by Ellery Queen
“You have your orders,” I said quietly.
He nodded. “Yes.” With bitterness. “I do.”
I knew what he thought: some official high up in the interior ministry had been bought with American dollars so that yet another white-skinned hunter could walk a quick path to riches. And bring the elephant that much nearer oblivion. It caused him pain, this one. He really cared.
Let him, I thought. Let him think whatever he wants to. I rose to go.
“One thing,” he said. He pushed back from the desk and rose, sucking his lips in pensively.
The breeze peeled off the top sheet of paper he’d been anchoring down with his hand. It fluttered across the room. He ignored it.
“I saw your rifle. Out in your vehicle.”
He seemed reluctant, so I prodded him. “And?”
“It is a Remington .300 magnum.”
“So?”
He paused, then shook his head disgustedly. “You can kill an elephant with one, if you’re good. But it’s a gun for zebra or eland—or leopard, perhaps. It wouldn’t stop a bull like this patriarch in a charge.”
“It’s a damn sight easier on my shoulder than one of these .577 cannons. I’m a specialist. I use the tools that suit me.”
His face tautened. Why had he told me? I wondered. Perhaps he had the peculiarly British notion of exercising fair play even with those one despises. Or maybe he was hoping to goad my American machismo into making me face the old and mighty bull close up and get trampled flat.
“Thanks for your concern, anyway,” I said.
“Get out of here,” he said.
I made camp that night in the midst of an endless rippling of tawny grass. Out of some urge doubtless springing from my own arboreal ancestry I pulled the white Cruiser up into the lee of the single tree in sight. I cooked some tasteless foil-wrapped rations on a Coleman stove, not wanting to send up smoke in case anyone was watching, and afterward made myself some tea.
I sat on the hood of the Toyota, sipping, watching the sun sink and the sky go red. The grassland started to come alive around me as the day faded and myriad animals woke to greet the night. So did the bugs, unfortunately. As soon as the sky had shaded through purple and indigo and was starting in on starshot black, I unrolled my sleeping bag in the back of the Landcruiser—no use in tempting any of those leopards Muzakere had mentioned—and draped mosquito netting over windows half open for ventilation. The local fauna might not have qualified as a flight of angels, but their sounds sang me to my rest well enough.
Morning was early. The other party would be up with the sun, the natives gathering up the camp things and packing them into the Rovers, the white hunters rechecking rifles and ammunition, feeling the pulse-quickening that said there’d be a kill today.
I felt a bit of that myself as I sipped my morning coffee.
The herd was making for a nearby river—stream, rather—that ran through a great shallow depression in the land. The group of hunters was following them at what I judged would be a careful distance. They probably hoped for the elephants to be occupied with drinking and bathing when they came in range.
Luck was with them and me. The wind was right in our faces. Those trunks are acutely sensitive olfactory apparatuses as well as the most versatile manipulatory members evolution has produced on this planet. And no bull ever got as big and old as that patriarch without becoming ever so wary of man scent. If the wind blew wrong the herd would bolt, and that would put a stop to the day’s hunting.
Unless, of course, somebody happened to be in charging range of the big bull when the wind went foul. In spite of what Muzakere said, I didn’t think even a .600 would be much help then.
The map and the gradual rise of the land told me I was getting near the broad bowl. I stopped the Toyota and sat listening. I couldn’t hear the growl of other engines. A good sign? We’d see.
It was afoot from here on. I didn’t want either the elephants or the other hunters to hear me. If the animals were at the stream the only thing that had kept them from hearing me already was the fold of ground between us.
Flies strafed me as I got out and unzipped my Remington from its case. Everything seemed in order. Bouncing over the landscape might have thrown the scope off, but I sure as hell was in no position to fire off a few rounds to sight it in. I’d been through this before, though. I felt fairly confident.
I fed the magazine full of cartridges. Then I filled my canteen from the tank behind the driver’s seat, closed and locked the Landcruiser, and set out after my prey.
