The Extinction Club Read online

  THE EXTINCTION CLUB

  A TALE OF DEER, LOST BOOKS, AND A

  RATHER FINE CANARY YELLOW SWEATER

  Robert Twigger

  for samia

  Table of Contents

  MAJOR

  TRUTH

  TRUTH II

  THE PHONE CALL

  MY STORY

  EMPEROR

  LIBRARY

  ISBN ENVY

  £D

  BUSINESS

  DIRT

  FORGETTING MILU

  BLUE PETER

  TOM

  CHINESE MIRROR

  SELLING YOURSELF

  SOLD

  KLAUDIA

  BLAG

  BLOCKAGES

  EGYPT

  BASQUE COUNTRY

  ESPIRITU SANTO

  BIRTHPLACE

  KILLING AND EATING

  FLOWERING

  CLOCKS

  RELATIVES

  MILU

  DARWIN

  EGYPT II

  MAJOR II

  SURVIVAL

  SURVIVOR

  SURVIVALIST

  DETERMINATION

  EXTINCTION

  CLUBLAND

  PSEUDONYM

  HAIR

  FREAKS

  SNAIL

  EGYPT III

  FAMOUS PHOTOS

  BREAKTHROUGH

  DIARY

  PULPED

  BOOK DEATH

  EGYPT IV

  HANLIN

  READING ROOM

  BOOK DEATH II

  KEY TEXTS

  X MARKS THE SPOT

  RESUSCITATION

  CABINET

  COMPETITION

  END

  UPRISING

  KUNG FU

  FIRE, PAPER, WATER

  SIEGE

  HANLIN II

  AMERICAN WIVES

  TRUCE

  TIMING

  EXTINCTÓK, EXTINCTEE

  DEEP TIME

  DIARIES

  BACKHOUSE

  DECADENCE

  FARM PLAN

  PUB

  EGYPT V

  ENCYCLOPEDIC

  LOOT

  BOOKS OK ANIMALS?

  EGYPT VI

  FARM PLAN

  UNICORN

  CALF DEATH

  SUNRISE

  HOTEL

  DUKE

  CANOE

  RUSSELL, EARLIER

  EDEN

  CHERNOBYL

  EDEN II

  MISTAKE

  HISTORY

  WORLD WAR 1

  FARM SAVE

  EGYPT VII

  I’M IN THE DARK

  CON AIR

  EXPERTS

  CULLS

  DRESSING DOWN

  PAD

  CONSCIENCE

  CHINA

  REASONS

  TURNED DOWN

  EDEN’S PRICE

  EXTINCTION II

  YELLOW JUMPER

  EXTINCTION III

  DIVINATION

  REASONS II

  HAPPY ENDING

  SPARROWS

  EZBEKIYA GARDENS

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  ALSO BY ROBERT TWICCER

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  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

  MAJOR

  JOHN MAJOR Ill’s 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 didn’t 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. That’s 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 didn’t mind telling me that it was costing him five thousand dollars to shoot a young buck he wouldn’t 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. “They’re here for the rack, don’t 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 Major’s 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? That’s neither pleasure nor displeasure,” he said. “It’s 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 don’t 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 an
d 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 while—I’d been caught out before by a .308 cartridge in a confined space and it had been deafening. I looked out at the deer—tail, thick neck, two points of antlers—certainly it did not seem to sense death. Then I looked at the trigger finger, seeing if I could see it move. John Major’s wheezing was the loudest thing in the car until BANG.

  BANG. There is no gun, no guide, no “me,” certainly not one that’s been to Texas to shoot exotic deer. Sorry, Klaudia, I know I told you I’d been there and done that, but it just wasn’t true. There’s no John Major III—though I was beginning to like him. There’s no Chrysler 4 WD (do they make such a vehicle?), and there is no deer, emphatically no dead deer. It’s 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 couldn’t 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. That’s why I had to give up. Fuck it. I’ve got to tell the truth. There’s 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 I’m 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 people’s 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 dishes—huge 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 couldn’t do it in England. My son, who is only five months old, just wouldn’t 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.

  In Cairo, surrounded by dust, noise, and pollution, I can relax. And get this book done.

  TRUTH

  AZOIC ROCK, crumbling, cracked, and expanded by rare earth in exposed strata, the earth powdery and blowing up now and all morning into the faces of the Han poor, thin-chested old Chinamen conscripted to dig holes for the foreign man whose khaki shirt stretched over his important belly. Herbert Boileau. Boileau—self-styled professor, sometime photographer for National Geographic, a veteran of the Lafayette Brigade of the Great War (as he always referred to it), an American who affected Britishness in order to impress. If this did not sufficiently engage, he would inspissate his talk with Latin and the odd dialect word of Wei Chinese, allowing the strange, elongated sounds to hang in the air like a challenge.

  Boileau roughly tolerated his competitors in the field of Chinese paleontology, Father Teilhard de Chardin and Arthur Sower-by of Shanghai. Boileau spent more time in the field than either, had neither de Chardin’s penchant for mysticism nor Sowerby’s preference for dull fact over extravagant theory. That he was a liar had not, so far, impeded his rapid progress, now set on Sinitic archaeology after failed ventures in pharmacology and railwayline surveying. If questioned about exactly which professorial chair he held, Emeritus was uttered with sufficient force to stop casual prying. That he had faked no discovery pleased him: Chinese earth was rich enough to provide without recourse to Hong’s antiquaries shop in Peking. His reports were a different matter. Here Boileau knew that a good story should prevail. He admired Schliemann over Pitt-Rivers for the German millionaire’s appreciation of narrative. If there was a Troy to uncover in the Ch’ien T’ang estuaries of the south, Herbert Boileau would be the man to do it.

