The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  There was nothing like BANR in my time. I like to think I would have been drawn to it, to the awesomeness of the project, to the adultness of the endeavor. So when an opportunity arose to edit an issue of BANR, I found the prospect immediately appealing. What was not to like? There’d be lots of good reading and discussions. There’d be burritos. And there’d be the inherent coolness of editing a book with teens. What would high-school sophomores make of Katie Coyle’s “Fear Itself” or Victor Lodato’s “Jack, July,” I wondered? Lots, actually. A whole lot. More, I’m afraid, than I would have at such an age.

  The young editors read widely and proposed interesting and often overlooked works to be devoured and discussed. Right away, I found a story I thought was heartfelt yet edgy, perfect for BANR’s panel of young editors. I attended the Monday night session when the editors read and discussed the piece I’d put forward. The discussions take place around chuck wagon tables in a storefront on Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District. The verdict on the piece I’d presented: rejection. I hadn’t seen that coming. I was the editor, right? But the passion, thought, and seriousness with which the students engaged the work was all I’d hoped it would be.

  The next story I put forward did pass muster, and I was an admirer of all the work the editors suggested and selected. And I could see in their passions and devotions the false analogy I’d created. As a construction worker, stories were all I had to help me get through long shifts and terrible working conditions with people you normally wouldn’t sit next to at the DMV. There was no way to compare that to the experience of reading today’s best works with our community’s finest young minds. And I always forget the awful stories from my days as a construction worker. I once worked on a big job in Chandler, Arizona. One of the carpenters would bring books to read on his lunch breaks. Everyone teased him mercilessly about that. They started calling him “professor.” I called him that, too. I wince to think of it now, and it reminds me that, even though I would have been drawn to an amazing project like BANR, I probably wasn’t ready for it. Books had a lot to offer me back then, but I had little to return. Perhaps I had to learn what literature wasn’t before I could appreciate what it was. Literature isn’t about porta-potty disasters or people reading blueprints while intoxicated. It’s about the most important examinations in life. In that regard, the young editors who bring you this anthology are leagues ahead of us.

  ADAM JOHNSON

  Adam Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University. He is the author of Fortune Smiles, Emporium, Parasites Likes Us, and The Orphan Master’s Son, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His work has appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, Playboy, GQ, the Paris Review, Granta, Tin House, the New York Times, and The Best American Short Stories. He lives in San Francisco.

  WELLS TOWER

  Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?

  FROM GQ

  Chapter 1: The Huntress Seeks Her Trophy

  It is just before dawn at a hunting camp in Botswana’s game-rich northern savanna, and Robyn Waldrip is donning an ammunition belt that could double as a hernia girdle.

  “You can’t help but feel like sort of a badass when you strap this thing on,” she says. Robyn, a Texan in her midthirties, seems to stand about six feet two, with piercing eyes of glacial blue shaded by about twelve swooping inches of eyelash. She’s a competitive bodybuilder and does those tractor-tire and sledgehammer workouts, and there is no part of her body, from the look of it, that you couldn’t crack a walnut on. In her audition video for a reality-television show called Ammo & Attitude, Robyn described herself as a stay-at-home mom whose “typical Friday-night date with [her] husband is going to the shooting range, burning through some ammo, smelling the gunpowder, going out for a rib-eye steak, and calling it a night.”

  Robyn Waldrip could kick my ass, and also your ass, hopping on one leg. Her extensive résumé of exotic kills includes a kudu, a zebra, a warthog, and a giraffe. But she has never shot a Loxodonta africana, or African elephant, so before she sets out, her American guide, a professional hunter named Jeff Rann, conducts a three-minute tutorial on the art of killing the world’s largest land animal.

  “You want to hit him on this line between his ear holes, four to six inches below his eyes,” Jeff explains, indicating the lethal horizontal on a textbook illustration of an elephant’s face. The ammo Robyn will be using is a .500 slug about the size of a Concord grape, propelled from a shell not quite as large as Shaquille O’Neal’s middle finger. About three feet of bone and skin insulate the elephant’s brain from the light of day, and it can take more than one head shot to effect a kill. “If he doesn’t go down on your second shot, I’ll break his hip and you can finish him off.”

