The Devil's Horn (2 page)

Promise walked on, Hard Life’s shadow spilling across her sandals. The mention of wealth and the rhinos he would butcher for it had beefed up Hard Life’s courage to talk. The boy rapped the hatchet against his palm.

“The bosses recruit in the villages on the border. Nothing but poor. What can we do? The bosses say they have money, they have weapons. Go poach for us. There’s risk, but there’s pay. So we go.”

Promise already knew these things, a common story about poachers, but she let the boy talk, it seemed to calm him. She glanced back at Good Luck strolling in his spotted pelt. The high moonlight made caverns of his sockets, and his black eyes did not shine.

“What about him?”

Hard Life shrugged, to say he knew only a little.

“He’s from Maputo. I think he was a criminal already. Or a soldier. I don’t like him. Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Have you done this before?”

“No.”

“Who recruited you?”

“No one.”

“What do you mean?”

“Stop talking.”

“But you want to get rich.”

“No.”

Promise widened her stride to separate herself from the boy. Hard Life caught the cue and faded behind her, taking his shadow out of her path.

She led the Mozambicans deeper into the open expanse. The world lay the hue and flatness of slate. Far to her left, tracing the horizon, another car trickled down the one paved road. The moon crowded out all but the brightest stars low in the sky. Promise made a wish on those stars, wished away the shooter and the poor boy behind her, but they did not go. The shooter wore his magic leopard skin, the boy his tusks, and she had no charm or magic to counter them. Promise continued to guide the poachers because she, like them, knew of no other way but to the rhino.

In that moment, the earth gave her the animal. Perhaps there was magic in the world, but only for dark uses, for the people like Good Luck. This chilled her on the warm night. Promise turned to the poachers to tell them what she’d found. Good Luck’s broken smile and emptied eyes made her shiver. She stopped walking. She could stop everything else. Lie to the shooter and the hatchet boy, tell them the rhino was not on the plain but elsewhere, she did not know where. She would send the Mozambicans back across the border. Tonight, Promise could save the beast and herself. Then tomorrow, she would make the same choice to come back. So she knelt.

The midden had been kicked and spread around. Promise broke open a cool, fist-sized chunk of dung. Under the moon the insides showed green gray, a grazer’s stool. She touched the spoor to her lips. The warmth inside told that the rhino had been here within a half hour.

A fresh set of tracks led northeast, away from the river and the road and the moon. She led the poachers toward that darker horizon.

On the scrub-dotted veld, the pearly light made nothing stand out. The bushes and short trees could all be large animals champing grass or asleep on their feet. No birds chirped in the brush, no monkeys howled. The plain lay hushed, starry. Walking fast behind the rhino tracks, Promise clapped her hands. The beast, wherever he was, would not see them coming. A rhino’s eyesight was poor, but its hearing was acute.

The savanna did not flinch. Promise sped forward. Hard Life’s backpack, Good Luck’s rifle, and the gun across her own back all jangled. She clapped again. Passing another midden she clapped a third time.

A shape moved on the veld. To the east, a hundred meters off, the big rhino put his head into a bush, thinking he was hiding.

Again, Good Luck tramped ahead of her. He tugged the long Remington into his hands. Promise stepped in front of him.

“We’ll get closer.”

“I can shoot him from here.”

“Can you kill him from here?”

Promise didn’t wait for the hiss of Good Luck’s answer. She jammed a finger inside the ring of tusks against Hard Life’s chest.

“Stay here. Come fast when you hear the shot.”

The boy did not protest but squatted in the patchy grass.

Promise gave the shooter an uncompromising glare. The rhino was hers, in her Shingwedzi, though she only rode a bicycle through it. Good Luck was a trespasser, nothing else; murder and theft gave him no rights here. How many rhinos had this grinning Mozambican killed? After tonight, how many more carcasses would the boy attend to get his riches? After tonight, who would forgive her?

“Follow me.”

Good Luck filled the gap in his teeth with a peeking tongue, as if he had a snake in his mouth. The tongue pulled back. Good Luck nodded.

With his lisp, he replied, “As you say.”

She pressed ahead, checking that the wind did not carry their scents to the animal. The rhino continued to ignore them, believing he was covered in the brush though his enormous hind end faced Promise and the poacher.

