Big Game (20 page)

“I'm fine,” she said, then cased the gym. “Thank God this game is finally over. Let's get Violet and get the heck out of here.”

“My aunt and uncle aren't
jerks,” Violet said.

She was sitting with Summer and me in the back of the McCrackens' SUV as we headed out to the ranch. I was in the middle, between the girls, while Hondo was up in the front seat with Tran. Violet had changed from her cheerleading uniform into jeans and a sweater. She was obviously thrilled to be in the car with Summer, though she seemed a bit nervous about it too.

It was strange to see Violet acting self-conscious. Until Summer had transferred to our school, Violet had been the queen there, the girl everyone wanted to be friends with. But despite Summer's complaints earlier, she was still rich and famous, and now everyone wanted to be friends with
her
. Including Violet.

“Why would we think they're jerks?” Summer asked.

“A lot of the time people just assume they are—without even meeting them,” Violet replied. “Especially people who don't like hunting. They hear what my aunt and uncle do and figure they must be horrible people. But they're not. They're really nice.”

“Sure,” I said, although the truth was, I
had
assumed Violet's relatives were jerks. I couldn't imagine how anyone nice could possibly run an exotic game ranch for a living. But now I felt like a bit of a jerk myself for making big assumptions.

Now that she'd cleared the air, Violet seemed relieved and gave us all the background on the ranch. We didn't even have to question her about it; Violet could talk a mile a minute when she got excited about something. Her family had been raising cattle in the Texas Hill Country since before the Civil War, but that wasn't as profitable as it used to be. So when her uncle saw that lots of other ranches in Texas were converting from traditional ranching to raising exotic species for hunting, he'd decided to do it too. They still had cattle, but now much of the property was given over to exotics. Violet thought they had at least twenty different species there and more than a thousand different animals. “It's not quite as many animals as your dad has,” she told Summer. “But we're getting there! In fact, my family even sold him some antelope for SafariLand.”

“I didn't know that,” Summer said. “That's really cool.”

Violet beamed at the praise.

It had never occurred to me to ask where J.J. McCracken had gotten all his animals. I'd simply assumed they had mostly come from zoos. But now I realized that was probably wrong. After all, J.J. had acquired thousands of animals in a very short time, which was a lot for zoos to provide. J.J. wouldn't have been able to capture that many endangered species in the wild, either. It made much more sense that he'd bought them from exotic animal breeders. Which meant Violet's claim that these places could help with conservation wasn't a bunch of hot air.

We arrived at the entrance to the ranch. It wasn't very dramatic, merely an iron gate set between two stone pillars along a two-lane back road. It looked like a hundred other ranch entrances we'd passed on the way. The fence along the road was only barbed wire strung between ancient wooden posts.

“This is it?” I asked. “There's no sign or anything.”

“My family doesn't like to advertise that it's here,” Violet explained. “If we did, we'd have animal rights protesters camped out here all the time.”

Tran gave our name at the call box, and the gate swung open, revealing a rutted dirt road beyond. We bumped along it slowly for the next few miles, passing through hundreds of acres of scrubby oak and cedar forest. I kept my eyes on the windows, expecting to see exotic animals gamboling past, but instead, all I saw were longhorn cattle.

After ten minutes I asked, “Where's all the exotics?”

“On the back half of the property,” Violet replied.

“We're not even halfway across yet?” I asked. “How big is this ranch?”

“Forty thousand acres.”

For once, even Summer seemed surprised. “That's more than sixty square miles!”

Violet shrugged. “Yeah, it's pretty big. I don't think even my daddy has seen all of it. But my uncle says he knows the whole thing like the back of his hand.”

I turned back to the window again. The scrub forest outside looked similar to many parts of southern Africa, with shorter trees and thick underbrush in which even large animals could easily camouflage themselves. I thought I caught a glimpse of a large brown antelope with long, curved horns bounding away from us.

“Was that a sable?” I asked.

Violet shrugged. “I don't know the animals here that well.”

We eventually emerged from the woods and found ourselves before a small hunting lodge. It looked a lot like some of the safari lodges in Africa. It was one story tall, with only four rooms flanking the road. There was no one around it, though.

“That's not very big,” Summer pointed out.

“No,” Violet said. “We have only eight guests here at a time, max.”

“Is anyone staying here now?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” Violet replied. “We're always full up. There's a waiting list to stay here that's, like, a year long. Everyone's just out on the hunt.”

“Now?” Summer asked. “It's getting dark.”

“The animals are more active at dusk,” Violet explained. “Now and dawn are the best times to hunt.”

A little past the lodge, we came to the main house. This was a sprawling one-story building that sat at the top of a hill, with several mud-splattered four-wheel-drive vehicles parked in front. A middle-aged couple stood at the edge of the drive, eagerly awaiting our arrival.

“That's my aunt and uncle,” Violet said.

They didn't look anything like I'd expected—but then, I realized that I'd rather stupidly been expecting them to look like cartoon hunters. I'd pictured them clad in camouflage gear, with ammunition belts and combat boots, which was as silly as assuming that Doc would wear surgical scrubs all the time. Instead, Violet's aunt and uncle had dressed up to meet us. She wore a floral-print dress and had her hair done nicely. He was wearing a suit with a button-down shirt and a bolo tie. They both might as well have been at a country club.

The moment the SUV stopped, Violet sprang out and gave both of them big hugs. “Uncle Adam and Auntie June, these are my friends Teddy Fitzroy and Summer McCracken.”

The smile on Uncle Adam's face faltered as we emerged from the rover. He turned to Violet and spoke quietly, as though hoping we wouldn't hear. “Vi, I thought you said
J.J.
McCracken wanted to visit our ranch.”

