The Devil's Horn (9 page)

Promise snatched the cooler off the counter and whirled for the shop door. She halted on the edge of the sunlight, did not step into it. Up on the green hill, trucks and men cobbled together the first new homes, every house to be solid and straight, high above everything that held the township down. In the doorway, Promise turned back to Bongani, who’d said nothing more and would have let her go. Again, she rested the cooler on the counter.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“You did nothing wrong, child. You made me proud, that’s all. I’ll talk with her about this.”

“Please don’t.”

“And why should I not? I will tell you this. She asked me to do it. And she turned my kindness into a lie.”

Promise slid the cooler toward him.

“This is for you.”

“For me?”

Bongani took from one wall a toy, a plastic water pistol. He put it down next to the cooler.

“A gift for a gift.”

It was a silly gesture, and Bongani made a forgiving smile. She took the toy off the counter.

“You have a real gun in the bush?” Bongani asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you shoot people with it? Poachers?”

“Others have. I haven’t.”

“Could you?”

“Yes.”

Bongani covered his mouth in mock shock. He surveyed the cooler and reached for it.

“What have you brought me?”

“Muti.”

Bongani’s hands stalled on the cooler.

“That is a powerful gift, Nomawethu.”

“I know you’re working with the government. For the new houses on the hill.”

Old Bongani cocked his head. He drew out the word as he replied. “Yes.”

“You’re in charge of the names and applications from the township.”

Bongani tapped his fingertips on the cooler. He seemed wary.

“And I will be the first to move up there. Trust that.”

Promise touched the back of Bongani’s hand, and with the touch cast to Bongani her hope.

“Open it.”

Wide-eyed in wonder, Bongani slid aside the cooler’s top. He tapped on the iced packet Promise had wrapped in foil from the kitchen of her ranger station.

“What have we here?”

Bongani laid the crinkled package on the counter. He plucked at the foil to peel it back. When the first black nail emerged, he paused to nod gravely, marveling.

“A sangoma.”

Bongani uncovered the rest of the severed front feet of the aardvark. The beast’s cold paws had been neatly cut, bone and meat even. The claws curled as though still digging.

The old man spread apart all the foil, then flattened his hands on the counter. He spoke without looking up.

“You are trying to heal.”

Promise rolled the plastic water gun in her hands. She set it on the countertop to return it, to ask for a far greater gift.

“Yes.”

Bongani picked up one of the claws. He scraped the hard, dead tips against his open palm.

“Forty years.”

“Gogo has told me.”

“He took her from me. He lied.”

“I cannot say, Bongani.”

“I loved her. She chose me first.”

“I know. It’s been a very long time.”

Bongani put down the claw.

“Has it?”

From a pocket, Promise pulled the last of Juma’s cash, ten thousand rand rolled in a rubber band. She set this on the opened foil. Louder than the muti, the money spoke out for healing.

Promise rested a hand on his wrist.

“Please, Bongani. Let them have a house on the hill. Don’t stop them.”

Bongani lingered under her hand, moving his eyes between the claws and the bills.

He straightened. Promise reeled back her touch. Bongani stowed the cash in a drawer. He folded the foil over the claws; he would put them in a mesh cage to keep away the birds and rodents, then hang them on his roof to dry. He might sell them, or he might wear them. A sangoma had power.

Bongani reached across the counter to caress Promise’s cheek.

“Did she ask you to do this, too?”

“Yes.”

“Your grandmother.” Bongani blinked at some memory or a tear or both. He lowered his hand. “And if I consider this? Where will they get the money? The mechanic can’t buy her a house.”

Promise took the toy gun off the counter. She’d give it to a child at the orphanage on her way out of Nyongane. She turned for the shop door and the sun, speaking over her shoulder.

“I’ll buy it.”

Chapter 6

Opu rode in the back of the chopper with the bodies. Both poachers had fouled themselves in their dying, and at sunrise Opu cleaned them as well as he could, using the last of his canteen. The poachers’ blood had dried in the cool night and no longer stank, but even so the pilot and Neels left their window vents open in the copter for the thirty-minute flight to Skukuza.

A bakkie met them at the airport, come for the bodies. Neels and Opu caught a ride in the pickup bed, along with the corpses, to the main headquarters. There, the poachers were locked in cold storage with a dozen more dead Mozambicans awaiting postmortems and identification. Neels and Opu entered the air-conditioning of the offices with rifles strapped across their backs. They stepped into the intelligence room to make their report.

Karskie, a young man Neels barely knew, did not stand when he and Opu walked into the drab room, an office made brown by cheap furniture and wood paneling. Karskie faced many computer screens, and when he looked up, his grin was sporty, his hair combed to a centered ridge. Neels had only spoken to Karskie once before; at the golf course a few evenings back, they’d been at the same table with a dozen others from the main office. Karskie was not a ranger but a contractor, a numbers genius brought in by SANParks last month just before he was let go by a Jo’burg university. Neels recalled being satisfied with how the big boy handled his share of the drinking. That evening, a lion had roared out of the darkness from far across the lake, maybe three kilometers away, but the throaty chuffs filled the night, rising above the cicadas and monkey screams. Karskie had left the table alone to go sit beside the lake and listen.

