Wild Meat

by Newton, Nero

  at Point Brumosa University down on the central coast. Stephen had gone to Point Brumosa as an undergrad and had taken some of Elaine’s classes before settling on history as his major.

  Elaine’s research dealt with hominids from two to three million years ago. Not the earliest of early humans, but getting back there pretty far. Anyone who dealt with the fossil record from that period also knew something of the variety of non-human primates that had come and gone in the intervening eons.

  Stephen had let Elaine in on the Baja secret right from the beginning because there was something about the images that screamed primate. Not big primates, as in apes or humans, or even monkeys. He had in mind a category of much smaller primates, most of them nocturnal, called “prosimians,” which included bush babies and lorises from Africa, and tarsiers from Southeast Asia. He’d shown her the photos and repeatedly tried to get her excited, with limited success.

  “If these pictures really are from the Middle Ages,” Elaine had argued, “then they’re from a time when people seriously believed in all sorts of fantastic creatures that lived out past the horizons. How about the headless men with faces in their chests? And animals that had the head of this and the body of that and the tail of something else?”

  But Elaine had finally admitted that the drawings didn’t quite have the feel of mythical beasts. They seemed to be meant as realistic representations of something the artist had actually seen. One piece even depicted a stand on which an entire set of bones had been mounted, similar to the way modern museums display fossil skeletons.

  Because of the drawings, Stephen’s interest in primates and evolution had slowly rekindled, although most of the Baja envelopes remained unopened in the orange garage.

  He’d come to think of that airtight box as the kind of ancestral mummy that native Andean people once stored in caves and brought outside to be venerated on the most important feast days. The feast day for this particular mummy, it seemed to him, might not come for many years.

  But in fact, it had arrived this blazing summer morning.

  * * *

  The cats kept clamoring for food and attention, and the iguana on the bookshelf sneezed. Stephen promised he would tend to them soon, but first he wanted to microwave yesterday’s coffee and read a little news online.

  Browsing the headlines, he found a lengthy article about an Australopithecus find in Chad. The story provided links to other articles involving Africa, and to a forum called PrimateWeb, where messages were posted by anyone with an interest in non-human primates. Institutions were listed after the participants’ names: Dublin Zoo, Melbourne Primate Research Center, University of Arizona Anthropology Department….

  No affiliation appeared after the name Caroline Yi, only an email address. Most of her posts dealt with poaching near logging camps, but one gave a description of an animal carcass she had seen but failed to photograph. She asked for help identifying it.

  No one had posted a helpful reply, and Stephen doubted anyone would. The combination of features Ms. Yi described was too improbable for the scholars on this forum to take seriously.

  After all, Stephen had gotten nowhere trying to persuade his cousin Elaine that an animal of very similar description might really exist.

  One of the cats was sharpening her claws on the edge of a vinyl armchair, really ripping the crap out of it, but Stephen didn’t notice. He even forgot all about his usual hour-long morning run.

  A person he’d never met was trumpeting information nearly identical to the content of his dark secret, and the academic world wouldn’t listen to her.

  The young male tabby was on the kitchen counter, loudly tearing open a plastic bag of bread rolls. The iguana knocked a lamp off of the bookshelf in its quest for a sunnier basking spot. Stephen was aware of none of it.

  The day had come for the mummy to be brought out of its concrete cave – the whole mummy, or as much of it as was still intact. The threatening inquiries on behalf of INAH had stopped almost two years ago, and Stephen had nearly all of summer vacation left. It was time to do some research.

  He headed off to a friend’s place to borrow a set of studio spotlights, then went to the orange garage, and finally home to his apartment. After many deep breaths, he started slicing envelopes open.

  More than half the envelopes were ones that Mario had sealed up and loaded into the big suitcase before Stephen ever arrived in Baja, so their contents were entirely new to him. There were new texts and new images and, to his relief, not too much crumbled debris so far.

  He stayed up half the night with his digital camera in hand, begging forgiveness of the paleography gods for blasting the sensitive old drawings and documents with bright light.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The big guard with the broken nose checked the sheet of paper he’d found in the American woman’s Land Rover. A squiggle of red ink had been added at the end of Avenue 9, where he now stood. Nothing on the map indicated what was located at the red squiggle, but it wouldn’t take long to narrow the possibilities. The “Avenue,” a broad strip of oiled dirt, was only a block long

  It had been weeks since the woman appeared in the camp, and he’d been waiting eagerly to follow up on this. Marcel had kept him busy with the animals – the cages, the feeding, the capture of new stock. Finally, he’d managed to get some free time during one of his delivery runs into the city. The American woman probably wouldn’t be in Prospérité any longer, but this seemed like a sensible place to begin tracking her.

  Suntanned young foreigners strolled in twos and threes, wearing denim pants and loose cotton shirts. Some carried backpacks, glancing from battered guidebooks to signs over doorways. A few of the women wore colorful wraps that covered their hips and legs, like the Indian ladies in the marketplace across town.