I’d diverged from the tracks of the elephants and those who followed them a few kilometers back. I guessed the others had left their vehicles well around the curve of the circular depression to walk in on the animals. When I crested the rise I found I was right. There was no sign of the bulky, broad-shouldered Land Rovers, but perhaps 2000 meters away was a small clump of figures moving steadily down toward the stream. The hunters.
I looked to the stream. They were there, all right. Almost 20 of them. And the patriarch. Muzakere hadn’t been mistaken about him. He was the biggest creature I’d ever seen outside the dinosaur room of the Smithsonian. Four, maybe four and a half meters at the shoulder, and the tusks coming out of his mouth like white and twisted bowsprits from the wreck of an ancient sailing ship. A record breaker. It would be a shame for such magnificence to die.
Still, there was the lure of that ivory. That big ivory.
I started moving down, rifle slung and bumping against my rump. In my rising excitement I didn’t give the discomfort much thought. They looked like great, gray children, playing in that brown and greasy water. I’ve never got over the feeling of sheer power they exude. I felt five and small and taken to the zoo again, watching those monolithic beasts.
I quickened my pace. The other hunters were getting close to what they’d probably consider fair range—long enough for some margin of safety, short enough for the fat slugs from their expresses to stagger the giants. Time pressed on me like deep water. I didn’t want to allow them first shot.
I was farther away than I liked when they stopped and started to position themselves. We’d been following gradually converging courses whose nexus was the herd. I was still 500 meters from the elephants, the hunters about 300 from the animals and 400 from me.
I sat, unslinging the Remington, bringing it to shoulder and elbows to knees, forcing myself to breathe with deliberation. No use letting myself get flustered. I couldn’t afford to fluff a shot.
I brought my cheek near the gleaming receiver and peered through the Bausch & Lomb. I saw a mother and child playfully splashing water on each other. There was something almost human about their easy affection.
The rifle traversed till I saw him, the bull. God, he was huge. My breath caught in my throat as I watched him. He looked like a mountain about to fall on me.
The crosshairs aligned themselves as if by their own accord on his wrinkle-circled right eye. He seemed to be gazing at me. He was aloof, unafraid, as if aware I was there and disdainful of my power to hurt him.
Time was short. I swung the rifle again, dizzily upslope, till the figures of men appeared.
There were two whites, in typical khaki bush clothes and wide-brimmed hats, and six or seven natives in loose trousers and shirts. I was cutting it fine. The older of the whites had his rifle halfway to the ready, squinting at the elephants as if to fix their location in his mind. Once he opened fire he’d have to fire fast to get more than one before the rest fled out of range. Though his range would be long—my eyes widened as I recognized his weapon.
I’d never actually seen one—a World War II German bolt action antitank rifle, 12.5 mm and rechambered to take a .50 caliber machine-gun cartridge. Heavy artillery. He had three of the enormous shells in the cartridge loops on his left breast.
His every move and gesture was that of a professional, a cold, steady, Hemingwayesque hero in his own eyes and those of the world. The other white hung back; younger, he see
med to defer to the man. His own gun was a standard twin-bore Rigby .577.
The .50 came up to a solid shoulder. The time had come. With something like regret I brought the crosshairs onto my own target, inhaled, let it out slowly, squeezed.
The Remington slammed me and the barrel kicked up. I gave way, then leaned forward and lined up the scope in time to see the bullet hit.
The Hemingway type was doing an oddly balletic spin and fall, the rifle dropping from his hands. My slug had bored under his right arm, through lung and heart and out. As calmly as I could, I ejected the spent shell and chambered another round.
The elephants were alerted, trumpeting their alarm. I had no time for them. I centered the crosshairs on the pallid face of the younger hunter, staring in horror at his fallen idol.
The second report left my ears ringing like a carillon. Red mist exploded behind his head. He dropped like a string-snipped marionette as the bearers fled.
