African Dawn

by Tony Park

  ‘Stop!’ Tate screamed. ‘Why did you do it … why did you do that to her … to me?’ Braedan could hear Tate was sobbing, but he didn't turn around to look at him. He just walked away, back to the war.

  PART TWO

  Zimbabwe

  15

  Tanzania, 2009

  Tate Quilter-Phipps raised the Dan-inject dart rifle to his shoulder and leaned out of the helicopter's hatch. The slipstream blasted him cool for a blessed few moments.

  Victoria Regan, the South African pilot, brought the chopper down lower, until they were no more than ten metres from the rhino, above and to the left of the galloping cow. Victoria was an expert pilot – a former military flying instructor who now specialised in game capture. She bled off a little speed until Tate was positioned just aft of the animal as she charged along the short-grass plains within site of the granite Moru Kopjes at the western edge of Tanzania's Serengeti National Park. Victoria reported that their speed was twenty knots, matching the rhino's.

  ‘Steady,’ Tate said into the microphone of his headset. Tate aimed the red dot of the sight mounted atop the dart gun on the muscle of the cow's upper left leg. He curled his finger around the trigger and got ready to pull it. He knew from experience that if he started to squeeze the trigger gradually, as one did with a rifle, air would begin escaping from the gun, lessening the power of the shot.

  The rhino veered suddenly to the right, to escape a termite mound, and Victoria made a smooth correction to keep Tate in the same position. Tate pulled the trigger in a single rapid motion, but just as he did so the young girl beside him suddenly lurched into his left side. The dart flew wide, missing the rhino by a good metre.

  ‘Zoe!’ he yelled. ‘What the hell?’ He leaned back into the helicopter and saw the American girl was on her knees, trying to retrieve her expensive Nikon camera from the floor.

  ‘OK back there?’ Victoria asked via the intercom.

  ‘No. Take her up.’ Tate swore and shifted his right leg in out of the slipstream. He made no move to help the girl. ‘Get in your seat and put your seatbelt on,’ he snapped.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, sitting up again ‘I just wanted to get a picture and –’

  Tate held up a hand to silence her. ‘I told you to keep your seatbelt on at all times. We're causing this animal enough stress as it is. Now I have to prepare another dart. Stay seated next time, all right?’

  ‘I'm so sorry.’ The twenty-two-year-old undergraduate from California buckled her seatbelt, her lip trembling.

  Tate busied himself sliding the plastic fishing tackle box from under his seat so he wouldn't have to deal with her juvenile behaviour any more. He took out a sixty-millimetre needle and slipped a circular red plastic sleeve over the closed point, so that it covered the two small side ports located near the tip. He worked with practised ease, despite a frantic grab for the next dart's components as the helicopter hit an updraft of hot air. Once Victoria had her flying straight and level again Tate opened another compartment in the box and extracted a dart and a pre-loaded syringe fitted with a spinal needle. He injected the four milligrams of Etorphine into the dart's chamber.

  ‘That's the M99, right?’

  Tate ignored the girl's question. He knew Zoe was smarting from his rebuke and was now trying to impress him with her meagre knowledge in the hope that he might forgive her and start to like her. She was doomed on both counts.

  ‘It looks like you're using the same dose as this morning, for the white rhino,’ she said, leaning closer to him again. ‘Isn't that a lot of Etorphine for an animal half the weight of the white?’

  Tate frowned. It was a good question and she was right to notice the heavy dose of M99, the common name for Etorphine. ‘Despite the difference in their sizes,’ he said into the intercom, ‘the black rhino has a justifiable reputation for being far more aggressive than the white, and the rule is never skimp on the M99. You want to put a black down fast, not only for your own safety, but also the animal's.’

  ‘I see,’ Zoe said.

  Tate added the sixty milligrams of the tranquilliser Azaperone to the dart. ‘The M99 will knock the rhino down, and the Azaperone will keep it drowsy.’ The final ingredient in the cocktail was an enzyme, Hyalase, which would help the other two drugs be absorbed more rapidly. Next he fitted the needle to the end of the dart.

