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

out.
    “This.”
    He indicated a deep hack behind the rhino’s neck, the cut in the shape of a V as if to fell a tree.
    “And this.”
    Opu touched a finger to a fourth wound, a puncture drilled through the top of the skull. Someone had stood where Neels stood and fired that round.
    Neels growled.
    “I will moer the sons of bitches who did this.”
    Opu and the police photographer paid no mind, but Neels was glad to hear himself say this. He’d come along on the morning chopper ride to make himself freshly angry. His job was a hard one. Anger eased it.
    From his knees, Opu aimed the tip of the knife at him and the policeman.
    “Lift the head.”
    Both men dug hands under the chin. The rhino’s skin was coarse, but its bottom lip felt soft, like that of a horse. Short whiskers brushed against Neels’s palms. With the photographer he shifted the weighty head to the side so Opu could dig into a small tunnel in the dirt. With his long knife the old man pried out a spent round. He held it up for Neels, then nodded to the photographer. The Zulu cop got busy with his camera, shooting close-ups of the carcass, the holes in the head, the one in the ground, and the wreckage of the rhino’s face.
    Opu squeezed the bullet between his finger and thumb.
    “Three hundred grains. Maybe more.”
    Neels agreed.
    “H & H .375 magnum.”
    Opu sealed the round in a clear bag from his kit. He carved a small square of skin and flesh off the rhino’s neck and tucked that in another bag. The beast’s DNA would be recorded and cataloged. Later, if the horns were ever found, they could be typed back to this carcass. The same applied to the bullet; the ballistics would be checked against other poachers’ bullets to help spot a trend, a gang, a farmer’s stolen rifle, any clue.
    Neels reached down to help Opu to his feet. The old man dusted off his knees, then doffed his cap to draw an arm across his brow.
    “This one ran.”
    “Ja.”
    Opu tapped a finger below his temple.
    “They missed the first shot. Caught up with it. Cut the spine. Then.”
    He tapped a fingertip to the top of his own head to mimic the final shot. Opu puffed out his cheeks.
    “One day dead.”
    He gathered up his kit, knife, and metal detector and strode out of the circle of scoured dirt. The flies overlooked the photographer snapping the body. Opu sprayed green paint on a tree branch, to signal park rangers that this carcass had been spotted and recorded.
    Neels walked past the pilot. They’d not met before today. When the ECP called in the coordinates yesterday, this became the first poaching in Neels’s sector in three weeks. At two hundred and twenty-five square miles, sixty thousand square hectares, Shingwedzi was one of the smaller of the twenty-two sectors of the Kruger. Higher concentrations of rhinos roamed to the west in Woodlands and Shangoni and south in the Marula region of the park. Usually, the poachers only snuck across Neels’s territory on their way to or from the border. Shingwedzi was more passageway than killing ground; it saw more spoor and scurrying poachers than killed rhinos. Because of this, Neels made certain the boys under his command were the best trackers and shots in the Kruger.
    The pilot sucked his teeth. “Bliksems.” Though he was English, he used the Afrikaans word for bastards. “Can you ever catch them?”
    Neels stopped beside the pilot. He glanced back, trying to see the dead rhino through this young man’s blue eyes after working one week in the Kruger. Neels couldn’t do it, couldn’t see the tragedy of only this carcass, couldn’t smell just this one.
    He noted the word, “ever.” If he had that long?
    “Ja.”

    While Opu and the photographer recorded the carcass, while the pilot folded his arms and shook his head in the unshielded heat, Neels pieced together the story of the poaching.
    The rhino had run, just as Opu said. A full day of wind and sun had eroded much of the spoor, but there remained enough