I looked at the stream. The herd was in full flight now, all except for the big aged bull. He stood knee-deep in water, facing me, trunk upraised in challenge. I waved to him, though his squinted old eyes doubtless couldn’t make me out. Go in peace, old one, I thought. I’ve no business with you now.
You see, not all emerging African nations care nothing about their endangered native wildlife. Some of them have been fighting the poachers for a long, long time. And some of them have realized the only way to counter the poachers’ greed is to appeal to the greed of others. So they offer bounties. Good ones.
The poachers come from all around. Lots of them. They follow the big ivory.
And me, I follow them.
Asia Minor
ISRAEL
Mayberry
Florence V. Mayberry
When Nothing Matters
The story of Solange Jensen, a woman utterly alone after a yearlong honeymoon, who has learned that happiness can be a fragile, fleeting thing. . .a perceptive and compassionate story full of poignant memories and bittersweet thoughts, told with the “Mayberry touch”. . .
It was a long tiring walk from the top of Mount Carmel to the shore of the sea, but Solange had taken it again, as she had for the past week, every day since Thorwald was gone. Gone. No longer her husband.
The tiring was good. She yearned for a fatigue so sodden and compelling that she would sleep, stop thinking.
She crossed the highway, stumbled over rough ground to the railroad tracks, stepped over them down to the sandy beach. She kicked off her loafers, rolled up her slacks, and let the waves lick her feet. She shaded her eyes, gazing at the water. Near the shore, the Mediterranean was a brilliant turquoise. A few meters out it deepened into dark blue, almost cobalt. In the distance a white ship, contrasting sharply against the sea, moved slantwise from the horizon toward Haifa’s harbor.
Perhaps she should take a ship, go to Greece, Italy, America. Anywhere but Haifa and Israel.
She faced southward, in the direction of Tel Aviv. No ship to be seen there, only the empty horizon. “Like me. Empty. Alone with itself,” Solange said aloud. Vaguely she realized that it was aloud, and vaguely she was troubled because it was. For the past week, and only for the past week, she had been holding conversations with herself. “It’s because I’m alone. Alone!” she shouted at the sea. The rush and thud of the waves against the shore blotted up the sound, leaving her even more lonely.
She moved away from the soothing touch of the warm sea, rubbed the sand from her damp feet, slipped on her shoes, and continued on down the beach, past a service station, past the public beach, on and on. When she considered she was sufficiently tired she crossed the highway to a weedy space of ground where an Arab shepherd guarded a straggle of black goats and began the long slow climb up the steep height of Carmel. “Surely you’ll sleep tonight,” she assured herself.
Short of the mountain top she turned along a narrow slanting lane, went down a flight of stairs past terraced gardens, turned the key in the lock of her ground-floor apartment, shut the door behind her. She hesitated, not wanting to go farther into the empty room. “Empty,” she said aloud. “Not even a cat or a dog or a bird. Nothing but you.” She looked at herself in the hall mirror, watched her mouth twist in a grimace, its bitterness intensified by contrast with the delicate blossoms of the potted plant beneath the mirror. On impulse she picked up the plant, walked through the living room to the window area, pushed aside the glass of one window, and hurled the pot into the deep wadi below. “Nothing,” she repeated.
She went to the kitchen, thinking: boil the water, put in the filter paper, measure the coffee, pour the water, drink it and you’ll feel better. Anything else, Solly—a poached egg? No? Corn flakes? Yes, corn flakes. Eat.
“Why?” she asked.
She removed the bowl she had filled with brown flakes and the bluish Israeli milk from the table, carried it to the sink, poured its contents into the drain. She returned to the living room and lay down on the sofa, her face pressed against an embroidered Indian pillow. Its little metal mirrors scratched her cheek as though to sharpen memory of when she and Thorwald had bought the pillow covers in India, almost in the shadow of the Taj Mahal.
