Next-to-Last of the Tiger Men and Mack’s Last Rhino (Two Short Stories)

by Alex Bledsoe

  Startled by his quarry’s bizarre action, the cat hit the ground and flattened out, ready for another spring. Bunch met the jaguar’s cold emerald eyes and knew at this range, he’d get only one shot.

  But he didn’t fire.

  He couldn’t cheat Linda of her screwy opportunity at redemption. Whatever he thought of it, she felt she needed this chance, and as her friend he just couldn’t take it from her. He made a motion with the gun, and the cat jumped back a half step.

  “Go on, y’all get outta here,” he said softly. The cat slowly backed away and disappeared into the foliage.

  Bunch sat heavily, the shotgun across his lap, and stayed that way until he heard the dogs announcing they’d found the jaguar. Then he strolled leisurely toward the sound.

  He wouldn’t tell Linda he’d encountered the jaguar first. She didn’t appreciate charity.

  Christophe examined the jaguar’s carcass slung over the horse. One wide, smooth slice right in front of the shoulder blade marked the fatal wound. Blood soaked the fur around it, and pink foam still glistened at the corners of its mouth. A perfect, classic kill, the blade driven finally into the heart by the beast’s own struggles.

  Then he carefully opened the wrapped bundle next to the dead cat. Serpiente’s lifeless eyes stared out, his tongue dangling from limp jaws. The claw slash across his throat showed pink and gray, already covered with gnats.

  Bunch waited at the hut while Christophe led Linda down the hill toward the stream. When they reached the water, he motioned for her to sit on the bank next to him.

  “I’m sorry about Serpiente,” Linda said softly.

  Christophe nodded. “I’ve lost many dogs. Perhaps Serpiente will be the last. You’ve killed a tigre on your own, so you’re finished here, yes?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. I…found what I needed to find.”

  He looked at her face closely. “I don’t see the emptiness in you anymore. That is why you succeeded. You realized the value of your life.”

  “Yeah.”

  He smiled. “I am old and tired and drink too much. Força will need someone to care for her and help rebuild the ranch, and soon I’ll need someone to care for me. We will be, what is your word…‘okay.’”

  “Yeah.” Linda stared off into the trees and felt the last of her tears well up. “Shit, Chris, I—”

  “Say nothing. A pupil owes a teacher nothing but her best effort. You have given that.” He touched her cheek with one rough, gnarled hand. “You have become the last tigrero.”

  “Hey, not while you’re around,” she said with a forced, awkward laugh.

  “My tigrero days are over. And soon I believe there will be no tigres left.”

  “I don’t think so. Nature’s awful tough.”

  He smiled. “Yes.”

  She kissed him on the cheek. “How about we say I’m the next-to-last tigrero. How’s that?”

  He thought about it, then nodded. “Yes. I will live with that.”

  MACK’S LAST RHINO

  The sounds of the African night surrounded Macklin Cawder, and for a moment his old bones felt limber again, the aches from his accumulated injuries faded, and he was as strong and vital as the land itself. He took a deep breath of the pungent, distinctive air and sighed, “Dam-nation, I love this place.”

  Then his companion twisted off the top of a beer bottle, and the sound brought Cawder back to the present. When he turned to take the offered drink, his shoulder protested, his knees popped, and he was once again an old man about to retire, standing under the thatched roof of a rough-hewn hunting club in the middle of the African grasslands.

  “Gonna miss it, huh?” T. S. Bunch drawled.

  Cawder smiled. Despite their age difference, he liked Bunch because he knew the same love for Africa beat in the younger man’s heart. Not many came here to make their honest fortune anymore, but then T. S. Bunch would’ve been an anomaly in any era. With his long hair and wiry physique, Bunch looked more like a small-town mechanic than one of the best hunting guides around. A fellow Southerner, he reminded Cawder of the family he would soon rejoin in North Carolina to spend his twilight years as the “cool” grandfather all kids imagine.

  “’Course I’m gonna miss it,” Cawder said. He leaned on the rail. “And you know what? I’ll miss them danged kifaru the most.”

  Bunch snorted. “Come on. Nobody misses rhinos, not even mama rhinos.”

