"Kineas can grill you a steak if you'd prefer that."

"Maybe for dinner."

"Good. I'll have one of the boys find something you can use for a target," Ray offered.

"I brought targets."

Ray Johnson raised his eyebrows. / have a feeling this is going to be a really good hunt he thought with a smile.

"You didn't bring a shotgun, did you?" Ray asked as they stopped under a tree beside the fire road fifteen miles from camp. The sun was bright and Ray recommended regular breaks to ingest fluids. They had parked the Land Rover and had been walking for about two hours. Henry had seen several zebra, which were not on his ticket, and almost a hundred impala since leaving the vehicle.

"No, I don't shoot shotguns. Why?"

"That's a pity. There's lots of good wingshooting in Africa. Especially guinea fowl, like we had for lunch," he said, nodding towards some birds in the distance. "Lot of them in this area. They're like small turkeys. Eight, ten pounds. Take a lot of killing, though. Last client I had who brought a shotgun only had skeet loads with him. They'd've been okay for doves, but guinea fowl, it just made 'em squawk and keep flying. Number eights won't do it. You need fours, at least," he said as he took a drink from his canteen.

"Wouldn't the noise spook the other game?" Henry asked as he watched the birds fly towards them. Ray laughed.

"Not plains game. There's so much of it in this area, you could detonate a bomb and you'd still find more a mile farther on."

Henry thought about that and looked at the eyepiece of the Leupold variable on his .375 Ackley Magnum. The scope was one of the new models in 1.5-5 power, with the dot reticle that Henry preferred. He noted with satisfaction that the power ring at the front of the eyepiece was set to the lowest power. Henry pulled a single earplug from the breast pocket of his khaki shirt and slipped it into his left ear.

"Hold your ears," he said softly as he held his rifle at port arms and watched the four guinea fowl fly towards the trees that he and the others stood under. The lead bird was to the left of the three that followed it. Thirty yards, maybe less, in a second. Dead on at thirty, half-inch low at twenty. Henry threw the Enfield-actioned .375 to his shoulder and flicked the safety forward to disengage it. He squeezed the trigger a practiced amount, then increased the pressure when the dot in the center of the crosshairs was about two inches in front of the bird's head. As the muzzle blast rolled out over the Rhodesian plains and the gun rose in recoil, Henry Bowman slapped the bolt handle up and to the rear, then shoved it forward and down as he pulled the rifle back on target. The rifle's stock obscured his face, but he was smiling.

The three other guinea fowl reacted simultaneously to the shot. Two of them broke left, but one started to turn to Henry's right, spotted the four men under the trees, and wheeled left to join the other birds. Henry swung on this one, and felt the trigger break just as the dot reticle passed through an imaginary spot four inches in front of and just slightly above the bird's beak. As the rubber recoil pad hammered his shoulder once again, Henry relaxed and watched the second corpse fall out of the sky.

"Jesus!" Ray Johnson exclaimed. "Banda! Grab those!" he said unnecessarily. The head tracker was already jogging out to retrieve the dead birds. "I've certainly never had a client do that," Ray said to Henry, as he alternated his stares between the rifle in Henry's hands and the area out in the dry grass where the dead birds had fallen.

"A 270 Nosier at 2900 doesn't have the problem of insufficient power that skeet loads do," Henry said happily.

"Probably blew the meat all to shit," Ray said, in a tone that made it clear that he didn't care at all if each entire-bird was now inedible.

"We'll see," Henry shrugged.

The tracker returned a few moments later with both guinea fowl and held them out for inspection. The professional hunter was stunned to see that the meat was not damaged at all.

Using a bolt-action rifle that most people thought of as an elephant gun, Raymond Johnson's newest client had decapitated both birds in flight with two perfect head shots.

"Exactly how is it you ended up a professional hunter over here, anyway?" Henry asked as they sat at the dinner table and worked on their salads. "Didn't Uncle Max tell me you were originally a lawyer, or something?"

Ray smiled. "Yeah, I had a job in New York doing securities law fifteen years ago. Lucked into an unusual personal injury case, where the defendant was a big company about to be bought out by a conglomerate. We settled out of court for a bunch of money so it wouldn't queer the sale.

"I took some of the money from my cut and went on a safari in Kenya. While I was there, I got a cable that my dad had had a heart attack while driving with my mother, and they'd both been killed in the wreck. I finished up my hunt and then went home to settle the estate. I realized that I wasn't looking forward to going back and living in New York and poring over prospectuses. Guy I'd been with in Kenya had said there were some good opportunities in Angola and Mozambique for a guy who knew a bit about game. I settled things in the States and went to Angola. That's where I met your uncle."

"Do you have any brothers or sisters?" Raymond shook his head.

"No, only other family I had was my Dad's brother, Uncle Carl. He and Dad both ran the ranch in Colorado."

"Is it still there?"

