by Stuart Gibbs
“This is it?” I asked. “There’s no sign or anything.”
“My family doesn’t like to advertise that it’s here,” Violet explained. “If we did, we’d have animal rights protesters camped out here all the time.”
Tran gave our name at the call box, and the gate swung open, revealing a rutted dirt road beyond. We bumped along it slowly for the next few miles, passing through hundreds of acres of scrubby oak and cedar forest. I kept my eyes on the windows, expecting to see exotic animals gamboling past, but instead, all I saw were longhorn cattle.
After ten minutes I asked, “Where’s all the exotics?”
“On the back half of the property,” Violet replied.
“We’re not even halfway across yet?” I asked. “How big is this ranch?”
“Forty thousand acres.”
For once, even Summer seemed surprised. “That’s more than sixty square miles!”
Violet shrugged. “Yeah, it’s pretty big. I don’t think even my daddy has seen all of it. But my uncle says he knows the whole thing like the back of his hand.”
I turned back to the window again. The scrub forest outside looked similar to many parts of southern Africa, with shorter trees and thick underbrush in which even large animals could easily camouflage themselves. I thought I caught a glimpse of a large brown antelope with long, curved horns bounding away from us.
“Was that a sable?” I asked.
Violet shrugged. “I don’t know the animals here that well.”
We eventually emerged from the woods and found ourselves before a small hunting lodge. It looked a lot like some of the safari lodges in Africa. It was one story tall, with only four rooms flanking the road. There was no one around it, though.
“That’s not very big,” Summer pointed out.
“No,” Violet said. “We have only eight guests here at a time, max.”
“Is anyone staying here now?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” Violet replied. “We’re always full up. There’s a waiting list to stay here that’s, like, a year long. Everyone’s just out on the hunt.”
“Now?” Summer asked. “It’s getting dark.”
“The animals are more active at dusk,” Violet explained. “Now and dawn are the best times to hunt.”
A little past the lodge, we came to the main house. This was a sprawling one-story building that sat at the top of a hill, with several mud-splattered four-wheel-drive vehicles parked in front. A middle-aged couple stood at the edge of the drive, eagerly awaiting our arrival.
“That’s my aunt and uncle,” Violet said.
They didn’t look anything like I’d expected—but then, I realized that I’d rather stupidly been expecting them to look like cartoon hunters. I’d pictured them clad in camouflage gear, with ammunition belts and combat boots, which was as silly as assuming that Doc would wear surgical scrubs all the time. Instead, Violet’s aunt and uncle had dressed up to meet us. She wore a floral-print dress and had her hair done nicely. He was wearing a suit with a button-down shirt and a bolo tie. They both might as well have been at a country club.
The moment the SUV stopped, Violet sprang out and gave both of them big hugs. “Uncle Adam and Auntie June, these are my friends Teddy Fitzroy and Summer McCracken.”
The smile on Uncle Adam’s face faltered as we emerged from the rover. He turned to Violet and spoke quietly, as though hoping we wouldn’t hear. “Vi, I thought you said J.J. McCracken wanted to visit our ranch.”
Violet shook her head. “No, I didn’t. I said Summer. That’s J.J.’s daughter. She’s my friend.” She pointed to me. “And this is Teddy. He’s the one who dealt with that bully who was causing so much trouble for me.”
Uncle Adam’s eyes lit up with understanding. “You’re the boy who found the koala!”
“That’s right,” I said.
Adam broke into a big, friendly smile. “It’s a pleasure to meet both of you. Welcome to the Flying J Ranch.” He extended a hand to me and I shook it.
“Come on in,” Auntie June said sweetly. “We just brewed some iced tea, if you’d like any.”
They ushered us through the front doors. Hondo followed us, though Tran stayed in the rover.
Inside, the house was rather modest; it would have been completely ordinary if not for all the animals. There were six hunting dogs—all alive—and dozens of other creatures—all dead. The dead were stuffed and mounted in various poses around the regular furniture. It was quite jarring, as if the animals had started migrating through the house and then time had stopped while they were in midstride.
