Read or die! | Africa | Wildlife | Poaching |
The Last Rhino
This is Part Twenty
Refresher from part 19
“Their bodies, Gabriel, what’s left anyway. I’m sorry. You have the coordinates. Get the police out here. I’m going to head back with Rebecca. Over”
“How is she?” Gabriel asks. Rebecca rolls her eyes.
“Rebecca is Good. We’ll see you later. Out.”
Part 20
Mahoney sat alone on the verandah of the Nhdlovu Ranch house, having brought the two boys from the court to start their sentences. Before the boys could begin to work, they would need to learn how to shoot an AR-15, and the target practice would be the monkeys in the trees.
In the house, Courtney Nhdlovu spoke with a Vietnamese syndicate wanting to purchase one hundred and twenty rhino horns over the next two years. A booming illegal trade supplies primarily Vietnam and China, where rhino horn is often ground to a powder and ingested as a treatment for everything from cancer to sea snake bites and hangovers. A deal that would net the Nhdlovu brothers almost four million dollars and be worth three times that to syndicates.
Fletch flew the helicopter over a herd of giraffes, not too close, for fear of setting them off running.
“What exactly is your role, Fletch? I don’t think it’s just to fly a helicopter,” Rebecca asked.
“My role is to kill poachers,” Fletch said without a hint of emotion.
“From the helicopter?”
“No, flying over the territory gives me a look at an area. I will live down there for a week, maybe two weeks. The helicopter lets me see where the rhinos are and the poachers will likely be. I’ll return to the area on the ground with a small team of Rangers, two or three, hopefully trustworthy, and try to hunt down the poachers,” he said.
“That’s not what we’re doing today, though, right?”
“No. Gabriel had a rough idea of where his missing Rangers were last they called in a couple of days ago. I guess we’ve established the poachers murdered them, and their bodies were thrown in the bush,” Fletch said. “Poachers today are sophisticated; it’s a high-stakes earnings game. Not for the, poachers, primarily locals who track rhinos on foot. They are the ones who clamber over park fences or are sometimes put down from a helicopter armed with Czech-made CZ rifles; they sleep rough for days, braving heat, thorny bushes, deadly snakes, lions, and even rampaging elephants. If they find a rhino, they shoot it and then saw off the horn, leaving the dead animal in the bush to be found — or not. Vultures circling over a dead rhino are nature’s first alert to mercenaries like myself. So what are poachers doing, poisoning vultures.”
“You’d kill these men before arresting them?”
“Arrest? Do they arrest the animals before killing them?”
“But we are supposed to be better than that.”
“No, we are not,” he said to her angrily. “We are not better. White South Africans keep black people poor. Poor people try to earn money to live. In the black’s desperation, white people take advantage, it’s like lions don’t hunt healthy antelope; they look for the weak among them, and in this way, nature works, keeping the herd strong by sacrificing the weak. White people sacrifice the poorest of the blacks here in Zimbabwe,” Fletcher tells her. “So, tell me,” he said, changing the subject, “why are you leaving? I’ll tell you because white justice is not black justice. Right? The whites make their own law to suit themselves. Am I right?” Rebecca is loathe to answer. “Exactly,” he said. “You’re leaving. I will stay and kill the poachers. Which of us is wrong, Rebecca? Tell me that.”
Rebecca sits back and looks out the window.
Before they land, Fletch asks another question. “You said that a boy brought you to me, was there anything about him, something you would notice again?”
“No, it was dark. There was a street lamp… oh wait, no, before he left, he picked up something from the ground… yes, I think it was a tennis racket.”
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