by White, Gwynn
“Depends,” I said. “Rhinos generally like to keep to themselves. If you bother them and they’re running down your jeep, it’s more likely they want to chase you away.”
He grinned.
“But make no mistake, they’re no pushovers. If you make them feel that they’re threatened, that’ll be three tons of beast bearing down on you at fifty klicks.”
Now Jake was grinning, and behind him Caspar Theiler, our PH, the legally designated Professional Hunter of the group, who had the big-game license for the what was called the big four: buffalo, lion, elephant and rhinoceros.
“You need to be ten meters away before you can take a shot. Assuming your aim is true, the dart’ll put her to sleep, in, oh about twenty, twenty-five minutes. If you’re on the ground, that’s more than enough time for her to close the distance.”
Caspar clapped Walter on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be covering you if she charges.”
* * *
We weren’t just darting a rhino, we were moving her.
If this whole thing worked out, she’d be in Cheshire, England at the Chester Zoo this time next week, part of the EESBP, the European Endangered Species Breeding Program, for the eastern black rhino. And I’d be back in Canada, with something else to add to our continuing work at CIRCE.
Operations like the EESBP at Chester were a last chance that the current population did not become the last generation of these creatures, threatened to near-extinction for their horns.
Rhinoceros horn is made of keratin, a material found in human hair and fingernails, growing to between three and five feet in length. Rhinoceros horn is perhaps the most valuable animal material on Earth or the inner colonies, and worth even more on the black markets. It was even more valuable than cocaine or gold.
The demand came from the prosperous demographics of China, Vietnam, and Valles Marineris, where rhino horn—much like that of the unicorn—was held as a status symbol among the elite, drunk as a water-powder mixture in social gatherings, used to combat cancer, alleviate snakebite, hangovers, and as an aphrodisiac.
To satisfy demand, the wholesale price on the black markets of these regions had reached $60,000 per kilogram of rhinoceros horn, with retail prices astronomically beyond that.
A poacher, the first link in the market chain, could sell into the back market in South Africa itself at $6,000 a kilogram. For a poacher, a bull rhino horn weighing 40 kilograms, was life-changing, and all it took was a bunch of nerve and a semi-automatic assault rifle.
* * *
To move the rhino, we were armed with a very different sort of fire-arm. We stocked a tranquilizer rifle that shot 0.50 caliber darts tipped with a hypodermic needle, filled with a powerful sedative. On impact, a steel ball at the rear of the dart would be flung forward, activating a syringe plunger and injecting the drug into the animal.
For a fully-grown rhino it took a while for the sedative to take effect, as it circulated through the bloodstream, but when it did, the rhino was incapacitated, unresisting, which allowed handlers to move in without risk to themselves or the animal. The handlers had to move quickly, securing the rhino, protecting its eyes, checking its vitals, and administering antidotes as required.
The day before had been earmarked for the practice session for Walter to get used to the tranquilizing rifle. Dr. Hansie Malema, the team veterinarian, had filled the practice darts with water, showed Walter the breach loading, pressure adjustment and gauge readout. Nothing to it—get close enough, aim, squeeze, release.
Moving a rhino was a fairly involved operation.
We had nearly a dozen strong men to handle Amahle after she was tranquilized, and an additional truck to carry her in.
Jake’s unmanned aerial vehicles were there to save us a bit of time locating the rhino, and there was an aerospinner on stand-by in case we needed one for the actual run.
There were safari vehicles for Walter, Caspar, Jake, Hansie, Mark Jensen—the conservation scientist representing Chester, and myself representing Glen Eden.
* * *
I say Glen Eden, but CIRCE was actually an independent entity from the Zoo, albeit having its main office and labs in a building on the banks of Kelso Lake, on Zoo grounds.
CIRCE was established several years after the Zoo was founded, but its affiliation with the Weston Foundation made them close partners. CIRCE also worked closely with many of the other zoological parks and facilities in Canada, such as the Toronto Zoo and the Greater Vancouver Zoo in British Columbia.
