Wild Meat (9 page)

Wilson. Hugh vaguely remembered the production manager. But now the world such people occupied was no more real to Hugh than a cartoon playing on TV, seen through a neighbor’s window.

H
e must have dozed because when he suddenly sat up, fully awake, he saw that the sunlight slanting through the windows reached far into the room, its angle approaching horizontal.

Marcel reappeared
, followed by a husky middle-aged woman carrying a plate of meat and rice. The foreman opened the little fridge and handed Hugh a cold bottle of Beaufort beer from Cameroon. Hugh’s first icy swig thrilled him from throat to crotch, and he finished the bottle at once. Marcel handed him another, pointed out that the fridge was full, and told him that the woman who had brought the food would be right outside if he needed anything. Then he departed again.

* * *

Marcel guessed that Sanderson was fairly well settled and would soon sleep off the urge to charge into the forest. He breathed a long sigh as he stepped out into the sunlight and closed the door behind him.

The big barrel-shaped guard was coming his way, and Marcel greeted him with a slight head movement. The big man was tiresome to talk with, but at least Marcel could switch back to French and quit struggling
with English.

The bloody splint on the guard’s nose usually made him seem to be squinting angrily, but at the moment his mouth was curled into a sloppy smile of triumph. He held out a well worn, double-folded piece of letter-sized paper.

“I found it in her Land Rover.”

My Land Rover now
, Marcel thought. He’d found the record of sale in the glove compartment, with no buyer’s name filled in. The woman had picked up the vehicle just a day before she arrived in the camp, and hadn’t even filled out the forms that made it legally hers.

He took the scrap of paper from the big guard. There was nothing on it but a partial city street map, faintly printed, the kind of map generated online.

Marcel stared for a moment and said, “What is it?”

“It’s a map.”

“I can see it’s a map. Why are we interested in it?”

“It’s
a neighborhood in Prospérité. There are street names on it, and there is a red pen mark. Maybe someone there knows about her. Maybe she’ll go back there.”

“If she’s still alive,” Marcel said.

“But you told me Mr. Sanderson says he saw her on the road.”

“He said he might have. But so what?”

“So what?” The guard sounded truly taken aback. “So WHAT? Look at my nose!”

Marcel groaned. “I know, but we have a lot of things to do. If you want to go after her, I don’t care. But do it later, after everything’s taken care of.”

“Later? She may be out of the country later. She could be leaving tomorrow, for all we know.”

“It’s too bad, but breaking her neck isn’t going to fix your nose. Besides, she can’t do us any harm.”

“She can destroy everything. Wipe us out if she spreads the word.”

Marcel said, “I told you, she came to find out about the hunting. She was talking to a hunter while we talked on the phone. As soon as you drove off behind her, I asked the hunter about it, and he said they talked about animals.”

“Exactly.”

“No, not our animals,” Marcel said. “The monkeys and birds that the hunters shoot for meat.”

“How do you know she wasn’t trying to find out about our animals, just going at it roundabout?”

“Forget about her,” Marcel said. “And remember what we have to do when Mr. Sanderson wakes up.”

Marcel headed off to find the old man. He did not turn around when the guard shouted after him, “Forget about her? Look at my nose. Look at my fucking nose!”

* * *

Drowsiness crept up on Hugh. He set the plate of food aside and lay back on Marcel’s bed, feeling himself sink slowly out of consciousness. His eagerness to go back into the forest had almost completely faded. Now his surroundings began to fade, too, and the sinking turned to floating.

The CD changer rotated and some Nigerian dance pop rocked him to sleep.

Half an hour later, the CD changed again. The vocals and guitar became shrill and confrontational. The first chord sent lightning crackling through Hugh’s abdomen and hauled him straight from deepest dreaming to his feet, fully alert. It was music that had been on the radio a lot during his college years.

Something significant was taking shape here
. He’d heard someone recite a line from this song. When had it been? Not long ago. He was sure that something cataclysmically important had happened at that moment.
Welcome to the jungle….
Why did it give him this sense that some great event was imminent?

The song continued in a hammering rhythm that
conjured a vision of an endless thrumming lattice of blue-green crystal, shot through with networks of hot red capillaries. At one of several crescendos, the singer in the recording seemed to step across the trailer’s dim interior, lift Hugh overhead and hurl him out of the trailer, He crashed through the latched door, which broke and was left hanging at an angle from its upper hinge. The woman sitting outside leapt and shouted when he landed at her feet.

It was
very late in the afternoon, and because the trailer was near the edge of the forest, the sunlight came in slanting shafts that cut through the camp at a low angle. At first the shafts paralyzed him. He thought of them as the laser beams that a master jewel thief must not break as he approaches the velvet pedestal upon which the emerald-studded bauble rests.

But excitement welled up too fiercely to allow for a patient negotiation of the imagined obstacle course, and he began simply sprinting along the edge of the clearing. The cheap, rigid material of the boots cut into his feet, but he did
not care.

He turned up a wide path that had been made by skidders hauling trees to the clearing. He nearly collided with two men coming round that blind bend, but dodged them at the last minute
like a running back, moving with agility that surprised and excited him.

Seeing a machete leaning against a tree stump, he snatched it
up for no reason except that he knew it would be a thrill to grab it without breaking stride. He hurdled the next, even higher stump, feeling like a gazelle, running wildly, fluidly, guided by the pristine clarity of uncontaminated instinct. There were startled murmurs as he rocketed past a few more men.

Still running, he turned onto a much narrower path, wanting only to get deeper into the
bush. After a few more turns, there was no longer a trail. He plowed onward through uninterrupted undergrowth, descended a small slope, and presently came to a natural clearing full of saplings and waist-high grass, with only a small grove of tall trees in the center.