  “Anything else I need to know?” Robyn asks.

  “That’s it,” says Jeff.

  “Just start shooting when they all come at us?”

  “The main thing is, just stay with the guns,” Jeff tells the rest of the party, which includes Robyn’s husband, Will Waldrip, two trackers, this journalist, a videographer who chronicles Jeff’s hunts for a television program, Deadliest Hunts, and a government game scout whose job it is to ensure that the hunt goes according to code. The bunch of us pile into the open bed of a Land Cruiser and set off into the savanna, the guides and the Waldrips peering into the lavender pre-dawn for an elephant to shoot.

  If you are the sort of person who harbors prejudices against people who blow sums greater than America’s median yearly income to shoot rare animals for sport, let me say that Will and Robyn Waldrip are very easy people to like. They didn’t grow up doing this sort of thing. Robyn’s dad was a fireman who took her squirrel hunting because it was a cheap source of fun and meat. Will’s father was a park ranger. In his twenties, Will went into the architectural-steel business, and now he co-owns a company worth many millions of dollars. They look like models from a Cabela’s catalog. They are companionable and jolly, and part of the pleasure of their company is the feeling that you’ve been welcomed into a kind of America where no one is ever fat or weak or ugly or gets sad about things.

  The Waldrips arrived in Rann’s camp on the eighth of July, and they’ve allotted ten days for the hunt. But it is unlikely to take that long to find their trophy. Botswana contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 154,000 elephants, most of them concentrated in this 4,000-square-mile stretch of northern bushland where the Kalahari Desert meets the Okavango Delta.

  In addition to airfare, ammo, and equipment costs (the antique double-barreled Holland & Holland rifle Robyn bought for the trip typically sells for about $80,000), the Waldrips are paying Jeff Rann $60,000 for the privilege of shooting the animal, at least $10,000 of which goes to the Botswana government. In September 2013, a ban on elephant hunting goes into effect in Botswana, making the Waldrips’ hunt one of the last legal kills. It is a precious, expensive experience, and Robyn wants to take her time to find big ivory, not to simply blast away at the first elephant that wanders past her sights.

  Through the brightening dawn, the Land Cruiser bucks and rockets along miles of narrow trails socked in by spindly acacia trees, camellia-like mopani shrubs, and a malign species of thornbush abris-tle with nature’s answer to the ice pick. No elephants are on view just yet, though a few other locals have come out to note our disturbance of the peace. Here is a wild dog, a demonic-looking animal whose coat is done up in a hectic slime-mold pattern. Wild dogs, among the world’s most effective predators, are the biker gangs of Africa. They chase the gentle kudu to exhaustion in a merciless relay team. A softhearted or lazy dog who lets the prey escape can catch a serious ass-kicking from the rest of the heavies in the pack. What’s that, Mr. Wild Dog? You’re on the endangered-species list? Well, karma is a bitch. Let’s move along.

  Now here is a pair of water buffalo. Charming they are not. They scowl sullenly from beneath s
cabrous plates of unmajestic, drooping horn. “Hostile, illiterate” are the descriptors I jot on my notepad.

  And there is the southern yellow-billed hornbill, and there the lilac-breasted roller, which, yes, are weird and beautiful to look upon, but if you had birds jabbering like that outside your window every morning, would you not spray them with a can of Raid?

  Say what? I’m unfairly harshing the fauna? Yes, I know I am. I’m sorry. To the extent that I’ve discussed it with Jeff Rann and the Waldrips and other blood-sport folk I know, I believe that hunters are being sincere when they say they harbor no ill will toward the animals they shoot. Not being a hunter myself, I subscribe to an admittedly sissyish philosophy whereby I only wish brain-piercing bullets upon creatures I dislike. I’ve truthfully promised Jeff Rann that I’m not here to write an anti-hunting screed, merely to chronicle the hunt coolly and transparently. But the thing is, I’m a little worried that some unprofessional, bleeding-heart sympathies might fog my lens when the elephant gets his bullet. So I’m trying to muster up some prophylactic loathing for the animals out here. I want to be properly psyched when the elephant goes down.

