Under a Poacher’s Moon by W. Aaron Vandiver

Author:W. Aaron Vandiver [W. Aaron Vandiver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Boutique of Quality Books Publishing
Published: 2021-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

The mother rhino’s carcass lay in the grass and the dirt, the flies starting to swarm. A fat, repulsively ugly, pinkheaded vulture had already moved in, anticipating a feast. The rhino’s de-horned body looked like an ancient ruin, the Sphynx with his missing nose, a relic of a distant age. A fading icon of a lost world, slowly decaying in the elements.

As a teenager, I’d once seen a dead horse, a bay mare. The owner of the barn had to put the horse down after she broke her leg. I remembered the dead body like a brown lump, a scar on the land swarming with flies, just lying there in the field before a dump truck came and hauled it away.

Finally, Chris approached and sat down beside me in the grass. We were the only two witnesses left on the scene—alone again. The rangers had left as suddenly as they had arrived.

The hot sun was directly overhead now. We’d been out here for hours with nothing to eat and very little to drink. The sense of urgency I’d felt before dawn when I’d heard the mother’s cries had dispersed with the chopper and the jeeps and the walkie-talkies, and now I felt mostly a numbness. What was all this for anyway, sound and fury signifying what? Why had I let the mother’s cries lead me here and exposed myself to danger? Why had I allowed myself to experience all of these powerful feelings about the mother and calf, to pick at scabbed-over wounds, to dig into my most private, heartfelt feelings? It would have been easier to just wait back at camp with the others.

A drink, I needed a drink. A good, stiff one in a cold glass with ice piled up to the brim. Looked like Chris could use one too. Then maybe I could regroup.

“You told me it was a war out here,” I said. “I should have listened.”

“You showed a lot of guts coming out here, Anna. A lot of guts.”

“Will the calf really be all right?” I hated to think of him in the helicopter with the hood and the stuffed-up ears and the big facial wound, ripped from his mother’s side—the only safe place he’d ever known—as he was being translocated, a word invented by a bureaucrat, if I ever heard one.

Chris picked a stalk of thick grass from the red earth and peeled it, sticking the fat end between his teeth and chewing. “That’s relative,” he answered. “It’s not like he’ll ever live a perfectly normal life, but some of the rhino orphanages are excellent. I’m going to put in a word, and hopefully they’ll take him to my sister’s place in Namibia. It’s way up north of the country, far from the killing fields. It’s a sanctuary in the truest sense of the word, the best there is. Sis is a Svengali; she can always find a way to get through to the traumatized rhinos they bring to her.”

“And what about the poachers, what will happen to them?”

“There could be a shootout, or they could go peacefully.

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