  “I will. Don’t know what it is, but I love them big ol’ ugly critters. I know they’re blind and smelly and dumb, but I’d rather hunt a rhino than anything else. Never can tell what they’re thinkin’ or what they’ll do.”

  Bunch grinned. “Hell, Mack, I know what it is.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. You like ’em ’cause they’re just like you. Blind and smelly and dumb.”

  Cawder’s guffaws filled the night and momentarily silenced everything else on the dark plain.

  Cawder’s client, Atlanta lawyer Daniel Lowe, felt sweat trickle down his face from the morning sun. The crosshairs in his rifle’s scope held steady on the bull rhino’s forehead, but he waited for the animal to turn and present a shoulder shot.

  Cawder crouched painfully behind him. His knees, at least, would be glad to retire from bush work. His equally elderly native gunbearer, nicknamed Fossil, hunkered down beside him, holding Cawder’s own gun loaded and ready.

  A bead of sweat ran down Lowe’s nose. He ignored it.

  Finally the rhinoceros tossed his head, tore loose a mouthful of tough leaves, and turned toward another bush. Now Lowe had the ideal shot, the one that would take out the animal’s heart and lungs and drop him in his tracks.

  With practiced skill, Lowe simultaneously exhaled and squeezed the trigger. A stinging drop of sweat dripped into his eye and, microscopically, he winced. The gun boomed, and a moment later the rhino bleated and disappeared into the cloud of dry dust churned up by its feet.

  “Dammit!” Lowe hissed. He knew he’d missed the kill shot even before the haze cleared. “Sorry, Mack, I got sweat in my eye.”

  Cawder stood with a groan as the wounded rhino vanished into the bushes. Naturally, this would happen on his final safari. “Ah, don’t worry about it. Part of my job. Just go wait at the jeep and tell the driver what happened. Don’t let him start drinkin’ yet.” He took the rifle from his bearer. “Fossil, you’re with me. Let’s go finish the sumbitch.”

  The old, thin bearer fell into step behind him. The two men had worked together for more than twenty years, and neither needed to speak to the other. But as they reached the fresh tracks and prepared to follow them into the brush, Cawder said, “Well, Fossil, I better enjoy this. It’s my last kifaru.”

  Hours later, as night fell, T. S. Bunch stood at the pavilion rail back at the hunting camp. Behind him the sun hung perilously low, casting long shadows across the plain and turning everything the color of blood-soaked sand. Despite the heat, he felt an ominous chill.

  His partner, Linda Fontana, six feet of tan, blonde competence, moved up next to him. Technically she was his boss, but they’d known each other since grade school, and their platonic relationship had lasted longer than either’s romantic ones.

  Her Southern accent thick as cold syrup, Linda said, “Y’all lookin’ pensive.”

  “Nah, cheap as ever,” Bunch replied without looking at her.

  “Not expensive, dummy, pensive. Thoughtful.” She leaned closer and said deliberately, “Worried.”

  Bunch nodded. “Got a weird feeling about Mack. It’s awful late, even if they did get a rhino.”

  They both looked up suddenly as a jeep approached, its lights shafting through the twilight. It bounced like a tennis ball over the rough ground. No one drove that way except in a real emergency, so Bunch and Linda were already calling instructions to the camp staff when the jeep arrived.

  The story was as old as professional hunting. The wounded rhino went to ground in a two-acre patch of scrub dense enough to conceal a small to
wn. Cawder and Fossil did everything right, approaching into the wind, following the fresh spoor. When the rhino surprised them, having doubled back on its own trail, Cawder had time for only one shot, which struck too high for the animal’s heart and too low for its spine.

  Fossil fled to the jeep while the rhino killed Cawder. No one thought this cowardice; an unarmed man against an enraged, wounded rhinoceros was not exactly an even match. By the time Fossil returned with Lowe and the driver, the rhino was gone again and Cawder wasn’t even a viable carcass. When they attempted to move the body, it fell apart, so Lowe made the command decision to bury him there, in a small clearing at the heart of the scrub patch. Lowe stood watch as the two Africans covered the shallow grave with stones and razor-sharp thorn branches to keep the body safe from scavengers.