  Most of the places here offered lodgings. A sign on the door of the Auberge Gecko advertised a café and bar on the second floor. The Pension Baobab had the outline of its namesake stenciled on its front door, although none of those fat-trunked trees grew in Equateur.

  He was close; he could feel it, and he knew Sanderson would be happy. The others, especially Marcel, had given up on finding the woman, but the guard had convinced Sanderson of the need to track her down.

  A few days earlier, Marcel, the old man, and both guards had been at Sanderson’s mansion just outside the city, discussing their new arrangement. Sanderson had mentioned that the woman was making trouble for them again, rousing the people he called “tree heads” to hurt the company’s business. She’d used yet another name this time around, but it had to be the same person because of the dates during which she claimed to have been at the logging camp.

  Sanderson also let his four new partners use a small extra office for “market research.” Sanderson’s infusion of capital into the operation had caused it to expand with astonishing speed.

  The big guard had searched for more information on Caroline Yi, discovering that the woman was also telling scientists all about big nocturnal animals in the rainforest of Equateur. No one seemed to be interested in her story so far, but if they ever started paying attention, there would be adventurers and scientists combing the place, looking for the animals, and that would be the beginning of the end.

  The guard had shown Sanderson this evidence and had convinced the boss that the woman needed to be tracked down. It was possible that she didn’t know what purpose the animals served, that she was just some curious nature lover, but no one wanted to count on that.

  So Sanderson had told the big guard, “See what you can do.”

  The clerk in a place called the Hotel d’Or grew tense when he saw the enormous visitor stride in through the small front door. The guard produced a police ID that he’d borrowed, for a price, from a real policeman he knew. He asked whether the clerk remembered a guest named Francine Whelk.

  The clerk did not, nor was the name Caroline Yi familiar. The big guard described the woman he was looking for, and suggested that she might have disap
peared for a few days after checking in. The clerk replied that people often paid for several days’ stay in advance before going on tours in the bush. That way they could leave some of their bulkier possessions behind. He could not remember everyone who did that.

  The clerk did, however, remember one woman who had paid in advance for two weeks, left for a few days, and returned in terrible condition. Badly injured, filthy, and deathly sick, she had gone to a clinic and then checked out of her lodgings for good later that night.

  The clerk reached for the open three-ring notebook on the counter and turned back a few pages.

  After each guest’s name were the dates he or she had checked in and out, country of origin, passport number, and the bearer’s city of residence.

  The big guard had never heard of Amy Kellet’s home city, but knew the name California. He left the Hotel D’or feeling exhilarated.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The lone message in Caroline Yi’s inbox was from somebody in Oakland who described himself as an amateur historian. The guy insisted he’d seen pictures of animals just like the ones Ms. Yi had described. He asked if she could possibly sketch the creature and email him a scan. Amy almost didn’t respond, but finally decided that dialogue with another amateur was better than none at all. She began sketching on ruled paper in a spiral notebook.

  She didn’t like drawing because she’d never been good at it. She could create a somewhat recognizable image of something in front of her, given enough time, but had never practiced enough to be able to get it right in fewer than a dozen tries. Drawing from memory was even worse. Crumpling paper after paper, she fumed at herself for not getting a photo of the animal.

  After most of an afternoon, she managed front and back views that seemed to be about right. She took the evening to craft a picture of the limbs and head that was more schematic than realistic. Late the next morning, she photographed her drawings and sleep-walked through the gelatinous heat to the CyberCafé Pirogue.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Hugh Sanderson could never remember the names of the two guards from the logging camp. Marcel had told him at least twice, but he had never been able to commit African names to memory at the best of times. Like Amy Kellet, he thought of the two men simply as Tall Guard and Barrel Guard.

  On paper, the guards were now part of the mansion’s security team, but in reality they still worked with Marcel. Their rounds took them from the officially abandoned logging camp, to the Free Forest Campground, to the mansion, and to the warehouse space that Hugh had just bought in the city.

  Marcel was the new overseer of the Sanderson Free Forest Campground, a patch of land that the timber company had leased from the government a year and a half earlier, providing a free campground for eco-tourists. It had been a big part of the company’s green-image campaign and still was, but now the campground served a much more useful purpose.

  Marcel had actually come up with a few good ideas. He had been the one to suggest that Sanderson call his secretary from the logging camp and say that he was down with malaria, that he would be in a clinic for a while before getting back to the office. Sanderson had eagerly gone along with that plan because it had let him avoid going back to work right away. He had needed some time to consider the opportunity before him.

  The guards were still subordinate to Marcel, and this was a dynamic that Hugh might eventually be able to use to sow disharmony among his new partners, if that ever became necessary. For now, he let the situation play out without much interference. Everything had been working too well for him to want to bruise it. Income was beginning to surpass the costs of operation, and it had only been a few weeks. Independence from big brother William, from a life focused on tree trunks and band saws, would take a few years at this rate. But Hugh was already thinking of steps that would radically speed the process up. He just had to coax the vision into clarity.

