"Ian Stewart - Environmental Friendship Fossle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Ian)

it was a mammoth tusk, not elephant, there was no risk involved. Perfectly legal, environmental friendship
fossle. Who would ever believe otherwise?

If it was a scam, it was a beauty.

Was the tusk really mammoth? I had no idea.

Why hide a smart card from an antique digital camera? I could think of lots of plausible reasons, but the
best way forward was to find out what was on the thing.

At home I have a special card-reader attachment for my wristband, which recognizes obsolete formats
and translates them into iPEG. So I went home, downloaded the files from Tsong's card, and brought
them up in FotoSwap, my mouth dry, my pulse racing.

The quality was excellent, the lighting strangely dull, the skies smeared with clouds in multiple shades of
gray.
There were individuals, standing, sitting, lying on the ground.

There were groups. Young and old together.

Not pornography. The authorities on the mainland are hot on that, but Hong Kong is fairly relaxed except
for kiddie-porn, which this thankfully wasn't. The individuals and groups looked like woolly elephants.
Either they were woolly elephants, or they were genuine Mammuthus primigenius.

Some were living. Most were dead. The dead ones were all bulls, and most of them had gaping wounds
where their tusks should be.

Several of the men in the photos were carrying guns. I recognized the brand immediately: AK-83 assault
rifles. The originals were Russian, but these had most likely been manufactured in backstreet machine
shops in Kabul.

Some frames showed piles of tusks roped to battered Toyota trucks, no registration plates. A few
showed tusks being hacked from their owners using chainsaws. And in three of the photos, the man
holding the chainsaw looked a bit like Tsong. Younger, I'd guess early forties, but the face and hands
were familiar.

Sweat broke out all over my body. The old man had hunted mammoths. Somewhere.

What had I gotten myself into?
****
Lies.

Shaggy mammoth story.

Senile old goat.

Other ways to go nuts .

Hypnotism.