Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) by Audrey Schulman Read Free Book Online Page B

gun, he realized and this understanding spoiled a trifle the thrill of the hunt.
    Still he pulled the trigger.
    At the report, the huge animal simply disappeared, knocked backward into the grass. A moment later, even from two hundred paces, he heard the dull
whump
of it hitting the earth. With it standing like that, just waiting, a child could have killed it, but in the instant afterward he felt so much mightier than a child, so much bigger. The thump was as loud as when a ten-foot span of iron rail dropped into place at the head of the train tracks, such a sense of permanent change.
    Galloping Patsy forward, he dismounted dangerously close to the twitching eland, amazed by its sheer girth and giant limbs. And yet he
had
dropped it, all this muscular mass. “Dropped” was the word, as though the only thing that had been holding this beast up before was his lack of desire to shoot it.
    The bullet hole was obscured by the fur, so the dark stain spreading across its pelt did not appear to be blood, or even that visually interesting.
    He noticed the way its shining eyes stared in single-minded concentration at the grass in front of its nose. Somewhere inside, it must know it would never run again, never stand. The life it had considered normal had ended. Still, it struggled to breathe, willing to settle for so much less than what it wanted in order to survive.
    Jeremy knew just what that felt like.
    Reaching out one finger, he tentatively stroked the fur on the half-ton of wilderness lying at his feet. At his touch, the animal exhaled and died.
    When the rest of his hunting party reached him, he bade the Sikh gun boy to set up the camera and take a photo of him. He sat on the eland’s shoulder, his rifle across his lap, his face impassive with his chin thrust forward, his best imitation of Grandpapi. He would mail the photo home. They could pull it out each time a guest inquired of him. In his correspondence, he would make sure to relate events backing up this image of him: successful hunts for large animals, observations of native customs, some of the technical difficulties with the railroad’s construction. Every two weeks, he would ship home another envelope filled with a series of foreign and dusky adventures.
    In his life, he had striven so earnestly not to disappoint them.
    By the time the camera was set up and the exposure taken, the eyes of the eland had glazed over. Within the space of two minutes, the wild animal had turned into a furry mound of undressed meat. He reminded himself he had made this countryside a trifle safer for cattle and horses. The prevailing belief was that killing wild hoofed animals would decrease the speed with which rinderpest could spread. Although no one knew for sure which exact species the disease resided in, the theory was—when in doubt—shoot. The epidemic was so bad and the urge to help so strong, that across the continent, colonists hunted even from trains, resting the rifle in an open windowsill and blasting away at whatever they passed, shooting until the barrel burned with heat, the corpses rotting where they fell.
    Perhaps it was partly the fault of the sheer size of the continent, bringing out such excess as this.
    All this shooting, as well as the mounting toll from the rinderpest, was creating a scarcity of game that people were already noting. There was some talk of starting an animal preserve, as soon as the epidemic ended, perhaps around Tsavo, where no hunting would be allowed, not even by the tribes that resided there.
    â€œLook,” said the N’derobbo, “a lion.”
    Glancing up from the eland, Jeremy searched over the top of the rustling grass. Off his horse, the grass seemed surprisingly tall, the tips waving back and forth in the wind.
    â€œLook,” Otombe insisted, “look.” He was pointing with his whole arm.
    Newborn, Jeremy thought. I am a baby. He forced himself to survey the grass systematically in the area where