Glen Eden Zoo itself wasn’t as big as the Toronto Zoo, just over an hour away. They had over six thousand animals from over 550 different species. The Zoo’s public collection represented 120 species, including some endangered, critically endangered and previously extinct species.
Besides Judith Weston and the staff at CIRCE, there were the official keepers who were responsible for operating the facility, including Gwynn, Pavarti, Cheri, Daniel, Ann, Anthea, Kylie, Erin and Lisa.
There were also volunteers and co-op students, there on a rotating basis, although many of them continued on season after season, often becoming part of the regular staff. That season the roster included Frankie, Sharyn, Melanie, Dean, Margo, Felix, Derek, Rebecca, Tim, Tony, Becca, Logan, (a different) Erin, Marilyn, JC, and Ella.
The Zoo has programs in captive breeding and re-introduction, which involve mating, propagating, and raising endangered and critically-endangered species in controlled habitats and, where possible, returning the population back to their natural habitats. The program included Algonquin wolves, tri-colored bats, Jefferson salamanders, spiny softshell turtles, Kirtland’s warbler, and others.
There were other projects, like the ones I worked on at CIRCE—honed by my experience at the biodiversity institute at Guelph—that are slanted more towards biotechnology, process efficiency, and other innovations, complementary to the Zoo’s captive breeding programs. One of those projects was what brought me here to Kruger, here to South Africa.
8
Elephant March
Suddenly, other voices filtered into the tent. The men, a mix of field rangers and contractors, led by the PH’s right-hand-man Bongani, were talking outside.
The music from their Ukhozi FM radio program was unexpectedly interrupted by a news broadcast, and over Jake’s intonation of coordinates, I could make out the radio broadcaster saying something about a cubewano. But my earpiece didn’t translate it quite right. It sounded like this—kyu-bee-wan-oh.
It was a word that should have registered, but it didn’t. The rangers seemed to be repeating it, not quite understanding, either, what it meant.
I turned back my attention to Jake’s computer. On one of the screens, scimitar tusks raised and lowered in an elephant march.
9
Birds of Prey
There she is!”
I was shaken back into the moment, as the team crowded around the table. Jake enlarged one of the frames to fill most of the computer screen, shrinking the others to the periphery of the main window. He selected the silhouette in the middle, dialed up the magnification, and the animal enlarged to fill up the frame. There she was.
Amahle.
“About twenty-four miles out, grid eleven-nine.”
She was magnificent.
She was close to three-and-a-half meters in length, and one-and-a-half meters high. One-and-a-half thousand kilograms of beauty. Her two horns curved up, the larger front one long and lean, maybe the length of my arm. It tapered slowly to a point, curved like a scimitar.
She was nibbling on a shrub, using her hooked, prehensile upper lip to grasp the leaves and twigs as she fed. As she looked around, her ears flickered.
* * *
A flicker of movement in the corner of the computer caught my eye, in a frame different from the one we were focusing on.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Jake keyed in a command and brought up a split-screen view of Amahle and the screen I just pointe
d out. On the right-hand a view of dry terrain emerged, and you could see dark silhouettes moving against the landscape, deliberate and fast—not zebra or wildebeest.
Men. Two of them.
Now something else came into view at the edge of the screen, behind the two men—an all-terrain vehicle.
Even at this magnification, I could see what the two in front are carrying—AK-47 selective-fire assault rifles. One of them held a box, his firearm slung over his shoulder. He started waving at the others. He pointed up in the sky, toward our camera—he’d seen our drone. Another man lifted up a rifle, let loose a clip, and our screen went blank.
“Jou bliksem!” Caspar muttered. “How far are they from Amahle?”
John checked his coordinates. “Five miles.”
Caspar yelled out “Bongani! Arm the men and get them on the trucks! I’m going on the spinner.”
“Yebo!” Bongani ran out of the tent.
