Old Hunters on the New Wild Page 9

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  “We first hunted for survival, and then we hunted for sport. After that, I’m not sure why we hunted at all. Maybe we killed for pleasure, or maybe we killed for pride. But we killed, and we never needed much of a reason to pull the trigger.

  I knew nothing about killing on my first expedition so many long decades ago. It was before chaos whirled about the globe, before I ever lifted a rifle to hunt or to war. I knew nothing, and so I was eager to answer the advertisement of that tourist package promising me the chance to play the part of a big game hunter, mesmerized as I was by those glossy, color photographs of zebra herds running across the field, of the hippopotamus lounging in the water, of the sleepy lioness soaking in the sun. Like the rest of my kind, I lived surrounded by concrete and glass, and so I was any easy mark for those peddlers who claimed they knew where to find a little of the old wild. I didn’t know then that the wild they offered was a sham.

  Great fences defined the savanna I first visited. Tall walls kept the animals on the inside and the people on the outside. I flashed the ticket of my tourist pass at the front gate, and a human guide – a guide whose face bore no mudder brand – escorted me into the savanna, taking time to pull me through all the souvenir shops selling khaki pants and sunhats, through all the stores selling the fancy rifles and frivolous camping supplies my escort told me would make my expedition so enjoyable. Those shops and all that gear taxed my finances, but I didn’t care by the time I sat in the all-terrain carriage and felt the wind whistle beyond my ears as we rolled atop the smooth, asphalt roads that took us to our hunt. I was young, and green, and so what did I know? How could I know if my hunt was only some tame reflection of killing? I didn’t know that all that money I spent for that tourist package only granted me access to a zoo.

  We rode for a few hours, and when the carriage stopped, I felt isolated in the wild. The guides taught us how to load a round into the chamber of our rifles, and they showed us the safeguards that would keep us from unintentionally shooting one another. We all took turn shooting at a wooden tiger propped atop a nearby hill, none of us questioning if an orange, striped tiger had any natural place on the savanna. Our guns chimed each time our bullets hit that practice target, and we grinned and felt proud. By the time we finished our luncheon of turkey sandwiches and fruit salad, we felt so confident we were the masters of the wild. We ate slices of raspberry cheesecake before loading back into the carriage to reach the climax our expedition. The world hadn’t yet toppled, our bowls held more than mudder stew, and we had no reason to suspect that mankind’s time had in fact grown old, or that sickness was about to push our world onto the sickbed.

  We followed our guides through a narrow path cut through the grass. We even joined with the guides in singing. But our songs were childish compared to the ones I’ve so often heard the mudders sing. Yet none of us shut our mouths long enough to wonder why the guides encouraged us to make so much noise, or to wonder why our commotion wouldn’t scare away the game.

  One of the guides lifted a hand to stop us as we climbed a gentle hill, and he suggested that we might all like to ready our cameras, so that we might have another keepsake of our great expedition, so that we might take a picture that one of the gift shops might print onto posters and coffee mugs. There was a loud shrill, and many of us flinched at the noise. Some of us were even too scared to continue forward. But our guides encouraged us, and we scaled what remained of that hill with our cameras in our hands to find a half dozen, ivory-tusked elephants waiting for our arrival. The creatures didn’t balk as we approached them. They showed no sign of feeling alarmed by the pack of men who flashed cameras into their eyes. They showed no concern at all for the rifles slung over our shoulders. Teams of guides pulled at the elephants’ chains and coerced the creatures to stand upon marks spray-painted on the ground. The guides whistled and barked, and the trained elephants slowly turned for us, so that we had a moment to admire what ancient nature once wrought.

  The elephants were incredible animals, so unlike the beasts the geneticists introduce today to repopulate the world. A far more subtle hand crafted the animals of that previous age. They lacked the extremes of color. In fact, the elephants were only a kind of gray. They had none of the oversized muscles like those of the hump tank, which I suppose is the geneticists’ animal that best compares to the elephant of old. Survival, over the span of millennia, shaped those elephants. Those animals were not made to just give pleasure. They owned a purpose for living that was more than amazing humanity’s survivors with rainbow feathers, or with glimmering, knife teeth. I’ve grown old enough to humbly accept that I will never really know what the divine source of those animals’ purpose was, but I know I will not forget how purpose made those creatures strong.

  Another guide gestured, and the teams turned their elephants for a final time. The guides then explained how a portion of the expedition’s profits funded the researchers who raced to preserve the elephants’ genetic composition, so that those animals could be saved for a better future to come, for a time after the planet healed when the climate stabilized. The guides told us they had no other option that might save the elephants’ wild from extinction, and that humanity needed to devise strange and desperate solutions to preserve the natural beasts for another future. And so we fools paid such treasure for the right to hunt one of the last, noble animals left to our world. But I know now, after so many expeditions on this savanna, that what we did that day was nothing like hunting.

  The guides pulled the elephants’ chains until the beasts shrilled another, last time. A guide gave a brief signal, and every one of us lifted our rifles and fired on the giant elephants. None of us hesitated a second before pulling our triggers. We pulled them over and over again. We didn’t stop shooting until all those elephants stopped twitching and crying, and we smiled while their blood stained the ground.

  We believed we deserved the right to take such a killing after paying for our tickets. We believed that our money would fund the efforts to archive the genetic material of all those fading creatures, so that after the last elephant, giraffe, monkey and jackal vanished, a time would surely come when we could just lift them back out of the grave. I had no reason to suspect those genetic engineers would falter. I lacked the humility to believe in such a possibility. So I returned many times. I paid over and again for my chance to shoot lions that howled within cages. I brought my ticket to shoot birds kept in domed shooting ranges. And each time I pulled the trigger, I believed I was helping to save the old wild.

  I would’ve spent all I owned to keep killing at that zoo. I returned so many times, never imagining that I would return to one day to learn the zoo held no more beasts for me to shoot. I had photographs of my past kills. I had t-shirts screen-printed with the snow foxes and polar bears I shot in captivity. I had the skin of the grizzly bear on my study’s floor, the head of the antelope overlooking my bookcase. But I would never have any more of it.

  I had thought I would hunt that game through my lifetime after those animals were one day resurrected in test tubes. But the world just kept declining. The dry seasons grew longer, until the monsoon eventually vanished. Everything withered. Even the household dog and cat vanished into oblivion, even their hunger too much to feed as humanity struggled to swallow the mudder stew. Try as they did, those geneticists could never bring those fallen animals back to us. They birthed the clones that inherited man’s labor. They birthed all the new and fantastic creatures of such brilliant feathers. They filled the new wild. But those geneticists never succeeded in bringing the old world back.

  So that’s how I played my part in the wasting of the old world.”