“Gerald Kersh would understand.”
###
Men with rifles smelling of cordite, leather, and blood, their breath laden with rotting flesh, climbed higher despite an approaching storm. “We can bag him and beat the storm to base camp.” Kathen slapped a cigarette from one of the tourist’s mouths. “You serious about this? You want your pelt?” He snarled. “We had an understanding.”
Fat-faced, timid, the tourist pouted, wheezed an apology, then put his gloves back on, covering his manicure and lack of callouses. Temperature, altitude, and cowardice had him, and his pals, shivering. Their gazes darted toward every ridge, every under curl of snow.
Kathen started climbing again. “Keep moving. No chatter.” He wanted this hunt done.
Disliking the strutting fat fools with their costly guns and unused gear felt normal. Racing snow clouds settled into his comfort zone. What galled this time was, of all things, politics.
Phonies, liars, and macho poseurs with tough right-wing talk, those Kathen knew as well as an old map knows its folds. Brags, boasts, and blowhard claims struck him as almost mandatory among these types; nice people, polite people, humble people you’d want to know or have in your family, didn’t pay obscene bribes to get ersatz licenses to kill endangered species for display in their sad over-compensatory man caves. Good people had rumpus rooms and game rooms decorated by dart boards, game tables, and big old sofas. No need to display the deaths they’d caused.
Politics, though, enraged Kathen. He knew mealy excuses for cruelty when he heard them. He understood self-congratulatory bravado covering mild twinges of vaguely-comprehended guilt. Those politics of theirs encouraged psychopathic behavior worse than Capitalism’s profit-over-all-else credo. A politics of fear, hate, and categorical thinking drove these bigot gun enthusiasts. He hated it, he hated them.
#
Kathen had been a lawyer. Years of subverting a rule of law had burned him out on people and their agendas. Africa beckoned; he’d become a poacher hunter. His kills stood well over three-hundred; his squad had slaughtered poachers by the dozen in skirmishes, ambushes, and open fire-fights. Safety-in-numbers failed them when they tried to kill protected elephants, lions, rhinos, giraffes and other species, especially when they entered Kathen’s squad’s control zone.
A dozen years of this burned him out on war, and war it was. Stepping aside, he tried his hand at the lawyer’s typical fall-back, writing. Three books about conservation extremes gave him a minor reputation as an old African hand, familiar to both Nairobi’s party circle and to the guides and guards on the savannah.
It was at a party that he first encountered spoiled rich psychopaths eager to ‘bag’ a specimen of forbidden trophy animals.
Kathen listened to a drunken man in a corporate polo shirt brag about being able to pay any cost for a chance to shoot this or that nearly-extinct beast. He further bragged of private jets and bought customs agents allowing him to smuggle illegal trophies ‘back home’.
On the spot, Kathen offered his services. “I can guide you to any animal you name.” He could, too, and his friends at the bar who fell silent when he engaged the rich lunatic knew it. They traded guarded glances, wondering what was going on. Were they witnessing a betrayal?
Kathen’s books and reputation sealed the deal for a fee that dizzied those close enough to hear it. A hand-shake, done and done. Thus Kathen took on the first of many subsequent Allen Quartermain wanna-bes.
#
After a few years chatter at the bars cited how funny it was, odd-funny, that Kathen, a man who’d fought the war against poachers, had become a trophy guide for rich idiots. Then they’d grin and, on the second or sixth whisky, reveal how even funnier it was that so many of the infantile, marshmallow-soft male shapes Kathen led into the bush never came back. They tended to have fatal accidents.
Nothing suspicious, they’d assure new ears. Animal attacks, avalanches, sink-holes, crevasses, accidents.
“Can I help it they’re killed by the wild animals I find for them? That’s what they pay me for, to find them. What happens between them and the animals is their business.”
Lucky Kathen, they started calling him.
They didn’t specify good or bad.
#
Putting tenderfoot greenhorn twits into harm’s way in the bush, where the only witnesses were the calm eyes of wild beasts, proved easy. It could even be done accidentally, if one were incompetent, which Kathen was not.
No one believed Kathen was doing it inadvertently. No one found it at all objectionable, either. The locals and expats at the bars concurred that shit happens, if you’re lucky. Anything to cut down on great white hunter syndrome was, they figured, to the general good, both for the animals and for the photography safari business.
Who’d come to see miracles if you killed the miracles?
