Ajax

I drop my phone to the table, tremors racing through me. I knew it would happen one day, but today...

I’ve been naïve. As the illusion falters, I regain control of myself.

I scramble from my desk to the door. On my way, I grab the rifle from the wall. The old guard dog Jojo looks up, but I’m already sprinting for the jeep. He stays. His heart wouldn’t take the strain in this baking weather.

This morning, I walked into the office with the sun massaging my back. Now, the heat is smothering, filling my head with the drone of mosquitoes. And I keep hearing my mother’s grief-cracked voice.

“Ajax is dying.”

Ajax. I stomp the accelerator. The jeep doesn’t move. I blink at the lights on the dash, trying to decipher them. In my head, there’s an eruption of swearing, but I struggle to get more than a croak from my mouth. I crank the key in the ignition again, pleading for some fortune.

The jeep stutters. I stamp my foot. Wheels spin. It lurches into motion. I repeat the coordinates Mama gave under my breath.

We rocket along, wheels bouncing over rocks. Beyond arid hills, the city looms, creeping closer by the year. I remember Bibi telling me it was only a village when she built the sanctuary. If Mama hadn’t sent me to school there, I’d have been glad to never go.

Ajax. My hands almost melt into the steering wheel. Sweat glues my shirt to my back. The city, school, whatever else I think of; it’s all distraction.

I’m not ready to see Ajax die. I’ve been around death many times. But Ajax...

I drive down the other side of the hill, but the tallest buildings of the city peer over at me.

A man from the city came to the sanctuary a month ago. He came with a big smile and big collar, like a lion, to tell us he had some buyers interested in Bibi’s land. Mama glared at him from the porch, never saying a word to acknowledge him. His big smile went away quick.

“You keep fighting your losing battle then, Njeri.”

Mama didn’t like the way he said her name. All along, people have looked at her strange for working at the sanctuary like Bibi. Children at school used to tell me Bibi was mad. As I get older though, I see why she didn’t want so many people around. The sanctuary always mattered more. The rhinos mattered more.

Not worth thinking about now. The man with the big smile probably went scuttling back to his air-conditioned cubicle, to bleat into his phone about the mad people out in the wilderness. His clients probably went hunting for another patch of land their wallets could eat up.

Ajax.

The jeep bumps over a rock, and my heart jumps to my throat as I veer to one side. Dust spumes under the two grounded wheels.

The jeep hovers like that for an eternal few seconds, then thumps down on all fours. I take a breath. It won’t help anyone if I get myself pinned under this relic. And I will always hate myself if I miss Ajax’s final moments.

He’s just an animal. But I need to be there, just like I needed to be there for Bibi. This time, I will be.

More memories rush to distract me. Bibi, already gnarled and crooked as a fever tree, and her smile as she escorted the sanctuary’s newest occupant to me. I must’ve been six or seven, frightened of everything. This would’ve been after poachers killed my father. I didn’t see it, just heard the gunshots.

Ajax was the new arrival, less than a year old, trotting at Bibi’s side. Bibi laughed when he charged. I ran, screaming for my mother, but the little rhino bowled into me before I could reach the house. I landed in the dirt, and sat up to a baby rhino nuzzling my chest.

I forgot the scrapes and the embarrassment when Ajax looked at me with his sad eyes. Ignoring my fear, I smoothed the rhino’s neck as if he were a pet dog, though Bibi had always reminded me never to see the animals as anything close to tame.

Ajax understood me. Bibi had found him lying by his mother at the edge of our land. Poachers again. Ajax had been dismissed as dead, until Bibi heard him sigh.

We’ve sheltered many rhinos at Bibi’s sanctuary. Ajax was always my favourite though. He liked to stay close to the house, so we let him, even as he grew into a behemoth and the bumps on his nose grew into sabres. We all knew he wasn’t tamed, of course, but I suppose he was close enough for us to trust him. I used to play with him as a boy, the way others played with puppies or kittens, and, as time went by, the sadness left his eyes. I’d guess it left mine too.

The jeep trundles over flatter land now. I turn to take in something other than the city, but the land is bleak and barren. I’m glad Bibi can’t see what became of her precious sanctuary.

The trees mostly stand desiccated. Black scars are left in the scrubland from the last wildfires. There are no rhinos in sight.

But the wilderness will persist. Bibi believed that. I have to. In truth, I can’t see this sanctuary lasting another twelve months.

With Ajax gone, what would be the point?

My phone buzzes against my hip. I bring the jeep to a halt, hands still shaking as I unlatch them from the steering wheel.

Mama.

Please. I can’t be too late. Ajax can’t be dead. Please, not yet.

My gut coils. There was another time I was caught by a phone call from my mother. I’d been stuck in city traffic then. I’d known I was too late before Mama told me, and, when she did, I howled at the roof of the car. I doubt anyone heard over the rumble of the city.

