The transgression was unlawful; our entry witnessed. Predatory eyes monitored the offense, observing our accordance dissipate in clouds of dust kicked up by the Land Rover. Stalking the land, this mechanism of intrusion bumped along Botswana's dirt tracks. A sentry at our camp's entrance at sundown, we trusted its assurance that the enclosure wouldn't be breached.
So when I found a dead cheetah the next morning within the vehicle's bounds--fur shrouding the gruesome bag of bones and blackened parts--it was clear my presence had been unnecessary, that dominance had already been established.
Camouflage in life, the cheetah's coat was a beacon in the dawn light. Its canvas was aglow, the message transmitted as a black-speckled cipher in coarse hair. There was no dignity in this cheetah's death: rules of engagement, written in blood, had been violated.
I had seen a dead animal before. At least I'd seen what remained after it was picked clean by maggots and vultures, its skeleton bleached by the African sun. Hunter and prey, ragged vegetation snagged on an azure sheet of sky--opposition is bred in the bush, regeneration assured through sacrificial decomposition.
Yet when I stood over the cheetah's putrid pile of organs, I yearned to climb inside its grotesque ribcage and feel around me its forsaken embrace of bone.
I counted the barbed wire gashes in its neck: one, two, three. My revulsion wasn't for the cheetah's degrading death after becoming ensnared in the fence, but at the brutal entanglement of civilization and wilderness that had been ensured with a weapon of wire. Whereas nature ingests, humankind had seen to it that this carcass was left to rot.
Staring into the beast's empty eye sockets, I imagined my body lying exposed in the scrubland beyond our camp. Drawn to the movement of the flies I saw how the cheetah would preserve my humanity, initiating the process by tearing into my flesh.
Erin McKnight