These people lived there. They stood against poaching and felt any danger faced by rich, fatuous jerks fair game. In fact, it fulfilled in fact the lip service such oafs gave to individual freedom. “They choose to come here unprepared. They hire us to find wild animals for them. They go out into wilderness entirely without experience or preparation. A guide can do only so much, he’s not a babysitter or bodyguard.”
#
It was worse with this latest crop of punters, Kathen thought. They spoke mostly of how their politics allowed, even demanded predation and exploitation. It meant they could hunt and kill at will, even people they hinted. Even masses of people, all in service of short-term profit. Zero-sum thinking meant someone else had to lose for them to win.
Not merely sick, empty poseurs trying to impress absent, uncaring, or dead Daddy Big Bucks, whose scorn they wore like scars, whose apathetic contempt warped their every thought, cringe, and passive-aggressive lashing out – these were not just that type, these political types scaled up malignant narcissism into a meme, a global monster, a moral cancer.
These politicians wanted each animal they unfairly killed for greed to represent hundreds, thousands of human beings, who’d be victims of their scams, cons, and fascist policies.
#
“They’re a cult of nihilism.” Kathen finished a whisky. “If they can’t have it all now, they’re happy to destroy it, to kill it all so no one can have anything. That’s what they’re doing out here with their fancy guns and mail-order equipment.”
“So you lead them to their doom, one lot at a time.”
Kathen ignored this and paid his tab. He’d be out seeking a snow leopard for the next few weeks. His friends knew they wouldn’t see him for several months; after each catastrophic hunt, in which the tourists got themselves killed, Kathen absented himself from the place where he’d found them looking for a guide.
Being three times the size of the United States, Africa afforded room for a man to say away until things blew over and settled back into routine.
#
He got to thinking about ghosts. Ghosts are guilt, he decided. He’d be haunted by none of the strutting empty jackasses led to slaughter themselves via their own ignorance.
Sins of omission came next. He might not be murdering them directly, but he was letting them cause their own deaths by failing to protect them. How, though, could he protect them from themselves? Were not many more protected by the elimination of these predatory psychopaths?
A shrug for that line of thought sufficed to dismiss it from his mind. Human perspective provided too little information to allow such refined assessment, such perfect ethical certitude.
#
They climbed past the tree line, entering a boulder field. Ice underfoot, wind howling to freeze their blood shrieking over them, swirling around them, often visible in snow spun into hungry maddened dervishes.
Kathen kept his gaze scanning. He new there was little chance of spotting a snow leopard. Their pelt, charcoal grey and velvet black spots on off-white, conferred camouflage bordering on the ghostly. When hunting, they’d perch atop a boulder or ledge, motionless. Snow would cover much of their bodies. Their gaze absorbed instead of projecting the way human gazes did. Their tails did not twitch or, if they did, were not visible to the prey.
Almost a hundred pounds of muscle, sinew, claws, and fangs would be hurtling through the air toward you before you could blink, gasp, or understand that the approaching blur meant death. Your throat would be gone before you thought to scream.
When his scalp prickled and the proverbial hair on the back of his neck rippled, Kathen held up a fist, the signal to stop. He stood on a ledge varying between ten to twenty centimeters wide, boulders to his left, a drop of hundreds of meters to his right. Wind scraped at him. Every gap between the boulders offered danger but he’d found one wide enough to get them off the sheer side of the mountain. He entered, gesturing for them to come along.
One fell, the guy on drag. Being last, no one saw exactly what happened. He was there one second, gone the next, before reaching the stone doorway into the maze of boulders.
This boiled the tourists’ fear. Three of them remained, all looking at Kathen to advise them.
Kathen spat. “He’s gone. We go on.” He hoped a big cat had its bead on them, would launch an attack soon. He also hoped he could drop flat to the icy ground fast enough to avoid ricochets as the inevitable panic shooting began. If they didn’t shoot each other, they’d bolt, and run either into a baffling tangle of twists and turns, or off an edge into depths of mystery.
With no heavy weather gear, they felt the cold at misery level. Kathen huddled them into a shallow upright divot in a boulder, a kind of cave that offered slight shelter. “We can bivouac and start a fire but the storm is gonna fill these.” He gestured to the paths among the boulders, all at least twice as high as the tallest among them. “We’d be snowed in for days, maybe weeks. Maybe forever.”
“So we keep going? Where to? Where are we headed?”