  Perhaps out of a kind of kindred impulse, Will and Robyn Waldrip are quick to point out the violences elephants have inflicted on the local landscape. And it’s true, the Loxodonta africana isn’t shy about destroying trees. We are standing in an acreage of bare earth ringing a watering hole Jeff Rann maintains. It looks like a feedlot on the moon. Where there is not a broken tree or a giant dooky bolus, there is a crater where an elephant started eating the earth.

  “Man, [the elephants] have just destroyed the ecosystem,” Will says. “People who oppose hunting ought to see this.” Will is a bow-hunter. Elephants aren’t his bag. And while he has no reservations about Robyn shooting the elephant, he is doing, I think, some version of the hunt-justifying psych-up going on in my own head. He wants to feel like it’s a good deed his wife is doing out here, a Lorax-ly hit in the name of the trees.

  It’s midafternoon before we spy a candidate for one of Robyn’s Concord grapes. In the shade of a very large tree, a couple of hundred yards from the jeep trail, is something that does not at first register as an animal, more a form of gray weather. We dismount and huddle before setting off into the brush.

  The elephant appears to be a trophy-caliber animal, but at this distance, it’s hard to say for sure. “One thing,” Jeff says to Robyn. “If it charges, we have to shoot him.”

  “If he charges, I’m gonna shoot him,” Robyn says. The entourage begins a dainty heel-to-toe march into the spiky undergrowth. As it turns out, it is not one elephant but two. One is the big, old, shoot-able bull. The other is a younger male. Elephants never stop growing, a meliorative aspect of which (elephant-hunt-misgivings-wise) is that the mongo bulls that hunters most want to shoot also happen to be the oldest animals, usually within five or so years of mandatory retirement, when elephants lose their last set of molars and starve to death.

  For the record, this detail does not soothe me as the guns make their way toward the elephants under the tree. I have not yet figured out how to dislike elephants enough to want to see one shot. In private treason against my hosts, I am thinking, Not now, not now. Let it please not get shot today.

  We near the creatures. The big bull shifts its ears, and it is a significant event, like the hoisting of a schooner’s rigging. Jeff lifts his binoculars. As it turns out, the bull is missing a tusk, probably broken off in a fight. So it will not be shot, its ultimate reward for the tusk-snapping tussle.

  We creep back to the jeep. Robyn is electrified, breathing hard, her blue eyes luminous with adrenaline: “That was big!” she says to Will. “As soon as we got out of the truck, was your heart going?”

  “Nah, but when he turned and his ears spread and he went from huge to massive? Yeah.”

  “Huge,” says Robyn. “It could just mow us down.”

  “We’d be jelly,” says Will. “But you wouldn’t want to have shot him on your first day, anyway.”

  Chapter 2: Can You Save Thousands of Elephants by Shooting Just a Few?

  Fair warning: An elephant does get shot in this story. It gets shot pretty soon. Maybe that upsets you, as it did 100 percent of the people (hunters and nonhunters) to whom I mentioned this assignment.

  Elephants are obviously amazing, or rather, they are obvious receptacles for our amazement, because they seem to be a lot like us. They live about as long as we do. They understand it when we point at things, which our nearest living evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee, doesn’t really. They can unlock locks with their trunks. They recognize themselves in mirrors. They are socially sophisticated. They stay with the same herds for life, or the cows do, anyway. They mourn their dead. They like getting drunk (and are known to loot village liquor stashes in Africa and India). When an elephant keels over, its friends sometimes break their tusks trying to get it to stand up again. They bury their dead. They bear grudges against people who’ve hurt them, and sometimes go on revenge campaigns. They cry.

  So why would you want to put a bullet in one? Well, if we are to take hunters at their word, it is because the experience of shooting an animal yields a thrill, a high that humans have been getting off on since we clubbed our first cave bear. And if you go in for this sort of thing, then it arguably stands to reason that the bigger the beast, the bigger the thrill when it hits the ground.

