you needed to become a sniper in urban combat. Accuracy plus patience, patience, patience.
It wasn’t the kind of thing you could forget. It was a gift. The only thing you had to do was pull the trigger at the right moment. What could go wrong? There was hardly any wind; there wasn’t a single reason to believe that the bullet would miss its target. Its head had been notched with a cross so as to burst behind the eye socket on impact. The animal would die instantly with a minimum of suffering. It sounded cruel but it was humane.
For minutes on end, Tony stood there, trying to gird his loins, but again he didn’t manage to pull the bloody trigger. He was forced to watch helplessly through his scope as the rhino cow turned her head away again. She revealed the contours of her magical, majestic double horn, the price of which, per kilo, exceeded that of gold. She sniffed around suspiciously, her head back, her nose in the air. Then she bent down toward her baby. He was standing next to her, panting away after frolicking in the mud of the watering hole. The place where his own horn would grow was marked only by a small bump. How old was this calf? A few weeks? Months?
Tony let his gun drop. He couldn’t do this. His right leg was shaking, sweat was running into his eye again. His armpits stank. Thank God the light breeze was blowing in his direction, away from the watering hole; otherwise his presence would have been betrayed long before. He rested his back against the pickup and rolled his shoulders around to relax them, breathing deeply in and out. A zebra stallion brayed in the distance, a family of warthogs trotted toward the waterline at a respectable distance from the rhinos, the wading birds were still pecking away like crazy, and the colossal red sun sank ever deeper into the horizon. How much time was left until darkness fell? Which escape route should he choose?
And what would happen if he missed the eye, and the animal was only wounded? That wasn’t an option. He had to hit his target with the first shot.
He pulled himself together and aimed again.
His heart winced. The endearingly clumsy rhino calf was searching between its mother’s back legs for a nipple. It wasn’t easy, with all those skin folds and layers of fat. The calf just kept on feeling around, searching.
The rhino cow didn’t interfere. She stood there with her legs wide apart, somewhat peevishly—or was that more silly anthropomorphism? A little bird with a red beak was sitting on the cow’s hunched back, pecking away at parasites. The cow just let it all happen.
Again, Tony had her right eye in his sights; again, his finger failed him. Now he was paralyzed by the thought of the suckling calf. What would happen to a calf like that in the African night? He shuddered to think. Next to a corpse that would attract scavengers from kilometres and kilometres away? God, he wasn’t about to sentence one living being to death, but two. He could picture it already. The baby would be snatched and dragged off by a crocodile because it had dared to venture too close to the water’s edge. Or it would be attacked in the middle of the night by hyenas with slimy, already-bloodied maws. Or by a pack of Cape hunting dogs. In ten minutes they could tear an impala to bits. They might need slightly longer for such a thick-skinned baby.
He wiped the sweat off his top lip with his wrist. Should he shoot twice, then, so as to grant the baby a merciful death, too? That would be even harder for him. He was no brute. Two shots would result in lost time and a racket, with all the attendant risks. The fight against poaching had been drastically stepped up in recent years. You could read all about that online, too. The government and the game managers were co-operating more closely. As well as night vision goggles and reconnaissance planes, they now possessed the most modern forms of communication, and had even gone so far as to acquire munitions, recently—the poaching gangs were becoming so foolhardy. In the Umfolozi game reserve, the former hunting ground of King Shaka Zulu, there had been a bloody clash between a poaching gang and a surveillance patrol, with deaths on both sides and a fuss in the international press.
It could actually be considered a miracle, Tony realized, that he hadn’t already been caught red-handed. The risks he was running were outrageous. That was why he’d cooked up the plan on his own, without any nosy parkers or potential snitches, leaving no loose ends, no helpers who could turn against you on the way back. A life wasn’t worth much in this part of the world. You saw plenty of stories in the papers. A single horn sold for enough money on the Vietnamese black market to ensure a dozen families a generous standard of living for several years. It didn’t do much for his spirits. The one chance I have, Tony thought, is to act fast. I shoot, I drive over, I get out the axe, I strike, and I hurry back to the hole in the fence. The night and the unlit access roads will hide my retreat. That’s the way it has to happen. Forget that calf!
He beat off a few mosquitoes and took aim.
To his dismay, he saw the zebra stallion he’d just heard braying many times appear some way behind the hunched back of the rhinoceros cow. The stallion was the first to descend a low ridge; the herd followed in his footsteps, in dribs and drabs, in a messy line. A family of giraffes ran along with them at a slow gallop, thirsty, majestic. Tony had been so focussed on his prey, he hadn’t seen them coming. He suppressed an expletive. What else was about to turn up? A herd of gnus? A watering hole like this could be incredibly busy at this time of day, and that made all of the animals nervous. They were venturing into treacherous terrain. Lions often lay in wait here. Tony needed to strike before the rhino cow cleared off. Rhinos liked their privacy; it wasn’t in their nature to share a lair or a watering hole. There you go! The cow was getting restless. Her large pointed ears turned in all directions; she sniffed for hostile odours again. Stepping backward, she began to rock her massive head to and fro.
Tony cursed and followed her with his gun. He couldn’t get the eye cleanly in the cross hairs anymore. I should have pulled the trigger just now, he muttered. At the same time, he was overwhelmed by the hefty grace of his prey. Her nervous stamping carried all the way over to him; he saw quivers run across her dusty flanks. In her neck, under her legs, and in her groins there were folds like an old leather armchair, her armoured skin stretched between them, pockmarked like magnified, concrete-coloured orange peel. He saw the shaking of her heavy, hanging belly, the curling of her short but powerful tail. What an awe-inspiring, beautiful creature she was! Millions of years of precarious evolution and an irrepressible survival instinct.
Tony’s own Klara flashed through his mind; he’d only spoken to her a couple of times in the past year. Surreptitiously and briefly, via Skype and all kinds of false accounts and digital back doors. His wife and his daughter were the bait he would have chosen, himself. Not only the government would be looking for him. The bank had a different name by now—its relaunch had been generously subsidized by the government—and it had hired not only most of the old bank directors but most of the researchers, too. Those Judases were good at their jobs. They had given Tony hushed-up information about clients often enough, or insider knowledge that bordered on the illegal. He couldn’t be too careful.
But it was also high time he took the step toward his potential deliverance, towards rehabilitation, however bloody and difficult that step had to be. His odyssey had lasted long enough. His life’s course couldn’t just end here. He’d already given up too much, invested too much for that. He had the right to a second chance. A future, just like everyone else.
He determinedly took aim again, gritting his teeth with determination. And at last a crisp shot rang out at the foot of God’s Porch.
Tony was surprised. He wasn’t the one who had fired it. He let his gun drop and looked at the rhino in disbelief. One of her temples had been blown away, eye and all. Blood gushed out. An expert shot.
For the moment, the cow remained on her feet, shuddering. She bellowed briefly but dolefully, stamping her back legs truculently as the wading birds rose up above her, the zebras and giraffes fled around her in disarray, and the echo of the shot rumbled behind her, ever deeper and higher into the ravine.