This was not a hunt, though some would call it so. The rhino made no attempt to disguise his spoor in the veld, had no ability to hide behind a bush, and could barely see. Under constellations on this immense plain, he would die from a high-powered bullet fired by a man Promise would lead to within twenty paces. The rhino swung his head out of the brush to look their way. His main horn was over a meter long, the secondary horn a quarter the size, both primitive and beautiful and far more valuable than his life.

Good Luck chambered one magnum round into the silenced Remington. The clack of the bolt made the rhino blink, and nothing more.

Promise did not say, “Shoot,” she gave no order or permission. In her heart she clung to the wisp that she had only guided the poachers here, she was not the killer but still, somehow, redeemable. Good Luck smirked at her, darkly pleased.

He raised the rifle to his cheek, turned his night eyes to it. For a motionless moment, Promise and the rhino looked stupidly at Good Luck. The rhino turned his profile. The gun barked, an ugly, muted punch with nothing on the plain to echo it. Promise’s hands flew up, whether to her ears or the lie that she was not to blame or to the animal, she did not know.

A rhino with a bullet in its brain will fold to its knees, dead, and remain upright. A mortally wounded rhino will stumble, then collapse on its side. This one ran.

The beast squealed, wheeling away from the sound that had stung him so terribly. He lunged into a copse of brush, lowering his horns to crash ahead as if blind. Good Luck lowered the Remington to gape at his failure.

Promise shoved the shooter in the chest, pushing him almost off his feet. The rhino barreled into a thicket, too large to disappear under the bright moon. His shrieks mingled with the thunder of his clumsy gallop; he’d been hit, surely, and perhaps killed, but would not drop until he’d run out the last of his great terror.

Hard Life skidded to a stop beside Promise.

“What happened?”

Promise grabbed the hatchet from the boy.

“He missed.”

She sprinted away with the ax, even as Good Luck advanced on her to answer the shove she’d given him. Promise followed the mewling rhino into the brush. Running flat out, the panga banged against her thigh, and her rifle bounced on her back. Both sandals threatened to fly off, but she gripped them with her toes as she ran. When she burst through a broken line of shrubs, the animal’s blood smeared her arm.

When she caught up to the rhino in the open field, he had slowed to a trot. He trudged ahead; driven on by agony, his only understanding was to move. In the moonlight the rhino’s head glistened with blood, the bullet had struck behind his eyes, short of the brain. He did not turn to Promise, jogging alongside, but snorted a wet mist. The lumbering beast lowered his horns, sensing an enemy.

Promise could not guess how long the rhino might run. Every step seemed heavier, but the beast was an old bull and had been powerful. If a ranger patrol lurked anywhere near, they’d heard the shot, even with Good Luck’s silencer, or the rhino’s bellows of agony. Promise could not let him go on. Loping alongside, she laid a palm to his thick, heaving hide.

“Uxholo
,
umnunzan.”
(I am sorry, sir.)

Gripping the long-handled hatchet with both hands, she swung high over her head. Promise leaped to bring the blade down as hard as she could into the ridge of the rhino’s spine, just behind the head. She’d seen this wound on many carcasses in the Kruger, the brutal way poachers stopped a runaway rhino without firing another shot.

The crunch of meat and bone shot through the handle into her hands. The blow had bit into the rhino’s vertebrae but not deep enough to sever the cord. Twisting his head against the hatchet, the rhino shrieked and slashed his long horn her way. Both huge forelegs dragged in the grass, but the beast slogged on, grunting.

Promise hacked at the beast’s spine again. The ax only chipped the rhino’s backbone. She swung again, missing the spine but chopping into the shoulder, where the blade cut a vessel. Hot blood fountained over her. Promise took aim at the brawny neck and swung one more time, leaving her feet, pounding the ax down with all her strength. The edge broke through the spine; she felt the bones give way. Showering blood, the rhino honked and collapsed to his chest. Spattered and panting for breath, Promise yanked the hatchet free and dropped it.

The blinded rhino sprawled in the grass, legs bent wrong under his massive weight. He could no longer feel his own torso but kept swinging his horns left and right. Promise knelt in his warm breath. Dark mucus drained from the rhino’s snorting nostrils. Promise laughed, giddy and confused with nerves strained from the kill, descending toward tears. She choked back the need to weep as Hard Life and Good Luck hurried across the field.

