by Bobby Akart
His brain processed the shape, color, orientation, and sounds. Instinctively, a fight-or-flight response to a perceived threat to his survival was initiated. In animals, the reaction varied from escape to fight when cornered by an attacker. In humans, the consensus was that men were wired to fight while women tended to flee. It was simply human nature.
Tommy was familiar with snow leopards. He’d extensively studied Taza, the ten-year-old snow leopard, while at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Until the cat was transferred to the Potter Park Zoo in Lansing, Michigan, Tommy was a frequent visitor to Taza’s habitat. The two had bonded somewhat, or at least as much as any zoologist could with a wild and deadly animal.
Taza had been a rescue from the Rafah Zoo in Gaza, the Palestinian territory on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea that had been the center of Arab-Israeli strife for centuries. When Taza was only fourteen months old, zoo workers at Rafah had held a bag over the cat’s head and removed his claws so that children and visitors to the zoo could play with him.
It was a barbaric, vicious procedure that caused long-lasting damage to Taza. He was prevented from most natural behaviors, such as grabbing food or climbing rock formations. When he began to suffer from bouts of infection following the operation, international rescue workers petitioned the United States to intervene. Taza was brought to Lincoln Park, and he became one of the first animals that Tommy cared for.
His brain immediately recognized the stalking movements of the white leopard approaching him. Its large thickly furred paws, which acted like built-in snowshoes in the wild, gave him away as he moved surreptitiously through the grasses. Tommy was being hunted by the big cat, which, unlike Taza, had not been declawed.
Snow leopards, contrary to their lion counterparts, cannot roar. Their method of attack was far more stealth-like. Ordinarily, they were not aggressive toward humans, and to Tommy’s knowledge, there had never been a verified snow leopard attack on a human being.
But his brain, processing the threat at the speed of a supercomputer, reminded him that animals’ behavior at the moment was anything but ordinary, and there’s a first time for everything.
Fight or flight?
His brain responded before his conscious thought could finish the question.
You cannot outrun a snow leopard. If you do, you’ll only die exhausted.
Being charged by a big cat was frightening, and it was difficult for Tommy to keep his composure. If he ran, it was more likely to prompt an attack. He stood his ground and raised his arms high in the air to make himself look bigger, not unlike what a person would do when confronted by a bear.
“Goooo!” he shouted at the snow leopard as the creature revealed itself from the tall grasses. Tommy began to clap his hands, using a cupping gesture to make the sound louder. He followed this action with waving his arms over his head.
Ordinarily, snow leopards would turn and walk away. Perhaps they might perform mock charges toward their target in an effort to force their prey into a mistake.
Kristi was coming toward him and he quickly held his left arm out toward her, instructing her to stop. Fortunately, the cat didn’t see her advance. Tommy glanced over his shoulder at an arched bridge that crossed the watery moat that was supposed to prevent the big cats from escaping their habitat. Clearly, that security measure hadn’t worked.
“Kristi! Stop! Go back and get the cart. Meet me on the bridge!”
“But!” she shouted back.
“Trust me!”
She had the presence of mind not to make any sudden moves that might startle the snow leopard. She, like Tommy, began to slowly retreat toward the walkway where the maintenance cart was parked. This enabled Tommy to focus on the task at hand.
As the snow leopard crept forward, his rigid tail indicating his intent to hunt, Tommy slowly retreated. He continued to alternate between clapping his hands and waving his arms high overhead. His shouts at the snow leopard went largely ignored, except by the lions below, which continued to feast on the zookeeper and periodically glanced upward at the commotion.
The sound of the maintenance cart caught the cat’s attention, providing Tommy a welcome distraction. He retreated several paces in just a few seconds, putting a little more distance between him and his attacker.
In a flash, the snow leopard rushed toward Tommy, only to skid to a stop twenty feet away.
A mock charge.
Tommy stood his ground and shouted at the cat, a deep, sincere, from-the-belly plea to leave him alone.