"Yeah, my uncle still runs it," Ray said, nodding his head. "I still own the half that belonged to my father. Dad had enough savings and insurance to pay the estate tax due at the time. That was in '63. I told Uncle Carl since he was going to have to hire more help, and I was fixed okay for money, he was welcome to all the profits so long as Dad's land stayed in my name. He knew I didn't have any urge to sell."

"So you've got a bunch of land in Colorado to retire to if things go to shit over here, huh?" "That, and a mutual fund I bought with my settlement money. Dollar cost averaged over five years, and wrapped it an annuity contract so it would grow tax-deferred."

Henry nodded in understanding and sipped his lemonade. "Whoever told you to do that was smart. Feds slammed the door on that one a few years back, but guys who were in already got grandfathered."

"Tony Kearns, my broker, was really good," Ray agreed. "So, is it what you expected?" he asked, changing the subject. "Game plentiful enough?" Henry had shot a good-sized impala at a little over 200 yards, and a nice wildebeest at about half that distance, but the professional hunter was still thinking of the flying birds he had seen his client kill that morning.

"Better than I ever imagined. I can't tell you what I was expecting, exactly, but it wasn't this good, not by a jugful." He looked thoughtful for a moment, remembering how astonished he had been at regularly spotting elephant and rhino that afternoon. "How many elephants did you say there were in Africa, Ray?"

"Last estimate, about a million and a quarter. That's what astonishes every one of my clients from the United States. Apparently there's some crazy rumor over there that because of all the hunting, African elephants are nearly extinct."

"A lot of people seem to think that," Henry admitted. Raymond laughed, then turned serious.

"No one likes to say it out loud, but it comes down to the simple question of which do you like better- African elephants, or Africans?" He took a bite of his salad, and continued. "That's why every country over here has game department people on the payroll whose job it is to go kill hundreds of elephants a year- whole herds of them, babies and all. I guess a lot of the American public flunked arithmetic."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, a full-grown elephant eats about four hundred pounds of vegetation a day. That means that per elephant, you need between five and twenty-five square miles of free grazing area, depending on the country and how good the soil is. That's just to sustain the animals at existing levels.

"Got a little problem there, though. It's called people. They have this nasty habit of wanting to own their own property, and plant crops on it, and raise cattle, and stay alive. Those goals are not particularly compatible with having elephants and rhino and lions sharing the same real estate. You said in the summers, you grew up on a place out in the country?"

"Right."

"Cattle, chickens, pigs, corn, like that? All fenced in?"

"Yeah."

"Your mother have a vegetable garden?" Raymond asked.

"Of course."

"Any groundhogs ever get in it?" This elicited a nod. "So what'd you do?"

"Shot "em," Henry said.

"Right. Well, imagine that instead of weighing ten pounds, those groundhogs you wanted to keep out of your fields weighed ten thousand pounds, and each one of them ate four hundred pounds of your crops every day it was alive. Imagine instead of building a fence to keep the cattle and pigs in, you had to build one that would keep lions and leopards out. And also keep them away from where your children might happen to be. Good luck," he said with feeling.

"Any place here in Africa where the people want to grow crops, all the elephant and rhino have to be exterminated first. Any place people want to have beef or dairy cattle, or raise children for that matter, all the cats have to be killed off. Every last one of 'em." He smiled sadly.

"Like if you were in Florida. Send a dozen guys off into the swamp to kill as many alligators as they can, ten years later there'll be plenty of alligators in that swamp. But drain the swamp and pour concrete for a new A&P, there'll never be another 'gator there again."

"So there's a big push to divide up the government land for the residents?" Henry asked. Ray Johnson nodded.

"With the trophy fees as high as they are, the raw land brings in enough money that the government can afford to leave huge sections of it alone. Continued profitable hunting businesses keep the land undeveloped, and that's good for photo safaris, too. The photo people don't spend any money out here, but they do a lot for the tourism in the cities. One client I had brought his girlfriend on the hunt. She wanted to know why people couldn't just take pictures of the game, and have no more hunting. I asked her if she'd be willing to pay a hundred dollars to the government for every picture she took of an impala, and three thousand for every elephant, on top of paying for her transport over here and four hundred a day for my services. She looked at me like I'd lost my fucking mind."

"The whole system usually goes to shit when they outlaw hunting. That's what we've seen in the other countries, at least. Looks like it might happen to us, with all this crap that's going on." He was referring to the civil war in Rhodesia that had been going on for several years.

"Do you think that will happen here?" Henry asked.

"Don't know. A lot of people are leaving, mostly for South Africa. What I do will depend on if the government decides to outlaw hunting and kill off the game to make way for hundred-acre farms. No read on that yet."

Henry nodded. He took a drink of water, and finished off his salad as Kineas set a thick steak down in front of him. The talk soon returned to the events of the day's hunt, and what was expected for the following morning. Political discussion was shelved for the time being, but the issues were ones Henry would ponder for the remainder of his trip.

