31 October 2004
Breytenbach private reserve
Mpumalanga, South Africa
As Dmitri Kondratiev took a drag of his last cigarette, sitting on the dirt, leaning against a tree, having lost all feeling in his legs, blood pooling into the dirt underneath him, a corpse rotting in the midday sun nearby, he wished he’d never answered that damned advertisement.
Dmitri’s life had been a good one up until this point. Some would say he’d been blessed, but Dmitri had never felt that his success was due to any sort of providence. He’d worked too hard to give credit to anyone else, least of all a nebulous divine presence whose existence was unprovable.
His brothers and cousins would have said that he was the beneficiary of at least one providential act: receiving all of Uncle Yuri’s money when he died of cancer.
Yuri was the only family member to be a financial success in the bleak years following the fall of the Soviet Union. He amassed his fortune by selling drugs and various black-market items and peddling protection and loaning money with back-breaking interest. The rest of the family treated Yuri with disgust and disdain. Dmitri, though, made sure to always treat him like any member of the family. As a result of this consideration, Dmitri was the only person named in his uncle’s will.
After Yuri’s estate was settled, Dmitri proceeded to invest the money he’d inherited, primarily in European and American businesses. In particular, Dmitri put money into various websites that became prominent in the mid-1990s and was sure to divest in the late 1990s before that particular market collapsed. Dmitri saw the latter coming primarily due to so many of those sites not actually producing anything, a market correction he was more than happy to avoid.
However, he was able to turn the hundreds of thousands he received from Yuri when he died in 1994 into millions by the turn of the century, at which point, he could pretty much do whatever he wished.
And so he invested most of it, some more successfully than others—his Disney stock had skyrocketed; his Enron stock, not so much—and used the rest to enjoy what life had to offer.
He’d gone scuba diving in Papua, New Guinea. He’d climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. He’d walked the ice shelves of Antarctica, the volcanoes of Hawai’i, the sands of the Gobi, and the fjords of Norway. He’d seen the Taj Mahal, the Empire State Building, and the Eiffel Tower.
Having done many of the legal things he could do with money, he started to grow bored. Going white-water rafting in Colorado the first time was thrilling. The second time was repetitive. He wanted new experiences, not to repeat the old ones, and he was rapidly running through the possibilities.
So he started to look into things that were not legal. He had money, after all, and money could buy a great deal of forgiveness and the ability to function outside the confines of law and order. He’d learned that from his uncle.
A trip to India had revealed a heretofore untapped love of hunting, but that legal hunt had provided very little by way of a challenge. However, the gentlemen who’d run that particular hunt had turned him on to more “extralegal” ones.
Dmitri had never had much patience for euphemisms. Yuri always called himself a “businessman” when he was, in fact, a criminal. And the hunt for white rhinos in a private preserve in the northeastern region of South Africa that the Indian hunters had led him to an advertisement for was not “extralegal,” it was wholly illegal, especially given the dire state of the white rhinos’ survival, as they were very much on the endangered list.
Not that Dmitri cared. He wanted to hunt a white rhino precisely because there were so few left. Whatever thrill there was in hunting something of which there were plenty had been drained from him in India.
The advertisement in question said it cost five hundred thousand American dollars, and you got to keep the horns and meat of any white rhino you successfully hunted. Dmitri knew that white rhino horns could be sold for obscene amounts of money, though he didn’t care about that so much, as he already had obscene amounts of money.
He answered the ad and paid the fee to Byron Breytenbach, the owner of the preserve. Dmitri took his private jet to Skukuzu Airport, where he was met by a vehicle owned by Breytenbach that took him to the wealthy man’s preserve.
Initially, it had gone swimmingly. Breytenbach provided a helicopter that flew him over the grasslands in search of the white rhinos. Since the rhinos traveled in packs, it was easiest to spot them from the air.
Eventually, he sighted five of them. The pilot brought the copter within sight of them, and did his best to hover. Dmitri took aim with his Big Horn Armory Model 89 rifle.