It lunged at him again, closer this time. Tommy instinctively flinched and backed up several paces, but his shoulders remained squarely facing the snow leopard.
“I’m here!” Kristi shouted.
It took only a second. Tommy looked briefly behind him to confirm her position. He didn’t need to, but his memory reflexes caused it to happen.
In that second, the snow leopard closed the fifteen-foot distance between them and lunged for Tommy’s throat.
Chapter 2
Brookfield Zoo
Chicago, Illinois
Tommy had never experienced fear like this before. The air sucked a guttural scream out of his throat like a long hemp rope. Yet, despite the adrenaline surging through his body, he held his ground like a half-wit heavyweight boxer willing to be pummeled into submission to earn his share of the prize money.
Attacking like his cousin the lion, the snow leopard was airborne, open mouth bearing deadly fangs, heading straight for Tommy’s face and throat. Tommy defended himself the only way he knew how. He pulled his right arm back and levied a powerful punch toward the nose of the agile cat.
He caught the animal squarely in the nose with a solid right, but the big cat’s sharp teeth cut a gash between his index and middle fingers. The momentum of the snow leopard’s leap caused it to crash into Tommy’s chest, knocking them both to the ground.
Tommy scrambled to his knees, cupping his hand to his jawline, blood dripping between his fingers, which had been sliced open by the snow leopard’s sharp claws.
The lions noticed the scrum and were oddly howling and roaring in an inharmonious cheer for their cousin. The cat responded to the encouraging roars and lunged at Tommy again, biting at his face and forearm that Tommy used for protection. Tommy was able to force the animal off him and down a slight embankment.
Tommy’s instincts kicked in. He had no choice but to fight back. He grabbed two softball-sized rocks and threw them at the snow leopard as it made another lunge. One of the rocks caught the creature on the side of the head and bounced back toward Tommy. He quickly picked it up and used it to pound the animal’s side as it attacked again.
The counterattack surprised the snow leopard, but it refused to give up. It came at Tommy again, so he prepared a one-two counterpunch. As the leopard raced toward him, Tommy threw the rock as a distraction and prepared to kick the animal in the jaw.
His timing was perfect, although the animal’s fangs pierced the laced-up part of his boot. The snow leopard fell hard on its side, and Tommy became the aggressor. He jumped on the cat’s back and grabbed it around the throat, using his powerful arms to squeeze the snow leopard’s throat.
The animal thrashed about, angrily trying to claw at Tommy and twist its head to gnaw at the man’s arms. However, the zoologist was undeterred. Crazed, in fact.
Tommy let out a low growl and then he began to scream at the top of his lungs. The primal yell quietened the lions, who had been cheering their fellow cat along. Tommy continued to squeeze, and despite the fact that the seventy-pound animal had succumbed to his death grip, he continued until his arms finally relented.
Finally, Tommy let go of the cat, and his emotions. He fell back on his butt and raised his knees to his chest in a fetal position. Then he cried. Deep sobs of despair as the man who’d devoted his life to caring for magnificent animals like this one had just done the unthinkable—he intentionally killed one of them. His favorite. A snow leopard.
“Tommy! Are you
okay?”
Kristi raced from the bridge to where he was curled up next to the dead animal. Tommy wiped the blood, sweat and tears off his face and remained on the ground, staring at the dead creature.
When she reached his side, he mumbled, “They were always my favorite.”
Kristi didn’t respond and focused her attention on his wounds. While she looked at the cuts and scrapes he’d received, she glanced around their surroundings to make sure none of the other ferocious cats had escaped the habitat.
The superficial wounds he’d endured would heal, but his soul might not. Kristi sat next to him and put her arm around his shoulders in an effort to comfort the man she’d only recently met. Neither said a word, opting instead to watch the sun begin to drop over the horizon. Had it not been for the circumstances, the two could be any couple sitting on a rock outcropping overlooking the grasslands in Botswana, admiring the giraffes meandering across the landscape, or the African fish eagles diving for a meal.
