A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur (читать книги полные .txt) 📗

The gun talk was mostly unintelligible gibberish to her.

Her father said things like "The.300 Weatherby can move a hundred-eighty-grain bullet at thirty-two hundred feet per second; that gives you over four thousand foot-pounds of muzzle energy and stupendous hydrostatic shock."

And Sean would respond, "You Yanks are obsessed with velocity. Roy Weatherby has blown up more bullets on African game than you have eaten spaghetti, Capo. Give me high sectional density, Nosier construction, and moderate velocity..."

No normally intelligent person could keep that up hour after hour, she had told herself. Yet every night of the safari so far she had gone to bed and left the two of them at the camp fire, still at it over their cognac and cigars.

When they spoke of the animals, however, she could take more interest and even participate, usually to vent her disapproval. They talked mostly of particular individual animals, legendary old males for which Sean had pet names, which annoyed Claudia, just the way it irritated her when he called Papa "Capo," as though he were a Mafia don. One such animal he referred to as "Frederick the Great," or simply "Fred." This was the lion they were hunting now, the lion for which they had hung the buffalo carcass.

"I've seen him twice so far this season. One client even had a shot at him. Mind you, he was shaking so much with nerves that he missed him by a football field."

"Tell me about him." Riccardo leaned forward eagerly.

"Papa, he told you about him last night," Claudia reminded him sweetly.

"And the night before, and the night before that-"

"Little girls should be seen and not heard." Riccardo chuckled.

"Didn't I ever teach you anything? Tell me about Fred again."

"He's got to be well over eleven foot, and not just length. He's got a head on him like a hippo and a mane like a black haystack.

When he walks, it ripples and tosses like the wind in a msasa tree," Sean rhapsodized. "Cunning? Sly? Fred knows it all. He's been shot at at least three times that I know of. Wounded once by a Spanish hunter over in Ian Piercy's concession three seasons ago, but he recovered. He didn't get that big by being stupid."

"How are we going to get him?" Riccardo demanded.

"I think the two of you are disgusting," Claudia cut in before Sean could reply. "After seeing those glorious creatures today, those beautiful little cubs, how can you bring yourself to kill than?"

"I didn't see any cubs shot today," Riccardo remarked as he nodded to the waiter offering him another helping of tripe. "In fact, we went to a great deal of trouble and risk to ensure their survival."

"You're devoting forty-five days of your life to the sole purpose of killing lions and elephants!" Claudia shot back. "So don't get all righteous with me, Riccardo Monterro."

"I'm always fascinated by the confused thought processes of your average shrieking liberal," Sean intervened. Claudia turned on him gleefully, lusting for battle.

"There's no confusion in my mind. You're here to kill animals."

"The same way a farmer kills animals," Sean agreed. "To ensure a healthy, flourishing herd and a place for that herd to survive."

"You're not a farmer."

"Oh, yes, I am," Sean-contradicted. "The only difference is that I slaughter them on A range, not in an abattoir. But like any farmer, my chief concern is the survival of my breeding-stock."

They're not domestic animals," ClaudIa contested. "Those are beautiful wild animals."

"Beautiful? Wild? What the hell has that got to do with it? Like anything else in this modern world, the wild game of Africa has to pay its way if it's going to survive. Capo here is paying tens of thousands of dollars to hunt a lion and an elephant. He is giving those animals a monetary value far above goats and cattle, so that the newly independent government of Zimbabwe is willing to set aside concessions of millions of acres in which the game can persist. I rent one of those concessions, and I have the strongest incentive in the world for protecting it from grazers and poachers and making certain I have plenty of game to offer my hunters. No, ducky, legal safari hunting is one of the most effective arms of conservation in Africa today."

"So you're going to save the animals by shooting them with high-powered rifles?" Claudia demanded scornfully.

"High-powered rifles?" Sean laughed softly. "Another emotive liberal parrot cry. Would you prefer us to use low-powered rifles?

Wouldn't that be rather like demanding that the butcher use only blunt knives to cut throats? You are an intelligent woman; think with your head, not your heart. The individual animal is unimportant. His life-span is limited to a few short years-in the case of this lion we are hunting, probably twelve years at the very most. What is beyond price is the continued existence of the species as a whole.

Not the individual, but his entire kind. Our lion is an old male at the very end of his useful LIFE-span, during which he has protected his females and young and already added his genes to the pool of his race. He will die naturally within the next year or two. Much better that his death produce ten thousand dollars in cash which will be spent on providing a safe place for his cubs to live than having this wilderness encroached upon by swarming black humanity and its scrawny herds of goats."

"My God, listen to you." Claudia shook her head sadly.

"Swarming black humanity" are the words of a racist and a bigot.