  Opu tapped a finger below his temple.

  “They missed the first shot. Caught up with it. Cut the spine. Then.”

  He tapped a fingertip to the top of his own head to mimic the final shot. Opu puffed out his cheeks.

  “One day dead.”

  He gathered up his kit, knife, and metal detector and strode out of the circle of scoured dirt. The flies overlooked the photographer snapping the body. Opu sprayed green paint on a tree branch, to signal park rangers that this carcass had been spotted and recorded.

  Neels walked past the pilot. They’d not met before today. When the ECP called in the coordinates yesterday, this became the first poaching in Neels’s sector in three weeks. At two hundred and twenty-five square miles, sixty thousand square hectares, Shingwedzi was one of the smaller of the twenty-two sectors of the Kruger. Higher concentrations of rhinos roamed to the west in Woodlands and Shangoni and south in the Marula region of the park. Usually, the poachers only snuck across Neels’s territory on their way to or from the border. Shingwedzi was more passageway than killing ground; it saw more spoor and scurrying poachers than killed rhinos. Because of this, Neels made certain the boys under his command were the best trackers and shots in the Kruger.

  The pilot sucked his teeth. “Bliksems.” Though he was English, he used the Afrikaans word for bastards. “Can you ever catch them?”

  Neels stopped beside the pilot. He glanced back, trying to see the dead rhino through this young man’s blue eyes after working one week in the Kruger. Neels couldn’t do it, couldn’t see the tragedy of only this carcass, couldn’t smell just this one.

  He noted the word, “ever.” If he had that long?

  “Ja.”

  While Opu and the photographer recorded the carcass, while the pilot folded his arms and shook his head in the unshielded heat, Neels pieced together the story of the poaching.

  The rhino had run, just as Opu said. A full day of wind and sun had eroded much of the spoor, but there remained enough blood and tracks to guide Neels along the rhino’s path a hundred meters south. The animal’s prints showed elongated strides as he rumbled over the veld; dots of blood marked his dying. A pair of sandals, a small-footed and lightweight poacher, ran alongside. The rhino crashed through scrub and thorns trying to escape, always in a straight line. Why?

  The bullet holes in the skull behind the eyes. The rhino was likely blinded. Panicked. It could only run straight.

  The poacher had dashed up and flailed at the fleeing rhino’s spine with a panga or an ax. Once the cord was severed, the beast dropped like a sack.

  At the spot where the poacher’s sandals joined the rhino’s tracks, Neels hung his bush hat on a branch of a scraggly mopane. This saved his place. He returned to the chopper where the others waited.

  He grabbed his backpack, rifle, and extra water. The cop buckled himself in, silent as his photographs. Opu reached for his own pack and made to climb out.

  “I’ll come.”

  The pilot nodded at Neels.

  “Going off to catch them?”

  “Going to follow them.”

  “I see you meant what you said.”

  “Ja.”

  “Look. That was the last carcass for the day. I’m headed back to Skukuza.” This was the southern sector that housed the central offices for Kruger’s rangers and the airport. “I’ll wait till sundown for you to radio in.”

  Opu dropped to the ground. The pilot brought the chopper to life, flipping switches and toggles. He tugged on his helmet as the copter’s blades turned.

  Neels tossed the young pilot a thumbs-up. He bid no farewell to the stone-faced Zulu cop. With Opu beside him, Neels bent at the waist to hurry out of the chopper’s building wind.

  Lifting off, the copter whipped up specters of dust and blew away the rotten smell. With Opu, Neels returned to his hat, hanging on the spindly tree, and faced east to the border. The buzzards, in flapping flights of five and ten, descended again on the dead rhino.

  For the first hour, Opu did not speak and Neels only muttered. The poachers had done little to hide their spoor leading away from the carcass. They’d trod single file on game paths, and when they left the bare dirt for grass or rocks, the trail took up again in a line straight for the border. This paltry effort to evade insulted him as the sun climbed and the heat peaked in the buzzing bush.

  Neels caught glimpses of three poachers in the earth. One was tall, marked by a longer stride in his sandal prints. The other two were slight, with smaller feet. What were they doing hunting in Shingwedzi? His sector rarely suffered more than a few poachings per year, and these were mostly happenstance and bad luck. In this set of tracks Neels sensed something purposeful, an incautious gait, an unwavering direction. These poachers knew where they were going. The notion nettled Neels more.

