Page 83 of Duty Preserved

We moved forward with four rangers behind us. The rest held where they were. The waterhole came into view through a break in the acacias, and past it, in the open, the shape that didn’t belong.

A rhino. On its side. Legs stiff, the bulk of the body unmistakable even at a distance.

Zayn was twenty meters from it, down on one knee with his weapon resting across his thigh. Baraka stood behind him, his face sour.

We closed the distance and the details arrived. Flies first. A dark shifting blanket of them over the exposed tissue, a swarm that produced a sound almost like radio static.

The carcass was whole. The hide unbroken except where scavengers had started working the soft tissue. No meat had been cut away. Nothing else had been touched. It appeared to be a fairly fresh death, but the oddest part was it was missing its horn.

I dropped to a knee beside Zayn.

“If you had to take down a rhino, where would you want to hit it?”

Zayn considered the carcass. “Behind the shoulder. The heart and lungs sit low and forward. A heavy round placed there could drop the animal fast.”

He moved to the far side and pointed. I came around and saw it. A single entry wound behind the left shoulder, exactly where Zayn had described.

The hide was split and curled back at the edges from the force of the impact, and the cavity that was created was pretty substantial. No exit wound that I could find.

“How old?” I asked.

“One day. Maybe two.” Zayn pointed at the earth around the carcass.

He stood and walked a slow circle around the site, reading the dirt, stopping twice to crouch over something before moving on.

I looked at Baraka, then back at Zayn. “All right. Let’s work the scene. Tell me everything you can read from what’s in front of us. Tracks, tools, anything that tells us who did this and how.”

Zayn went first. He pointed at the churned-up prints near the carcass. “The tracks around the animal are a mess. Too much overlap from people moving around while they worked.” He walked out about ten meters and pointed down. “But out here, on the approach, the prints separate. It looks like four men. Maybe five.”

“What’s giving you that number?”

He knelt beside two prints and traced the edges with his finger. “Different treads. This one is a boot with a worn heel. This one is a sandal. And there are at least two more patterns, all heavy enough to be grown men.” He stood and traced a line with his hand toward the northeast. “They came from that direction, I think. And it looks like they left the same way. I would need to walk the trail to be sure.”

“Baraka?”

Baraka was kneeling near the animal’s head. “Somebody used a saw on this. The cuts are too clean for a panga or a machete. No hack marks, nothing wasted.”

Andrew came alongside me. He’d been working the perimeter in a wider arc, checking for anything the immediate scene didn’t show.

“Site’s clean,” he said. “No brass, and nothing else left behind that I can find. Whoever did this knew enough to police their mess.”

I looked at the wound again. That entry point bothered me.

“This wasn’t a small rifle,” I said. “Whatever dropped this animal, it had serious weight behind it. That’s a heavy round.”

Zayn looked up from the tracks.

“I wouldn’t expect a village to have something that could put this down in one shot,” I said. “That’s a hunting rifle. A real one.”

“You would be surprised.” Zayn straightened and rested his hands on his rifle sling. “Old rifles come through these communities. They have for decades. Like .303s from the colonial era. Some military surplus. An AK here and there. They get loaned and borrowed and traded. Somebody’s uncle has one, and it passes through many hands.”

“He’s right,” Baraka said. “My father’s neighbor had a rifle like this when I was young. Nobody knows where it came from.”

Andrew looked at me. I looked at the wound and then at the tracks leading northeast toward the inhabited boundary of the reserve.

“So, somebody local,” Andrew said, “gets hold of a serious rifle and figures out what a horn is worth?”

“That is what I think,” Zayn said. “The tracks go toward the settlements. The approach came from that direction. And I know who moves through this country.”