Fair Exchange

There's a new anti-poaching sheriff in town, and she's trying a radical new approach.

Griffith let out the breath it seemed he’d been holding since they’d first entered the jungle three days ago. Ahead of them, crouching on a branch high above the jungle floor, was a young male orangutan, completely oblivious to their presence. Griffith had been starting to wonder if they’d ever find a specimen. It was bad enough that some of his most reliable local contacts were either refusing to do business with him or just plain nowhere to be found, not to mention that the local natives were all treating him like... well, he couldn’t quite describe it. There had been a none-too-subtle change in their attitude toward him; a sort of smug mockery now tinged their interactions. They’d always treated him with an edge of fear, if not actual respect. Now he couldn’t walk through a village without feeling like his fly was open. Yes, this trip had definitely gotten off to a very bad start, and their utter failure to find any trace of their quarry for the last three days had set his nerves increasingly on edge. He and Smythe had just about come to blows more than once during their laborious trek through the choking vegetation, and it would take all his powers of persuasion to get Winters to ever work with them again after the way they’d both been treating him.

Still, it was going to be worth all the hassle. The buyer wanted a live adult orangutan for his private estate. Normally they would find a mother with an infant and kill her, hoping the fall from the tree wouldn’t kill the baby as well, but if the buyer was stupid enough to think he could manage a wild adult, who were they to argue? With the recent scarcity of qualified poachers in Borneo, Griffith had been able to double his price on top of the increase he claimed that capturing a grown specimen required. The government was belatedly taking the credit for the apparent success of their animal protection programs in reducing illegal trade, but Griffith personally had his doubts. He certainly hadn’t heard news from the field about any increase in arrests, and was worried that they’d decided to forgo the hassles of prosecuting poachers by simply executing them on the spot. With the growing international pressure to protect endangered species, he wouldn’t put it past them. Whatever the case, anyone who tried to get in their way on this trip was going to find his stay in the jungle extended indefinitely.

But he could stop worrying about that, at least for the moment. Motioning Smythe and Winters to take their places behind him, he crouched behind a large fallen branch. Shouldering the tranquilizer rifle, he sighted in on the stocky, red-haired figure in the branches above. Carefully he squeezed the trigger, and with a muffled crack, the dart shot through the air to embed itself in the ape’s shoulder, driving a mixture of ketamine and xylazine into his tissues. Screeching in shock and fear, the ape tried to scramble to safety. Smythe, with his usual perfect timing, sent a trio of rounds thudding into the tree above the ape’s head, trying to drive it to the ground before the drugs took hold.

But it didn’t quite work out that way. One shot struck the bottom of a branch close to the trunk, sending a shower of wood fragments into the ape’s upturned face. Shrieking in pain, it twisted desperately away, losing its grip on the branch and plummeting straight down. Twenty feet above the ground, it struck a thick limb, taking the impact squarely in the small of its back. Its feet slapped the back of its head as its body was wrenched into a backwards arc, its spine snapping with a thick crack that raised the hairs on the back of Griffith’s neck. It hung on the branch for a moment, swaying gently, before overbalancing and falling the rest of the distance to the ground.

Griffith struck the rifle butt against the ground. “F**k me ragged! How the hell could you do that, Smythe?” He stood, arm already back for the first punch, but a sudden cramp doubled him over, his head cracking against his knees. He flopped onto his side, eyes squeezed shut against the pain ravaging his body. With a sudden wrench that felt like his entire body had been turned inside-out once, then back again, the agony stopped. He eased his eyes open cautiously, at first not understanding what he saw. Stretched out before him on the ground were two long arms covered with coarse red hair �" the arms of an orangutan. He clenched his fists and tried to stand, and the ape’s arms clenched their fists as well. He flexed his fingers experimentally, watching in horror as the ape’s hand before his eyes did the same.

He rolled onto his back, and saw Smythe and Winters staring open-mouthed down at him. He tried to ask them for help, but could only grunt. Smythe shifted his grip on his rifle, and the sight of it sent sudden, overpowering fear washing through Griffith. He lurched to his feet. Scrambling desperately to escape, he quickly scaled a nearby tree, leaping from branch to branch and tree to tree until he was well away from his partners.

Finally he stopped, the fear ebbing and leaving his mind clear once more. What the hell had he been thinking? How were they going to find him now? He put a hand to his face in exasperation, only then remembering what had happened to him. He leaned back against the trunk of the tree in which he was perched, his mind reeling. What was going on? This must be a nightmare of some kind... anything but reality. Had Smythe and Watkins drugged him? Were they planning a double-cross?

The air next to him shimmered, thickened, coagulated. Suddenly a small bearded man was sitting beside him on the branch, looking for all the world as if he’d been comfortably settled there all along. He somehow seemed right at home up here, despite being dressed like a typical Florida retiree �" garish shorts, even more garish Hawaiian shirt, sunglasses, and thoroughly worn flip-flops. All he was missing was a metal detector. Griffith drew back, involuntarily grunting in alarm, as surprised at his own ape-like response as at the man’s appearance.