Caspar started to follow but was stopped by Walter. “It’s my hunt,” the real estate developer said.
Caspar sighed. “You’re with me. Dr. Malema, you too. But listen to me,” he growled at Walter. “You do exactly as I tell you or it is all over.”
Up over one shoulder, I slung my CIRCE backpack, emblazoned with the Canadian flag, and motioned to Jake. We moved outside, where Bongani was busy getting the men into the trucks. Most of them were holding what looked like bolt-action Lee-Enfield .303s. I winced. No match for the poachers’ firepower. The laughing and banter that had been going on earlier had stopped, replaced by a stone-faced muttering and anticipation.
Caspar was strapping Walter into the rear of a four-seater spinner. The vet took the other rear seat as Caspar jumped in next to the pilot. There was a rising whir as the spinner’s gyro revved up, and they were airborne.
Jake bundled his tracking computer and comm-devices under one arm and jumped into one of the jeeps with the man from Chester. I climbed in the back and strap in. We revved up, following the dust trail of the trucks.
* * *
I could hear Caspar shouting over the noise of the spinner engines, as we followed on Jake’s audio feed.
“Bongani,” he barked, “You take the men and try to cut off the poachers, form a line between them and Amahle. I’m going to take the spinner and make directly for the rhino, drive her in the other direction, away from them. If they get through we fall back and keep the wall between them and the rhino.”
His spinner was closing in on Amahle fast, but the poachers were closer, and it was a tight race between the two. We were moving quickly too, zooming past the landscape and the vistas of animals. They were better armed, but there were more of us, and we had more vehicles and equipment. Something else was bothering me, not just the imminent danger that Amahle was in, not just the prospect of getting in the middle of a firefight between AK-47s and Lee-Enfields. It was something I couldn’t shake, something from the quick view we had of the intruders back in the tent.
Jake got his computer open, yelling into his comm to confirm with Caspar’s pilot the positions of the targets. He’d re-directed a couple of new drones to fly toward the last known location of the poachers. They flew at a higher altitude, trying to figure in on their vector. Meanwhile, he steadied his view on Amahle, keeping her in sight.
“Two miles!” I heard Caspar’s voice over the comm. They were almost there, almost within sight of her. The objective was to fly closer, dodging the trees and flying a few meters above Amahle.
Unaware of everything that was happening within a few miles of her, the rhino was still browsing through the vegetation, her lips in a cyclical chewing motion, ears twitching.
All of a sudden, Amahle reared up in alarm, dropping the twigs in her mouth, circling back at something I can’t see, something that has stricken her from the sky.
* * *
Suddenly I realized what had been bothering me about the poachers. One of them hadn’t been holding his rifle. He was holding something else—a box. Radio? Scanner?
It hit me. A remote control box.
“Caspar!” I yelled into the comm. “They’ve got drones!”
“What?!”
“Drones,” I said. “Weaponized.”
Just as I said that, Amahle circled again. There was no sound, but her head was back and her mouth was open, straining. In the back of my mind I heard her bellowing as a tracer of bullets hit her from an enemy she could barely see. She began to run.
“Oh my God,” Mark was saying.
Jake spoke directly to the spinner. “She’s been shot! She’s bolted, headed west, away from you.” Of all the goddamn luck—right toward the poachers.
“Bongani,” Caspar called, “What’s happening?”
And suddenly there was the sound of gunfire bursts on the comm, the thuka-thuka-thuka of fully-automatic fire interspersed with the single crack of bolt-actions. It was the trucks, but where were they?
“Faster!” I shouted to the driver, even though we were already racing. I felt for my sidearm, something they issued me for use only in emergencies, although, what that was going to do for us in the face of the firepower we’ve heard, I had no idea.
Amahle was still running.
“We’re hit!” It was Caspar, and on the comm I could hear the spinner’s engine whining in the background, Walter yelling something unintelligible, and suddenly I saw the spinner in the distance, in real life, fifty feet in the air, careening out of control, spiraling as if one of its gyros was suddenly out of commission.
