It was no less than a curse.
“Boodle, no!” Stoat yelled, cigar waggling. “Bad boy!”
A few yards ahead stood Clapley, his aggrieved expression revealing all: He wanted to shoot the dog, but Durgess wouldn’t permit it. In fact, the guide was signaling all of them to remain still.
“Hold up here,” Asa Lando dutifully instructed Stoat’s group.
Dick Artemus leaned in and whispered, “Palmer, is that your damn fool dog?” Willie Vasquez-Washington chuckled and began shooting pictures. In mute wonderment the guides and hunters watched the Labrador circle and taunt the rhinoceros; even Asa Lando found it difficult not to be entertained. The dog really was a piece of work!
Palmer Stoat shaded a nervous eye toward Clapley, huddled in a heated discussion with Durgess. Of all those present, Stoat alone knew of Clapley’s peculiar obsession. Stoat alone knew without asking that the man had brought dolls, and probably a miniature pearl-handled hairbrush, concealed inside his ammo vest. Stoat alone knew the wanton seed of Clapley’s motivation (which had nothing to do with sport), and understood the true base nature of his panic. No rhino, no horn; no horn, no live Barbies! In such a fraught equation, one frolicsome Labrador carried zero weight.
Only too late did it dawn on Stoat that he should have taken Bob aside the night before and explained that the “killer” rhinoceros would not and could not escape, due to the insurmountable barbed fence that enclosed the Wilderness Veldt Plantation. And though the news might have taken a bit of luster off the hunt, it might also have lowered Robert Clapley’s buggy anxiety to a saner level, at which he might not have attempted to sight his Weatherby on something so inconsequential as a pesky hound. From the spot where Stoat knelt, he could see Clapley trying again and again to raise the gun barrel, only to have it slapped down by Durgess.
In desperation Stoat bellowed: “Boodle! Come!”
Dick Artemus stuck two fingers in his cheeks and gave a whistle that sounded like the screak of a tubercular macaw. The Labrador failed to respond. Peering at the confrontation through a 500-mm lens, Willie Vasquez-Washington could make out amazing details—the electric green bottleflies buzzing about the rhino’s rear end, the shining strands of spittle on the dog’s chin…
And when the Lab suddenly leapt forward and seized the rhino’s tail, it was Willie Vasquez-Washington who loudly piped: “Look at that crazy sonofabitch!”
Palmer Stoat saw the rhinoceros spin. He saw Boodle windmilling through the air. He saw Robert Clapley shake free of Durgess and jump to his feet. And then he saw the rhino take off, his idiot dog biting at its heels. The beast vectored first one direction and then another, ascending halfway up the northernmost slope before deferring to gravity. With a resolute snort, the rhino arced back downhill toward the three groups of men, whom it might easily have mistaken for shrubbery or grazing antelopes (given the rhinoceros’s notoriously poor vision). Arbitrarily it picked for an escape route the twenty-yard gap between the first two groups. The dog bayed merrily in pursuit.
Because of the rhino’s barge-like girth and laconic-looking trot, the swiftness of its advance was misjudged by both Stoat and Clapley—though not by the two guides, whose awe at the decrepit pachyderm’s resurgence was outweighed by their aversion to violent death. Durgess, who anticipated the next phase of the fiasco, grimly flattened himself to the ground. Asa Lando spun on one heel and ran for the live oak. Governor Dick Artemus took the cue; dropped his gun and hit the grass ass-first. His two bodyguards dashed forward, seizing him roughly under the armpits and dragging him toward the zebra-striped truck. Meanwhile, Willie Vasquez-Washington backpedaled, snapping pictures in hasty retreat.
And Palmer Stoat, faced with a charging African rhinoceros, raised his rifle and took aim. Exactly sixty-six feet away, Robert Clapley did the same. Both men were too adrenalized to recognize their respective vulnerabilities in the lethal geometry of a cross fire. Both were too caught up in the heart-pounding maleness of the moment to sidestep manifest disaster.
It had been years since Stoat had shot an animal that was more or less ambulatory, and he trembled excitedly as he drew a bead on the grizzled brow of the lumbering rhino. As for Clapley, killing it would be more than a display of machismo—it would fulfill a fantasy that consumed him night and day. Through his rifle scope (laughably unnecessary at such close range), Clapley breathlessly admired the rhino’s immense horn. He imagined presenting the hair-encrusted totem—upright and daunting—on a satin pillow to the twin Barbies, who would be curled up nude and perfumed and (he fervidly hoped) blond. He envisioned a grateful glow in their nearly completed faces. Next week: the chins. By Christmas: perfection.