There was a stuffed grizzly bear by the front door, standing on its hind legs. It was twelve feet tall, and its mouth was open in what was probably supposed to be a frightening snarl, although whoever had done the taxidermy had messed up and the bear looked sick, rather than imposing. Like it was about to barf on us. In addition, it also held a small serving tray upon which the iced tea sat. This once-majestic animal had been turned into a stuffed, nauseated butler.
Hondo eyed it uneasily, as though worried it wasn’t actually dead. The whole room seemed to be giving him the willies.
Auntie June waved to the iced tea. “Please, help yourselves.”
We each took a glass.
“Do you raise bears on this ranch?” I asked.
“No. I shot Jeeves here up in the Brooks Range in Alaska,” Adam told me. “I’d love to be able to breed grizzlies for hunt down here, but there’s simply no way to control a carnivore of this size. It’d eat all my other stock. So we only raise herbivores.”
“Uncle Adam didn’t just shoot him,” Violet said proudly. “He also did the taxidermy.”
“Really?” I asked, trying to sound impressed. “It’s very good.”
“That’s kind of you to say.” Adam waved an arm to all the other animals. “I did all these, too. The way I figured it, the local taxidermist was charging so much, I was gonna go broke having all the animals I shot mounted. So I built my own shop here and started doing the taxidermy myself.”
He led us into the living room, where we could see his work up close. It was immediately evident that Adam was much better at shooting things than he was at mounting them. He’d done a decent job with the poses, but he couldn’t seem to get the faces right. A lion by the sofa was supposed to look regal, but it was comically cross-eyed instead. A bighorn sheep looked constipated, rather than imposing, while a kudu seemed to be having terrible indigestion.
“These are really nice,” I said, trying my best to be a good guest.
“There’s plenty more, if you’d like to see them,” Auntie June said.
“Oh yes,” Summer said politely. “I’d love to.”
“Right this way!” Adam said, leading us onward.
Summer came up beside me and whispered, “Is it just me, or is all this freaking you out?”
Before I could respond, Violet slipped between us. She was beaming, pleased that everything seemed to be going so well. “Pretty cool, huh?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Pretty cool.”
“Here we go!” Adam announced. “The pièce de résistance!” With that, he led us through a doorway into his trophy room.
As soon as I entered, I froze in my tracks. The room was enormous, twice as tall as the other rooms and ten times the size of my family’s entire trailer. It was filled with dead animals. There were dozens lined up on both sides of a wide center aisle, while the walls were lined with disembodied heads. There must have been more than a hundred and fifty. And Uncle Adam had botched the mounting of almost every single one of them. They all had the same nauseated look, as though each had died in the act of smelling something terrible.
“Oh my,” Summer said. I couldn’t tell if she was stunned by the sheer amount of dead animals or amused by the looks on their faces.
“Thanks,” Adam said proudly, mistakenly thinking she was impressed. “It wasn’t easy to bag all these animals—or to mount them.”
Hondo
didn’t even enter the room. He stayed right outside, looking like being around so many animals—even dead ones—was giving him hives.
“How many of these are from your ranch?” Summer asked.
“Only about a fourth,” Adam said. “Truth be told, I don’t do too much hunting for exotics on this property myself. They’re for the paying customers. But every now and then, there’s one like this bad boy here that I simply can’t resist.” He patted the hide of a disturbed-looking sable antelope. “The rest of them, I’ve traveled far and wide to find. Fifty-five countries on six different continents.”
Violet led me into the middle of the room. To my surprise, there were lots of smaller stuffed animals—mostly squirrels—interspersed with all the bigger ones. Only, rather than being posed majestically, these had been dressed in doll clothes and given tiny props. I realized they were supposed to be famous people. There was a squirrel Ben Franklin in bifocal glasses flying a little kite; a prairie dog Abraham Lincoln with a top hat, a beard, and a teensy Gettysburg Address; and a weasel Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a cigarette holder and a wheelchair.
