An insensible threat was at fore, a primordial evil.
The calico dog stopped dead-still, using the dusky shadows of the bush to secret himself from the revealing glimmer of the building moon. He had the fragile night breeze in his nose. On it had been borne the stimulus of ire.
Immediately, instinct worked to craft an illusion bigger than himself. His tail bushed, a low growl grew in his throat and the hackles lifted along his back. While his large ears flared and curled to discern a more exact disclosure of its location. He had sensed abruptly its source, the pungent spoor unmistakable. A jackal, his smaller, wild canid cousin. An ancient rival in the contest of predator for prey. Their encounters were frequent, inevitable in the normal breadth of travel for his kind, which might account for 30 miles or more in a Single night. Though the jackal was as ever opportunist as hunter, quick to infringe or steal a kill, and normally too cowardly to venture confrontation. It was probably the same, insistent silver-backed male he had put to flight the week before.
Now he was poised to do it again, this time for better, as for present his wanderings and that of his companions were not so far-flung, circumcised to a lesser and guarded distance from the abandoned warthog burrow, by the nearby kopje, that sheltered the litter of three-month-old pups that bore his genes.
For that was his duty, as the alpha male of a pack of African wild dogs, perpetuating the survival of his band. A dependency of 20, constituted of nine pups, three breeding females, two subordinate, adult members of his own gender, and six yearlings, his offspring of the previous winter. A pack of 21in a species already gravely endangered, numbering less than 3,000 on the entire continent. It was a charge he accepted as readily as death, as urgently as the next second.
The jackal had intruded to an offending distance. This he could not allow.
He could see the smaller canine now, skulking along in the open interstices of moonlight between shadows. Slowly approaching. The same, cheeky, silver-backed male, the corroboration of his heightening scent irrefutable. Though there was a difference, a strangeness of the closing interloper that was as equally undeniable. Something the warning at his gut interpreted as vaguely unnatural and foreboding. Unnatural was disturbing in an existence conditioned by caution, strained in any moment for survival. But it was a thing duty and nature would never shrink from.
The alpha-dog sank to his stomach, tensed and waiting against the sand, the blue aura of the night glimmering on the hackled guard hairs along his back. To do the thing he must always do. The anger climbed into his throat, growing to a tortured whine and gurgle. This time he would give the jackal a thing to remember.
The momentum of the dog’s unexpected onslaught sent the jackal off his feet, shrieking and rolling. In unrelenting, practiced and fluid motion, the dog pressed the advantage, snarling, slashing, pressuring the jackal to the sand with his body weight and fury. With the slice of a canine, he cut a deep, reddening, three-inch gash through the hide and into the ropy muscle along the jackal’s spine. Another into its hindquarter as it struggled vainly to right itself under the smothering attack. Sensing the damage and relying on his dominion, the dog allowed brief quarter. He did not wish to spend himself further.
Fighting, any fighting outside the battle for prey, was depleting, and dangerous. There was always the chance of injury; even the teeth of a spring-hare could be dreadful when it was pressed for existence. Delivering injury that could, under the unending vileness of the flies and ticks, foster the debilitating fester of disease or infection. Bringing the inability to hunt. Even death. It was foolish to risk that unnecessarily. Besides, he expected the jackal to scramble, turn tail and run, as always it did. Then he could relish the chase, know that his duty was done.
The dog could not know that this time he would be wrong, mortally wrong. That this time he would invite the risk, and not avoid it. That, would nature have allowed, he should have been the wiser to have heeded the mystic, deviant warning his sixth-sense was attempting as he watched the intruder approach. For now on the turntable of utter surprise, the jackal staggered up crazed and slashing of its own, attacking rather than retreating. Its yellow eyes glazed with hate, rage and pain, skeins of bloody, frothy saliva dripping from its jaws, it charged recklessly and cruelly. Snapping and snarling, it came like a buzzsaw, teeth popping wrathfully as its jaws clacked together.
Startled momentarily by the fact and ferocity of the assault, the dog jerked rearward, tumbling over himself to reestablish the tactical advantage of a working distance. Unhesitant, the jackal would not allow it, was upon him, cutting, slicing. Twirling, coming up deftly on skillful feet, the dog momentarily escaped the onslaught, lighting himself. There was no lee now. He was past the surprise and his authority had been fronted. He would kill this interloper. Hurling himself against the jackal, he knocked the smaller animal once again to the ground, cutting and slashing viciously, and with effect, but suffering cuts to his ruff and head as well. Using his weight to push the jackal against the sand, to keep it off-balance and struggling, the dog pressed for its throat, seeking the jugular.