  From the tackle box Tate took a large empty syringe and used it to pressurise the dart by pumping air into it until the red rubber stopper was seated firmly behind the chamber containing the immobilising agents. Finally, he fixed a bright pink ‘fluffy’ to the end of the dart and slid the whole thing into the butt of the airgun. Tate screwed the cover into place. ‘Ready,’ he said to Victoria. ‘Stay in your seat,’ he cautioned the girl. Zoe nodded.

  ‘There she is. One o'clock,’ Victoria called.

  Tate looked out and put his right foot on the skid again as Victoria brought the chopper down. As he'd been preparing the dart Victoria had been herding the rhino, keeping her in the short grass away from the kopjes and some stands of trees and bush, and moving in the direction of the ground party, with whom he'd been liaising. Tate glanced at Zoe to make sure she was behaving herself, then took aim again, laying the sight's red dot on the rhino cow's gluteal muscles, at the top of the left leg, over her pelvis. He pulled the trigger.

  ‘Good hit,’ the pilot said.

  ‘Oh my God, Tate, that was awesome.’ Zoe laid a hand on his forearm.

  Tate shrugged her hand off as Victoria kept pace with the rhino. He'd sensed she'd find an excuse to touch him again. He hated people invading his personal space and if she kept it up he would need to have words with her.

  ‘Wow, you're such a good shot,’ she persisted in his headphones. ‘I can shoot, too. My dad taught me. Do you think maybe I could dart the next rhino?’

  ‘No.’

  Tate could see the pink fluffy bobbing on the rhino's hide and the black rubber at the end of the plunger was now forward inside the dart's clear plastic chamber, telling him the drugs inside had been injected. It looked like a good hit. He hit the timer button on the digital stopwatch hanging from a lanyard around his neck.

  ‘How long will it take for the rhino to drop?’ Zoe asked.

  ‘Three to eight minutes.’ Tate didn't take his eyes off the animal. The rhino's charge had eased to a loping gate. Instead of avoiding a small bush in front of her, one of the few on the plain, she ran right over the top of it – a sure sign she was affected by the drugs. Two minutes later she slowed right down and was moving her legs in an exaggerated high-stepping motion. The rhino sank to her knees. ‘Take us down, Victoria.’

  Victoria made a tight turn and put them on the ground no more than fifty metres away from the rhino. She had done a good job keeping the rhino in open ground, as the cow had been heading for the safety of some thick thorn bush amid a couple of granite boulders and had fallen just short of the cover.

  Tate, Zoe and a Tanzanian national parks scout named Teacher climbed out of the helicopter and Victoria lifted off again as they turned their backs to the swirling cloud of dirt, grit and twigs.

  Tate had been in Tanzania for a month, supervising the darting of black rhinos in the Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti National Park. There had been about a thousand rhinos naturally occurring in the area until the 1980s, but the number of home-grown animals had been reduced to two by poaching. Numbers had been slowly built up in recent years, though, with rhinos translocated from Kenya and South Africa. Tate had been on a team that had brought in new stock from South Africa ten years earlier.

  Rhino poaching, a perennial problem in Africa, had experienced a spike in recent times, ever since a Vietnamese government minister had claimed powdered rhino horn had cured his cancer. As if it wasn't bad enough that rhino were still being killed for a supposed cure for impotence and fever, this latest ludicrous claim had sent the market into overdrive. There was new pressure to conserve and protect the remaining populations, including Tanzani
a's small number of wild animals.

  The project he was involved in was part of an ongoing monitoring program, checking the health and numbers of rhinos and fitting VHF radio transmitters. Once an animal was located and immobilised the team of researchers Tate was supervising would get to work installing a transmitter in each rhino's horn. A cavity would be drilled, the transmitter inserted and then the whole thing sealed up with resin.

  ‘Keep watch in that shateen, Teacher,’ Tate said, pointing to the curtain of thick bush nearby. ‘Come,’ he said to Zoe.

  Tate untied the long strip of white cloth he was wearing like a sash around his waist and handed it to Zoe. ‘You put on the blindfold, like we discussed. She's down, but she's not unconscious. She can still respond to visual stimuli and sound, so we want to cover her eyes and keep the noise down. And watch out for her horn, OK?’

  Zoe nodded. Tate hoped she would at least get this simple task right.