“These are Auntie June’s handiwork,” Violet told me. “Aren’t they adorable?”
“They really are,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it.
“Well, thank you,” Auntie June said sweetly. “I don’t hunt myself, but once Adam started doing taxidermy, I thought it looked like fun, so I took it up myself. Here’s one you might like, Teddy. I understand you’re named after him.” She pointed me to a squirrel Teddy Roosevelt, dressed in safari gear with a tiny rifle, its foot propped on a badger it had “killed.”
“Wow,” I said. I was well aware that Teddy Roosevelt, while a great conservationist, had also been an avid big-game hunter; in fact, he’d shot many of the animals on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. But seeing a rodent version of him killing another animal was disturbing.
On the wall behind it, the head of an African white rhino was mounted. It looked like it had died in the middle of a belch. It had an exceptionally long horn, almost two feet tall, tapering to a perfect point.
“You don’t raise rhinos here, do you?” I asked.
“No, though I’ve thought about it,” Adam replied. “It’s legal, but I’d still catch way too much flak. No one seems to care that I’ve got a thousand antelope out there. If I brought in a rhino, though, I can guarantee you the anti-hunting folks would be clamoring to shut me down within days. Which is a darn shame, because rhino hunting’s practically the only way to save those animals.”
“Wait,” Summer said. “How do you save an animal by hunting it?”
“It’s all a question of money,” Adam explained. “Big-game hunting brings in far more money than safari tourism does—and most of that goes right to conservation efforts. Hunters don’t want these animals to go extinct any more than the animal rights activists do.”
“Because if they do, there won’t be anything left to kill,” Summer muttered under her breath.
Adam didn’t hear her. “In fact,” he went on, “there are plenty of wild animals that have been saved from extinction by places like this ranch. I have quite a few endangered species on my property, and I know other ranchers who do too. We don’t hunt all those. Instead, we’ve sponsored reintroduction of these species back into the wild. I’d love to try to do the same thing with rhinos, help them build back up their populations.”
“Wouldn’t you be worried about poachers?” I asked pointedly.
“Oh, I think any rhinos I had here would be equally as safe as the ones at FunJungle,” Adam replied. If he knew anyone was going after our rhinos, he did an amazing job of hiding it. “I’ve never had an issue with poachers before.”
“But rhinos are different,” Summer pointed out. “A poacher’s not going to come onto your property and make off with a whole antelope. But with the rhino, they’d only want the horn, which would be a lot easier to get.”
Adam sighed sadly. “True. Poaching’s a big problem for rhinos. But there’s a lot of evidence that legalized hunting cuts down on that too. See, when you make killing something illegal, that doesn’t stop folks from killing it. In fact, you make the value of it go up so high that killing it becomes impossible to resist. A poacher in South Africa can make more money selling one rhino horn than he can working an honest job for three years. But if you legalize the harvesting of horns and regulate it—maybe even grow horns for sale—then the bottom would drop out of that market and there’d be far less incentive to kill those poor animals.”
“Except for sport,” Summer pointed out.
“Right,” Adam said.
I noticed another rhino head on the opposite side of the room. Adam had actually done a decent job of mounting this one, for once. It might have looked majestic if it hadn’t been directly above thirteen stuffed squirrels reenacting George Washington crossing the Delaware. They were all rowing a toy boat surrounded by Lego icebergs, while squirrel Washington stood ramrod straight in a tiny powdered wig.
“Is there anyone in Texas who lets people hunt rhinos?” I asked.
Adam and June looked at each other, then shook their heads. “I doubt it,” June said. “If there were, we’d know. Exotic ranching is a small community.”
“Do you know of anyone looking to hunt one here anyhow?” Summer asked.
Adam and June regarded Summer with stunned silence. “What do you mean, exactly?” Adam asked.