Neels sat in front of him. Opu remained standing. Karskie pointed.

“Is that blood on your shoulders?”

“Someone else’s.”

“Ah. Well.” The boy lowered plump hands to one of his keyboards. “So you had contact. What happened?”

Karskie typed at an impressive speed while Neels related how he and Opu had followed a set of tracks east, away from the carcass, and what he’d found in the road at the border. Opu had shot one poacher in the dry ravine, Neels shot another, one got away. Neels made no mention of interrogating the poacher. To do so would be to admit the poacher had been alive. Karskie was new. Neels didn’t know where the boy stood on this.

Karskie entered data as he asked questions. Where did the poachers cross into the park? Exactly where had they been spotted and engaged? What time? Was there a description of the one who escaped?

The big boy typed blithely, dispassionate.

“How many firearms were recovered?”

“One.”

Karskie stopped his fingers.

“One.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Two corpses were brought in.”

“That’s how many
moers
we shot.”

Karskie tucked his tongue behind his lower lip, not disengaging from Neels’s hard gaze.

“The nature of the contact?”

Neels had never been asked this, and did not like it. Behind him, Opu shuffled his feet.

“Beg pardon?” Neels asked.

“When you encountered the poachers, what transpired?”

“Transpired.”

“What did they do? What did you do? What was said?”

“Why?”

Karskie flattened his hands on the desk, away from his keys, the equivalent of a man from a different generation setting down a pen. Karskie drummed both index fingers, unafraid of Neels.

“Because you are in the tenth month of the year. So far, you’ve lost close to a thousand white rhinos out of a population in the Kruger of nine thousand. You’re on the same pace as last year, which, if you understand, was a record. At this rate, your rhinos are, for all intents and purposes, already extinct. Your kill rate exceeds the birthrate.”

“You think you’re telling me something I don’t know?”

“The point is that I know. You’ve got no statistical stability to your data. That’s what I was brought in to do. What month, day, what phase of the moon? What weather, temperature, what time, what location, how many and what sort of weapons? I’ve been here a month, and so far what I’ve seen is a primitive response to a primitive problem. Poachers sneak in, butcher a rhino, then walk out. You follow their tracks. And if somehow you manage to bump into them in a park the size of Israel, you kill them, for the most part.”

“We do the fucking best we can.”

“And the result of that is your rhinos are being wiped out. It’s not enough. We’re trying to change that. We can spot tendencies. Be more efficient. We can bring some fucking twenty-first-century technology to bear.”

Karskie flicked one finger onto the keyboard to make some facts march.

“Let’s see, shall we? Alright.”

Karskie pecked one key repeatedly. The gesture agitated Neels, as if the boy were nicking at him.

“Over the last two years, Kruger’s lost an average of three rhinos per day. Out of ten to fifteen border crossings daily, your rangers find and follow just one set of tracks. Every day and night, somewhere in the park, where hundreds of thousands of tourists visit year-round, there are shots fired. So, let’s just figure, for shits and giggles, that, on any given day, you have twenty to thirty armed and illegally present men creeping over the Kruger. That’s six hundred poachers a month. Out of that number, just twenty are neutralized. Sixteen of those are shot dead outright. So, in effect, you’re stopping one poacher for every five rhinos killed. Please, tell me, how’s the tracking thing working out for you?”

Karskie sat back from his tattletale computer screen. He folded his arms and tilted his head at Neels.

Opu said, “Fuck you,” and walked out of the room.

The big boy waited until the old Zulu was gone before speaking again.

“You think I’m judging you. I’m not.”

Karskie said this with a lowered voice, to keep his words from carrying out the door Opu had left open behind him.

It seemed acceptable for Neels, the bush warrior, to talk this way, to be critical of their slipping hold on the last rhinos. But in this cool office, away from the bloodletting, with only pictures of half-devoured carcasses and dead black men on his desk, young and new Karskie could not.

The boy leaned forward to speak to Neels above his computer screens, as though cutting them out of the conversation. He almost whispered.

“Look. No one cares if you shoot every bastard you find out there.”

“I intend to.”

“Good. And along the way, keep me up to speed. We’re building intelligence nets in Mozambique. I’ve got informants in a few of the poaching gangs. Give me what you get in the field. I’ll give you back gold. I promise.”

Neels got to his feet, shouldering his rifle.

“Alright. Here’s your first.”

“Give it to me.”

“Juma.”

Neels waited past noon at the airport for the chopper pilot to give him a ride north to Shingwedzi. Opu had disappeared and would find his own way.

