Wild Meat

by Newton, Nero

  Driving away, he tried not to puzzle over the mysterious fever, forcing himself to think of Carina, what she would be doing late the next morning when he arrived in Madrid. Working, probably. He imagined walking with her near the Puerta del Sol, just feeding on her voice, watching her warm, lightly painted lips form sounds, barely hearing the words.

  Twenty minutes later, beginning the slow climb up to the only negotiable pass leading out of the basin, Tobin lowered his window and savored the forest air, moist and sweet, so different from the sour-smelling deathtrap he’d just left behind. Sometimes, when he took his foot off the gas pedal and let the enormous engine wind down to idle, he could hear a faint sampling of the region’s many night birds. A few sounded close by, and it surprised him that the noisy vehicle hadn’t scared them all off. Sometimes they seemed to coalesce into a single sweet voice, similar to the cries of a small chimpanzee, plaintive as a puppy’s whining.

  When something dug into Tobin’s collarbone, surprise held off the pain for a second or two, until after he noticed the smell. When the pain did hit him, it immediately began to spread. Something scraped across his flesh, tearing skin the whole way from shoulder to neck. His eyes burned and he shut them protectively. When he opened them, his vision was hopelessly blurred. He barely managed to stop the vehicle without crashing, and somehow got outside.

  His whole upper body rang with a harsh stinging. A weight clinging to one side of his upper back kept him stumbling. He tried to shake free but only managed to throw himself further off balance until, after perhaps a full minute, he finally went off his feet altogether.

  He hit the ground with his back but never knew it, was never aware of the impact, only an endless sensation of falling, or maybe flying. Then the music started. The darkened forest canopy above him became a glowing cascade of medieval Italian mosaics, depicting not a grim worker’s camp seen through a rainy windshield, but host upon host of golden angels, and Carina’s face among them. He could smell her skin, and her warm breath told him beautiful things.

  * * *

  “Did you know that my people once lived on the farmlands just on the other side of the ridge?” the old man asked Marcel.

  They were in Marcel’s pickup, a couple of miles outside the camp, just past that big humpbacked thing the American scientist had driven away the night before. It had been looted, and the driver was nowhere in sight. It also smelled like the fever victims at their worst, and Marcel had backed away before getting within five feet of the vehicle.

  “No, I never knew that your people used to live around here,” Marcel said, trying to convey with his tone that he didn’t even care about his own people’s ancient history, let alone someone else’s. He only kept listening because he half believed the old man when he claimed to know something that the scientists didn’t. He claimed to know for certain that the reason the scientists couldn’t identify the mystery fever was that it did not exist, and that fit with the little bit that Marcel had overheard a day earlier. The old man said he was going to show Marcel proof that there was no fever. He wanted Marcel to try and convince the company not to shut down the logging site.

  The old man had been working for Sanderson Tropical Timber longer than Marcel. He was nimble and wiry, and on a work day, he could usually be seen wielding his chainsaw like a Japanese calligrapher’s ink brush as he trimmed branches from trees already felled by younger men.

  “Before the wars for independence, ours used to be the only language you heard out there.” The old man gestured eastward. “But when the fighting got close to us, the French took almost all the land. They set up army camps and moved us a hundred miles away.”

  Marcel yawned. He’d heard the same story back home in Niger, and from his relatives in Nigeria. Heard it a hundred times. The version from Nigeria substituted the English for the French, and in more recent tellings it was the oil company. But the story didn’t change much.

  A minute later they made a right turn onto a trail barely wide enough for the truck’s wheels. Soft green branches slapped the sides of the pickup and poked inside.

  The old man went back to his rambling. “I remember what some of the old people used to say about the valley on the other side of the jagged mountains. They were talking about this place. Right here. No one came here to hunt because they could not carry much meat back over those high ridges. And men who came here looking for farmland never returned. No one ever knew what they had found.”

  “You’re sure this is the same place?”

  “It is. I came in here with Sanderson’s first crew, right after they dynamited a new pass through the mountains. We were clearing away trees to make a road. Even after all those years, I recognized that line of peaks at the top of the ridge. Have you ever noticed they look like giant teeth? Giant crocodile teeth, maybe.”

  Marcel had noticed it.

  “Some of the road builders disappeared into the forest forever,” the old man continued, “and I remembered that this was no ordinary place. It was weeks before some of us began to understand, and a few men had already died by then. At first there were five of us who saw what an opportunity we had here, and we worked together. By the time the camp was up and running, there were only three of us, and the day before yesterday, those two other men died. I am the only one left, and now you are going to join me. But first you have to see.” He paused a moment and said, “Now.”

  Marcel stopped the truck. An old red gas can had been tied to a small tree as a marker. Beyond that, the narrow road diminished to a footpath.

  “We’ll need to widen that path for your truck pretty soon,” the old man said, pointing ahead. “But for now, come over this way.” They left the trail. After a few paces, Marcel looked back in the direction of the truck and saw only undifferentiated forest.