  The white rhino they’d killed had been great, a solitary giant. Twenty years ago, when Neels was not a baas and had spent more time patrolling Shingwedzi, he’d watched the bull rhinos sharpen their horns against termite mounds and marula trees, witnessed battles between challengers for mates. The ground trembled when these beasts ran near; who would not tremble to feel this? Who had judged Shingwedzi and Neels vulnerable, to sneak here in the night? The image of the Goliath’s skeleton laid bare and its blood lapped
up drew Neels onward, faster over the tracks, while the sun beat on his shoulders and neck and the rifle across his back. He did not stop because the poachers had not. He could see their feet; walking with them, he vowed he would see their faces.

  Skirting a copse of mopane trees, Opu left the path to squat in the shade. He sipped from his canteen and did not ask Neels’s permission to stop. Neels halted, remaining in the sun. The instant he stilled, the day became hotter.

  Opu asked, “What are you doing?”

  Opu was older than Neels, by how many years they’d never discussed. Neels was not certain Opu knew his own age. He’d been born in a township outside Hazy View, into a hovel and all the poverty no one in South Africa needed to describe. Apartheid had not educated Opu, his poorness had. He retained no vestiges of the ways of that time; he was a quiet man, but his was not a servile silence. Opu had seen much and had learned to let each man see his own. He’d been a petty thief in his youth, a jailbird in his middle years, then a poacher in the Kruger, first a mule, then a shooter. He’d earned less in five years of killing than the men who’d shot the Shingwedzi rhino would for that one job. Such was the skyrocketing price of horn. Six years ago on a cold day, Opu had walked into the offices in Skukuza, a rifle across his upright back. He’d laid the gun on the front desk and asked for Neels. Neels came; Opu requested to work for him. When Neels asked why, Opu said that Neels was the only name he’d heard as a poacher. Old Neels was the scout who trained the rangers. Neels asked, “Why are you no longer a poacher?”

  Shrugging, Opu asked in return, “Why do you stop them?” Neels did not feel the need to give his reasons, thinking them obvious, and seeing Opu felt the same, Neels hired him.

  Opu in the shade and Neels in the sun seemed a silly result. Neels strode under the motionless mopane leaves to sit, checking the ground for ants. Opu handed over his canteen. Neels poured some water in his hand and pressed his palm over the back of his neck to cool his blood.

  “You want to ask me something?”

  The old man scratched his stubbly chin, making a susurrus like the insects around them, the summer thrum of the bush. Opu capped the canteen and spit between his spread knees.

  Neels removed his hat to wipe the band inside with his kerchief. “Go ahead.”

  Opu ran a crinkled hand across the crackling landscape.

  “Why are you out here today? You are a baas.”

  Neels returned his hat to his head, to signal he would not sit long for this. Opu dropped the long fingers, his yellow nails, to tap Neel’s knee.

  “How are things at home?”

  Neels blinked a long moment at Opu, the uncanny tracker.

  “What?”

  “You have not been on the chopper in two years. You have not tracked in the bush in five. I know many nights you sleep in your office. We are following armed poachers together, and the sun is going down. So I ask.”

  “This is my private life.”

  “Then live it privately. Right now, you are not.”

  “My wife left.”

  “When?”

  “Two months ago.”

  The old man nodded sagely. Something fell into place in his head.

  “Why have we not spoken of this? We talk every day.”

  “About dead rhinos. We’re not friends, Opu.”

  Silent Opu looked like a gargoyle squatting on his heels, arms folded in his lap. A bush monkey screeched in a nearby flame tree, flushing a flight of birds. Perhaps the monkey was raiding a nest for eggs. He’d be pecked at for it.

  “Then why did you tell me?”

  The answer was that Neels had woken on his office sofa this morning, a drained Scotch bottle on the floor. Coffee and a shower had not cleared his head or his growing shame, but at least he’d been a drunkard alone. For the hour of sunrise he’d stood in his office window staring emptily over the parking lot at filthy jeeps and garbage bins. For the next hour he’d lain back down on the sofa under more overwhelming sadness, one arm across his eyes like a compress. He hadn’t answered the phone or unlocked his door until late in the morning. When he’d emerged dressed in green camo fatigues, rifle across his back, Neels felt driven out. As Opu said, for the first time in years, he’d stomped to the helipad for the day’s carcass ride.

  The answer, too, was that Opu was a nobody. Neels could fire the old crook without notice or reason, and Opu knew this. And the answer was the bush, vast and uncaring; this was the place to say it, where it would disappear, as it would with Opu.

  Without an answer, with nothing more for Opu to follow, Neels rose from the shade. The sun dazed him until he relocated the poachers’ trail.