In leopard skin and tusks, gaunt and black in the moonlight, the two Mozambicans seemed phantoms, beasts and men blended, wraiths of the veld rushing to her and the dying animal. Promise watched them come and imagined they brought mercy.

The boy arrived first. His expression fell into awe at bloody Promise and the felled giant. Hard Life’s jaw dropped, and he wanted to speak. Good Luck came behind and pushed the boy in the back.

“Get the horns.”

Not taking his eyes off the rhino or closing his mouth, Hard Life picked the hatchet up off the grass. He licked his lips and plainly wanted to run away. At the sound of the boy approaching, the crippled rhino shifted his head to fend him off, the only motion he could make. The wound behind his eyes pulsed, gouts of blood reflected the moon like tar.

Promise raised a palm at Good Luck.

“Kill it first.”

“Why didn’t you shoot it?”

“I can’t have one of my bullets found in the carcass.”

Promise backed away.

“Kill it.”

Good Luck had a round ready in the Remington. He stepped up, but the rhino did not react to him, as though Good Luck were a shade, were death. The rhino lay completely still and closed his ruined eyes when the shooter pressed the silencer against his crown. The beast breathed a long sigh, sinking into the ground even before Good Luck pulled the trigger.

The rifle jerked in the shooter’s hands, making only a pop against the skull. The rhino did not shudder.

Good Luck picked up the spent brass casing, then slung the rifle over his shoulder. Promise and the poachers flanked the silent gray mound. The rhino’s severed spine rose eye level with little Hard Life. The tip of the long horn stood taller than the boy’s waist.

Hard Life eased forward. He shrugged out of his backpack, coming to his knees beside the hushed head. The boy rolled the ax handle in his hands, spinning the blade.

Good Luck waited, then lisped, “Do you know how?”

“I was told.”

“Then do it.”

Hard Life rolled the hatchet over again, hesitant. He cast a pleading glance at Good Luck, then Promise. Kneeling on the veld, so far from where he ought to be, the boy was easy to pity.

The shooter cursed with his peeking tongue.

“Get out of the way.”

Promise stopped him.

“Make the boy do it.”

“Why?”

“Because.” She squatted beside the boy and spoke gently. “Because you have no other way to your riches.”

Hard Life sniveled. Promise slapped him. She left the rhino’s blood streaked on the boy’s cheek.

“Do it.”

Promise stepped away, beside Good Luck. Hard Life ran his bare arm under his nose, sniffling. On his knees, he fingered the tusks around his neck, muttering.

As if the secret words or the muti had given him resolve, the boy raised the ax two-handed. Arching his little body, he hewed hard into the snout at the base of the front horn. The blade bit into solid bone with the sound of grinding rocks. Hard Life struck again, diagonally, the blade digging deep to take flesh with the horn. Good Luck folded his arms, satisfied. Promise did the same, crossing her arms and making herself watch. She did not deserve to look away.

Ten, fifteen more times Hard Life slammed the hatchet down. He wept while he chopped and grew frenzied. The dead rhino’s head was so large it barely shook under the little boy’s blows. When Hard Life wrenched the horn loose from the mangled face, he climbed to his feet with it held by the tip. He did not raise the horn as a trophy but let it drag in the grass. In his other hand, the gory ax dangled. The boy’s face gleamed with tears and blood, and his eyes were as empty as Good Luck’s.

The shooter took the horn to admire the heft. In his leopard pelt and rifle, weighing the big, gray spike still jagged with meat, Good Luck looked the role of killer. He tucked the horn into Hard Life’s backpack, then pointed.

“Get the other one.”

With vacant motions the boy returned to his knees. The ax rose and fell around the shorter horn. The scrape of metal on bone crawled up Promise’s back until the boy pried the horn free. Good Luck snatched it to tuck it into the knapsack.

“You know the way back?”

Promise nodded. Good Luck pulled the Remington off his shoulders to make room for the backpack. The gesture said, “I have the horns, and I am in charge now.”

“Let’s go.”

The shooter did not wait for Hard Life to stand but strode into the dimness. Promise did not follow. A dozen steps away Good Luck stopped, annoyed with her and the slender boy.