  On the subject of hunting’s pleasures, Robyn Waldrip has this to say: “It kind of taps into your primal instincts. I think everybody has it in them.”

  But an elephant?

  “It was on my bucket list of hunting. It’s the largest land mammal, and just to go up against something that big, it’s exciting. I ran into this mom at the grocery store and she was like, ‘What are you doing for the summer?’ and I said, ‘I’m going to Africa to do an elephant hunt.’ And she said, ‘Why in the world would you wanna do that?’ and I’m like, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’”

  Jeff Rann has a similar take: “Hunting’s almost like a drug to people that do it.” In his thirty-eight-year career, Jeff has presided at the shootings of around 200 elephants, and he has never had a trophy get away from him. It is Jeff Rann whom King Juan Carlos I of Spain calls when he wants to shoot an elephant, as he did in April 2012. (King Juan Carlos likely will not get the hankering again. He broke his hip on the safari—in the shower, not on Rann’s watch—and amid the general outrage sparked by leaked photos of the king posed alongside his kill, Juan Carlos was booted from the honorary presidency of the World Wildlife Fund and compelled to issue a public apology.)

  Rann is the most perfect exemplar I have ever met of Hemingway’s speak-softly-and-shoot-big-things-without-being-a-blowhard-about-it masculine ideal. He is lethally competent and incredibly understated and cool, even when he’s telling swashbuckling stories, such as the time he nearly got killed by a leopard: “The leopard charged. I shot him. It was a bad shot. He jumped on me, and we just kind of looked at each other. I remember those yellow eyes staring back at me. He bit me twice and dropped to the ground. He also pissed all over me. For about a year, I’d wake up in the night and I’d smell that strong cat smell. But I don’t think about it anymore.” Or the time he led the Botswana Defence Force into a camp of poachers who’d been hunting in the land he leases from the government. “We went into camp, and there were two old guys and one kid about 16 years old. The agents just opened up on them. Killed the two old guys outright. The one they shot eleven times, the other they shot fourteen times. The kid took off running, but they shot him a couple of times in the back.”

  Q. So you, like, saw three guys get shot and killed?

  A. Yeah.

  Q. Whoa. Wow. What was that like?

  A. Didn’t bother me.

  Q. Wow, really? Weird. Do you think that’s because maybe you’ve seen so many animals killed over the years that seeing the poachers get shot, it’s, you know, just another animal?

  [Patient silence during which Rann seems
to be restraining self from uttering the word "pussy” in conjunction with visiting journalist.]

  A. I don’t know. Hard to say. Those guys [illegally] killed a lot of animals. It pissed me off.

  In addition to million-acre leases in Botswana, Rann has a hunting concession in Tanzania and a 5,500-acre rare-game ranch outside San Antonio. The economic downturn did not put much of a bite in Rann’s business, a happy fact he credits to the addictive nature of hunting’s elemental pleasures: “Our clients might not buy a new car as often, or buy a second or third home, but they’re still going to go hunting.” But this new hunting ban is poised to do to Rann’s elephant-hunting business what economic calamity could not.

  There’s been a regulated hunting industry in Botswana since the 1960s. Before the ban took effect, the government was issuing roughly 400 elephant-bull tags per year, of which Jeff Rann was allowed to buy about forty. And counterintuitively, even in the presence of an active bullet-tourism industry, Botswana’s elephant population has multiplied twentyfold, from a low point of 8,000 in 1960 to more than 154,000 today. These healthy numbers, as people like Rann are keen to mention, mirror elephant populations in other African countries where hunting is allowed. Despite a recent uptick in poaching problems, both Tanzania (with 105,000 elephants) and Zimbabwe (with 51,000) have seen similar patterns of population growth. Kenya, on the other hand, banned elephant hunting in 1973 and has seen its elephant population decimated, from 167,000 to 27,000 or so in 2013. Some experts predict that elephants will be extinct in Kenya within a decade.