  And so ended the career of Macklin Cawder, for thirty-seven years a fixture in African hunting.

  But his last rhino was still out there.

  As the sun rose the next morning, Linda brought Bunch a cup of coffee. He sat on a folding camp stool, his feet on the pavilion rail, and watched the dawn shadows creep across the grass. To all appearances he was as blasé as ever, but Linda knew better.

  “Thanks,” he said without looking at her.

  “You’re welcome.” Linda leaned against one of the roof support posts. “Y’all been sittin’ here all night?”

  “Yep. Except for the two hours I spent convincing Mack’s client it wasn’t all his fault.”

  “It kinda was.”

  “Yeah.” Bunch sipped the coffee and placed the cup on the rail. “It was his last day on his last safari with his last goddamn client, y’know? That’s some dumb-ass luck.”

  “Yeah, and it’s Africa, where stuff like this happens. You didn’t get all pensive when that leopard got Lou Larpis, so what’s really buggin’ you about Mack?”

  Bunch scowled at her. “What’s with you and that word pensive, anyway?”

  She lightly kicked his chair. “Don’t change the subject.”

  He looked off into the distance at the sun-blasted grass waving in the dregs of the cool night wind. “Hell, Linda, it’s the damn irony. I know we all say we want to die the way nature intended, out in the field getting ripped apart by some wild animal, instead of growing old and useless. Mack said it too, more than once. But he had a family waiting for him back in North Carolina; hell, he had grandkids. You think he really wanted to go out like this?”

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “You were his best friend here, what do you think?”

  Bunch knew Mack wouldn’t want him to dwell on this, but he was also certain Mack would be drinking the same coffee after the same sleepless night, asking the same questions, if Bunch lay mangled under a pile of rocks and thorns.

  “I guess I ain’t sure, Linda,” Bunch said quietly. “And I ain’t sure Mack was really sure. If he was, I guess I’m happy for him: he went out the way he wanted. But y’know, if he wasn’t…”

  She nodded. “And you’ll never know.”

  “Yeah.”

  Her hand rested on his shoulder for no more than a heartbeat. It was the most physical contact they ever had, and it was all they needed. “C’mon, pensive boy,” she said. “There’s still a pissed-off, wounded kifaru out there that ain’t gonna kill itself.” She paused. “And while we’re out, we might as well collect Mack and send him home like he wanted.”

  Bunch nodded, took another sip of coffee, and followed her to the jeep.

  They reached the patch of scrub by noon and slowly drove around its perimeter. Linda studied the ground for any evidence that the rhino had departed during the night. Fossil sat in the backseat, his face implacable; if Cawder’s death affected him, it didn’t show. No vultures circled above, a good but not infallible indication that the rhino had not died during the night. With two gunshot wounds, though, it would certainly be less than accommodating when they found it.

  “Well, we didn’t cut his track,” Linda said as Bunch stopped the jeep. “Reckon he’s still in there.”

  “At least the sucker’s had all night to bleed out,” Bunch said with more optimism than he really felt. He handed a satchel containing a body bag and two collapsible shovels to Fossil, then picked up his own shotgun.

  They entered the scrub along a wide, often-used game trail. Linda noticed the fresh tracks of a lion in no appreciable hurry, but no recent sign of rhino. She strained every sense and instinct; in these close quarters, they could all very quickly end up in as many pieces as Cawder had.

  They walked in careful silence for half an hour, progress slowed by the need to search all sides for any hint of the hidden rhinoceros. Abruptly she realized that, except for the wind and their own faint footsteps, everything had grown quiet and still. Then Bunch, in the lead, softly said, “Whoa.”

  Fossil and Linda slipped up silently behind him. Bunch made the barest pointing motion with his shotgun. Through the tangle of limbs and branches ahead, Linda saw the curve of a rhinoceros’s back where the beast lay bedded down. She couldn’t tell which way it faced, though, since no more than a foot of hide was exposed.

  Approaching it through the dense greenery was impossible, and a branch could deflect any shot from this distance, so they knew they’d have to draw it out. Linda and Bunch did a quick rock-paper-scissors to determine who’d be the bait. Bunch lost.