Summer turned to Violet. “You didn’t tell them why we were coming here?”
“I thought you wanted me to keep it a secret,” Violet said.
“What’s this all about?” June asked.
Summer returned her attention to the adults. “We’re having some trouble at FunJungle, and we thought you could help with it.”
“Well, we’d be happy to,” Adam told her.
“Great,” Summer said. “But the thing is, this is top secret. No one’s supposed to know. In fact, my dad would probably have a cow if he knew I was talking to you about this.”
“Wait,” Adam said. “J.J. doesn’t even know you’re here?”
“Yesterday morning someone took a shot at one of our rhinos,” Summer said.
June gasped in alarm. Adam took a step back. Their surprise seemed genuine to me.
“How so?” Adam asked. “Like some dumb kid taking a potshot with an air rifle?”
“No,” I told them. “It was a real hunter. Using a .375 H&H Magnum.”
Adam sighed heavily. “That’d take down a rhino, all right.”
Summer said, “So we were wondering: Do you know any hunters who want to kill a rhino so badly that they’d come to a zoo to do it? Maybe someone who couldn’t afford a trip to Africa? I mean, that can’t be cheap, can it?”
“No,” Adam admitted. “Hunting a rhino legally can run up to a hundred thousand dollars. But I can’t imagine any real hunter going after one in a zoo. A rhino in captivity is a sitting duck. That goes against everything hunters believe in.”
“But real hunters come here, don’t they?” Summer pressed. “And your animals are in captivity.”
“It’s different.” Adam led us to the end of the room, where a large window looked out over the property. Since we were up on a hill, we could see miles of woods spread out below us in the setting sun. “Yeah, our animals are fenced in, but they still have thousands of acres to roam. If you want to hunt something here, you have to go find it. Then you have to stalk it. And only after all that can you kill it—if the stars all align. I’ve hunted an awful lot of animals in the wild, and I can guarantee you the hunts we run here are virtually the same experience. A real hunter doesn’t want me to make it easy for them. Hunting’s a sport.”
“A sport one team doesn’t know it’s playing,” Summer whispered to me.
“The point of hunting isn’t killing simply to kill,” Aunt June added. “It’s pitting yourself against the animal. I can’t imagine any self-respecting hunter shooting some
thing in a zoo. Certainly, none of our clients are like that.”
I nodded, aware their argument made sense. “What if we’re not talking about someone hunting the rhino for sport? Do you know anyone who’d want to kill it only for the horn?”
Adam bristled, a bit annoyed. “I don’t associate with poachers.”
“But you must know most of the big-game hunters around here,” I pressed. “And whoever did this was really good with a rifle. They shot through a small window from at least a hundred yards away and came awfully close to hitting Rhonda.”
June whistled, impressed. “Your shooter knows what they’re doing, all right.”
“And they used a .375 H&H,” Summer added. “That’s not cheap, is it?”
“No,” June admitted. “They’re several thousand dollars. And the ammunition is pricey too.”
“Could you use that gun on anything local, like deer or turkeys?” I asked.
“Of course not,” Adam said. “You’d blow them to pieces.”
“Then the only people who’d have rifles like that would be big-game hunters,” I concluded. “The kind of people who might hunt at your ranch.”
Adam’s eyes flicked to meet his wife’s. Then he sagged a bit and nodded. “I suppose you’ve got a point.”
Summer asked, “So do you know anyone with a gun like that who might need the kind of money that a rhino horn would bring in?”
Adam said, “Look, there’s thousands of big-game hunters in Texas. I don’t know them all. . . .”
“There’s a good chance that it’s a woman,” I said.
Everyone looked to me, surprised—including Summer.
“You didn’t know?” I asked her, then explained. “Security found footage of the hunter going over the fence last night. It looks like it’s a woman, if that helps narrow things down.”
Adam thought about this for a bit, then started to shake his head.
Then June said, “Lydia Trask.”