Violet shook her head. “No, I didn't. I said Summer. That's J.J.'s daughter. She's my friend.” She pointed to me. “And this is Teddy. He's the one who dealt with that bully who was causing so much trouble for me.”

Uncle Adam's eyes lit up with understanding. “You're the boy who found the koala!”

“That's right,” I said.

Adam broke into a big, friendly smile. “It's a pleasure to meet both of you. Welcome to the Flying J Ranch.” He extended a hand to me and I shook it.

“Come on in,” Auntie June said sweetly. “We just brewed some iced tea, if you'd like any.”

They ushered us through the front doors. Hondo followed us, though Tran stayed in the rover.

Inside, the house was rather modest; it would have been completely ordinary if not for all the animals. There were six hunting dogs—all alive—and dozens of other creatures—all dead. The dead were stuffed and mounted in various poses around the regular furniture. It was quite jarring, as if the animals had started migrating through the house and then time had stopped while they were in midstride.

There was a stuffed grizzly bear by the front door, standing on its hind legs. It was twelve feet tall, and its mouth was open in what was probably supposed to be a frightening snarl, although whoever had done the taxidermy had messed up and the bear looked sick, rather than imposing. Like it was about to barf on us. In addition, it also held a small serving tray upon which the iced tea sat. This once-majestic animal had been turned into a stuffed, nauseated butler.

Hondo eyed it uneasily, as though worried it wasn't actually dead. The whole room seemed to be giving him the willies.

Auntie June waved to the iced tea. “Please, help yourselves.”

We each took a glass.

“Do you raise bears on this ranch?” I asked.

“No. I shot Jeeves here up in the Brooks Range in Alaska,” Adam told me. “I'd love to be able to breed grizzlies for hunt down here, but there's simply no way to control a carnivore of this size. It'd eat all my other stock. So we only raise herbivores.”

“Uncle Adam didn't just shoot him,” Violet said proudly. “He also did the taxidermy.”

“Really?” I asked, trying to sound impressed. “It's very good.”

“That's kind of you to say.” Adam waved an arm to all the other animals. “I did all these, too. The way I figured it, the local taxidermist was charging so much, I was gonna go broke having all the animals I shot mounted. So I built my own shop here and started doing the taxidermy myself.”

He led us into the living room, where we could see his work up close. It was immediately evident that Adam was much better at shooting things than he was at mounting them. He'd done a decent job with the poses, but he couldn't seem to get the faces right. A lion by the sofa was supposed to look regal, but it was comically cross-eyed instead. A bighorn sheep looked constipated, rather than imposing, while a kudu seemed to be having terrible indigestion.

“These are really nice,” I said, trying my best to be a good guest.

“There's plenty more, if you'd like to see them,” Auntie June said.

“Oh yes,” Summer said politely. “I'd love to.”

“Right this way!” Adam said, leading us onward.

Summer came up beside me and whispered, “Is it just me, or is all this freaking you out?”

Before I could respond, Violet slipped between us. She was beaming, pleased that everything seemed to be going so well. “Pretty cool, huh?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Pretty cool.”

“Here we go!” Adam announced. “The pièce de résistance!” With that, he led us through a doorway into his trophy room.

As soon as I entered, I froze in my tracks. The room was enormous, twice as tall as the other rooms and ten times the size of my family's entire trailer. It was filled with dead animals. There were dozens lined up on both sides of a wide center aisle, while the walls were lined with disembodied heads. There must have been more than a hundred and fifty. And Uncle Adam had botched the mounting of almost every single one of them. They all had the same nauseated look, as though each had died in the act of smelling something terrible.

“Oh my,” Summer said. I couldn't tell if she was stunned by the sheer amount of dead animals or amused by the looks on their faces.

“Thanks,” Adam said proudly, mistakenly thinking she was impressed. “It wasn't easy to bag all these animals—or to mount them.”

Hondo didn't even enter the room. He stayed right outside, looking like being around so many animals—even dead ones—was giving him hives.

“How many of these are from your ranch?” Summer asked.

“Only about a fourth,” Adam said. “Truth be told, I don't do too much hunting for exotics on this property myself. They're for the paying customers. But every now and then, there's one like this bad boy here that I simply can't resist.” He patted the hide of a disturbed-looking sable antelope. “The rest of them, I've traveled far and wide to find. Fifty-five countries on six different continents.”

Violet led me into the middle of the room. To my surprise, there were lots of smaller stuffed animals—mostly squirrels—interspersed with all the bigger ones. Only, rather than being posed majestically, these had been dressed in doll clothes and given tiny props. I realized they were supposed to be famous people. There was a squirrel Ben Franklin in bifocal glasses flying a little kite; a prairie dog Abraham Lincoln with a top hat, a beard, and a teensy Gettysburg Address; and a weasel Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a cigarette holder and a wheelchair.

“These are Auntie June's handiwork,” Violet told me. “Aren't they adorable?”

“They really are,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it.

“Well, thank you,” Auntie June said sweetly. “I don't hunt myself, but once Adam started doing taxidermy, I thought it looked like fun, so I took it up myself. Here's one you might like, Teddy. I understand you're named after him.” She pointed me to a squirrel Teddy Roosevelt, dressed in safari gear with a tiny rifle, its foot propped on a badger it had “killed.”

“Wow,” I said. I was well aware that Teddy Roosevelt, while a great conservationist, had also been an avid big-game hunter; in fact, he'd shot many of the animals on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. But seeing a rodent version of him killing another animal was disturbing.