Kathen gave the fat smoker with the pursed lips a hard look. “So you’re not serious about getting your trophy?”
Again the guy withdrew, turtle into shell.
The other two men, looking forlorn, nodded how serious they were. Manly nods. Squared shoulders. Fuck, yeah.
Kathen, somehow, held back laughter. He’d known they’d walk away from any responsibility if one of their own went down. He’d known they sacrificed each other casually, for personal gain. It was their whole ethos.
One down, three to go.
He led them deeper into the boulder field, wondering the chances that all of them had not fucked the others’ wives and children.
#
Big wet flakes of snow the size of his palm kept landing in Kathen’s eyes despite the brim of his hat being pulled low. Wind danced in all directions, swooping around them, frisking off. Soon visibility would white out and they’d be forced to bivouac.
“Take a grip on each other and don’t let go.” He took a length of rope, tied it around his belt, then handed it to the tourist nearest him. “You loop this around your belt and pass it back. Have the others do the same.”
With a diffident sneer, as if the rope smelled bad, the tourist did as told.
Kathen wanted to kick them all off a cliff and be done with it, but that would violate his own ethics. He’d lead them into dangerous places and situations, but he’d always let them sink or swim on their own character and skill. Their own merits saved few of this type of tourist, given how few they had, even in aggregate. Virtually all came unprepared, arrogant, and ignorant, as if swagger and the money they’d stolen could see them through rough terrain or a confrontation with a wild animal.
It is on a slope, not a cliff’s edge, that an attack comes. As the men shuffle along in heavier snow, leaning toward the upslope against wind, a snow leopard, the biggest Kathen has seen, smashes onto the last man in line, appearing from swirls of snow, as if from nowhere, the mountain’s hate for them manifest in fur, muscle, claws, and fangs.
The man squeals once and tumbles down the slope, wrapped in a pelt of furious death.
The rope around the last man in line goes tight.
Not sure what is happening, the second from the rear of the line is pulled down the slope to tumble on icy rocks in a helpless flailing of limbs.
Though he makes no sound, that man alerts the one following Kathen, who whips his head around as if seeking a way out. He fumbles with the rope looped through his belt. He bellows in terror, then he, too, is yanked from his feet to roll down the steep slope into the storm’s white.
Kathen, who spotted the huge cat’s attack, has pulled his knife. He leans hard toward the upslope and lays down. He is about to cut the rope when the knife slips from his gloved hand. It clatters away, instantly invisible. “No.” The single complaint angers Kathen.
He reaches down and unbuckles his belt, pulling it free of the loops on his pants, as if to spank a spoiled child. He feels the tug as the rope, with the weight of three men and, presumably, a snow leopard, whips the belt, to which it’s tied, from his hands.
For a moment Kathen lays panting. Too close.
He glanced up, beginning to push himself to his feet, thinking he’d gotten rid of the predatory pricks quicker than expected. He grunted, then froze. He blinked snow from his eyes.
The snow leopard, or its mate, huge, stood head low and tail high in front of him, a man’s length from him, gaze locked on his face.
Oh shit, he thought. He eased a hand for his pistol but before he touched it, before he could tense or cry out, the snow leopard leaped.
We had an understanding.
He cried out in terror as the beast sailed over him to land upslope, where it scrambled away into the blizzard.
Kathen collapsed for a time, recovering from the burst of adrenalin, panting and gasping like a landed fish.
He stood then, found a cave that opened into caverns, where he made a small fire and weathered the storm. By the time he dug himself out three days had gone by. His instincts led him, somehow, to a safe route that descended to the tree line. From there he knew the way.
Later, to those who knew him or knew of him, in restaurants and bars, he’d tell only a tale of the snow leopard’s leap. He added mystical details, small but important in explaining how he’d experienced it.
He left Africa a few years later, having never led another expedition. Rumors vary from Kathen setting up as an animal rights attorney, or going on tour as a lecturer, or living off his nest-egg gleaned from his many safaris. No one knew, nor cared to find out.
Generally those who knew him or knew of him respected the privacy of a beast gone to its lair. “You poke them at your own risk.”
Oddly, it was the advice some of Kathen’s friends gave each new flock of mendacious, scurrilous, and greed-infected psychopaths that flew in from America and Russia wanting only trophies for their nonexistent manhood.
Not many had what it took to come back alive.
• • ° /// /// ///