  They stopped at a plastic tarpaulin that had been draped over something waist high and roughly square, about three yards on a side. The edges of the tarp hung to the ground. The old man reached down and lifted one side of it. He told Marcel to back up, then did so himself, pulling the tarp. Very faintly, an animal whimper came from underneath it.

  At the far end of the tarpaulin, an uneven row of low, crude wooden posts came into view. It made Marcel think of a pen for small farm animals, except that the posts were too far apart to keep anything in. They seemed to do nothing but hold up the tarp.

  The whimpering changed to terrified shrieks. A thick rope came partly into view, and Marcel saw that it extended past the penned area and was tied around the trunk of a sturdy tree. The receding tarp revealed more and more of the rope, which went taut and limp and taut again as something tugged at it hard.

  At last the plastic was pulled clear of the pen.

  Marcel could think of nothing to say as he stood looking at the anguished creature writhing on the ground. The old man kept staring at him, waiting for a reaction, as though the sight before him should explain what had become of the driver of the Fat Rabbit. As though it should explain why the old man said he knew that no one was sick from any fever, and why he had insisted on telling his stories about the old days.

  But to Marcel it still gave no answers at all.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The road widened like a river widens at its mouth, and it spilled Amy Kellet’s Land Rover into a shallow sea of red mud. Scents of the cooling forest now wrestled with sharper smells of freshly cut wood and with wandering sewage fumes. She downshifted to second gear, trawled, and surveyed the logging camp.

  The workers’ settlement formed an island seventy yards away, roughly in the center of the clearing. An equal distance off to her right, where the clearing met the forest, sat a white camping trailer with a gold stripe along its body. Guessing that the trailer was the seat of authority, she turned and maneuvered toward it. The mud was shallower here and a layer of wood chips made for better traction.

  As she stopped alongside the trailer, a slender but round-faced man emerged from it. She hopped out to meet him, a
nd he introduced himself as the foreman.

  In halting but passable French, Amy said, “I’m Francine Whelk, from the University of Illinois. The branch office gave me permission to interview some of the workers.” She handed him a letter printed on a faked replica of Sanderson Tropical Timber letterhead.

  The foreman unfolded the letter and frowned. “I wonder why they did not direct you to one of the other locations.”

  “I told them I wanted to visit a site with a diversity of people. I understand there are over ten languages–”

  “But the other camps are just as…diverse, and this one is closing down in less than a week. They’re moving us all to a new site. They decided just a few days ago.” He peered into the Land Rover. “You are here alone?”

  “Only me.” She hadn’t meant to come alone, but the local man she was supposed to meet in Prospérité hadn’t shown up, and she’d gotten impatient.

  “I see you have the company’s permission to be here,” the foreman said. “ But I think these are not the best conditions for your work. Excuse me for a moment.” He went back into his trailer.

  Amy paced around the muddy ground, feeling defeated. Her original reason for making this trip was already moot: barely two hours ago, she’d learned that the person she had come to find was no longer here. The man was a Cameroonian named Robert, a former park ranger she’d sent here to gather evidence that the logging company was abetting poachers.

  Sanderson Tropical Timber, the only American logging company with a wholly-owned operation in the region, had recently gotten a tentative gold star on its green report card. A year and a half earlier, its managers had reacted with explosively apologetic fervor to revelations of poaching and clear-cutting in their logging concessions. The corporation had taken a sustainable-forestry pledge, and had even allowed observers from environmental groups to come and monitor its operations at length.

  But harvesting at this particular site had begun after that round of observation ended. Activists who wanted to see the place had been stalled for weeks now, so the only quick way in was to get hired as a worker, which was what Robert had done.

  It drove Amy crazy that the company had pulled such a slick PR coup. Environmentalists had finally come up with a way to boycott timber wholesalers – which normally have no name recognition among the general public – but Sanderson had danced around the scheme. They’d dumped sixty grand or so into damage control, sponsoring free eco-tours for foreign tourists who came to the area, giving donations to wildlife sanctuaries in various countries – including the U.S., where their efforts were most visible. A sleazy pretty-boy of a VP had actually convinced a lot of people that he was a convert to the cause of saving wildlife, that he was steering his company in the right direction. He’d become a minor celebrity for a while, going on talk shows and urging other corporate leaders to join him on his quest to preserve the natural world.

  All that was fine as far as it went, but it hadn’t really gone all that far. The donations and the openness about logging operations had dwindled to practically nothing over the past year, yet the activist community had not renewed its pressure on the company to live up to its promise of responsible logging.

  So Amy had taken it upon herself to ramp up that pressure again, sending her best snoop into the camp, paying him nearly three times what he’d formerly earned monthly as a park ranger. She’d equipped him with the best telecom service available and a top-shelf smart phone, yet he had dropped out of contact ten days earlier.. Early on, Robert had told her that the geology of the basin made cell reception very spotty, but still she had grown more and more worried when she couldn’t contact him. After several anxious days, she’d cut short her work in Senegal, made her way to Equateur via short-hop flights and buses, bought the Land Rover, and headed into the bush.