Almost as if she were taking it again, the long taxi drive from New Delhi to Agra ribboned through her mind. Passing crews of women in dull-colored saris as they scrabbled in dirt to build a highway, male supervisors idly watching. Past painted elephants, monkeys chattering in trees above strange long protuberances that their driver said were birds’ nests, dangling from branches to protect their eggs from marauders. At Thorwald’s request the taxi stopped and laughingly he pulled her toward a painted elephant, insisted she clamber onto it and have her picture taken. “You looked like a princess riding to meet your lover,” he said, once they were back in the taxi.
“I am,” she said confidently, snuggling close to him. “And I’ve met him.” How long had they been married then? Six months? No, a year but it was still like a honeymoon, traveling continually to Thorwald’s engineering assignments in exotic, wonderful places. That was what he liked, a constant change, and so did she as long as he was with her.
That day they had stopped at village rest stations where men charmed snakes out of baskets, where scraggly Himalayan bears danced pathetically to reedy music, where men wandered casually in and out of open-doored relief sheds. The heat throbbed over the land and crescendoed into a blinding, staggering white blaze as they walked past reflecting pools toward the scalding noon beauty of the Taj Mahal. It was so hot she thought she might faint, and she clung to Thorwald to steady herself against the swirling vertigo in her head. He hurried her forward, fleeing from the heat into the shadowed protection of the exquisite mausoleum that the Shad Jahan had built for the wife he loved so dearly.
She had gazed, fascinated, at the jeweled final token of adoration a king had given his beloved, yearning not for it but for the love that caused it. “Thorwald, if you were king and I had died, would you build me a Taj like this?”
“Of course,” he said easily. “Now let’s find a restaurant. I’m famished.” As they walked back past the pools he added, “Jewels are easy to give when they are only promises. Even a poor man can give them.”
And she had answered, “But promises like that are jewels.”
She sat up and asked the empty room, “Are they?” She walked again to the window to distract the memory, but it would not leave. It kept reeling on, like a film, with the rest of that day’s journey as they drove back to New Delhi, traveling the same road, past the same houses, trees with monkeys and birds. But the late golden sun changed the scene, made it into a new road, a new country and people. Now the village women were clean and fresh, dressed in brilliant saris, like butterflies freed from the chrysalis of the dusty morning’s work. They walked gracefully beside the highway, copper pots of water balanced on their heads, calling to children, laughing with neighbors, their staccato chatter rising like fragmented music. Happy, serene, gentle.
But then, so soon after
, she had become tearful, almost hysterical from the awful proof that happiness is fragile, fleeting. Ahead of them a crowd was gathered on the highway. The taxi slowed, then veered sharply to hasten past the group with its terrible center. A body’s crumpled figure was flat on the road, face down, one leg askew, a jagged white bone glistening from mangled flesh and torn trousers, the road beneath him streaked red.
“Don’t cry,” Thorwald had soothed. “Never waste life by crying over things you can’t do anything about. Where shall we have dinner tonight? At the hotel, or go adventuring?”
Her stomach had turned at the thought of food, but she forced down the repugnance. This was their continuing honeymoon, it must be kept happy, not spoiled. She leaned against him, drawing on his cool control. For yes, Thorwald was as controlled as the engineering graphs he produced for his company. She determined to learn from him, to become pragmatic, objective.
She had not learned.
“Solly, you’re all emotion, no control. And I might add, that’s damned wearing,” he had told her a week ago. “No, I will not tell you who she is, I’ll not have you messing about with some crazy, useless confrontation. It wouldn’t change a thing, only make everything more difficult. I’ve told you before and I tell you again, don’t waste strength on things you can’t change. Because frankly, Solly, you haven’t got what it takes to change what I’m going to do.”
But she couldn’t stop trying; she was driven to know about the woman who was taking Thorwald away from her. “Thorwald, what is she that I’m not? Prettier? Poised, controlled the way you want me to be? I’ll change, truly I will, but don’t leave me, Thorwald.”