The mother rhino’s carcass lay in the grass and the dirt, the flies starting to swarm. A fat, repulsively ugly, pinkheaded vulture had already moved in, anticipating a feast. The rhino’s de-horned body looked like an ancient ruin, the Sphynx with his missing nose, a relic of a distant age. A fading icon of a lost world, slowly decaying in the elements.
As a teenager, I’d once seen a dead horse, a bay mare. The owner of the barn had to put the horse down after she broke her leg. I remembered the dead body like a brown lump, a scar on the land swarming with flies, just lying there in the field before a dump truck came and hauled it away.
Finally, Chris approached and sat down beside me in the grass. We were the only two witnesses left on the scene—alone again. The rangers had left as sudde