  ‘Hello, my girl,’ Tate said as he approached the rhino. ‘Get the blindfold on her, now.’ Tate could see Zoe was mesmerised by the mere fact of being so close to the wild creature. That was understandable, but her repeated inability to respond to orders was not. ‘Now!’

  ‘OK, OK.’

  Tate gripped the rhino's horn and held her sagging head up while Zoe tied the cloth around her eyes. When she was done he lowered the head and began assessing the animal. Tate called to Teacher to come and help them. The cow had come to rest on her chest, with one of her legs tucked up under her body. ‘We need to roll her onto her side,’ he said to Zoe. ‘She's been running flat out for some time and her muscles are producing lactic acid. We need to straighten the legs to allow the acid out and oxygen in, so that the muscles don't produce more. Lactic acid can cause tissue and muscle damage, which can lead to compartmental syndrome, which could cripple her.’

  Teacher arrived and the three of them heaved and rolled the rhino onto her side. ‘Good,’ Tate said. He unzipped his bumbag and pulled out his stethoscope. The first thing to check was her heart rate. ‘Good,’ he said to himself. Tate unclipped the handheld radio from his stout buffalo leather belt. ‘Nigel, Nigel, this is Tate, over.’

  Tate paused and tried contacting Nigel and the ground party again. There was no answer. He wasn't surprised, as the radios were limited to line-of-sight range and there was a ridge studded with granite kopjes between them. He called Victoria and organised to use the orbiting helicopter as a radio relay.

  Zoe was taking pictures of the rhino, but as she had a three-hundred-millimetre lens on her Nikon she had to back up about twenty metres to get her shot. Tate was about to tell her to come back closer to him, but then decided he was better off with her out of the way. Teacher had his back to them. His rifle was balanced on his shoulder and he was gripping it by the barrel. He wasn't a model of efficiency, by any means, but at least he was looking in the right direction.

  The rhino had her head lowered and each long exhalation from her nostrils raised mini dust clouds. Her breathing was fine. Tate yanked the dart from her rump and took a tube of antibacterial ointment from his bumbag. He pushed the long nozzle of the tube deep into the puncture wound and squirted until the ointment overflowed. This would prevent a subcutaneous infection under the rhino's thick skin.

  He picked up the radio again. ‘Victoria, Victoria, Tate … ask Nigel how far away he is, over.’ Tate stood there sweating, keeping a close watch on the rhino while he waited for the reply. The ground party should be close. Ideally, they didn't want to keep a rhino immobilised for more than thirty minutes. He checked his stopwatch. Ten had passed already.

  ‘Tate, Tate, this is Victoria. Bad news. Nigel says they've just got a puncture. The guys are working to change it as fast as they can, over.’

  ‘Affirmative.’ Tate knew there was no point in cursing or telling them to hurry. This was Africa and shit had been happening since the continent was part of Gondwanaland. His number-one concern now was for the rhino. He knelt by its head and grabbed its large front horn in one hand and stroked its big face with the other. ‘Hush, my girl. Not long now. Be patient.’ He loved these big, prehistoric things more than anything else in the world – certainly more than any human being he'd met in the past thirty years. The rhino let out a long, dozy snort.

  Tate crossed his legs and settled himself on his bum, next to the rhino. The girl was still a distance away taking photos. Despite his concern at the delay, he realised there was nowhere else in the world he would rather be. The sky was clear and the Serengeti Plains stretched away to the east for ever and ever. Tanzania was different to his native Zimbabwe and the rest of southern Africa. He'd been to places with a justifiably rich reputation for their densities of game, but nowhere else had matched the sheer spectacle of the natural bounty of the Serengeti during the wildebeest migration. The seasonal movement had passed them now, which made it easier to track and work with the rhino, but he'd been fortunate enough to stand in the middle of the Ndutu Plains and see nothing but wildebeest, zebra and their attendant marauding predators for as far as his eye could see. It was a humbling experience to gaze on nature as she was meant to be … well, almost. All that was missing from the landscape were more rhinos, and that was man's fault.

