Spinosaurus: A Dinosaur Thriller Page 2

  “This ain’t a big driving town, man. You’re lucky we’re even on a road.”

  “Yeah, my ass feels totally blessed,” I mumbled around my cheroot as we nearly careened into another monster hole in the asphalt. “So who’s on Team Killer Croc this time?”

  “You mean killer cryptid, man.” The word sounded funny inserted into his Spanish: creepteed. “One of these days, it’s going to be not a crocodile and you are going to feel very stupid for making assumptions in the jungle.”

  I had worked with Jefry in South America ten times over the past couple of years, and every time it was a croc which went feeding on pets and children in the villages encroaching on their habitat. Every time. “Okay, who’s on Team Monster From Outer Space this time?”

  Jefry almost drove off the “road” from laughing so hard. “No one has ever proven the Yemisch not to exist,” he was able to say once he got his breath. “Pero sí, our hunters are expecting it to be a big crocodile.”

  “Yeah, they wouldn’t know a Yemisch if it bit them in the ass,” I said with a smile, but my joke apparently didn’t translate well. (In English, that gag kills.) “Anyway, how big are we talking here?”

  “That little kid who got away? He said the Yemisch stopped chasing him once it noticed a goat tethered to a post. He said it took two bites—one to rip the goat off the rope into its mouth and one to swallow. That is a big croc, Mister Russell.”

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “No.”

  I love working with Peruvians—they give and take no bullshit whatsoever and are funny as hell. So I shrugged and said, “The kid reported it as a giant sloth, too. How much are we going to rely on his eyewitness testimony?”

  “All I’m saying is the hunters are expecting probably to be hunting a Black Caiman.”

  As I mulled this over, the Range Rover got into Iquitos proper. The road was getting a little better, but not by much.

  “Those are endangered,” Jefry added, unnecessarily.

  “That’s why we’re here, amigo.” I had smoked the cheroot down to a stub, which I tossed out the window. I used the Bic to light another one. “To assist the goddamn Nautilus-machine–fit dentists and lawyers. White men more likely to get eaten by a crocodile than to bag it themselves.”

  “I do not know this ‘Nautilus machine.’ Is it for diving?”

  Now I chuckled, looking at the sinewy muscles on my companion’s bare arms. “I’m too embarrassed for my race to even explain it.”

  “So this is a joke, like the electric clothing dryer?”

  “That wasn’t a joke, Jef. That’s something in almost every North American home. It heats the air while it …” I couldn’t think of the Spanish word for tumble. “… throws your clothes around in a circle.”

  He snorted and said, “Claro, claro.” (“Of course, of course,” as in “Pull the other one.”)

  “Anyway, let’s make sure these guys have the right rifles and ammo before they go shooting at a floating tree stump, or each other.”

  “That’s why they book you, right? Lead them right to the where the crocodile is bothering people so they can shoot it and feel like big men, saving the village or some shit?”

  “Yep,” I said in English. I had an ad running in nearly every hunting and rifle magazine, always a small, text-only piece all the way in the back. It read:

  DON’T LET “THEM” TELL YOU WHAT TO HUNT

  Experienced guide available. I know what wild species are endangered: crocodiles, elephants, tigers, etc. Contact me if you need to see these animals yourself so you know exactly what animals are RARE and the government says NOT to hunt. Inquiries to Box ES-338 ℅ this publication.

  I place the ad every month in print magazines and that’s how these “tough guys” find me. The mags put their classifieds on the Internet, so the ad can be found online as well, but never with anything identifying me like putting up my own Web page would do. (Also, I hate computers.) They know the shooting and killing and such is their job—mine is only to get them near enough to pull that trigger. Of course, Jefry and I enlist these rich would-be Hemingways to rope and then immobilize the animal (big cats are, perhaps counter-intuitively, the easiest to keep still, and the good old crocodiles among the toughest and take multiple men to handle), but then it’s all them. They envision themselves as heroes, saving the encroaching human community from this animal, technically “endangered” but really, when they think about it, more of a danger itself.

