So cold that even the polar bears are shivering.
But this one, of course, was shivering in fear.
The hunter hoisted his heavy duffel bag over his shoulder and turned away.
It was a good-sized show at the Holiday Inn Aurora, one of many hotels carved out of wrecked farmland on the outskirts of Denver International Airport. Something like two thousand tables spread across the floor of the convention center, holding endless rows of double-action safari rifles, police revolvers, shotguns, military hardware. Cartridges lined up like rows of gravestones. Knives and nunchaku and pepper spray. Signs saying things like, Laser scopes must be operated only by exhibitors.
Antiques too. A twenty-one-inch-barrel Volcanic rifle in .41 caliber, a circa-1650 Spanish epee, bear traps from the Colonial days, even a 1940s Jeep that had crossed the Sahara which the kids could climb on.
In other words, the usual. The same stuff you’d find at a hundred other gun shows on a hundred other exhibit floors in a hundred other cities.
One thing was different this time, though.
Up on the eighth floor, in the Executive Suite.
It had been a poor shot.
He could see the animal near the rear of the enclosure, leaping again and again off the floor, landing sometimes on its belly, sometimes on its back. Then getting onto its feet and flipping upwards once more, like a marionette dancing from the ends of a callous puppeteer’s strings.
A golden lion tamarin, one of the world’s smallest, rarest, and most beautiful monkeys, its spun-gold fur stained with black blood.
Akeley studied the hole in the glass front of the enclosure and saw what had happened. The glass had deflected the .22 round, just a little, but enough to prevent a clean kill.
He shifted his gaze to the wounded monkey. The others clustered above it on the vines strung across the enclosure, wide dark eyes showing the human emotions of fear and pity, the twittering of their birdlike voices coming through the glass to his ears.
The hunter sighed. He couldn’t leave it like this. Someone might notice, figure out what had happened, and stop him before he was done.
A door leading behind the scenes was located just inside the Monkey House’s entrance. Before he tested the handle, he looked around, seeing only a small group of teenagers over near the Zoo Center and a pair of nannies wheeling strollers toward the tropical warmth of the World of Birds.
No one paid him any attention. If they had, they’d likely have mistaken him for a keeper anyway. He’d dressed in khaki for this day.
He had his tools ready, but the door was unlocked, the passageway inside deserted. It smelled of rotten fruit and old urine, and the calls of captive animals came to him through the small hatches that led into each enclosure.
He found the entrance to the tamarin exhibit without trouble — he knew the layout of every building — and ducked inside. The little golden monkeys flowed away from him in alarm. They knew he was no zookeeper.
The wounded one, still leaping and falling, fully occupied with trying to escape its agony, didn’t notice him. Droplets of blood from its gut wound lay scattered across the floor.
The hunter reached for his duffel, then paused. Decided there was a better way to end this.
He squatted down and lifted the tiny monkey, insubstantial as a flake of ash in his hands. As he brought it close to his face, it stopped struggling and lay there looking at him, its gaze full of unwarranted trust. So used to humans, so tame, that it expected him to take away its pain.
So he did.
He laid the corpse behind a thick growth of plastic ferns, then straightened and looked into the eyes of the little blondhaired girl who was watching him with rapt attention through the glass.
There were five of them in the hotel room, sipping single malt and telling stories. Taking their time before getting to the matter at hand.
The Big Five, they called themselves. A joke, kind of, but also a boast. The Big Five: The most dangerous mammals in Africa. Lion, leopard, elephant, rhino, Cape buffalo. The ones you stalked if you were a real hunter.
Among the Masai, you weren’t a man until you’d killed a lion. For European and American hunters a century and more ago, just a lion wasn’t enough. You needed all five.
And you knew where to get them. The Serengeti. The Mara and the Selous. Amboseli, under the shadow of Kilimanjaro. You could shoot till the barrels of your bolt-action repeater melted, or till a rhino got his horn into your gut. Either way, no one cared.
Today, though? Today, all those places were preserves, and you were supposed to head to game ranches in South Africa or Zimbabwe instead. Places where all you had to do was hand over your plastic and choose from a price list of what you wanted to shoot. As if you were sitting in a restaurant and ordering off a menu.
A baboon, your basic appetizer, cost seventy-five dollars. Two hundred for a warthog, two-fifty for an impala, nine hundred for a wildebeest, all the way up to two thousand for a waterbuck and twenty-five hundred for a giraffe. Most of them so slow and stupid that you might as well have been some Texas bigwig blasting away at farm-raised quail.
The original Big Five were on the menu too, though their prices were never listed. You had to ask. But if your pockets were deep enough, you could still follow a guide out and knock down a semitame lion or sluggish buffalo on a groomed veldt that looked like something you’d see on a golf course. And then go home and brag on it to your friends.
The state of big-game hunting in the twenty-first century.
Unless you wanted more, and knew how to get it.
Standing close to the glass, the girl peered up at him. She looked to be about seven, with fair skin, a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, curly blond hair emerging from a green knit hat, and eyes so large and pale blue that he thought he might be able to see through to her brain if he looked right into them.
How much had she seen? She was old enough to understand, to tell her mother, to scream. She could ruin everything.
He leaned forward, looked past her, seeing only a young woman in a black parka glancing at the squirrel monkeys across the way. No one else was in the Monkey House.
He had choices, then. There were a couple of different ways this could go.
He tried the easiest first, and smiled at her.
She smiled back.
Okay. Good. Tilting his head, he gestured at the golden lion tamarins on the branches around him. Alarmed, they leaped away toward the farthest corners of the enclosure. But the girl saw only adorable little monkeys doing tricks, and laughed. Then she pointed to her mouth and made chewing motions. Feeding time?
He gave an apologetic shake of the head and showed her his watch. Later.
Her lips turned downward in disappointment, and she shrugged. Then she glanced over her shoulder. He heard her voice dimly through the glass: “Hey, Mom — there’s a man in there!”
But by the time the woman turned to look, he was gone.
Wilson and Crede, the lawyers, had bagged a bull elephant whose crossed tusks, as pitted and yellow as mammoth ivory, weighed a combined 407 pounds. Smithfield, the bluff and hearty CEO of a company with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, London, and New York, had shot a black-maned lion in Namibia that measured eleven feet from head to tail. Clark, the lobbyist, tall and skinny, had faced down a charging three-thousand-pound black rhino, standing his ground and firing his Brno ZKK-602 until the great beast came crashing to the ground not five feet from where he stood. And Kushner, the tanned, nasal-voiced neurosurgeon, had discovered that the leopard he’d shot was still alive, and had finished the job by jamming his fist down its throat until it died of asphyxiation.