Then it dropped, straight down.
* * *
We clambered out of the jeep and pulled the four from the spinner’s wreckage. Still alive.
“Go, go!” Mark said to me. He pulled the med kit from the jeep, and was kneeling beside Walter, whose head was bleeding. “I’ll stay with them, you stay with Amahle.”
We hesitated only a moment, then ran for the jeep.
Jake took the wheel, so I grabbed his computer and slid into the passenger’s seat. I got my bearings from the screen, and pointed. “That way.”
The rhino was half a mile away now, slowing down but still running. I re-directed another cluster of our drones in the direction of Amahle, while the one we’d already trained on her continued to keep a lock on.
From the picture I could see a stain on her upper back, dark and moist, spreading from a cluster of what must have been wounds from the drone attack. She was running, but every so often she winced, as if the unseen enemy drone let rain another barrage of fire on her from the air.
A quarter mile away.
Three of our drones had Amahle in their sights now, but more importantly, one of their cameras caught something else—the enemy drone.
“Got you.”
Jake glanced at me, then back at the trail.
I locked in the coordinates of the enemy to my three drones, and vector them in.
“What are you doing?” Jake yelled.
“I’m cluster-bombing the bastard.”
Amahle was in sight now, and Jake was following her dust trail. On the video screen, her legs seemed to be following a lopsided gait as she ran.
I made out the intruder drone following her, six rotors spinning and its weaponized payload swiveling beneath. It was unaware of my drones coming in, cameras focused on their prey.
I glanced at my screen. Almost there—closer—closer—
Two of my drones narrowly miss the intruder, but the third scored a direct hit—
THWOOM!
The two drones smashed into each other, breaking up into hundreds of individual shards of metal, plastic, and glass.
* * *
Amahle slowed to a walk, as if sensing that her tormentor was no longer following her. But the fuse which drove her forward seemed to fail her; she staggered, her legs not able to keep her completely vertical. She fell onto her side, breathing heavily.
We were about thirty meters from her now. It was not good. We had to get to her soon if she was to survive. What we neede
d was help. We needed to get her on one of our trucks, get her back to the station, to medical attention.
And just as I thought that, there was the smoke from a vehicle pulling up. My hopes rose.
But it wasn’t one of our trucks, it was an all-terrain vehicle. And when it stopped, and someone stepped out, it wasn’t Bongani, or any one of our men.
He was tall and lanky, and an AK-47 was slung over his shoulder, swinging slightly.
Two others stepped out of the vehicle, and motioned their rifles at us to stop, to get out of the jeep. We did. They yelled at us to raise our hands, drop all weapons, and I threw my sidearm to the ground.
“Geen wapens nie!” I shouted. No weapons.
It didn’t matter. They fired.
Hit, bleeding, I fell to the ground. Cheek pressed to the soil, arms stretched out, I watched as Lanky stepped up to Amahle, kicked a front leg.
Amahle coughed, raised her head.
The image of Kitani swam into my vision, and my ears fill with Mother, Mother—
Lanky pointed his rifle to the rhino’s skull, and fired.
10
Black Rhino, Night, No Stars
I remembered my mother’s voice calling my name once in winter, when I was fifteen. I remembered her arms underneath me while I was still half asleep, helping me up out of bed.
“Come on,” she said to me. “There’s a fire, we have to go.”
Suddenly I was wide awake, running with her hand in mine, but I was confused. There weren’t any flames around us, and wasn’t any smoke.
When we went outside, there was my brother Paul, still in pajamas but with his down jacket on, on the front lawn.
My mother settled me beside him, put a jacket on me, and we all held hands.
Across the street and two houses down was where ten-year-old Maria, another girl in my neighborhood, lived; I didn’t know her very well, but I saw her with her mother waiting at the bus stop everyday when my father drove me to school. They lived in a two-story turn-of-the-century wood-framed home, and it was burning.