He had never seen the place before, but felt confident that some new understanding had brought him here. He bounded toward the center of the clearing and began to whirl around the outer edge of the grove, striking martial arts poses and wielding the machete like a Japanese long sword. After six or seven circuits, he collapsed on
to the ground. Dusk had arrived.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Wiping fog off
of the mirror in her bathroom at the Hotel d’Or, Amy beheld a face like a police photo of a beating victim. She wondered when the hell her cheeks and forehead had gotten so banged up, then remembered running into the tree right after tumbling down the hillside, just after escaping Barrel Guard’s grip. She remembered the big man roaring away above her, and almost smiled, thinking his single injury would take a lot longer to heal than her multiple ones.

At twenty-five euro a night, the Hotel d’Or was the most expensive place on Avenue 9. Amy tried to live cheap
ly wherever she went, conserving the money Andre had left her, saving it for the work that had become her whole life. She stayed in low-budget guesthouses with backpackers and managed to hide the fact that she could afford far more comfort. Besides, the conditions of Andre’s trust fund – now hers – stipulated that the money was to be paid out to her in quarterly amounts that did not allow for indulgence in unlimited luxury. She really did have to choose between extravagance and funding her work.

Avenue 9
, though very broad, was only one block long. Along with the several guest houses, there was a snack bar, a place to get some nasty instant coffee, an erratically open Internet café, a clinic, and a food market frequented by travelers and locals alike.

In and out of these establishments, crisscrossing the dusty
pavement, went young Westerners: women in silks and cottons they’d picked up elsewhere during their round-the-world trips: lime greens and intense lavenders alongside pale, blue-gray peasant dresses. Men wore blond dreadlocks, braided beards or shaved heads. Colorful woolen Rasta caps had somehow stayed at least marginally in fashion decade after decade, at least on the travelers’ circuit.

The clinic staff told her she’d gotten back to the city just in time, that her wounds were infected and her condition was mushrooming dangerously into sepsis. She’d known something was wrong. A slithery sensation
had been rushing through the muscles in her neck and shoulders for the past three hours. Her face was burning hot, and intense nausea came and went in waves.

S
he’d been ignoring the symptoms, fearing she might have contracted the mystery fever from one of the carcasses on the truck, but the clinic staff assured here that there was nothing new or mysterious about her condition. They gave her an injection and sent her away with two weeks’ supply of cephalosporin tablets. It surprised her how quickly the symptoms began to subside.

At the Internet café, the woman at the counter asked, “What happened to you?” Amy got the same question from
eight backpackers in five languages over the next half hour.

The camera
she’d carried all the way from the camp was encrusted with her blood, but the data had survived. In French and English, she typed out rough transcripts of her interview with the hunter. She sent these, along with the original audio file and her images of the carnage on the truck, to three dozen environmental watchdog groups and six dozen news outlets worldwide.

She wanted to use her real name, but resisted. If the
logging company sued for libel or slander or whatever, they could bankrupt her just on court costs. That was how these people operated. Andre had known that because it was one method that his dad’s pals at Ovation Energies had used to crush their adversaries. He had explained all of that on the night he first proposed – not proposed marriage, but the work he wanted them to do together.

Besides the court issues, there were
rumors about the company hiring thugs to intimidate activists, media – even elected officials. One of the Sanderson’s non-tropical subsidiaries operated in California, where the state government had mysteriously failed to stop its illegal logging of old-growth redwoods. A couple of state assembly members had started an official investigation of the issue, but had abruptly called it off after one assemblyman’s adolescent son got slammed off his bike by a hit-and-run driver. The kid had lived, but the assemblyman had two even younger children to think about. That had been years ago, and any connection between the child’s accident and the terminated investigation remained conjecture. But why take a chance when the stakes were so high?

And then there was that business about the big mobile lab
at the logging camp, and the armed men in biohazard suits searching for a missing American scientist. Those events had occurred not too long before Amy’s own visit to the camp, and if that coincidence came to official attention, it might be sticky to explain. All the more so these days, when anyone who regularly contributed large amounts of money to activist groups, even environmental organizations, was automatically the object of intense scrutiny by all Western governments. She might be viewed as some kind of eco-terrorist, accessory to a biological attack on on of the few U.S. logging companies operating in Africa – a ridiculous conclusion, but that didn’t mean Homeland Security wouldn’t run with it.

She sent everything under the pseudonym “Caroline Yi.”

* * *

Around ten at night she settled into a surprisingly comfortable bus seat
, closed her eyes, and immediately entered a familiar half-dream state in which she almost always encountered Andre.

The past couple of days would have been less of an ordeal
if they had gone through it together, although she would probably have taken the lead most of the time. Andre had been the more experienced one when it came to handling complex gear –Nitrox equipment for extended dives over expanses of contaminated coral, or high-tech cables and harnesses for ascending into the forest canopy. But Amy had been better at navigating without a GPS, at reading the land to guess what kind of terrain lay ahead and what sorts of things lived there.

She’d also tamed his risk-taking behavior to a functional level.
High-adrenaline sports had been his whole life until the day his snowmobile had plunged into icy water, the same afternoon she’d first met him. Amy had been monitoring gray wolf populations in the snowy vastness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, part of a project for her undergrad program in environmental science. Andre and a friend had been riding snowmobiles illegally on the same stretch of protected land. Through binoculars, she had seen them zoom down a hillside, and had cursed them as they disrupted the movements of a sizeable pack she’d been watching for days. A storm would arrive within hours, and it would be hard to find the wolves again if she lost them.