by Joseph Wallace
We were camped on the shores of Lake
Albert in Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park. Every
night after we went to bed, hippos would leave the lake to
graze on the tender grass above our campsite, moving with
such grace and lightness that we never heard them going by,
though they passed within inches of our tents.
It was a hot July afternoon under an enormous sky and a blazing
African sun. The people I was traveling with were all asleep
under canvas, escaping the heat of the day until our next game
drive late that afternoon.
I couldn't sleep. I felt restless, itchy, sunstruck as I stood on
the edge of camp, looking outward. I was following the flight of
an eagle through my binoculars when I saw an odd movement at the
furthest limit of my vision.
I peered at it, and at first could only make out heat haze and
the shadows cast by hurrying clouds. But then I saw what had
caught my eye: a shifting of the air above the ground. A swirling
motion of dark specks below the clouds. The movement of vultures
over a kill.
I stood for a moment, irresolute, knowing I should wake the
others, tell them where I was going. Or not go at all.
But for some reason I knew that I wasn't going to do the rational
thing. I headed off along the lakeshore toward the vultures.
Picking my way along a faint animal trail, watched by hippos that
grunted and splashed in the lake and gigantic Nile crocodiles
lying on the baking mud of the shoreline. The wind whistled past
my ears.
I walked for almost an hour, knowing that I was being very
stupid. Leaving the campsite on foot was forbidden. Worse, it was
suicidal. Lions lived here, and leopards. Hyenas. Dense brush
grew along the lake, and every patch I passed might be hiding one
of these animals, already watching me with unblinking hunter's
eyes.
And here I was walking toward a kill, a site guaranteed to
attract predators from miles around. Through my binoculars, I
could see at least fifty vultures circling low over the ground,
others winging in from the distance. From the looks of it, this
was a big one.
But I could not stop. I needed to see what the birds were
feasting on. And who else had joined the feast.
As I drew closer, I saw that the site was screened by a wall of
brush, matted thornbushes and twisted fever trees. But someone
had been here before me, and had cut a rough path through the
underbrush with a machete.
I hadn't taken more than a few steps along the path when the wind
shifted and the smell hit me. The smell of death and
putrefaction, so strong it made me gasp for breath. I took my
shirt off and held it over my nose, but I kept on going, even as
the smell grew so powerful that it made my eyes water.
My first impression on stepping into the clearing at the end of
the path was of motion. The awkward, confident movement of
vultures, hopping and flapping across the ground. But then I saw
what they had come for, what feast had brought them here.
I stood before the corpses of elephants. More than a dozen huge
sprawled bodies decomposing in the hot sun. And each had been
mutilated‹stripped of its ivory, tusks hacked out with eager,
greedy machete strokes. They had no faces, these elephants, just
huge gaping wounds, red flesh swarming with maggots and flies.
Without thinking, I took a few steps forward. The vultures rasped
and hopped and flurried into the air, spiraling upward like black
ashes rising from a dirty fire.
And then I saw him. He was sitting on the back of one of the
slaughtered elephants, one that had died on its stumpy knees and
had not toppled over during its last agonized moments. A man
dressed in military fatigues, cradling an automatic rifle in his
arms. Sitting there as if he were riding this mutilated creature.
Watching me, waiting patiently for me to notice him.
He was skinny, horribly skinny. Sticklike arms protruded from his
uniform, and the skin seemed to have shriveled to the bones of
his face. Amid all this rotting flesh, he looked like a skeleton
brought back to life.
He smiled, white teeth gleaming in that death's-head face. Smiled
and raised his rifle and aimed it at me, sighting with such
steady-handed ease that I knew he would not miss.
I slowly raised both hands into the air and began to back away.
His aim did not waver, and at every moment I expected to feel the
impact of the bullet lift me off my feet, to watch my blood
fountain outward even as I heard the sound of the rifle's blast.
When I reached the path I turned my back on him, my hands still
in the air. I could feel his eyes still on me, a spot burning
here on my back, then here, then here, each a possible spot for
the bullet to enter.
But he didn't pull the trigger. As the path swung right and I
left his view, I could hear the dry sound of wings spilling air
as the vultures descended once more on their bounty.
For some reason they did not seem to fear the man with the rifle.
