Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Major
John Major III's disabled foot flopped this way and that as he got into the front seat of the Chrysler four-wheel drive vehicle. I had to admit that for a millionaire he was careless of his appearance. His shoes were cheap slip-ons. To get around he used a hospital-issue green canvas wheelchair. When I remarked on his name, as every Englishman must, he didn't show much more reaction than a wheezy grin as he reached for another Kent menthol cigarette. Inexplicably, he had ripped the filters off some, as if he was smoking Kents under sufferance. He was ill, but he was rich, and being rich is most important if you want to be a Big Game Hunter.
All of us were now in the Chrysler, heading out to the Kill Zone. That's what I called it to myself. The others, Tom the guide and John Major III, called it "the stalk."
We were driving fast down a dusty road in Texas in the cold December dawn to kill a deer. But this was no ordinary deer. John Major III didn't mind telling me that it was costing him five thousand dollars to shoot a young buck he wouldn't normally look twice at. The deer we were after was a Pere David, an animal so rare, or endangered if you prefer, that it is extinct in the wild, and has been for the last one thousand years. The Chinese call it Milu.
The plan was to drive slowly up to a dump of trees near to the place where the Pere Davids gathered in the early morning. John Major would then take his shot from his seated position in the front of the Chrysler, his gun poking through the open window and resting on the outsize wing mirror.
Tom the guide, who wore Realtree Advantage camo gear andyellow-tinted dark glasses, had told me earlier that some shooters preferred the car shot to a more realistic sneaking-up shot. "They're here for the rack, don't matter how they get it," opined Tom. The rack was the head of antlers on the deer.
Tom also took people lion-hunting on the Texas ranch. "Got to keep the deer away from the lions, though," he said with a smile. He told me how the lions spent most of their time in a small compound before being shot in a slightly larger compound.
The advantage of shooting Pere Davids was that there was no "natural" precedent to influence the "romance" of the kill. Every Pere David killed since guns were invented has been shot in a game park of some sort.
John Major's gun was a new acquisition, a .308 B.S. Johnson Special with a new-fangled plastic stock, fold-up bipod, and "several other interesting features." He told me that he had many guns, and believed gun-collecting was almost as great a pleasure as acquiring trophy heads.
"But what about the actual killing?" I asked.
"The moment of death? That's neither pleasure nor displeasure," he said. "It's going to sound strange, I guess, but I think of it as a lovin' duty."
Tom eased off the dirt road and onto the worn-down grass of the range. The trees we were heading for were actually a clump of high bushes with straight, bare branches. Tom put the vehicle into the lowest gear and we trickled over the range with a bumpy rumble.
John Major III looked keenly out of the window at the standing and grazing forms just beyond the dump of bushes. There were five or six, all males, not one older than two years. "Spikers," as Tom called them, their antlers just single prongs, with no branching spikes or "points."
"That one," said Tom after looking through his glasses. Zeiss 7X50s, just like the ones used by the hero in For Whom the Bell Tolls. John Major III had Zeisses too, but a more compact version, newer. Tom took a lot of care in showing which deer John Major was to shoot. It was slightly away from the herd, head down and grazing. It seemed to me to have a large patch of mange on its side, but I thought it prudent to keep my voice down as I was, after all, only a limey, and an unarmed one at that.
John Major III took several hand-loaded cartridges and fed them into the breech using the bolt to suck them in. He always hand-loaded his ammo because "at five grand a pop I don't want factory ammo going off wild."
The vehicle was silent now, engine off, parked in half shade behind the tall bushes. The breeze was cool when John Major wound the window right down. The gun barrel sneaked onto the wing mirror strut. John Major put his fat cheek to the stock and squinted down the telescopic sights, his trigger finger already curled into position. At the last minute he pushed his ear protectors down into position. Tom did too. Mine had been down for a while -- I'd been caught out before by a .308 cartridge in a confined space and it had been deafening. I looked out at the deerlong tail, thick neck, two points of antlers -- certainly it did not seem to sense death. Then I looked at the trigger finger, seeing if I could see it move. John Major's wheezing was the loudest thing in the car until BANG.
BANG. There is no gun, no guide, no "me," certainly not one that's been to Texas to shoot exotic deer. Sorry, Klaudia, I know I told you I'd been there and done that, but it just wasn't true. There's no John Major III -- thougb I was beginning to like him. There's no Chrysler 4 WD (do they make such a vehicle?), and there is no deer, emphatically no dead deer. It's all made up. Lies. Farrago of. Tissue of. Lies. Damned lies. Not Not Not true, Never was.
Now comes the tricky part. Why? Why do it? Why lie?
More to the point, why couldn't I keep going? Why stop after three pages?
The Extinction Club. Copyright © by Robert Twigger. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.