  And that makes it all right, I suppose.

  ***

  The Amazon River is huge. Huge. It is wide and deep. No one knows all the creatures that live in these waters, but pretty much everyone knows it’s chock-full of things that want to eat you, infect you, or kill you in some other way. There are piranha, worms that old explorers say want to crawl up your urethra, mosquitoes that definitely want to give you malaria, there’s leprosy, all sorts of good stuff available.

  If there were such a thing as the Yemisch, it wouldn’t be any less likely than a lot of weird shit that the Amazon is actually confirmed as having. Other than the Congo in deepest, darkest Africa, the Amazon is home to more mysterious and dangerous zoological discoveries than any place on Earth.

  But the dentist, the urologist, and the Toyota dealership owner, each of whom found me through my classified ad and wired $50,000 to a front account to hunt with me, had probably never heard of a Yemisch and wouldn’t have cared even if it did exist. No, they were here to bag the enormous and deadly Black Caiman crocodile—ideally three, one for each of them—an animal that had been hunted right to the edge of extinction into the 1970s for its handbag and shoe-enhancing hide. The species had rebounded since then, only lately to fall to low numbers again because of encroachment by the explosive growth of the human population and their desire to grow, eat, and sell land-consuming crops.

  It was my job, and Jefry’s, to lead these rich fellows right to the crocs, which as always I figured to be where the supposed Yemisch attacks were reported. I brought the guns and hunting prowess, Jefry brought his unequaled knowledge of the mighty Amazon, and our three clients paid their money to have a rifle placed in their hands and be told where to shoot. (All strictly confidential, of course, because poaching an endangered species in a place like the Amazon basin, where ecotourism is sometimes the only thing supporting the economy, can get you in big, big, bigger-than-a-Yemisch trouble with the law.)

  To help protect the guilty, I will call the dentist “Dan”; the Toyota guy “Theodore”; and the urologist “Peter.” (Ha! I crack myself up.) Jefry and I met them at the Arandú Bar, a colorful tavern overlooking the river. We would soon be headed down to the Bélen District, located at the southern tip of Iquitos and one of the poorest areas of the city, where the attacks were occurring and where my clients expected to welcomed as heroes there to save the children. And the goats and such. But first things first.

  Dentist Dan was tanned so evenly he looked like a cartoon. He was in great shape—muscled arms, flat stomach, bulging quads—each muscle looking exactly as if it were exercised individually under the supervision of an expensive personal trainer. He shook my hand with the intent to crush it but was well met by my manly manliness. We didn’t technically take out a ruler to compare dicks, but it worked as a proxy fight and ended in a draw anyway.

  Toyota Ted had a hell of a belly and was puffy in the face and bloated in the neck, the way a middle-aged former high school football star gets after he’s extremely comfortable financially and the first wife who plopped out his three children is shoved aside for a younger model. His handshake revealed pudgy, smooth hands. Absolutely what you want when you’re going after an 800-pound, 13-foot-long beast that’s half teeth and the other half even more dangerous as the muscle-bound animal feels cornered and starts thrashing.

  Peter the Penis Poker was thin as a rail and looked like a “before” picture in a muscle magazine ad. He sported a lip-shadow pencil moustache and his fingers felt like spider’s legs a
s they wrapped around my hand at our greeting. I was glad when that contact was over.

  We all sat in a curved booth and the skinny native camarera brought the group some beers even though it was just 8 in the morning. I guess that’s what they expect gringos up and about just after sunrise in Iquitos would want, and it wasn’t wrong. This suited us just fine.

  “So you’re the guy who knows where the, ah …” Dan said in English but still in a low voice, looking around the empty bar before continuing, “… where the big game is?” He said “big game” like we were using codewords, not really a bad decision considering how hard Peru had come down on poachers in recent years.