  He edged sideways down the trail, waiting for the moment when the injured animal scented him and charged. He ignored the weeds scratching his skin and kept his eyes laser-riveted to the small patch of gray hide visible through the foliage. He held the shotgun ready to spray buckshot right in the kifaru’s face.

  When it charged, none of them expected it. Suddenly it exploded right in front of Bunch, little pig eyes glaring, enormous blunt horn dropped horizontal and aimed right at his navel. The noise of two simultaneous shots filled the narrow trail as Bunch and Linda both fired, but the rhino did not react. It covered the distance to Bunch in less time than a blink and was on top of him, then—

  It went harmlessly right through him.

  With an indignant bleat, the rhinoceros trotted away around the corner of the trail. Its feet raised no dust.

  Linda followed the retreating rhino across her rifle’s bead until it vanished from sight. Fossil stood absolutely still, and even Bunch froze for a moment. Then he quickly patted himself to make sure he hadn’t somehow been so neatly sliced in half that he hadn’t felt it. “That wasn’t right,” he said at last.

  “No shit,” Linda agreed.

  “Kifaru is still there,” Fossil said quietly.

  They turned. The small patch of gray hide was still visible in the bush. Linda walked carefully toward it, and within six feet heard flies buzzing. Then the wind shifted, and the unmistakable odor of death reached her.

  “It’s dead,” she said softly. “It’s been dead a few hours at least.” There was no sign that another rhino had been anywhere around. She turned to Fossil and Bunch, thoroughly confused. “What in the name of my daddy’s Ford Ranger just happened?”

  “I dunno,” Bunch said. “But it went thataway.”

  They continued down the trail twice as alert. Linda spotted no sign of the rhino’s passage, even over ground she personally saw it cover. They arrived at a wide fork in the path.

  “Left,” Fossil said. “He’s buried beneath a tree split by lightning.” He put down the pack containing the body bag and collapsible shovels. “But I don’t think the kifaru will let us take him. They sent the one we saw as a warning.”

  “Well, we ain’t leavin’ him out here for the hyenas,” Linda said.

  Fossil reluctantly retrieved the satchel. They followed the left fork until they saw the tree described by the old bearer. Under it, Macklin Cawder’s makeshift grave was undisturbed, every stone still in place beneath the thornbush covering. Even the primitive cross, two sticks quickly lashed together with a spare shoelace, remained upright.

  But surrounding the grave were three big m
ale rhinoceroses. They faced outward like soldiers at attention.

  The wind suddenly reversed, blowing the hunters’ human scent toward the rhinos. Linda and Bunch both snapped up their guns, ready for the inevitable charge. But the animals did not react at all, something so out of character for rhinos that it gave Linda chills.

  “Please tell me y’all see that,” Linda whispered over the top of her rifle.

  Bunch lowered his shotgun. “Yep,” he agreed.

  A cloud of dust momentarily obscured the tableau before them. When it cleared, the rhinos remained—but they weren’t alone.

  Inside the ring of kifaru, atop his own grave, stood Macklin Cawder. He appeared younger than either Linda or Bunch remembered him, trimmer and taller. He held his prized rifle under his arm, the chamber broken open just like a pro’s.

  “He’s with his kifaru,” Fossil said simply.

  Linda looked at Bunch and asked quietly, “What do you want to do?”

  Bunch spit the dust from his suddenly dry lips. “Well, it is his grave. Reckon he’s where he wants to be.”

  “Then let’s just walk outta here real slow,” Linda said, “in case any of them rhinos turn out to be real.”

  As they backed away, another cloud of dust blew over them. Just before it obscured the scene, Bunch thought he saw Cawder wink at him. Then the forms of both man and rhinos dissolved into shafts of dusty African sunlight, leaving only the grave.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Alex Bledsoe grew up in West Tennessee an hour north of Graceland (home of Elvis) and twenty minutes from Nutbush (birthplace of Tina Turner). He’s been a reporter, editor, photographer, and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. He now lives in a Wisconsin town famous for trolls, writes before six in the morning, and tries to teach his three kids to act like they’ve been to town before. His books include Wisp of a Thing, The Hum and the Shiver, Wake of the Bloody Angel, Dark Jenny, and The Girls with Games of Blood.