I should’ve been there for Bibi, at the end. At the same time, I’m glad I wasn’t. But I must face a different death now.

I find the strength to answer. “Mama?”

“Did you bring a rifle?”

The knot in my stomach tightens.

“Yes, Mama.”

“Just in case,” she says. “He’s still here, but he’s in pain." And she hangs up. That’s Mama – always to the point, just like Bibi.

I sit in the jeep, quiet except the whirring of my thoughts. I’m trying to block out the vision of Ajax’s solemn eyes finding me as I aim the rifle at him.

Will I be able to do it? I can tell myself I’m doing it to free him from his pain, but...

Tears burn again, as I wonder if he’ll be broken by his suffering. Will he see me as his old friend, or is that scrubbed away by the agony? I know how I was with my father’s death still fresh on me.

I look at the rifle leaning in the seat next to me. I’ve never fired a rifle before. More than Ajax’s judgement, I fear adding to his suffering.

It won’t come to that. It won’t.

But, if it does, I’ll help my old friend. I nursed him on bottled milk when he was a baby. I stayed in the pen with him when he was sick. I gave him his name. I will show him this final kindness.

I get the jeep rolling, this time driving with more care. There are a few bumps, but my calm remains. Breathing deep, I steel my heart.

An untouched grove of pear trees marks the coordinates my mother gave me. I spy a tear in the fence behind the trees. My breath comes quicker, my calm buckling. Ajax is old, but it isn’t age that has killed him.

No memories fog my focus now. Fury roars to life in my veins. But I extinguish it. Animals sense these things, and Ajax should be calmed by my presence, the way a dog might be calmed by its master at its side. Of course, as Bibi said, rhinos cannot be tamed.

Mama appears from the pear tree grove. She waves to me, rifle slung over her shoulder, then disappears again.

I’m close to facing Ajax’s death. Memories of us as children threaten to break my resolve. I don’t give in, keeping myself in the present, as painful as it is, as easy as it would be to retreat to the past.

Taking the rifle, I kill the engine and sit for a moment. The wild is peaceful. I enjoy the peace while I can. I don’t miss the noises of the city cluttering my ears. When Bibi died, I came home, still with exams to take. The wild is where I belong.

It’s time to see Ajax.

I climb down from the jeep, a twinge in my bad knee. My back aches from the journey. As much as I can, I forget it.

Unsteady, I take my first steps towards the grove. It isn’t as bad as some deaths we’ve had, where you hear their mountainous groans miles away. The silence is both comforting and haunting.

Something stops me. Turning, I lay the rifle down in the passenger seat again, and march through the grove.

In the clearing, I find Ajax.

It’s bad. All along, I’d harboured some hidden hope he might be saved. But, God, I almost weep.

I trace the blood on his hide to a dozen bullet wounds. It takes all my strength to fight back my fury, because Ajax deserved more time.

I have to fight it. Ajax lifts his huge head as I emerge into the clearing. Mama rests her hands on his side, her cheeks tracked by tears.

Ajax fixes sombre eyes on me.

Again, I feel like he understands. Maybe I am a naïve fool, mad with the wilderness, but that rhino is my closest and oldest friend. And he knows I’m here to say goodbye.

“Hey, Ajax,” I say, scratching at the side of his head.

Ajax groans, nuzzling me. Bloody calluses remain where poachers have hacked his horns from his face. I stroke his neck, blinking back tears.

“It’s all right, Ajax. You’ll be all right.”

His laboured breath gusts against my chest. Gently, I shift myself so he can lay his head down. His eye finds me, knowing. I’m glad I could be here, as much as I hate it.

I continue to stroke between his ears. One flutters at the flies who’ve shown up early. I brush the braver ones away.

“You’ll be all right.”

Ajax’s breath becomes fitful and jagged. Twitches go through his chest and one of his legs. His eye remains on me.

Mama is weeping. She hugs me, and I wipe at my eyes.

“I’ll miss you,” I whisper to my old friend.

Ajax’s final breath emerges as a sigh. His eye is already glassy, staring at nothing. I stay by his body for a long time, until the twitches cease and it stops being Ajax.

What’ll happen now? I don’t know. Do we stay here until poachers come for us too? Until the city rolls over us? Do we run to the city and surrender the wild?

When I was a child, I feared the wilderness. Bibi told me to be wary of buffalo and hyenas and hippos. But she was most wary of city people. Now, there’s nothing else left to be wary of. Everything else is gone.

I pat Ajax’s neck one last time, hollow and heavy with grief. In a way though, I’m relieved his suffering is done.

With a sigh, I scrape myself up from the floor. I offer Mama my arm, and we head back to our sanctuary.