The Devil's Horn by David L. Robbins Read Free Book Online Page A

stink.
    The rhino lay in a round patch of bare dirt. All the grass had been scrabbled away by the host of animals that had come to eat the carcass, evidence of the great commotion in the bush whenever something big died. The beast’s belly had been clawed open, likely by lions. The guts would have been devoured first, then the meat around the ribs, leaving the bones picked clean to bleach in the light. The smaller scavengers would have kept their distance while the big cats and hyenas gorged. Once the body had been stripped of its softer meats and organs, the buzzards swarmed in. They were patient and numerous enough to peck through the tough hide on the back and shoulders. Finally, the sun, rain, and flies would dissolve the flesh and skin into the bush, and the wind and elephants would scatter the skeleton.
    Opu stepped onto the orb of raw earth, moving into the choking odor without a flinch. The man was a former poacher. Now an investigator for the Kruger, he rode this chopper to three, four, five murdered rhinos every day of the week.
    Neels stood back with the photographer. The cameraman was Zulu, a talkative people, but this one had not spoken in the chopper and did not speak now, only stared. The pilot came alongside Neels. In the heat and reek, all three winced while Opu worked close to the corpse. The young South African National Parks pilot, an Englishman in his first week on the job, pinched his nose. Neels glared at him, and the pilot dropped his hand. Pinching the nose was disrespectful; the dead beast’s condition should be witnessed, breathed, recorded, and despised.
    Opu waved the head of the metal detector over the rhino’s body, guiding it across the white picket of ribs into the emptied torso. Next he scanned the dirt around the body, seeking a casing or a bullet that might have been eaten by a scavenger and spit out or regurgitated. The detector beeped steadily, finding nothing.
    The old ex-poacher tugged down the bill of his baseball cap against the sun. He swept the metal detector across the rhino’s gray skull. The beeps lengthened into a tinny wail.
    Opu set the detector aside and knelt for his kit. He popped open the plastic case he’d brought, removing latex gloves and a long knife. The rhino lay awkwardly on his chest, on his own thick legs without composure. Opu flattened a gloved hand to the top of the beast’s great skull to mutter the Xhosa prayer that was his custom, his apology for his past.
    The old man waved the photographer forward. Neels walked with him; the young pilot held his ground on the perimeter.
    The smell grew grimmer with every step. Neels leaned into the stench to honor the beast and accept his failure to protect it, for it had been killed in his sector, Shingwedzi. Dead men stank but never this badly; they drew buzzards but not in the hundreds. They did not drip with other animals’ shit. Forty years ago in the Border War, mates and Angolans alike died in the hot bush, but back then Neels could lift a kerchief over his nose and mouth to pass them without regret. He’d killed many an Angolan and Cuban himself. But those bodies had been soldiers and enemies, they’d died as they saw fit, in uniform and battle, for a cause good or bad. The rhinos of the Kruger were dying to the brink of extinction for no cause but greed.
    Neels had never cared how a dead poacher smelled.
    He stood behind Opu, with the photographer beside him. Stench pulsed from the carcass like flames. The animal’s face had been butchered by an ax, hacked deep into the sinuses to carve out the horns by the roots. Jackals and buzzards had mauled much of the meat away from the snout to reveal how the ax had gashed the bone many times.
    Opu fingered a bullet hole behind the rhino’s right eye socket.
    “Entry here.”
    On the other side, he pointed at a second, larger hole.
    “Exit here.” The bullet had flattened on entry, then blown away a large piece of the rhino’s head on the way