“Piga m’uzuri!” the porters cry exultantly.
“Kufa,” Gracchus says. “Dead. A neat shot. You have your trophy.”
Ngiri is quick with the skinning-knife. That night, camping below Kilimanjaro’s broad flank, they dine on roast quagga, deads and porters alike. The meat is juicy, robust, faintly tangy.
Late the following afternoon, as they pass through cooler stream-broken country thick with tall, scrubby gray-green vase-shaped trees, they come upon a monstrosity, a shaggy shambling thing twelve or fifteen feet high, standing upright on ponderous hind legs and balancing itself on an incredibly thick, heavy tail. It leans against a tree, pulling at its top branches with long forelimbs that are tipped with ferocious claws like a row of sickles; it munches voraciously on leaves and twigs. Briefly it notices them, and looks around, studying them with small stupid yellow eyes; then it returns to its meal.
“A rarity,” Gracchus says. “I know hunters who have been all over this park without ever running into one. Have you ever seen anything so ugly?”
“What is it?” Sybille asks.
“Megatherium. Giant ground sloth. South American, really, but we weren’t fussy about geography when we were stocking this place. We have only four of them, and it costs God knows how many thousands of dollars to shoot one. Nobody’s signed up for a ground sloth yet. I doubt anyone will.”
Sybille wonders where the beast might be vulnerable to a bullet: surely not in its dim peanut-sized brain. She wonders, too, what sort of sportsman would find pleasure in killing such a thing. For a while they watch as the sluggish monster tears the tree apart. Then they move on.
Gracchus shows them another prodigy at sundown: a pale dome, like some huge melon, nestling in a mound of dense grass beside a stream. “Ostrich egg?” Mortimer guesses.
“Close. Very close. It’s a moa egg. World’s biggest bird. From New Zealand, extinct since about the eighteenth century.”
Nerita crouches and lightly taps the egg. “What an omelet we could make!”
“There’s enough there to feed seventy-five of us,” Gracchus says. “Two gallons of fluid, easy. But of course we mustn’t meddle with it. Natural increase is very important in keeping this park stocked.”
“And where’s mama moa?” Sybille asks. “Should she have abandoned the egg?”
“Moas aren’t very bright,” Gracchus answers. “That’s one good reason why they became extinct. She must have wandered off to find some dinner. And—”
“Good God,” Zacharias blurts.
The moa has returned, emerging suddenly from a thicket. She stands like a feathered mountain above them, limned by the deep-blue of twilight: an ostrich, more or less, but a magnified ostrich, an ultimate ostrich, a bird a dozen feet high, with a heavy rounded body and a great thick hose of a neck and taloned legs sturdy as saplings. Surely this is Sinbad’s rukh, that can fly off with elephants in its grasp! The bird peers at them, sadly contemplating the band of small beings clustered about her egg; she arches her neck as though readying for an attack, and Zacharias reaches for one of the rifles, but Gracchus checks his hand, for the moa is merely rearing back to protest. It utters a deep mournful mooing sound and does not move. “Just back slowly away,” Gracchus tells them. “It won’t attack. But keep away from the feet; one kick can kill you.”
“I was going to apply for a license on a moa,” Mortimer says.
“Killing them’s a bore,” Gracchus tells him. “They just stand there and let you shoot. You’re better off with what you signed up for.”
What Mortimer has signed up for is an aurochs, the vanished wild ox of the European forests, known to Caesar, known to Pliny, hunted by the hero Siegfried, altogether exterminated by the year 1627. The plains of East Africa are not a comfortable environment for the aurochs and the herd that has been conjured by the genetic necromancers keeps to itself in the wooded highlands, several days’ journey from the haunts of quaggas and ground sloths. In this dark grove the hunters come upon troops of chattering baboons and solitary big-eared elephants and, in a place of broken sunlight and shadow, a splendid antelope, a bull bongo with a fine curving pair of horns. Gracchus leads them onward, deeper in. He seems tense: there is peril here. The porters slip through the forest like black wraiths, spreading out in arching crab-claw patterns, communicating with one another and with Gracchus by whistling. Everyone keeps weapons ready in here. Sybille half expects to see leopards draped on overhanging branches, cobras slithering through the undergrowth. But she feels no fear.
They approach a clearing.
“Aurochs,” Gracchus says.
A dozen of them are cropping the shrubbery: big short-haired long-horned cattle, muscular and alert. Picking up the scent of the intruders, they lift their heavy heads, sniff, glare. Gracchus and Ngiri confer with eyebrows. Nodding, Gracchus mutters to Mortimer, “Too many of them. Wait for them to thin off.” Mortimer smiles. He looks a little nervous. The aurochs has a reputation for attacking without warning. Four, five, six of the beasts slip away, and the others withdraw to the edge of the clearing, as if to plan strategy; but one big bull, sour-eyed and grim, stands his ground, glowering. Gracchus rolls on the balls of his feet. His burly body seems, to Sybille, a study in mobility, in preparedness.
“Now,” he says.
In the same moment the bull aurochs charges, moving with extraordinary swiftness, head lowered, horns extended like spears. Mortimer fires. The bullet strikes with a loud whonking sound, crashing into the shoulder of the aurochs, a perfect shot, but the animal does not fall, and Mortimer shoots again, less gracefully ripping into the belly, and then Gracchus and Ngiri are firing also, not at Mortimer’s aurochs but over the heads of the others, to drive them away, and the risky tactic works, for the other animals go stampeding off into the woods. The one Mortimer has shot continues toward him, staggering now, losing momentum, and falls practically at his feet, rolling over, knifing the forest floor with its hooves.
“Kufa,” Ngiri says. “Piga nyati m’uzuri, bwana.”
Mortimer grins. “Piga,” he says.
Gracchus salutes him. “More exciting than moa,” he says.
“And these are mine,” says Nerita three hours later, indicating a tree at the outer rim of the forest. Several hundred large pigeons nest in its boughs, so many of them that the tree seems to be sprouting birds rather than leaves. The females are plain—light-brown above, gray below—but the males are flamboyant, with rich, glossy blue plumage on their wings and backs, breasts of a wine-red chestnut color, iridescent spots of bronze and green on their necks, and weird, vivid eyes of a bright, fiery orange. Gracchus says, “Right. You’ve found your passenger pigeons.”
“Where’s the thrill in shooting pigeons out of a tree?” Mortimer asks.
Nerita gives him a withering look. “Where’s the thrill in gunning down a charging bull?” She signals to Ngiri, who fires a shot into the air. The startled pigeons burst from their perches and fly in low circles. In the old days, a century and a half ago in the forests of North America, no one troubled to shoot passenger pigeons on the wing: the pigeons were food, not sport, and it was simpler to blast them as they sat, for that way a single hunter might kill thousands of birds in one day. Thus it took only fifty years to reduce the passenger pigeon population from uncountable sky-blackening billions to zero. Nerita is more sporting. This is a test of her skill, after all. She aims her shotgun, shoots, pumps, shoots, pumps. Stunned birds drop to the ground. She and her gun are a single entity, sharing one purpose. In moments it is all over. The porters retrieve the fallen birds and snap their necks. Nerita has the dozen pigeons her license allows: a pair to mount, the rest for tonight’s dinner. The survivors have returned to their tree and stare placidly, unreproachfully, at the hunters.