  And on the way here, she’d finally heard from Robert. He’d gotten away from the camp safely a few days back, but his smart phone had gotten soaked during a heavy rainstorm. Since Amy’s number was programmed into his phone, he’d never memorized it, so the number was lost with everything else when the phone stopped working. Only today had he managed to get in touch with someone who could give him her contact info again. At the moment, he was still in the capital, trying to find a techie who could retrieve the data from the phone. He and Amy had probably been within a few miles of each other without knowing it.

  “It will be worth whatever we have to pay to get that data back,” Robert had told her. “I got video of machine oils and other chemicals getting dumped straight onto the forest floor. I got poachers laying out freshly shot forest game. Chimpanzees, monkeys, hornbills, and a few other birds…those little red deer, and I think some scaly anteaters. At least half of what they’re shooting is on the CITES list, either endangered or threatened.”

  Then Robert had told her the best part: at least half of the bushmeat wasn’t getting hauled off to the city to fetch a higher price. At this camp, the logging foreman himself was the biggest buyer. According to one of the hunters, someone in the company’s management had instructed the foreman to routinely set aside the best of each day’s kill. Twice a month, a couple of guys came in a pickup truck and paid him triple the going price. Company money had even bought him a freezer for just that purpose.

  A recording of that conversation was one of the audio files he was hoping to retrieve from his phone.

  All of that would be wonderful if the data survived. But just in case it didn’t, Amy wanted to gather a little more evidence of eco-crimes, so she kept driving toward the logging site even as she spoke to Robert. He had apparently read her thoughts, and reminded her that getting in and out of the camp intact would be much more difficult for her than it had been for him, a French-speaking black African posing as a worker.

  After promising Robert she wouldn’t head out to the camp herself, she’d done just that.

  And now that secondary objective was also a washout. There was probably little or no information left to gather because this place would shortly disappear. With no direct flights from Senegal, she’d wasted a day and a half getting to the country, then half of yesterday finding a mud-worthy vehicle for sale in Prospérité, and a big chunk of today just driving here. Robert had said something about the camp shutting down soon, but Amy had thought he was just trying to dissuade her from coming here.

  She noticed a hint of wood smoke amid the general odor of bad sanitation and saw that a couple of women were laboring over cooking fires. She also detected the plain, sweet aroma of boiling tubers. Men trickled out of the forest and were greeted by shouting children. This was exactly the sort of population that had made the anthropologist story a workable cover for Amy and Andre back in the day.

  Amy hadn’t had the chance to give the foreman the full spiel today, which was probably just as well because she could never pull it off half as smoothly as Andre used to. He would ramble on for half an hour about researching the relations among different ethnic groups working together on cash-crop plantations, winging it the whole way. It had really never mattered precisely what he said; he had a strain of charisma that made most people want to help without ever really thinking about why. She pictured him gesturing with the folded sunglasses that were always in his hand as a prop, never on his nose.

  After Amy had saved Andre’s life, and he had laid himself and his millions at her feet, they’d gone on dozens of spying missions together. Andre had almost always done the talking in the field. He used to make up names for the different ruses they used, and had called the anthropologist routine “the Maggie Mead.”

  But Andre was gone, Amy was five years out of practice, and although she didn’t know it yet, the Maggie Mead was not working at all today.

  * * *

  Amy’s principle mistake had been signing the letter as Hugh Sanderson, the company president’s younger brother and VP in charge of African operations. He was the same guy who had been the company’s figurehead during its short-lived green campaign. She had calculated
that a letter from him would make it look as though her visit had PR value.

  Marcel had not bought that signature for a second. Once the decision had been made to close this camp, the company had no reason to let anyone come and look around. Even the observers who had been allowed into the other camps would not expect access to a place that would shortly disappear. The letter was also written in French, and everyone knew that Hugh Sanderson had never learned French, even after a decade or so in Equateur.

  Marcel wasn’t even sure Sanderson was in the country at the moment. He hadn’t shown up when he was scheduled to have his picture taken with the relief trucks a week earlier.

  Two security guards were sitting in the trailer with Marcel. The taller of them asked, “Do you think it’s about the rub’ewa?”

  “It’s probably about the hunting,” Marcel said. “That’s the main thing the foreigners who visited the other camps wanted to know about.”

  The other guard laughed. “She picked the wrong camp. I’ve only seen one hunter around lately, and maybe he’s gone, too.” This guard was almost as tall as his companion and his huge shoulders and chest gave him a barrel shape.

  “Maybe she’s another one trying to find out what happened to that Tobin fellow,” the taller guard said.

  Marcel shook his head. “No one’s asked about Tobin for a couple of weeks. I think that’s done with.”

  The barrel-shaped guard said, “Then it must be about the rub’ewa.”

  The guards’ first language was unrelated to Marcel’s native Hausa, so they spoke with him only in French. But they had heard Marcel use the Hausa word rub’ewa, which meant “rottenness” and referred to the odor. They liked the word because it suggested the French rubis, pronounced roughly the same as its English equivalent, “ruby.”

  Marcel picked up his cell phone. “I’m going to call Sanderson’s secretary, just to make sure he didn’t really sign this letter.”