The first half of the flight back was silent and seething for Neels, grinding his teeth above the vast expanse of the Kruger. Every ranger was aware of the boy Karskie’s bleak numbers, but that didn’t keep the numbers from being jarring when balled up and thrown in one’s face. Karskie was not liked. Neels had given him Juma’s name to see what he could do with it.

The pilot, Ian, flew level and straight for thirty minutes. Neels closed his eyes. Before long his gone wife entered through the dark space there and walked on. His heart called out and ached. Neels opened his eyes just as the chopper banked.

Ian had spotted a big herd of bok filling the khaki plain. The pilot nudged the stick to drop down, get a closer, lower look, and to make them run.

A thousand horned antelope leaped away from the zooming helicopter, across the grassless ground, crowded and rippling like troubled water. Ian flew fifty feet over the boks’ sprinting, bobbing backs. Neels pressed his forehead to the plexiglass window to see the dashing animals and the rushing earth. When Ian pulled up into the blue afternoon sky, Neels clapped the pilot on the knee.

The rest of the flight north to Shingwedzi was made twice as long; Ian took the two of them on a safari. He circled elephants in a clutch of marula trees, buffalo in the brown river with alligators sunning near them, a hundred zebra and ostriches milling together on an emerald hillside. The day was sunny, and tourists stopped their cars on the road to let grazing giraffes cross.

Neels’s mood swung sharply like the chopper; he became joyful, bouncing and pointing in his seat, his own voice a buzz in the headphones. Ian indulged him, finding and flushing out more wildlife. Neels’s excitement grew with every sighting of a beast caught in the open or frightened out of hiding. Neels laughed hard, and harder, until a tear slipped down his cheek. Then he asked Ian to head for Shingwedzi.

Neels’s small ranger station was set in a copse of trees in the center of a wide, flat plain, broken only by scrub and one dusty road leading to the park byway. In the middle of that plain, only a kilometer from the ranger station, a lone, massive, black rhino stood on its shadow, which made it seem even grander. The animal surveyed the dry and unwelcoming land. Ian, flying up from behind, slowed to hover in midair. The rhino’s ears twitched; it stood rock still for moments that to Neels felt ancient and stunning. The rhino began to dance in place, hopping side to side, keeping its tail facing the chopper.

At once the rhino turned to face the chopper, its magnificent horns tipped up at the floating machine. The animal pawed the plain once, again, then bent its anvil head and long horn to the ground to scoop up dirt, casting a cloud in the air. Ian held the copter in place. The rhino pawed a third time, challenging, then charged. Ian let the beast rumble at them, muscle, horns, girth, and rage, not too close but enough for him and Neels to have the thrill of it. When Ian flicked the chopper away and the rhino rampaged beneath them, both men whooped into the microphones bent to their lips. Neels glanced back. The rhino had not pivoted to watch them go but slowed its gait and kept its broad rump to them, in disdain and majesty.

Neels shook Ian’s hand, then slammed the copter’s door. He ducked beneath the spinning blades while the chopper lifted off. A stinging dust whipped up, turning Neels away to the ranger station.

He reached the small blockhouse in time to see the pair of day rangers push off on their bicycles. A boy and a girl. She was called Promise, her partner Wophule. The boy was still a teen, the youngest of all the Kruger rangers. His name was a Xhosa joke: Wophule meant
broken
, for broken promise. Bad enough he pedaled Shingwedzi; he did so with a woman.

But he was no less a joke than the girl.

In two decades of training rangers, Neels had yet to see a female up to the job. They needed time off for babies, couldn’t carry a full five-day pack, couldn’t keep their pants on; one issue or another always needed to be dealt with for the women. Few lasted more than a year in the bush, stuck out in the stations, isolated with the men. None had ever been promoted to the extended patrols, the ECP teams. This young one pedaling away, Promise, had joined the Kruger rangers two years ago, at age twenty. Like the rest of the trainees, the girl came to Neels after completing twelve months of study in tracking, weapons, nature conservancy, and bush survival. She’d been given to Neels, and he’d had no say in that. Promise had proven a good tracker, knew the veld well enough, kept her mouth shut, made no problems. That didn’t mean something wasn’t going to go wrong; it just hadn’t yet. He assigned her to routine daytime patrols on a bicycle. A year later, he gave her the boy, Wophule, to ride with.

She and her little partner wheeled out of sight, rifles on their backs, in the direction of the black rhino. Neels had no faith she could protect that giant if the hard work came her way. She rode a bike, and that’s where she would stay. And the boy who rode with her, what kind of ranger rides with a woman?

Neels went inside. Two other rangers were there, lean, quiet Zulus, one with a towel around his waist, fresh out of the shower. The other, in uniform and black beret, rose from a kitchen chair to give Neels a gentle fist in the shoulder as he walked past. “We heard. Good shooting, baas.”