  The day was cold, with a constant dry wind picking up earth from the diggings, whipping dust from the huge man-high wheelbarrows pushed and maneuvered by sunburned Chinese paid by the tightfisted Boileau in clipped silver taels and opium, men who would tolerate breathing the micaladen rare earth that made every man’s hair bright orange by the day’s end. Boileau’s only rule was not to reemploy men who turned up with earth on their faces the following day. Men so careless of their own appearance might break something valuable.

  Toiling in the pits were the younger men, paid more, with a tobacco allowance as well as opium and silver. Paid more, but not resented by the older wrecked shells of men working the heavy barrows.

  The men were younger, but few of them were whole. Many lacked several fingers on each hand. Those using the light brushes were all one-handed persistent thieves who had escaped south from the Muslim territories of Kansu. Boileau knew they were thieves, but thieves have sharp eyes—and at the day’s end they were all made to file unclothed through an outhouse of upright logs and flapping muddy canvas.

  Boileau needed every man he could get because of the curse attendant upon the great square holes he insisted on digging. The site was not propitious—a rammed-earth plateau bounded by stunted ginkgo trees, a Shang-dynasty burial site still avoided as a place of the dead. It lay on a bluff over a fork in the river, the bones washed up on the foreshore taken by most locals to mean that the whole area was a reliquary, a place of ghosts and the white birds that always accompany ghosts.

  Earth spumed off a perfect cone of tipped dirt. Boileau was reminded of one season in Japan and seeing the snow fly off the tip of Mount Fuji, but white, not dark orange. Each night, in the run-down shuttered lodgings of the headman, Boileau called for a lacquered basin of water, cold as they could make it, to sluice out the orange dirt from his nostrils. Half the time he’d wear a yellow silk triangle over his face, but it was always dropping and had to be removed when he needed a pipe. And even his pipe stem tasted of earth.

  It was 4:30 P.M., the half just struck on Boileau’s hunter, a timepiece cased in gunmetal that rang each quarter hour and nestled under his rubberized-cloth ulster in one voluminous pocket. The hunter had been through his year of the Great War, the chiming deactivated by a watchmaker in Charlesroi, and after the war was made to ring more loudly, announcing the presence of Boileau, no longer under orders, a free man at last.

  The half hour had rung and Boileau was already feeling under his ulster for the briar, prefilled with a mixture of imported lata-kia and local tobacco. A huge sieve, secured by three ropes to a rough wooden davit, trailed earth as it was lifted. As it went up in two jerky moves the men below cheered, in the curiously musical yet muted fashion they favored, men whistling for the wind through broken teeth.

  In the sieve were the dirt-encrusted flat parts of two deer’s antlers. Flat blades with a knuckle pattern at one end. Boileau had seen grave-site anders before; indeed it was he who had first suggested they were Elaphurus davidianus, Pere Davids deer, rather than the spurious Rucervus menziesanus claimed by the Reverend James Menzies.

  The three-fingered man who swung the davit was pointing repeatedly, stabbing his first finger, the middle one, again and again at the sieve. The pipe could wait. Boileau trod carefully around the duckboarded top of the ten-foot-deep hole. He brushed the man away as he tried to hand over the flat ander piece. Boileau picked it out himself, seeing at once the deep engravings that covered the thing—not Chinese characters but pictograms recognizably from the Shang dynasty; he’d seen them on
mortuary bronzes and deer scapulae excavated in Tsi-nan Fu, Shantung province. The scapulae, always from Pere David’s deer, were used as writing tablets for the so-far-indecipherable pictographic Shang script.

  To scry the future was another use for the deer bones and antler blades. Turtle plastrons were also used. The bone was drilled into and then a red-hot piece of metal was briefly inserted. The resulting T-shaped stress crack was interpreted as lucky or unlucky. Some of these divinatory objects were also inscribed with pictograms.

  Boileau deliberately slowed his actions, sensing the victory that was soon to be his, as he blew the fine integumental earth from the second antler. Pictograms and, underneath them, recognizable early Chinese characters. A bilingual document, not quite a Rosetta stone but still the first of its kind in China. At last he could translate from the prehistoric past.

  All this earth, and the Chinamen around grinning fit to burst, knowing that this was good for them too. Boileau holding up the antlers to the weak distant coin of the sun, hidden behind haze. Now he had something. Now he really had something.

  He looked around his crew of grinning misfits. One old man in mud-caked sandals was laughing, his whole locked frame rocking forward and backward. Boileau saw the arcus senilis, canescent eyes, a narrow band of white that ringed the old man’s irises, long thought to be a portent.

  Months later, the first translated antler of Elaphurus davidianus told of a ten-day week, of dreams and sacrifices and the fortunes of the hunt. There was no similarity between most pictograms—which looked like runes or a game of hangman—and the angular early Ku-Wen script. One ideograph, though, had hardly changed from its pictorial origin: the symbol for man and the symbol for word, which when combined read then and still read now as true, sincere, truth.

  TRUTH II

  IREMEMBER THE experience very clearly, even though it was several years ago. I was attempting to write a book in a cramped flat in London, and every sentence I typed seemed to be mired in bullshit, hitting all the wrong notes, useless. I looked out of the window despairingly and saw a sparrow perched on a tree branch, the wind ruffling his gray belly feathers making him look fatter than he really was. The sparrow is a rare creature now—it has suffered an incredible 92 percent decline in the last ten years. Kensington Gardens was home to 2,603 sparrows in 1925, 544 in 1975, but only 48 in 1995. And in the last five years that number has dropped to 12.