“Calm down, fer Weott’s sake. I’m not going to do anything to you. Well, anything else, that is,” he added with a snicker. Griffith was confused and terrified, but his brawler’s instincts were still intact. He lunged for the small man’s neck, ready to rip his head off. He knew that his new body had the strength to do just that, though part of his mind was horrified at the reflexive ease with which this knowledge came to him. His hands clutched at air, though. The man was now sitting much further down the branch, without having appeared to move at all. Griffith shook his head, shaggy red hair flying. How could he have misjudged the distance that much? The man was like a rainbow �" you approached, but never caught up.

“Now, now, monkey boy�"excuse me, ape boy�"behave yourself. I’m here purely as a courtesy to you.” He paused, looking at Griffith with an appraising eye. “Yes, you’re a fine specimen. This whole thing is working out wonderfully so far. Now, I’m sure you’re asking yourself all sorts of questions right now, right? And I imagine they all pretty much boil down to ‘What the eff?’ Allow me to explain.

“You see, I’m what you might call a manifestation of one aspect of Gaia, the Earth Mother, Mother Nature, whatever happy hippie crap you want to call it.” Griffith, as desperately as his thoughts were churning, still had the presence of mind to give the man a distinctly skeptical look. “Look, smartass, I can manifest myself as anything I want, so just put a lid on it. As I was about to say, we in and of nature are alarmed at the rate at which Earth’s myriad life forms, many of which took an incredibly long time to develop, not that we ever got any credit for it before that Darwin fellow came along, thank you very much, are being wiped out by a certain smug little biped that’s grown too damned big for its britches. Yeah, I mean you. Oh sure, I know what you’re thinking�"species have been coming and going for millions of years, so what’s the big deal? Extinction is just part of the natural order, right? Then again, knowing the intelligence of most of your lot, you may only be wondering if they’ll still let you into the bars back in town without pants. I’ll explain anyway because, confidentially, I like to gloat. So sue me.

“It’s certainly true that extinction is not a human invention. Gwmrach only knows, no matter how hard you little punks try, you’ll never match the sort of wholesale devastation the universe can dish out. I mean, Chernobyl was impressive, I’ll grant you that, but what’s a few three-legged pigs next to an asteroid impact that blocks out the sun for three years? Get back to me when you can wipe out 90% of life on Earth at a stroke and maybe we’ll talk about you being a bad-a*s species. No, it’s not the killing itself so much as the way you go about it.

“Let me try to put it in terms you might understand. Say an apartment building collapses in an earthquake. A whole lotta people of all sorts die in various nasty ways. It’s unpleasant, it’s messy, the genetic diversity of the city suffers somewhat, but hey, it’s life. S**t happens. You want to have a bunch of big buildings, you’re gonna have to put up with the odd catastrophe. It’s quite another thing, however, for someone to enter a building and go from apartment to apartment shotgunning the residents to take their pocket change. That isn’t life. And, frankly, we’re sick to death of it. So we’ve instituted a new policy. We’re starting small, sort of a test run to see how the market takes it. What it boils down to, and I’m gonna have to quote here...” He fumbled a wrinkled piece of paper out of a pocket of his shorts, sending a shower of fuzzy Lifesavers tumbling to the ground. Clearing his throat theatrically, he read aloud from the paper in a rather stilted voice, “‘Henceforth human beings (i.e. those creatures self-designated as Homo sapiens) are no longer permitted to indulge their regrettable though admittedly quite well-developed bloodlust in the recreational, i.e. non-survival related, killing of or infliction of mortal wounds upon those animal species designated as being in danger of or threatened by extinction through either direct elimination or reduction of their numbers below the point of viability of the species.’ Sorry for the florid verbiage, but what are you gonna do? The legal department are on their own flippin’ planet. The point is, from now on, any human who kills such an animal for sport or profit or laughs or whatever is going to become a replacement for it. Granted, it’s not a perfect plan. But it’s a start. Besides, you guys have the greatest expressions when you start to change!

“Finally, there’s one other thing you really should know...”

Griffith found it harder and harder to understand what the man was saying. He tried to concentrate on the words, but they kept slipping away from him. Then he found it harder just to concentrate; he kept forgetting why he was listening to these increasingly unfamiliar sounds. Finally he gave up and let the noise wash over him, hoping that the irritating little creature on the branch would go away soon.

The man cocked his head, studying the orangutan before him carefully. “Earth to Bonzo, Earth to Bonzo... you in there?” What was once Griffith was busy inspecting his toenails. “Well, I was going to explain to you that you’d have to lose your human self in order to be able to survive out here, but I guess there’s not much point now. I personally think we oughta try to leave at least a little of you in there, but the prevailing sentiment seems to be that we’re in this more to protect life than to punish humans. What are you gonna do? Tyranny of the majority. Anyway, enjoy the jungle, my hairy little friend. I hope I can rely on your erstwhile partners to spread the word about the new hunting restrictions.” The air around him shimmered, wavered, and he was gone as if he’d never been there, leaving a young orangutan to explore his new territory.

Author's Note

I really don't know how to classify this. There's some horror, some humor, some fantasy. I put it under horror because I figure that's the aspect that will be least welcome if you're expecting something else. Too bad they don't allow multiple genres. Sorry if the font size is as huge as it is in the preview window.