In rapid succession, he was able to down all five. It took ten shots, all together—it’s very difficult for even the best pilot to keep a helicopter steady in the air—but he did it. And the challenge was a great deal of what made it enjoyable.
Downing the first rhino was a thrill as magnificent as any he’d experienced. But downing the fourth was much less thrilling, and he only killed the fifth out of a sense of completeness.
That was only the first half of the hunt, though. Next was to remove the horns.
The pilot found a clearing to land in, and then headed back to refuel. Breytenbach had provided him with a chainsaw with which to remove the horns, a porter to assist with the packing of the rhino meat and the horns, and a satellite phone with which to call the copter pilot for pickup once he was ready. (Cell phone service was all but nonexistent.)
The rush as he took the chainsaw—provided by Breytenbach—to the rhinos’ horns in order to remove them was as powerful as that of his killing the first rhino. He knew that he’d never be able to hunt white rhinos again, because the thrill would never be the same, but that was fine. They were endangered in any case.
He would always have this.
That was what he believed.
He didn’t realize how right he was that he would never hunt white rhinos again.
It was when the helicopter came back sooner than expected that it all went to shit.
Dmitri hadn’t even taken out the sat phone yet when he heard the rotors of the copter overhead. The porter had packed the meat away, and Dmitri himself had the five rhino horns in a backpack.
Looking up, he saw the copter hovering in the air and then slowly lowering for a landing.
Peering more closely, he saw that the pilot was now, for some inexplicable reason, wearing a rhino mask.
The copter landed, and the pilot got out.
“I was unaware,” Dmitri shouted over the sound of the rotors, “that the hunt came with a costume show.”
Then the man in the mask held up a nine-millimeter Beretta pistol.
Before Dmitri could say anything, the man shot the porter, who fell to the dirt, his rhino-meat burdens falling next to him.
For his part, Dmitri stood very still, his hands raised, the backpack filled with rhino horns suddenly very heavy on his shoulders.
“Please don’t kill me,” Dmitri said.
He had, of course, been speaking Russian, but the man in the mask spoke in another language, one Dmitri did not know.
Dmitri attempted Afrikaans. “Please, I have no wish to be dying today.”
In the same language, the masked man said, “No doubt the rhinos you massacred could say the same. I had endeavored to arrive before the latest hunt, but I see that I have failed. I regret that a great deal.”
“I do as well,” Dmitri said. “Perhaps we can come to some manner of arrangement.”
“Unless you have a method of resurrecting the herd of rhinos you have killed, I doubt that any arrangement is possible.”
“That is beyond my power I am afraid. Would it matter if I told you I had no intention of hunting these animals again?”
“Does this promise extend to all other animals?”
“No.”
“Then I am afraid that no arrangement can be made between the two of us.”
Dmitri nodded. He recalled Uncle Yuri on his deathbed. “For a long time,” Yuri had said, “I was angry. But then I realized that was a waste of energy. I am dying, but I have been dying from the moment I was born. I’m simply fortunate enough to know the method by which it will occur. So I accept and I do what I may with my remaining time.”
As he faced the man with the Beretta, Dmitri found that he wished he had a bit more lead time, the way Yuri had.
The masked man lowered the Beretta a bit, and then shot Dmitri in the hip.
Screaming out in pain, Dmitri collapsed to the ground.
At some point, he passed out, which was embarrassing, but when he woke up, he was leaning against a tree.
The masked man was now wearing his backpack, and had also collected the sacks that the porter had been carrying.
“You know, if you were going to take those to sell,” Dmitri said, “I would understand. But you aren’t, are you?”
Shaking his head, the masked man said, “No, I will give them a proper burial, which is the least that they deserve. And more than you deserve.”
With that, the masked man boarded the helicopter and flew away.
Dmitri shifted position against the tree, and that was when he felt the squelchy ground beneath him that indicated that it was soaked. Glancing down, he saw that it was his own blood.
It seemed he was as close to death as Yuri had been the day he died.
Reaching into his shirt pocket, Dmitri took out his cigarette case and lighter. He preferred to roll his own cigarettes—the preservatives the companies put in their cigarettes were noxious—but he was down to the last one in the case. He had more in his luggage, but that was back at Breytenbach’s mansion, a location Dmitri doubted he would live to see.
