“What problem? Are you talking about the law?” Caldreaux demanded. “That’s preposterous! This is none of their business!”
“After all, it’s not illegal to shoot a mammoth, is it?” Fogarty said. “I mean, how could it be? They don’t exist.”
“Except that now they do,” Kingman reminded in a voice that could only be described as reverent.
“The law is not our problem, gentlemen; or, at least, not for the moment,” Hateley said. “As Sam correctly pointed out, it is not against the law to kill mammoths. Our problem is more of an emotional issue.”
Hateley thumbed the remote once more, and this time the two images of the elephant and mammoth appeared to have been merged into one; except that one of the animals was suddenly much bigger than the other.
“Oh my God, it’s a baby,” Kingman said in a hushed voice.
The three men sat mute in the darkened room as the magnitude of the problem struck home with a finality that tore at their hearts.
“I — can’t shoot a baby mammoth,” Fogarty finally said in a choked voice. “Jesus, I mean, if anyone ever found out — ”
“At this stage of my life, as you all know, I don’t have many scruples left; perhaps none at all,” Caldreaux said in a voice filled with anguish. “But I can tell you one thing that’s as certain as the passage of time: I am not going to sit down to dinner and stare at that little creature’s head on my wall; or on any of your walls either, for that matter.”
“Then we just have to wait, until they get older,” Kingman offered hesitantly.
“But, what if someone else — ?” Fogarty couldn’t finish the unthinkable question.
“They do belong to you, Michael; that is what you said, isn’t it?” Caldreaux demanded, turning his head sharply to stare at Hateley.
“I said I have access to them; but I don’t own them,” Hateley replied evenly. “They will have to be purchased.”
“Then we have to buy them now, immediately,” Kingman said, “at whatever the cost, before someone outbids us.”
“Or we could just steal them, if the price turns out to be unacceptable,” Fogarty pointed out.
“Either way, I don’t care; just as long as one of them ends up being mine,” Caldreaux said emphatically.
The solemn nodding of all three heads around his table told Hateley what he had desperately wanted to hear from the members of his club. It meant the plan was now thinkable, and perhaps even doable.
“Gentlemen,” he said after pausing a few moments for effect, “now that I have your full attention to the crucial matter at hand, I would like to introduce a fifth guest to our table this evening.”
“What?!” Caldreaux’s eyes bulged wide as he quickly looked around the darkened room. “You invited a stranger to our dinner?”
“Have you lost your mind?” Fogarty demanded as he and Kingman started up out of their chairs.
“Gentlemen, please stay seated,” Hateley said in a soothing voice. “And no, I have not lost my mind on this momentous evening, because the man I’m about to introduce is not a stranger to anyone in this room; or to the covert nature of our amusements.”
Hateley waited until all three of his guests had regained their chairs and at least some degree of their composure before thumbing the remote one last time.
In the far corner of the underground room, a single overhead light came on, revealing the figure of a man they all knew all too well.
“Gentlemen,” Marcus Wallis said, “thank you very much for inviting me to your annual dinner. The meal — which I had the honor of sharing with the chef, and as you’ve already noted — was superb. However, I came here tonight for more important reasons than food. First, to apologize for the unfortunate incident in Thailand; and, secondly, to offer a solution to what I see as a simple moral dilemma.”
Wallis paused for a moment, his cold eyes surveying the darkened room and the three men at the table, two of whom aappeared frozen in place.
“Every hunter has his limitations; shots they cannot or will not take. You four men seem to have discovered yours, and understandably so. But I would suggest to you that your revulsion to the idea of shooting an immature animal — especially one newly risen from extinction — and putting that creature’s head on your wall, is a perfectly rational response. I’m certain it’s not the act of shooting or killing that repels any of you; but, rather, the lack of a challenge.
“In essence,” Wallis concluded, “you would never be able to look up at these mounts with any sense of pride or accomplishment; therefore, they would never be a true trophy in any of your eyes.”
Wallis paused again to survey the frozen expressions of his audience, and smiled.
“Unless,” he said, as he reached down to the floor and picked up a pair of objects,” you chose to do something, as a group, that hasn’t been done for twenty thousand years.”
He held up a flint-tipped wooden spear in one hand, and a hide-wrapped flint knife in the other.
“Hunt down your mammoths and kill them the old-fashioned way.”
CHAPTER 30
At the Khlong Preserve shooting site
The night rain in Khlong Saeng Wildlife Preserve had turned into a light mist, causing the resident Hornbills, Bamboo Rats, tree frogs and insects to shift slightly out of their protective niches; because interesting things were happening in their wetlands neighborhood.
All of these diverse creatures were aware, in their own ways, of the single human figure stretched out on the top a crudely-reconstructed bamboo hunting platform standing six feet and a half feet above the lush undergrowth, and the other human’s standing beside the platform; but none of them seemed to view this latest intrusion as threatening. Very possibly because Chief Narusan — who was quietly contemplating the logical actions of a midnight poacher from the top of the platform he’d carefully reconstructed from the chopped bamboo lengths collected from the hidden grave site — was clearly at home in this lush Thai rainforest.
That and possibly the fact that the Chief, who had hunted and fished for his dinner all of his adult life, had no intention of killing anything other than a fellow human on this particular night; and only then if it became absolutely necessary.
Tonight, the Chief was fully engaged and focused on the complexities of his latest professional interest: the reconstruction of events at a crime scene. The confrontation and killing would come later; after all of the clues and evidence items had fallen into place.
And, in fact, it had been Narusan, the amateur naturalist, who thought he recognized the four larger-diameter sections of bamboo he’d found at the grave site — the ones that turned out to be platform legs when he finally managed to reassemble the pieces — as being an almost extinct south Asian variety replanted at the Khlong Saeng Wildlife Preserve, with some ceremony, a few years earlier.
Captain Achara Kulawnit had then used her law enforcement authority to awaken and demand the immediate services of the Preserve’s senior horticulturalist, who — when he arrived at the Preserve headquarters, groggy and disheveled — took one horrified look at the sharpened and pounded seven-foot bamboo sections, and then immediately drove the investigative team to the specific area in the Preserve where the ceremonial planting had taken place.
Ten minutes after the enraged horticulturalist pointed his flashlight beam at the shattered-stump areas when the components of the platform had clearly been taken, Achara Kulawnit — searching through a nearby section of recently trampled tall grass with a long snake stick — found the four barely-discernable holes where the platform legs had been pounded into the ground.
But it was Narusan, on his hands and knees while in the process of putting the thick bamboo legs into their original hole positions, who discovered the single expended brass casing nestled under a clump of trampled grass.
The casing — now rattling around on the end of a small twig — was being examined carefully by Achara while