In a way, perhaps they were. A couple, that is, whose minds temporarily took them away from the chaos unfolding at the Brookfield Zoo and transported them into the middle of sub-Saharan Africa.
Ten minutes later, Kristi whispered to Tommy, “Hey, we need to get you checked out at the hospital. Can you stand?”
He nodded his head and pushed off the ground after giving the dead snow leopard a final look. Tommy winced as he gave himself a quick medical evaluation. His clothes were bloodied and torn. His right hand was beginning to swell from the trauma when his fist had smashed into the face of his attacker.
“I’ll be all right,” he mumbled. He stretched his back and then rolled his head around his shoulders to relieve some stress. The soft lighting that illuminated the pathways through this area of the zoo began to come on as the last vestiges of daylight gave in to the night. “Kristi, where is everybody? You’d think that someone would’ve come by during all of this.”
Kristi led him to the cart and helped him stay upright as he stumbled over a rock. She quickly assessed his body to see if he was losing blood from another wound she hadn’t previously discovered. Apparently, his inability to walk was from both physical and mental fatigue.
“I don’t understand it. Nobody came looking for the zookeepers or us. I don’t like the feel of this.”
“Same here. Should we go to the administration building?”
Kristi gently pulled at his shirt. The blood was beginning to dry and was clinging to his skin. “I think we should get you to a hospital first, don’t you think?”
“Nah, I’ll be fine. Let me get to my locker. I’ve got a change of clothes in my backpack. I can wash up in the restroom.”
“Listen, Tommy, please don’t make me pull rank. You need to dress these wounds properly so you don’t get an infection.”
After a brief back-and-forth argument, she drove the maintenance cart toward Tommy’s office. The lights were off inside the small, block building. Apparently, none of the other zoologists had bothered to stick around that evening.
The two of them cautiously entered the building until Tommy could find the light switches. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary, so he cleaned up while Kristi searched the kitchen area for a first aid kit.
Fifteen minutes later, Tommy lied and proclaimed himself good as new. His wounds would eventually heal, but psychologically, he never would.
And this was just the beginning of their nightmare.
Chapter 3
Northwest Ontario
Canada
All our fears are darkest before sunrise.
The Hudson Bay Lowlands were considered one of the largest continuous wetlands in the world. One of the flattest parts of Canada, the lowlands were created millions of years ago when Ice Age glaciers retreated toward the North Pole, leaving flat land exposed that eventually began to dry. Because its altitude was near sea level, the lowlands didn’t drain properly, and they remained marshy, especially in the spring and summer months. The snow melt from the Canadian Shield’s interior plains flooded the lowlands, leaving them in a condition not unlike Florida’s Everglades, without the snakes and alligators.
Over eighty percent of the region was made up of peat or muskeg, a swamp-like bog of water and dying vegetation. This swampy forest was a challenge for the native species that inhabited the area, which included woodland caribou, moose, the arctic fox, and as winter approached, the Hudson Bay wolf.
On the Hudson Bay Lowlands, which stretched along the southern shores of the world’s second largest bay, which connected Northern Canada with the Atlantic Ocean, you could slog through the wetlands for days without seeing another living soul. If you were lucky, you wouldn’t find trouble there and trouble wouldn’t find you.
Levi Boone, however, had already found trouble.
It was late August and the passengers of the puddle jumper to the hunting camp at Smoky Falls shouldn’t have been in the midst of blizzard-like conditions, yet they were. It had all happened so fast. Their pilot, a seasoned veteran of shuttle flights throughout Canada, had been guiding their aircraft toward what should have been a routine water landing at Smoky Falls.
Rather than dropping the float plane gently on the water, his wings clipped the tops of several one-hundred-foot-tall red pines and then collided with the white birch trees that were abundant in the lowlands. The airplane broke apart, throwing gear and passengers in all directions. Within seconds after the right wing snapped in half, the aircraft flipped over and rolled through the fresh snow until it abruptly stopped against a snowdrift.
