Woburn Abbey - The extinction club: a tale of deer, lost books, and a rather fine canary yellow sweater

T HE E XTINCTION C LUB

A T ALE OF D EER , L OST B OOKS, AND A
R ATHER F INE C ANARY Y ELLOW S WEATER

Robert Twigger

for samia

To claim that it is true is nowadays the convention of every made-up story. Mine, however, is true

JORGE LUIS BORGES, The Book of Sand

It is easier to gain than to secure the advantages of victory.

CHINESE PROVERB

J OHN MAJOR Ills 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 didnt 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. Thats 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 didnt mind telling me that it was costing him five thousand dollars to shoot a young buck he wouldnt 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 clump 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 and yellow-tinted dark glasses, had told me earlier that some shooters preferred the car shot to a more realistic sneaking-up shot. Theyre here for the rack, dont 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 Majors 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? Thats neither pleasure nor displeasure, he said. Its 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 clump 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 7 50s, 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 handloaded cartridges and fed them into the breech using the bolt to suck them in. He always handloaded his ammo because at five grand a pop I dont 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 whileId been caught out before by a .308 cartridge in a confined space and it had been deafening. I looked out at the deertail, thick neck, two points of antlerscertainly it did not seem to sense death. Then I looked at the trigger finger, seeing if I could see it move. John Majors wheezing was the loudest thing in the car until BANG.

BANG. There is no gun, no guide, no me, certainly not one thats been to Texas to shoot exotic deer. Sorry, Klaudia, I know I told you Id been there and done that, but it just wasnt true. Theres no John Major IIIthough I was beginning to like him. Theres no Chrysler 4 WD (do they make such a vehicle?), and there is no deer, emphatically no dead deer. Its 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 couldnt I keep going? Why stop after three pages?

All I can say is that this story is better true than made up. I realize that now. And knowing this has had an effect. Destroyed my morale. Thats why I had to give up. Fuck it. Ive got to tell the truth. Theres nothing else for it, nothing else I can do, not now, not after making a false start of my false start. The truth.

In reality Im sitting on the seventh-floor rooftop garden of my in-laws in Egypt. The garden is dusty, with a pruned kind of Astroturf underfoot, like the ponds of green furze used to signify grass on a model train set. The view is dusty and distant, as far as the sandstone cliffs at the edge of the city where the rubbish of twenty million people gets picked over and burned. Before the cliffs there are shell-like mini tower blocks, gray concrete apartment blocks, and big villas with rubble on their roofs. All over Cairo, whatever direction you look in, you will see piles of rubble on peoples roofs. Some of the rubble is obviously from the house concerned, but some seems strangely out of place, as if the owner has dumped the rubble there just to fit in.

And of course the satellite disheshuge ones for the rich, medium-sized ones for the middle classes, and tiny little dusty hubcaps stuck everywhere for the teeming poor, bristling everywhere, all patinated with the same dust as the rubble, all of a piece and looking somehow ancient, under the hot dust haze of the day.

I am in Cairo to write this book. My excuse is that I just couldnt do it in England. My son, who is only five months old, just wouldnt let me. In Cairo there are many people who want to look after him, so my wife and I came here to escape the torture of being two isolated adults with a baby in a small house, without even a job to escape to