Free The Devil's Horn by David L. Robbins

in the road on the Mozambican side. A bakkie had waited in the dark hills, then rolled down to meet yesterday’s poachers. A big man, Juma, got out of the passenger side, in heeled leather shoes. There’d been an odd closeness with the smallest pair of sandals. And another unexplained set of barefoot tracks had disappeared into the boulders near the crossing, back into the park.
    Neels sat cross-legged in the dirt, turned away from Opu and the bodies. He swirled his canteen, forgetting that he’d emptied it. From his backpack he ate a few bites of biltong, offering some to Opu, taking a swig from the old man’s water in return. They couldn’t leave the dead poachers overnight in the bush; animals would strip the bodies to the bone before dawn. They needed to be identified. Tomorrow morning, Neels would call in the choppers to evacuate them all, living and dead.
    He put on his hat against the creeping chill. Neels was done with the stars for tonight. The lowered brim narrowed the bush to those bits of the world that would concern him until sunup: the dim ravine where he sat, the rifle across his lap, and Opu. Neels’s shoulder and knees twinged from carrying the poacher. A throb nagged in his head, the withdrawal after so much adrenaline.
    Opu pulled a slim dagga cigarette from his shirt pocket. He waggled it at Neels to ask if this was a problem. Neels looked away. The ground flickered orange while Opu lit up. Neels smelled nothing, the smoke blew elsewhere. He spoke over his shoulder.
    “You sleep first. Three hours.”
    Minutes later, Opu rolled onto his side in the cooling dust, old hands joined under his cheek as his only pillow. Neels peered off into the silent bush, keen with his ears. Scrub and fever trees circled the open ravine in gray shapes that seemed to stare back as the poacher had done, to see if Neels could be relied on. Out in the dark flats, unseen beasts padded wide, careful paths around him, wondering if they might get at the scent of fresh death.
    Neels, the protector of Shingwedzi, spoke out the name so the land could hear it, too, and be warned of him.
    “Juma.”
    The animals kept their distance, and the brim of his hat blocked the moon. Even so, she crossed his mind. It pleased him to wave Juma at her, to feel a new passion grow.

Chapter 4
    The blasts barely shook the tunnel. One dangling lightbulb swayed while dust sifted through its glow. The safety people kept Allyn far from the detonation. Even as the mine’s owner, he couldn’t insist on being closer.
    Allyn pressed a palm to the cool wall to sense the shuddering stone better, the power of the dynamite in the rocks, the rubble and thrill. Slowly, the rumbles faded under his hand. Long ago, when he’d been the one lighting the fuses, the spots on the back of his small hand were not there. So much time had gone by, and the changes were in him, heavy like collected calendars.
    He lowered his hand from the wall. A woman beside him scribbled something competently onto a clipboard; a young engineer walked away over the loose stones of the shaft floor. Three grimy miners stood listlessly around him, assigned to answer questions should Allyn have any. All were taller than him, and the roof of the tunnel ran only centimeters from the tops of their heads. All wore the same white coveralls and hard hats branded with the illustrated head of a leopard, the logo of Allyn’s company, Ingwe. This was the Xhosa word for the big, spotted cat. The eyes of his company’s symbol were drawn wide and alert, lips parted, teeth bared, a predator’s face.
    With the blast done, the always-moving conveyor belt shivered and bounced under the first chunks of rubble. A flurry of vehicles headed off to clear the debris, modern oddities of oversized tires and short profiles designed to operate in the low-slung dimensions of a mine. All the engines were plug-in electric to avoid emissions and ignition sparks; each vehicle trailed a great black cord. The motors were