| For much of the past two weeks, Americans have been consumed by the assassination of the health-insurance C.E.O. Brian Thompson—and by his alleged killer, a twenty-six-year-old Maryland native named Luigi Mangione. Even before Mangione was identified, the Internet ignited with speculation—correct, it turned out—that the murder was tied to Thompson’s leadership at UnitedHealthcare, a company criticized for its high rejection rate of customers’ claims. The attention has partly fixated on Mangione’s good looks and Ivy League education, but observers have also scrutinized—often with concern—the public celebration of what appears to be an act of vigilante justice. Nearly fifteen years ago, and a continent away, the reporter Jeffrey Goldberg investigated a different extralegal killing. In “The Hunted,” Goldberg—now the editor of The Atlantic—traced the path of Mark and Delia Owens, a married American couple who had moved first to Botswana, then to Zambia, to study wildlife. (Subsequently, Delia Owens became a publishing phenomenon with her novel “Where the Crawdads Sing,” which spent more than three years on the Times best-seller list.) The Owens’s African sojourn occurred at a time when the elephant population was plummeting, due in significant part to poachers killing the animals to harvest and sell their ivory tusks. By his own telling, Mark Owens began an aggressive campaign to thwart their efforts, cultivating what a U.S. Ambassador described as a “Rambo-ish” image, and buzzing hunters’ campsites with his private plane (sometimes while firecrackers were shot out of an open door). The Owens’s treatment of poachers who were caught in the area, and the circumstances surrounding a suspected poacher’s fatal shooting—which was later broadcast on American TV—generated fervent debate about their behavior, and about the attitude that the two white Americans displayed toward both the people and the animals in their adopted home. “Lions,” Delia Owens later said, “don’t frighten me nearly as much as humans.” | 
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