  Life was laid bare for all to see on the plains. And death. It was amazing, Tate thought, to see the interactions between predator and prey in the Serengeti and the adjoining Masai Mara, in Kenya. In his part of Africa predators hunted using an element of stealth. Lion used long grass to get close to their prey, and leopard ambushed impala and bushbuck from the deep cover of thick riverine bush. Here, however, prides of lion lived and moved within plain sight of the animals they fed on. It struck him that, unlike the human world, everyone knew their place. You could see who your enemies were on the short-grass plain, and it was up to you to take the right strategies to avoid them, or face the consequences. No one could sneak up from behind you and steal from you, or deliver a killing blow without you knowing. Unlike in the human world, Tate mused.

  Some people, such as Zoe, paid good money to do what Tate did for a living, and he did count himself lucky sometimes. The sadness was always there, however, threatening to drag him down, but as he looked at the drugged rhino and felt her warm breath on the back of his hand he was as content as he could be in this life. He would give her some more Azaperone soon if the ground team didn't arrive just now. If they were delayed further he would call in Victoria, then give the rhino a shot of Naltrexone to reverse the drug, and they would leave her for another day. Tate looked across at Teacher and saw him stiffen. The scout slowly moved the rifle from his shoulder.

  ‘Zoe,’ Tate hissed.

  ‘What is it?’ Zoe yelled.

  ‘Shush!’ He beckoned for her to come to him as he rose to his knees. Teacher held his rifle with the butt into his shoulder, ready to fire. He glanced over his shoulder and mouthed the word ‘Kifaru’. It was Swahili for black rhino.

  ‘Shit.’ Now was the time to swear.

  Zoe turned. ‘Oh, my G–’

  ‘Shush!’ Tate said, glaring at Zoe.

  ‘Sorry, I –’

  Tate held up his hand to her. The radio squawked and he turned down the volume knob and held it to his ear. Victoria was coming back out of a wide circuit. ‘Tate, Victoria … you've got trouble, man. There's another bladdy rhino trotting towards you from the kopjes. Looks a bull.’ The other rhino must have been sleeping in the bush between the rocks, Tate thought. He clicked the press-to-send switch once to tell Victoria that he understood and that he was not in a position to talk. He was answered with another click.

  Teacher backed slowly towards them. Tate heard the rustle of trees and a loud snort.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Zoe said as she saw the black rhino bull emerge from the thorn bushes at a trot. The stupid girl had ignored everything Tate had told her about keeping quiet once they were on the ground, and staying behind him. She was pointing her camera at the newcomer.

  The rhino lowered his head and cha
rged.

  ‘Trees!’ Teacher raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired a shot into the ground just in front of the animal, but it didn't heed the warning.

  Zoe ran towards Tate rather than the nearest tree. He grabbed her by a slender arm and propelled her ahead of him. ‘Run! Find a tree and climb it.’

  She turned and stumbled, tripping herself up in her panic. Tate dragged her to her feet and glanced back. Teacher's nerve or his faith in his own shooting abilities had failed him, because he was running as fast as he could for the nearest stand of trees.

  Zoe screamed, but Tate shoved her forward, away from the oncoming rhino and its attendant dust cloud. He could feel the vibration of its charging feet running up his own legs and pounding in his chest. ‘Climb!’ he ordered as he thrust her into the trunk of a sapling that barely looked strong enough to carry her weight. She reached up and grabbed a spindly twig that snapped when she pulled down on it. Her red nails scratched at the trunk.

  ‘For Christ's sake, climb!’

  ‘I can't!’

  Tate wrapped an arm around the back of her thighs and hefted her up into the stouter branches of the tree. She was tiny and he was able to hike her up onto his shoulder; when she finally managed to grab a bough, he gave her another boost up with a palm under her butt.

  Tate didn't need to turn to know the rhino was almost on him. He'd be gored or smashed between that huge skull and the trunk before he could get himself up to the lowest branch. Tate dropped to the ground and wriggled so he was lying on the opposite side of the tree trunk to the rhino. He heard the snorted puffs of angry breathing.

  Leaves and small twigs rained down on Tate as he clung to the base of the trunk, trying desperately to become part of the bark that he pressed his face to. Above him, Zoe screamed in terror as the rhino rammed his head into the trunk a second time.

  Tate risked a peek around the tree and saw the rhino standing there. More debris landed on him, and he looked up to see Zoe slipping from the perch on which she'd managed to sit. She screamed again and was suddenly hanging from the branch above her, her legs pedalling in midair above the rhino.