Missing the mark, a canine tooth tore the jackal’s chest open, blood gushing, then continued to rip open its belly, spilling green stomach offal and glistening coils of intestine. Incensed, the jackal fought sadistically, raking with four feet at the dog’s vulnerable underbelly, ripping and grabbing with its foaming jaws. Briefly, the dog was forced to relent, retreating slightly.
The jackal did not. On it came, its guts dragging the sand, lips wrinkled in evil rage over stabbing, clicking teeth.
Once again, the dog threw himself against it, bowling the smaller animal for the third time to the sand. But this time, rather than pressing to pin the jackal against the ground, he danced sideways, and with a deft roll of his shoulder and a thrust of his jaws, caught the soft under-throat of the jackal as it lurched to its feet.
The jackal whined in fury, knowing immediately its predicament. Clamped to its throat, the dog bettered his grip, driving his teeth deeper, shaking his head violently, raising the jackal from the ground and snapping it to-and-fro like a throw-rug.
In seconds, it was over. The jackal lay dying under the half-light of the moon, its intestines dirtied and strewn across the sand, spasmodically paddling the last of its life away. As if it were running in slow motion, through an illusion, on to eternity. Its throat was tom, its life vein ruptured, its small river of blood spilling out onto the ground.
The dog had backed away, considering the smaller canid, and what it had cost him in wounds. Nothing life-threatening, it seemed. But the jackal had fought with an unprecedented, demonic vehemence, a demented fury the dog had never known. Licking at a cut on his foreleg, he felt the sting of others on his head and muzzle. He had not escaped unscathed. It was a thing he would remember.
His reunion with the pack that evening was especially joyous, the cacophony of welcoming voices, the ritual of rank and order, dominance and submission, validating and fulfilling. To a dog, even the alpha-female, all licked exuberantly at his lips, the yearlings particularly expressive in their respect, dropping to the ground and rolling, exposing their throats and underbellies in subservience. Cleansing the cuts about his face and neck with the soothing care of their tongues. By instinct, they knew he had been called upon that night to protect them.
But there was a thing more they could not know, nor in the pure character of their being, avoid. A thing un sensed and unseen, far more dangerous than the jackal itself. Seven days had passed since the alpha-male had encountered the jackal. The wounds he had suffered in the offing had scabbed, were in the early stages of healing. He had hunted with the pack five days before. Yet, now — on the same evening a Hadzabi hunter, 200 miles to the north, sought to purify his soul from some unexpected evil — he lay dying. Cruelly dying, under the macabre light of the moon, in a land given to cruelty.
It had come swiftly, unbeknown, the debilitation that would kill him. First the fatigue, then the disorientation, the uncertainty of his limbs, the burning fever and malaise. So depressing and depleting was its possession, he had not felt like hunting. Or eating. Or mounting his usual patrols. Rapidly it had advanced, so that now his throat was swollen, spastic and aching. He could no longer swallow. Each spasm brought searing pain, and forced ropes of slobber to leak past his lips and drool involuntarily from his jaws.
Still he fought, struggling weakly, seeking to right himself. But he was too far spent, wasted and exhausted. In the past 12 hours death had crept ever closer. His muscles had stiffened. His body had been wracked again and again by convulsion, each time diminishing him the more, drawing him closer to his end. Now it came again. His torso tensed and withered, trembling uncontrollably against a vicious seize of paralysis, then jerked with a series of spasms, his feet Hailing hopelessly, his teeth clenched, his eyes rolled back into his head. So that their pupils, the windows of his life, were pulled shut, and there was no longer the sense of light, or being, but only the uncomprehending whites, bloodshot and gray. Gradually it subsided, leaving his body to loosen slowly, lost this time deeply beyond perception … to the dim world between, liberated at last to the mercy of a coma.
While the scythe of death hissed closer, closer. Until at last it severed the very little that was left of life, and his uncompromising heart failed.
Death has no dignity. Hideously scruffy and depleted, he lay in the bush at the edge of a veld. Urine staining his underbelly, his bowels loosening brown and putrid upon the once pure fur of his tail and thighs. Soon he would be picked over by the vultures and returned to the parched African dust. A piteous and contemptuous caricature of what he had been. Proud and sovereign. Wild and free.
He could no longer control the fate of his band. Even had he been left there, he could not have stopped the horror that had been set irrevocably to motion.
The third night afterward the remainder of the pack, disadvantaged by the absence of the alpha male, would return unsuccessfully from its hunt. To a member, tired, hungry and badly in need of rest. They had not killed in days and all had accompanied the quest. The nine pups, left alone for the first time since they were born, would spill gleefully from the den. Jubilant at the return of the troop, and famished, for it had been some time since they had fed. Grinning, ears back and tails wagging, they would rush to greet and lick the mouths of the homing dogs, begging food.
The reunion would seem replete of its usual joy. But the beginnings of betrayal are often benign.
