The Devil's Horn (6 page)

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 resurfaced. 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.

He lowered his face to the new prints to get the best look in the final light. Was this the spoor of one more poacher? No, these marks in the dust might be much more than a poacher. Someone in leather shoes, in a truck driven by another . . . Could this be a moneyman? A boss who ran a network? A big fish? A transporter? Elusive, rare, to see this.

Why had this one come out last night? If he was, in fact, a level up from the miserable, disposable poachers, he’d almost never show himself like this. He’d stay in the background, handling the cash through intermediaries, holding his identity secret. What was it about these three poachers, or the horns they brought him, that made him visible last night? Why did he get out of the truck?

Neels folded to his hands and knees in the road. He crawled beside the great shoe prints that had stepped out of the bakkie. Somewhere in the park, a hyena laughed like a madman, rousing the Kruger now that dusk had ended. Neels found a spot in the road where the leather shoes came toe-to-toe with one of the smaller poachers’ sandals.

He sat up on his knees, startled. What had happened here? A disagreement, a fight? An embrace?

Seemingly out of nowhere, a fourth set of tracks appeared in the road, barefoot, small feet.

Neels stood, excited. In the first stains of night, he trailed the bakkie’s tire marks southward on the dirt road. Not far from the border crossing point, the truck had clambered down out of the kopje, the small hills on the Mozambican side of the border. The vehicle had been up there waiting for a signal, for a meeting.

Why? Who was among the poachers to merit this kind of attention? Who wore the smallest of the sandals? Who arrived barefoot?

Neels said to the hills, “Who?”

He pushed off his hat to let it hang behind him, opening his view of the sky. He chose a western star and walked to it with his rifle in hand to keep it quiet. He lay his boots down flat to stop his heels from striking. The bush would know he was here, not the men.

Neels moved quickly, guided not by the game trails or plants; these were just ripples on the veld, seasonal and changing. Elephants would knock down scrub, giraffes and the other big beasts would wear new paths, lightning blasted trees, herds grazed down the grasses. After thirty years, Neels could feel the unchanging parts of Shingwedzi, the rises and plains, watering holes and dry gullies, the river valley, the bones of the place. He knew his sector the way a man understands not a map but a brother. Here, Neels could think like a human or a beast, whichever he chose.

For an hour, he forged southeast toward the streambed where he’d sent Opu. He saw and heard no animals along the way. This was normal soon after the death of something the size of a rhino. The jackals, wild dogs, lions, and hyenas, the night noisemakers of the bush, had gorged their fill over the past day on the carcass. Little hunting was going on. Neels cruised undisturbed through the dark. Anything peering at him did so silently, like the moon rising at his back.