  (Don’t mess with tourist money could have been the slogan of the new Peru, especially in its cities along the Amazon. To poor countries that depended on tourism, poaching was literally stealing vital national resources. But wasn’t that why one became rich in the first place? To take what you want, whether others want to give it to you or not? These muy rico “big game” hunters wanted crocodile heads as their trophies. They hired me—and I hired Jefry—to get them what they wanted.)

  “Funny you say that,” I said, leaning in to enhance that secret-men’s-club vibe, “because the village we’re going to? They’re lost dozens of animals and even small children to this monster.” So I did fib a little on the “small children” part, but guys like this trio liked to add righteousness to their technically illegal activities, making them feel like vigilantes working above cold, uncaring national laws.

  “They think it’s a Yemisch,” Jefry said in his perfect but heavily accented English. “That’s a, um … eh, how do you call amfibio—oh, yes, amphibious! It is a legendary amphibious creature that stalks the river’s edge, looking for victims.” The would-be poachers looked both entertained and a bit shocked.

  I tugged on Jefry’s shirt sleeve, trying literally to pull him back. “It’s a crocodile. Jef likes to act like he’s hunting Bigfoot when it’s really just a bear. Of course, bears are dangerous as hell, but they’re not a magical creature like Sasquatch or the Yemisch.”

  We all had a chuckle over that, Jefry included. This was part of our shtick, the credulous native guide and the more practical—and white—American hunter.

  “No, boys, I’ll bet you ten thousand dollars that what we have here is a Black Caiman, the biggest and most dangerous crocodile in the Western Hemisphere. It’ll eat any kind of animal it can crush with its jaws—adult humans as well as children included—and swallow it in two bites. There have been numerous reports of animals and children gone missing near the same time, when one Caiman would still be digesting, so I’m thinking there’s enough crocs to go around for each of you.”

  They liked that. Dan, Theodore, and Peter each grinned and practically slapped one another on the back at this news. They came from different parts of the country—Minnesota, New Jersey, and California, I believe—but seem to have bonded on their flight from Peru to the little airport in Iquitos. This was a good thing: they would likely have one another’s backs when it came down to it. Probably not—we are an “every man for himself” group of people, poachers and those who help them get to their targets—but maybe. Every little bit of camaraderie would certainly help to keep these guys from accidentally shooting one another … or Jefry and me.

  “All right, gentlemen,” I said with a now-serious mien, “tell me what you know about hunting something that weighs more than the three of you put together. Something that wants to kill you. Something that could get you twenty years in Peruvian prison if you’re caught.

  “I ask this because we can’t screw this up. There are people in this village, and while they’ll be thrilled to have the man-eater gone, stories can start spreading. We will need to hunt, kill and dress each Caiman in the light of day, then smuggle each one into the vehicle and down to the airport. Once you’re in the air, you’re golden. The U.S. doesn’t give a shit what trophies you bring home—some airlines do, but you were warned against flying on those.

  “So what do you know? Help Jef and me help you get these monsters.” I looked at Dentist Dan to start.

  “You gotta shoot them in the head,” he said with rock-hard confidence. “Go for the brain. It’s tiny, but a body shot isn’t gonna do shit except make it mad or make it jump in the water and swim away.”

  “Can’t we just have a boat on hand to chase it?” Peter offered in a reedy voice probably developed by trying to talk with his mouth mostly shut while examining man-parts all up close in his face. “I mean, you follow a lion if you’ve got an arrow in him, right? Eventually he gets tired and you take him down with another arrow or a bullet to the head.”

  “Have you done that shit? That’s wild,” Ted said to Peter, who looked even smaller and mealier under the fat man’s gaze.

  “Yes. Kind of.”

  “Kind of? What’s ‘kind of’?”

  Peter cleared his throat weakly and said, “Well, I did wound it and track it, and then I did put it down when it tired from the chase, but it was actually an, um … a cassowary.”

  “A what, now?”

