Last Chance to See

nothing, so far as we could tell, to hear; but who knows what the goat could smell in that place toward which we all were moving.
    Our deeply sinking spirits were next clouded sideways from a totally unexpected direction. We came across a circle of concrete set in the middle of a clearing. The circle was about twenty feet across, and had two parallel black stripes painted on it, with another black stripe at right angles to them, connecting their centres. It took us a few moments to work out what the symbol was and what it meant. Then we got it. It was just an “H.” The circle was a helicopter pad. Whatever it was that was going to happen to this goat was something people came by helicopter to see.
    We trotted on, numb and light-headed, suddenly finding meaningless things to laugh wildly and hysterically at, as if we were walking willfully toward something that would destroy us as well.
    Leading from the helipad was a yet more formal pathway. It was a couple of yards wide with a stout wooden fence about two feet high along either side. We followed this along for a couple of hundred yards until we came at last to a wide gully, about ten feet deep, and here there were a number of things to see.
    To our left was a kind of bandstand. Several rows of bench seats were banked up behind one another, with a sloping wooden roof to protect them from the sun and other inclemencies in the weather. Tied to the front rail of the bandstandwere both ends of a long piece of blue nylon rope, which ran out and down into the gully, where it was slung over a pulley wheel which hung from the branches of a small bent tree. A small iron hook hung from the rope.
    Stationed around the tree, basking in the dull light of a hot but overcast day, and in the stench of rotten death, were six large, muddy grey dragon lizards.
    The largest of them was probably about ten feet long.
    It was at first quite difficult to gauge their size. We were not that close as yet, the light was too blear and grey to model them clearly to the eye, and the eye was simply not accustomed to equating something with the shape of a lizard with something of that size.
    I stared at them awhile, aghast, until I realised that Mark was tapping me on the arm. I turned to look. On the other side of the short fence, a large dragon was approaching us.
    It had emerged from the undergrowth, attracted, no doubt, by the knowledge that the arrival of human beings meant that it was feeding time. We learned later that the group of dragons that hang out in the gully rarely go very far from it and now do very little at all other than lie and wait to be fed.
    The dragon lizard padded toward us, slapping its feet down aggressively, first its front left and back right, then vice versa, carrying its great weight easily and springily, with the swinging, purposeful gait of a bully. Its long, narrow, pale, forked tongue flickered in and out, testing the air for the smell of dead things.
    It reached the far side of the fence, and then began to range back and forth tetchily, waiting for action, swinging and scraping its heavy tail across the dusty earth. Its rough, scaly skin hung a little loosely over its body, like chain mail, gathering to a series of cowllike folds just behind its long death’s head of a face. Its legs are thick and muscular, and end in claws such as you’d expect to find at the bottom of a brass table leg.
    The thing is just a monitor lizard, and yet it is massive toa degree that is unreal. As it rears its head up over the fence and around as it turns, you wonder how it’s done, what trickery is involved.
    At that moment the party of tourists began to straggle toward us along the path, cheery and unimpressed, wanting to know what was up, what was happening. Look, there’s one of those dragons! Ooh, it’s a big one. Nasty-looking feller!
    And now the worst of it was about to happen.
    At a discreet distance behind the bandstand, the goat was being slaughtered. Two park guards held the struggling, bleating creature down on the ground with its neck across a log and hacked its head off with a machete, holding the bunch of leafy twigs against it to staunch the eruption of blood. The goat took several minutes to die.
    Once it was dead, they cut off one of its back legs for the dragon behind the fence, then took the rest of the body and fastened it onto the hook on the blue nylon rope. It rocked and swayed in the breeze as they winched it down to the dragons lying in the