Levi remained strapped into his seat harnesses in the back half of the airplane, which had been separated upon impact with the ground. The fuselage of the tail section and rear seat had wedged between two trees, which continued to shake from the impact, sending globs of snow on top of Levi’s head.
For a moment, he experienced an out-of-body rush. Blood hammered through his ears, and his heart raced. His scalp began to tingle and his eyes darted in all directions. Then, like the flip of a light switch, his thoughts became crystalline. He was suddenly keenly aware of his surroundings.
He instinctively wiped the cold moisture off his face and then checked himself to confirm all of his body parts were intact. Remarkably, nothing was broken, and except for his face being scratched by the red pine’s branches, he’d survived unharmed.
Levi took a deep breath and allowed himself a moment to gather his wits. He slowly wiped his face off again, this time squeezing his forehead and cheeks as if to pinch himself awake from a bad dream.
Except it wasn’t a dream. They’d crashed in a snow-covered wilderness, and his surroundings were deathly quiet except for the booming voice of a male snow owl desperately seeking a mate before breeding season ended.
Darkness surrounded him as the night sky was obliterated by the blowing snow. He unbuckled his seatbelt and slid out of the plane until he could touch ground. He landed calf-deep in the marshy conditions that existed beneath the blanket of snow. The freak snowstorm hadn’t been preceded by below-freezing temperatures, so the ground underneath still had the characteristics of late summer.
Levi immediately regretted wearing sneakers for the flight northward to Smoky Falls. He turned back to crawl onto his seat in search of his backpack and gun case, but both had been thrown clear of the plane when it crashed. Despite his need to change into his hunting boots, he had to find the others.
“Karl! Eddie! Are you guys okay?”
The wind picked up, causing the wet snow to blow off the canopy. The whispering pines were stifled by the weight, but the sound of the wind inhibited his hearing. He yelled louder this time.
“Hey! Are you guys okay?”
Levi tried to recall the moment of impact and the way the plane had reacted to crashing into the trees. He closed his eyes and replayed the sudden demise of their flight in his mind. They’d clipped a wing, flipped over, and then tumbled. He couldn’t make sense of it, so he decided to look for debris.
He’
d been fascinated by the work of the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigations of airplane crashes ever since a Cessna Citation crashed across the Ohio River onto Paradise Bottom in Kentucky when he was a boy. He’d paddled his canoe across the river and stood just outside the yellow caution tape, watching the investigators pick up and catalog every piece of debris, including body parts.
He tried to determine what direction the tail section had come from. It had plowed through the snow and broken-down pine saplings as it went. Levi was concerned about getting disoriented in the dark. It wouldn’t take but one wrong turn and, within minutes, he could be lost in these conditions. Also, he was keenly aware of how difficult it was to survive in a snowstorm without adequate shelter. As soon as he found the others, that would have to be their first priority.
The wind intensified and Levi was beginning to feel the chill in his bones. Up ahead, he saw a faint, flashing red light. Part of the wing, he surmised. Excited, he picked up the pace and trudged through the snow and the murky ground beneath it. The forest floor was the worst of both worlds. Muddy and cold from the snow.
“Hey! Can you hear me?” he shouted again as he got closer to the shining beacon.
“Over here!”
“Karl?”
“Yeah! Levi, this way. Eddie’s hurt and the pilot’s missing.” His voice drifted off.
Invigorated at the prospect of reuniting with his friends, Levi tried to jog-slog through the snow. This turned out to be a mistake, as his sneaker stuck in the muck and came off his foot. He turned to retrieve it, soaking his sock and foot in the snow in the process. He dropped to his knees in the dark and crawled on his hands and knees, plunging his arm into the eighteen-inch holes left by his steps.
“Got it!” he exclaimed as he wrenched the shoe out of the cold sludge. He replaced the shoe, but now he was soaking wet. By the time he reached the nose section and the first row of seats, he was beginning to shiver from the damp cold.