  Opu followed at a distance that let Neels feel alone. Far ahead of the old man, where he wouldn’t be heard, Neels argued with her. He did this under his breath at first, then with shouts that he could not control, even if Opu might notice. He told her that she’d abandoned him; she replied that he’d deserted her first, he’d left her for the rhinos. You knew who I was, he said in his head. No, she didn’t realize that he would rarely come home and that when he did, he could not relax, nor sometimes love. He’d asked her to trust him, he’d made promises, she wanted those promises kept. He’d dented a wall to say she didn’t understand, wouldn’t listen. Come see for yourself; I’ll take you. They’re killing four, five rhinos a day in the Kruger, every day. We stop them, only us, no one else. But she didn’t want to see murdered animals, snouts half cut off; who would want to look at that? She’d been just one year in his life, a late wife and his only try at it. His voice and hers replayed the argument they’d had beside the wall he’d struck in the house they too rarely shared. When a green mamba slithered across the game trail ten strides in front of him, Neels took his rifle in hand. She ran out of his head as she’d done from his house.

  The path afforded no more wildlife. This kind of heat made the animals torpid, left them lounging in mud or shadow until dusk, still an hour away. Neels, too, fought off the languor of the sun. Opu was right, he’d not tracked like this out in the open in a long time. He’d lost some of his stamina behind a desk. But he was still sharp enough to spot the second, fresher set of tracks that crossed the game trail.

  “Opu.”

  Neels took a knee beside the new trace, waiting for the old man to catch up. Opu came saying nothing, his face blank, black as the coming night.

  Together they knelt. A sneaker had made this imprint, not the sandals of the poachers they were following, not the boot of an ECP ranger. This mark was from a rubber-soled sport shoe. Opu ran a finger through the dirt next to it, then puckered and blew lightly. He did this until the scuff in the earth turned paler, the soil oxidized by his breath, to match the light-brown color of the shoe print. The wind would have gradually done the same to the track.

  Opu nodded when Neels said, “Two, three hours.”

  They found two more sets of human tracks headed southwest, deeper into the park: another pair of sneakers, one more pair of sandals.

  Opu shaded his brow to look in that direction, at the sere landscape and the lowering sun.

  “What do you want to do?”

  Neels gazed into the Kruger with him.

  “Those others have left the park. These bliksems are still in it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Go to the ravine south of here. Wait there. Maybe they’ll come back that way.”

  Poachers, refugees, anyone without a ranger’s fluency with the land would use natural features to guide their passage in and out of the Kruger. The ravine, a dust bowl in summer, was a prominent landmark in Shingwedzi.

  “What will you do?”

  “What I said I would do.”

  Follow the ones who killed yesterday’s rhino.

  Neels hurried east to beat the light fading behind him. The poachers’ trail waned several times, hiding under dung and the scattered tracks of impalas, zebras, elephants, and giraffes. Each time he lost the spoor, Neels walked in widening circles until the sandal prints resurf
aced. The smallest of the poachers was the guide; a second set of tracks lay on top. The tall one came last.

  A quarter mile from the border, with the sun touching the western rim of the park, the ground turned hard and rocky. The game trails dissolved because the beasts of the Kruger didn’t traffic near the fence. Though the wires and posts were down in many places, the animals stayed away from Mozambique, spooked as if it were a graveyard.

  In the gray dregs of daylight over the stony earth, Neels did not lose the track again. He followed straight for the border. He didn’t expect to find the killers; surely they were gone. But every bit of evidence was valuable. If he found the spot where they’d crossed, the ECP rangers could keep a closer eye there. The intelligence gatherers at Skukuza would record the place, mark their maps, check the number and locations of crossings against the carcass count and sectors trespassed.

  With the sky purpling to the west, Neels approached the border. The tracks had lost their shyness and led him openly over rusting wires and steel poles wasting in the dirt. All three poachers had walked into Mozambique. Neels followed.

  He had the authority to do this. A South African National Parks ranger was permitted to cross the international border in pursuit of poachers, while even a policeman could not. He stepped into Mozambique, onto the dirt border road.

  The red-brown dust kept a memory of what happened here. A bakkie had stopped, driven from the south. The poachers had climbed in. But someone stepped out of the passenger side. A heavy man who made broad, prominent treads in the road. He wore leather shoes with heels.

  The first stars twinkled in a sky that, had it rained or blown during the past twenty hours, would have hidden this part of the story. Neels uttered a thank-you out loud; he took note that he was doing this more recently, talking to no one.