  “It’s like an emu,” Peter said with his eyes fixed down on the table, “only smaller. I had to go to Australia to bag one of them once the guide showed me where the habitat was.”

  Ted outright laughed and Dan smiled, looking like he was trying with all his might to suppress it. Jefry looked confused. So it was up to me to rescue the Great Hunter from himself: “Cassowaries are fast sons of bitches, guys—they can run at 30 miles an hour. And if they kick you—”

  “They can disembowel a man with the claws on their feet,” Peter answered. “They’re considered the most dangerous bird in the world.”

  I wanted to say something like “Pelican supporters may find that insulting,” but kept my jocularity to myself. Instead I said, “The main point we should take from Peter here, I think, is that hunting a cassowary is beyond illegal in Australia. So he has experience in taking some rare game down, smuggling it past customs, and mounting it for his man cave.” I smiled and nodded at Peter, who looked even paler now.

  “I, um, didn’t actually kill it,” he said. “I did shoot at it! But it ran away. It would have been a definite kill if I had hit it, though.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to make it sound like an affirmation instead of an awkward interjection. I failed.

  The table was as quiet as a deer blind. Thank god for cute waitresses.

  “¿Más cervezas?” she asked with a cute dimple in her smile.

  We shouted “¡Sí!” as one, making her almost jump in surprise. That made her laugh, which made all of us laugh, including Peter.

  I literally sighed a breath of relief and said with a renewed smile, “How about you, Doctor Dan? Do you have some helpful experience we should know about?”

  Dan leaned back against the vinyl booth with a dentist’s grin, all perfectly straight teeth that were whiter than the population of Vermont. He looked at each of his with that smile, bronzed skin crinkling around his eyes, then took a quick look around to make sure no one was near enough to overhear, before he spoke.

  “I don’t know if it’s helpful, but I’ve brought down ‘protected’ animals on three—no, four—continents,” he said, actually making air quotes when he said “protected.”

  The other two men looked suitably awed. Jefry and I looked at each other, I think each to use the other as a mirror and make sure we each looked as equally (and falsely) impressed as the other. “That’s a hell of a résumé,” I said at last.

  The crinkles deepened as Dan’s blinding grin grew even wider. He counted off the continents on his fingers as he continued: “North America. I went down to the Everglades with an Indian guide, maybe a Seminole who didn’t get in on the casino gravy train or whatever, but before I found a Florida Panther, there were about a hundred estimated to live in the wild. After I saw it, there were ninety-freakin’-nine.”

  This guy was audacious. Everybody, myself included, was loving it. The wait
ress dropped off our fresh beers and gave me a wink. Oh, I felt manly as hell right then, let me tell you.

  He continued: “Then you got Asia, goddamned China, right? You know what they do to hunters who bag one of their precious pandas? They get the death penalty. But that didn’t stop me—why would it? A man’s got to hunt if he’s going to eat that day. I mean, I had high-calorie protein bars and stuff, but that’s the reason behind allowing a man to hunt: he needs that animal for meat, warmth, and so on. I could only take the head with me—hard to smuggle out a 250-pound carcass, even on a private charter flight—but that’s the solid reason we all hunt. You guys get me.

  “Anyway, I got the right grease onto the right palms and there I was, staring at one of these majestic black-and-white creatures munching on some bamboo and pow!” Dan mimed shooting a rifle as he said this, then added with a laugh, “I have to keep that trophy in my study at home, goddamn yakuza or whatever would come looking for me if I had it on display.

  “Africa, nailed an elephant—got the tusks in my living room—and then in Australia? You’ll love this. In Australia, I bagged a protected rhino that they had relocated from South Africa to save it!” He banged the table as he roared with laughter at that, the others joining in.

  Jefry and I exchanged a covert glance and I made a mental note to give Dan the most powerful, special rifle, since he lived up to the Internet research we had done on him: he was frickin’ serious about his hunting, and had developed his skills like a master.