Nonetheless, he removed the final cigarette from the case, lit it, then dropped both case and lighter to the ground, seeing no reason to go to the trouble of replacing them in his shirt pocket.
Then Dmitri heard the sound of footfalls. Someone was running very quickly through the grasslands.
A moment later, he heard the sound of the helicopter once again.
Within a few moments, he saw a familiar-looking man running toward the tree. It was Byron Breytenbach. Dressed in the same white linen suit he’d been wearing when he saw Dmitri off on his hunt, he looked haggard and sweat-drenched as he stumbled his way through the grasslands.
Above them, the man in the rhinoceros mask flew the copter toward them.
As soon as Breytenbach was within about ten meters of Dmitri, several reports from the masked man’s Beretta echoed. The moment the shots started, the copter bucked and weaved, as the masked man had trouble keeping the copter steady with a one-handed grip. His accuracy with the Beretta was also diminished by firing it one-handed.
Dmitri watched as one of the bullets ripped through Breytenbach’s left thigh, blood splattering outward along with torn linen. Breytenbach stumbled to the ground, his hand clenching his wounded thigh.
Having brought his prey down, the masked man landed the copter and exited it.
In Afrikaans, Breytenbach cried out, “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”
Walking toward him from the copter, the masked man continued to point his Beretta at Breytenbach. “You take money from people like this man”—he pointed at Dmitri with his gun—“and allow them to murder innocent animals. That will not continue.”
The masked man then holstered the Beretta and unshouldered a pack. Only then did Dmitri realize that it wasn’t the same one that he’d taken from Dmitri himself. Dmitri had used a large tan pack that he’d obtained from an online dealer. What the masked man dropped to the dirt was a smaller black one. Reaching inside it, the man pulled out a machete.
Dmitri swallowed. He had several notions as to what the man in the mask might do with such a weapon, and he wasn’t keen on any of them.
Breytenbach tried to crabwalk away from the masked man, but his thigh—which was gushing blood now—made it impossible for him to gain any headway. The masked man closed the distance in an instant.
He knelt down, pressing his left knee into Breytenbach’s chest.
Then he pressed the machete to the bridge of Breytenbach’s nose.
Even though Dmitri watched it as it happened, he found he couldn’t quite believe it.
Slowly, the masked man sawed the machete downward, slicing into Breytenbach’s nose.
When he’d been shot, Breytenbach hadn’t screamed, he hadn’t even cried out. His breathing had been heavy and labored, but that had been true before he’d been shot thanks to all the running he’d been doing. Dmitri had, in fact, been impressed with his stoicism.
Now, though, Breytenbach’s screams echoed off the trees in the grasslands, a shrill, violent cry that Dmitri felt in his ribcage.
By the time the machete reached the end and finished slicing off the nose, Breytenbach’s scream had become a gurgle. Blood was gushing out of Breytenbach’s face.
The masked man stood up. Breytenbach lay flat on the ground, his noseless face and left thigh both completely blood-soaked. The killer himself was also covered in blood from head to waist.
“Do you think this matters?” Dmitri asked in Russian. Then, recalling that the masked man didn’t speak his language, he asked the question again in Afrikaans.
“Of course it does.”
“You’re a fool.” Dmitri shook his head. “So I die. So Breytenbach dies. There are dozens of others who will take our place. The animals will still be hunted. At best you’ve saved one, maybe two herds. If that.”
The masked man shrugged. “That is one or two herds that will survive, then. Better that they live and you die than the other way around.”
With that, the masked man turned and walked back to the copter.
Dmitri took a final drag on his final cigarette as the copter took off. The smell of the porter’s body decaying and of the blood of both himself and Breytenbach permeated his nostrils. He wondered if Breytenbach would have been able to smell it, were he conscious.
He also wondered how long it would take him to finally die.
And so he sat, leaning against the tree, watching the sun slowly go down over the horizon in the west, wishing he could have one more damn cigarette.