  It sometimes irked Sanderson that Marcel and the spidery old man had gotten into the habit of making suggestions about what he should do, rather than simply taking orders, but that was temporary. He suspected that his new partners still thought he was hopelessly dependent on them, but soon Marcel, the old man, and the guards would realize that they needed Hugh Sanderson much more than he needed them. The venture could not expand without the capital, without the equipment and transport that he provided. The nature of their enterprise had briefly created the illusion that the normal dynamic had been derailed, that the man with the money had become the desperate one. But the man with the money would soon be regaining control.

  The guards and Marcel were now standing in the anteroom to Sanderson’s office at the mansion. On a low coffee table Tall Guard placed a plastic grocery bag containing something in the shape of a small brick. Barrel Guard and Marcel stood behind Tall Guard, watching Sanderson unwrap the parcel.

  The brick was a stack of money, all fifty- and hundred-euro notes. Marcel and the guards must have gone to a bank and swapped their small change for big bills, just so they could impress the boss with a more substantial-looking package.

  It worked. Sanderson was plenty impressed, particularly considering that some had probably been skimmed off the top already. He riffled the bills and guessed the sum came to forty- or fifty-thousand euro.

  “Fifty-two thousand euro,” Marcel said. “In only four days.”

  Sanderson nodded. “And, as I understand it, the only reason I didn’t see a stack like this last week or the week before was because of expenses.”

  Barrel Guard looked at Marcel, listened to a couple of words in French, then turned back to Sanderson. “A lot of expenses, sir. On gasoline, on the big refrigerator, on repairs to the truck after somebody at the campground smashed the windshield.”

  “So we made enough to cover all those expenses just last week and the week before, and we’ve made fifty-two grand in the first half of this week.” Sanderson beamed at his guests. “Gentlemen, this is fantastic.”

  “And even more good news,” Marcel said. “The females is popping!”

  “Pregnant ones?” Sanderson asked. “The babies are coming out?”

  “That’s right, sir,” Barrel Guard said. “There were a few born early on because the mothers were already pregnant when we caught them, but these new babies are the first ones that we know were made in the cages.”

  Sanderson understood. Not only could the animals be born in captivity; they could conceive in captivity, too. That was very good.

  Barrel Guard said. “Some were two at a time. I think it is because we feed them very much. They like living in the cages because they don’t have to find food. They just wait. The ones we caught already pregnant, they gave us only one baby at a time. But most of the others are doubles.”

  “Then keep feeding them a lot,” Sanderson said. “What’s it been? How many months?”

  “The old man and his partners caught the first ones back when they were clearing the road into the camp,” Barrel Guard said. “I think it has been six months now.”

  “How many new ones have…popped?” Sanderson asked, wondering where Marcel, with his awful English, had picked up that expression.

  “Eight babies come from five females in the last three weeks,” the big guard said.

  Marcel added, “And maybe more soon, but sometimes is hard to tell. They live in the dark, and when we put light in the cages, they….” He pantomimed an animal recoiling, hiding its head with its forelegs. “But when they are getting really big, then you can see. Maybe six or seven more mamas already getting big now.”

  Now the pieces fell into place, and Hugh realized what the next step had to be.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A day after she sent her sketches to the curious person in Oakland, Amy finally found a reply in her inbox. The guy had sent some images of his own, and when she opened them, a thousand questions stampeded through her mind. Did the guy know what kind of animals these drawings were meant to be? Where had he come by these pictures? Why were they done in those archaic style
s? When had they been done? Why were some of the animals dressed up? Why were others so elaborately chained?

  This was her animal, alright, but the quality of the drawings couldn’t have been further from her clumsy sketches. The artwork reminded her of a coffee-table book someone had given her mother, a collection of animal illustrations created centuries before modern taxonomy. She recalled luscious colors and exquisite calligraphy, letters that swooped and curled, strings of words forming circles or spiraling around the creature they described. The drawings in front of her now were not so lavishly decorated, but they were striking.

  Far too excited not to call the phone number listed in the email right away, she pulled a disposable cell phone from her daypack and dialed. A groggy voice answered. Within ten minutes she had recounted her experience at the logging camp, and a guy named Steve had told her a story about a colonial mission in Mexico, a story that involved his…well, it sounded like stealing centuries-old documents and artwork. If that was true, he was taking one hell of a chance in telling a complete stranger about it.

  “Bought a disposable cell phone just for this purpose, and used a public computer to email you earlier,” he explained. “But I initiated contact, not you. I really don’t think you’re a federal agent.”

  “And I’ll assume you’re not a goon from the logging company.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “And congratulations: you’re the fourth living person to have set eyes on these images. You’re also are the only one anywhere to have seen both the pictures and the real thing. Have you smelled them, too?”

  “What?”

  Steve was silent for a moment, then seemed to be reading aloud. “A stench like that of the wild carnivore’s den, of a badly kept stable, or of the small beasts of this New World that expel a foul mist to blind the attacking dog.” His tone changed back to a conversational one. “I’m translating from seventeenth-century Spanish. The small beasts in that last line are probably skunks. Does that sound about right? Something like skunk and urine and a generally sharp, dirty animal smell?”