The yearlings would reach the den first. The boldest of the pups, a male the make of his father, would gambol to meet the foremost: a normally amicable female that might easily have been assigned the task of sentry, and left behind to guard the litter. Dancing about her, the pup would vigorously lick her lips, pleading for food. It was the accepted signal, and he would not know that she was delirious with fever, unnaturally irritable and confused. More quickly than he could avoid, she would snap at him, lipping his ear. Yelping, he would cower, whimper and tender submission. The other pups would shrink back as well, startled and uncertain.
It would typically have been enough. The pups followed the laws of the pack, surrendering to superiority. The yearling female would usually have honored that, for pups, as perpetuation of the pack, were to be protected at all costs. Any indiscretion, and there would be hell to pay with the alpha-female. But the young female was strangely disoriented and angered, beyond the caring. The male pup lay at her mercy, and now the other yearlings were arriving too, watching curiously the unfolding drama — arrested by the same inner-sense of the abnormal that had brought the alpha-male to hesitation before the jackal, they would be cautioned by the foreboding evil. The other pups would withdraw further, wide-eyed, frightened and bewildered, almost to the den.
It would happen in a wicked instant. With a crunch of her jaws, the crazed yearling female would crush the male pup’s tiny skull. His small body would writhe and jerk, though briefly, then lapse still. A life so fragile that its surrender to death was almost spontaneous. Indifferent, the deranged female would turn aside, grab and kill another pup in the same sinister manner, lipping its stomach open and proceeding to eat it. Driven by the blood smell and drawn by hunger, the other yearlings would instinctively rush to join the meal. Only to stutter to a halt, hackling, put off by the deviant behavior. Low growls would grow in their throats, they would back away, and, one-by-one, lie down.
An insensible threat was at fore, a primordial evil.
Staring blankly, they would wish no part in the rest of the killings as their demented Sibling methodically chased, forced to submission, and destroyed the rest of the litter. Eating portions of three, but only popping the skulls of the rest. The adult females, including the dominant matriarch, would arrive as the last two pups were being slaughtered. Strangely weak and depressed, they would watch indifferently, taking no interest in aiding the young. Apart from the yearlings, they would collapse listlessly, and lay down to their own.
The two subordinate, adult males would not make it back to the kopje that night. Straggling in the next morning — dazed, drained and staggering — they did not join the pack, but curl ed to themselves at a distance. Two days hence, both would be dead, victims of the same horrors that doomed the alpha-male.
One after another — in a little less than the next 24 hours — as systematically as the young female had killed each of the pups, an insidious presence would annihilate as terribly the rest of the pack.
A week later Erick Nanai and Kimacha Mbwana of Tanzania’s Kingupira Wildlife Research Centre would find nothing but bones and fetid scuds of hair upon the hot, red sand. Another nail in another coffin in the procession to the vault of extinction.
All they could do was retrieve the telemetry collar from the remains of one of the subordinate, adult females. It was the insistent cadence of the transmitter signal that had led them there. They had guessed they would find death. They had not surmised its extent.
Suddenly the way grew deeper, and darker, and the two men gazed vacantly at each other. Pooled in their eyes was the ancient fear of the unknown.
Day-by-day between predator and prey, life is won — and life is lost …and the means is sometimes so deeply encrypted to fate that even the sharpest senses fail before its ever-present but mysterious warning. Sometimes it cannot be seen, or heard, or smelled, or tasted, or felt. Always, in every night, lies the threat of betrayal. The danger that what seems nearly natural, is not.
Even to the razor senses of the alpha-male, there had come only the faintest foreboding of an attendance, though rarely is there even that. Almost always it creeps silently and vilely into the midst of the compelling and endless struggle for survival, unperceived.
It had not been the swift fangs of the lion, or the leopard, or the crushing jaws of fisi, the hyena, that had brought the Njombe pack to doom. Mighty as they were, they were not powerful enough or cunning enough for that.
Tonight … somewhere in every night … behind all creatures great and small … stalks a greater force, hideous and unseen. Ever present. Sinister, and supreme. Tonight — to the jackal, to the hippo, to even the hon, the leopard and the mightiest of elephants … to even the humans that hunt them — death will come again. Neither claws, tusks, or wit, nor the skills of the best professional hunters and the awesome deterrent of their double rifles, will stop it. It will advance secretly, and horridly, and invincibly.
Only afterward . . . when life is cold … and only if you look beyond all that is familiar, can you find the chilling, invisible spoor to tell you that the most fearsome predator of all has hunted, the one that lurks beyond our senses.
From the master of adventure behind the classic Death in the Long Grass, former big-game hunter Peter Hathaway Capstick now turns from his own exploits to those of some of the greatest hunters of the past with Death in the Silent Places. Buy Now
