Joe Gores: Glass Tiger

‘You cheeky bastard,’ said Thorne. They both laughed.

Could the leopard kill himself a shifta ? A gratifying thought, but unlikely. The shifta’s specialty was spraying their prey with AK47 assault rifles from a safe distance away.

So why was Thorne leaving the camp Uzi at home, starting on his first manhunt in seven years with only his Randall Survivor and his 9mm Beretta? Was it his pathetic bow to a time when he had been a fighting man instead of a glorified babysitter? Or because his killing days were gone forever?

Sikuzuri Safari Camp was strung out along a quarter-mile of the Galana River’s south bank. Bar and lounge, dining hall as big as a posh restaurant, good china, chairs and tables of native hardwoods, buffalo horns and animal skulls on the walls.

The two men trotted down one of the resort’s well-marked paths. Golden pipits hurled themselves from bush to bush like tiny gold coins. The watumishi boys were stirring: strong coffee wooed their nostrils, but they had no time for a mug of it. An agama lizard popped up from behind an exposed acacia root to eye them icily, then ducked down again, like an infantryman checking out enemy troops from his foxhole.

They went silently down river on game paths twisting through saltbrush and doum palm, wary of ambush. Saltbrush, thick and bushy like dense groves of cedar, could conceal the leopard they had heard, a pride of lions, even a herd of elephant. All could kill the unwary, and often did.

The long rains were gone. Northeast across the Galana, thickets of spiked wait-a-bit comiphora shrubs — ngoja kidoga locally — blanketed the plains with nasty curved thorns that could claw the skin off a man’s back as neatly as an attacking leopard. Seven Grant’s zebras foraging the dried grasses looked car-wash fresh. Their kick could break a lion’s jaw.

Beyond was the flat-topped Yatta Escarpment, the longest lava ridge in the world, black and forbidding in the early morning light. Tsavo was the size of Massachusetts, still untamed and essentially untouristed.

A six-foot russet-necked Goliath heron, Africa’s largest bird, fished the sedges along the shore beside a shady grove of tamarind trees loaded with rattly brown seedpods. The tree trunks were polished red by mud-covered elephants rubbing against them. Morengaru stopped abruptly.

‘One click more.’

Ten minutes further on, across the river and below a small ridge, three maneless male lions were feeding on the massive body of a bull buffalo. A fresh kill, an hour old, not ripe yet.

The old bull, alone on a ridge above one of the small dry stream beds called luggas, fearless because he weighed as much as a VW Beetle, hadn’t had a chance. The three lions, each the size of a small grizzly bear, had been lying in wait. Each lion would eat seventy-five pounds of the buff’s meat before midday, then would not feed again for several days.

Another two hundred yards brought the dull telltale glint of metal in the saltbrush, also on the far side of the river. A decrepit British lorry of incredible vintage, camouflaged with branches.

Morengaru jerked his head downstream, whispered, ‘Kiboko.’

The hippos’ telltale protruding eyes showed above the water. They killed more Africans each year in panic than any other animal did on purpose. But they posed no real threat as long as the men didn’t try to cross near them.

Back upriver, the way they’d come, a fish eagle swooped low over a large eddy of russet water where half a dozen fifteen-foot logs drifted in slow, aimless circles.

Thorne chuckled and said in English, ‘Hippos and crocs.’

Crocodiles were Africa’s second deadliest animal. On purpose. A sudden lunge, a three thousand-pound snap of massive jaws, and a tribal woman washing clothes in the river, facing the shore as always, would be dragged backwards screaming from the bank. Then she would be stuck in the mud at the bottom of the river until ripe enough to be torn into bite-size pieces and eaten.

The two men could cross in only gut-deep water right where they were, but the crocs made such a crossing a race with death. Lose their footing, lose the race. Don’t try, and the shifta would be free to do whatever bloody work they were about.

Thorne trotted down the bank, went in, churning ahead, bent forward, straining against the weight of water, looking neither back nor to the sides. Morengaru would be behind him. The stolid hippos would be watching. The crocs would be coming; coming like half-ton cigarette boats, heads up, jaws gaping, casting spreading wakes behind them. The men splashed up the far bank with six feet to spare, the crocs lunging halfway out of the water before sliding back with frustrated jaw-clacks.

A brace of startled waterbucks bounded off across the savanna like outsized jackrabbits. Dense clouds of flies rose from the truck bed. Thorne approached with massive foreboding.

‘Cocksuckers!’ he exclaimed involuntarily.

Tossed carelessly into the back of the lorry was a pair of black rhino horns, matted hair use-polished into the hardness of bone, the curved front one five feet long. Hacked off with pangas after the nearly extinct animal had been killed by the burst of automatic weapon fire Morengaru had heard. Bits of skin and flesh still clung to them, pink but darkening rapidly.

Just over three months ago, Thorne had laid his hand on Bwana Kifaru’s back. He had considered the ugly, endearing, grumpy, near-sighted beast a friend: now he was dead and left to rot, slaughtered for hacked-off horns that would be carved into status-symbol handles for the decorative daggers of petro-rich Yemeni Arab youngbloods. Left-over bits would be ground into aphrodisiac powder for Asians who didn’t trust Viagra.

Just a bonus for the shifta. In 1989, the Conference on International Trade in Endangered Species had imposed a worldwide ban on the sale of elephant tusks. But now Zimbabwe and Botswana, overpopulated with elephant, were lobbying to lift the ban, again sparking demand for ivory in Japan and China.

So the shifta were after the last two of the Galana’s old bull elephants who carried 175 kilos of ivory that would sell for $6,000 a kilo. The tusks would be worth a million dollars to a black market buyer: the raiders had not come hunting on spec.

‘Not today, you fuckers,’ Thorne whispered to himself.

Nobody had been left to guard the lorry. Keys in the ignition. Thorne dropped them into his pocket. Morengaru moved slowly forward, bent at the waist. He put gentle fingertips into several shallow, barely-discernable depressions in the dust. Came erect displaying three splayed fingers.

‘Tatu.’

Three shifta. Catch the bastards, hand them over to the Kenyan Wildlife Service, rough fuckers who would work them over until they gave up their buyer. A very good day’s work indeed.

Thorne swung an arm, breathed, ‘Sisi endelea. Upesi.’

Let us go quickly. They trotted along the edge of the savanna for silent movement, detouring through the salt-brush only to avoid the scavengers squabbling over Bwana Kifaru.

It was a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life. Snapping jackals, snarling spotted hyenas, spindly-legged marabout storks with bald heads already red from being thrust into the rhino’s guts. Leaping, yelling, fighting. Overhead circled a pair of tawny, muscular bataleur eagles, disdainful of the scene below.

A kilometer on, they passed a score of elephant skulls as big as boulders, left by the poachers of fifteen years ago. Every gaping eyesocket held a nest of spur-winged plovers.

Half a click, and they came upon still slightly-steaming cannonball-size piles of fresh elephant dung. Getting close. A Hemprich’s hornbill foraging the strawy brown mounds for seeds and grasses flapped away, indignantly clacking his dusky red downturned beak. Later his own droppings would spread the seeds over the savanna to complete the cycle of death and rebirth.