Major changes were in store for Rhodesia. The asset-based qualification for voting would be abolished, and full independence with majority rule, along with a name-change for the country, would occur in 1980. As many had predicted, this event would immediately lead to a move towards a single-party government.

Five years after Henry's safari, Rhodesia's most productive citizens would have emigrated to South Africa. Hotels in the major cities which had averaged eighty percent occupancy throughout the course of a year would be down to fifteen percent in the tourist season. The government would levy a seventeen percent tariff on all retail sales in a fruitless effort to tax the country into prosperity.

These events would force the new leaders to recognize that hunting was one of their country's few remaining assets capable of attracting foreign dollars. Hunting concessions would still be leased to those people willing to risk a business venture in an environment largely hostile to capitalism. The handwriting was on the wall, however, and by the time the country became a one-party state in 1988, Ray Johnson would be long gone.

"Let's watch them for a bit," Henry requested.

"Sure. We'll glass them from here for a while, see if one of them's got a decent pair of teeth." Ray, Henry, the lead tracker, and two tracker-skinners were looking across a canyon at four elephants on the other hillside, about a quarter mile away. One of the bulls was pushing his head against a 12" diameter tree.

"Watch how he pushes and releases it, then pushes again, getting it rocking. He's going to get it moving farther and farther until he snaps it off at ground level." Henry watched, and just as Ray had predicted, in less than a minute the tree went all the way over, and a long cracking sound reached his ears a second later.

"Why do they do that?" Henry asked.

"No one knows. The explanation everyone uses is that the elephants do it to test their strength. They do it all the time-just look around at all the trees pushed over." Henry nodded. He was imagining a farmer trying to build something to keep elephants away from his crops. A two-foot-thick poured concrete wall, maybe? he thought with amusement.

"See that third one from the left? His tusks are about as big as you're going to find, at least in this area. Look like fifty, fifty-five a side from here. Want to finish that canteen, take a few pictures, and see if we can't swing around and approach them from downwi nd? Give your Rodda a workout?"

"Sounds good to me."

Ray Johnson got his client to within fifteen yards of the huge animal. He had advised Henry to avoid letting the elephant see his eyes. Henry didn't know if this was a superstition, or if his eyes reallycould give him away, like the glint off the lenses of an enemy's binoculars. He kept them shielded with his free hand. Henry had told Ray he'd take a heart shot, to see how well that would work using the huge 19th-century rifle.

Henry Bowman pulled the front trigger and held it down while drawing back the right hammer. He held the hammer to the rear as he released the trigger, then let go of the hammer spur as well. He didn't like to carry the 4-bore cocked and ready to fire, and hammer guns could be cocked in complete silence by using the method Henry had just employed. He glanced at Ray Johnson, nodded once, and threw the 25-pound rifle to his shoulder.

The animal was standing broadside to Henry, facing to the young man's right. When the front sight bead covered the proper spot on the elephant's side, Henry Bowman gripped the gun's wrist and forend with all his strength, leaned forward, and squeezed the trigger. The trackers, standing fifty yards to the rear (near some eminently climbable trees), smiled involuntarily. The huge rifle made a sound like no other whenever it went off.

Henry Bowman rocked backwards, brought the rifle down out of recoil, and thumbed back the hammer of the left barrel. He made no effort to do it silently this time. The elephant had taken two steps, stopped, and turned around so that Henry was now presented with its left side. Did I miss the heart? Henry wondered in amazement as he took aim again. The bull was standing still, and Henry saw a brown spot of dirt or other discoloration on the animal's skin in the proper area for another heart shot. When the front sight bead obscured it, Henry pulled the Rodda's rear trigger.

He was again rocked back under recoil, only this time Henry let go of the wrist of the stock, grabbed the knob of the underlever, and swung the lever to the side as he brought the gun down across his left knee, breaking it open. He could tell with his peripheral vision that the elephant was still standing. / can't be flinching that badly he thought for an instant, then closed his mind to all but the task at hand.

Without looking up, Henry plucked the two empty cases from the barrels, dropped them at his feet, and pulled a pair of cartridges out of a surgical elastic carrier he wore on his left forearm. He slid them into the chambers, swung the barrels shut, closed the underlever, cocked the right hammer, and threw the rifle to his shoulder just in time to see the bull elephant fall over on his side, dead.

Henry glanced at Raymond, who was holding his .458 in one hand at his side, grinning. He pulled the right hammer back, held back the front trigger, and let the hammer down gently. He could feel the blood pumping in his ears as he walked over and stood by the huge head of the dead creature. Henry laid his hand on the thick hide just over the eye. He felt a much stronger emotion now than he ever felt after shooting any other game animal. Ray and the men recognized this. They had seen it before. The four of them stood silently and kept a respectful distance.

"I don't know what happened," Henry said finally.

"What do you mean?"