Denny sat back, already changing channels. “Did you know that humans and elephants can transmit antibiotic-resistant bacteria between each other? That’s the kind of superbug that gives you boils and abscesses.”
“Still eating,” Linda warned.
“What does that have to do with Wallace?” Kayla asked him.
“Nothing,” I assured her. “Denny is speed-hypothesizing. Try not to get any on you.”
“I want to know,” she insisted. “Mr. Crandall won’t let me in the barn anymore, keepers only. We need to finish the elephant project. Jean—Dr. Reynolds—is upset about it.”
We turned to Ian for elaboration.
“Only keepers in the barn.”
“I got that,” I said. “Are you and Sam safe? With the new rules?”
Ian chewed the last of his burger, stalling. “Manage behind barriers.” He paused, apparently to let a trickle of words refill his verbal well. “I worked places that manage elephants that way. Train them with treats instead. Takes longer at first, but it works. Fewer accidents.” He considered for a moment while we waited. “Better to transition gradually. Not in one day.” I thought he was done, but he added, “Wallace took chances.”
“You mean routinely?” I asked. “He didn’t follow his own rules?”
Ian nodded.
Sam’s voice startled us. He’d come up behind me, where Ian wouldn’t see him either. “Wallace knew elephants. He didn’t take chances. Something strange happened the other night, and we’d better figure it out quick. Damrey is getting railroaded. Crandall is riled up and making up rules about stuff he knows nothing about.”
I swiveled around. The tall elephant keeper looked tense and miserable. “Pull up a chair. Isn’t this your day off?”
Sam shrugged. “Needed to come in.” He didn’t pull up a chair.
A young man with long dark hair, a visitor, sat down near us. He didn’t have any food, just sat facing away from us, close enough to overhear.
“What do you think happened?” I asked Sam, my voice quieter.
“I have no idea. Damrey would never hurt him, but now Mr. Crandall is treating her like a crazy killer.”
I spoke as gently as I could. “Sam, it really looked like she was mauling him. If you keep trusting her, you could be next.”
He looked grim. “Working Elephants could be a lot more dangerous than it used to be. I’m thinking about carrying my .38 until this is settled. I’ve got a concealed permit.”
In the silence that followed, Arnie said, “A .38 isn’t any use against an elephant.” We let him figure it out on his own.
Linda said, “The city won’t allow it. Not even the security guards have guns. You really think a person hurt Wallace and not Damrey? ”
Sam’s shoulders twitched, shrugging her off. “The investigation should clear this up, but Crandall’s not waiting. He’s shoving dolphin training down our throats for elephants. Thousands of years of elephant expertise, all of it full contact. A cow that’s been totally reliable for decades. But he’s tossing all that out and buying into the latest hippy-dippy theories about love and positive thinking. How am I supposed to manage them when I can’t go in with them?” His fierce glance at Ian made it clear who he thought was influencing the director.
Ian evaded his gaze. He took out a pack of Camels and lit one. Linda leaned away from the smoke.
Sam scanned us all. “I would appreciate it if none of you went around blaming Damrey.” His gaze lingered on me. “She gets a reputation as a killer, she’s going to get shipped off somewhere. That leaves Nakri alone, after almost twenty years together. You can figure out what that’ll do to both of them. And it would put the last nail in the coffin of a new exhibit.” He looked each of us in the face again, as if searching for the weak link, and walked off toward Elephants. The dark haired visitor got up and walked in the same direction.
Ian looked at his watch and made no move to follow Sam. Probably he had a few minutes left of his half hour lunch period, but it made me realize that the two elephant keepers didn’t move as a team.
“Dolphin training?” Denny asked.
“Operant conditioning,” Linda said. “You’ve heard of it?”
This was a sneer. The zoo had brought in a consultant to provide a workshop on modern animal training for all the keepers. The method began in psychology labs and was refined in aquariums and sea parks. Most zoos were using the techniques, which turned formerly stressful events such as veterinary examinations and even injections into opportunities for the animals to earn special goodies. It was amazing what animals would volunteer for if they had the right training and the right reward. Wallace said it was revolutionizing animal management in zoos. Finley Zoo had come late to this, but now we were all expected to incorporate “husbandry training” into our daily routine. I’d started with the lions before I left Felines, and now Linda had them opening their mouths for dental inspections, and she could position them wherever she wanted in the den to inspect all body parts. Calvin and I had the penguins trained to step onto a scale one at a time, rather than grabbing them to weigh them.
“Yeah,” Denny said, “I have heard of training, believe it or not. It just surprised me to hear him go all traditional and rejective. Sam needs to let go of that negativity and of this gun thing, or he’s going to hurt his back again.”
I wasn’t sure whether this was a non sequitur or actually made sense, aside from “rejective.” Sam was prone to back trouble. The idea of him packing a pistol was alarming. In our little zoo, full of visitors, most of them children? It was also troubling to hear Sam speak so disparagingly of alternative methods, on top of denying what had happened to Wallace.
“This is all very interesting, but it does not help a bit,” Kayla said. “I can’t go into the elephant barn anymore, and Dr. Reynolds wants the project completed. How’s that going to happen?”
“She’ll figure it out,” Linda said, getting up to go.
Kayla folded her arms under her breasts. “Yeah, maybe. She’s not dealing at all well with this. You’ll call me when the kittens come? Please?”
Linda said, “Of course,” and headed back to work. Everyone else left, Kayla last, and I sat for a moment gathering my energies.
When they were first hired, Linda had watched Kayla and Dr. Reynolds closely and concluded that they were not a couple. Linda had reason to care. She asked me wistfully whether I thought Kayla dated girls. “I know how to find out,” I’d responded. “Ask her.” Linda had plenty of guts when it came to her job, but none for dating. The question answered itself when Kayla commenced flirting with any guy who would play. Linda went back to researching lesbian bars she didn’t have the nerve to enter. I worried that being around Kayla was tough on her, but if Linda had feelings for the vet’s assistant, she kept them well buried.
Denny/Kayla was less complicated. She’d flirted, he’d shared his view that since swine flu was a mix of bird and pig genes, it was an effort by the planet’s animal consciousness to combat global warming by killing off most of humanity and that, on the whole, this was not a bad idea. No need after that for me to intervene and keep him safe for Marcie.
“How can any guy that hot be so weird?” Kayla had asked.
“Raised in a yurt by Wiccans,” I told her. She’d thought I was kidding.
I got up and tossed my lunch trash into the crocodile-jaw garbage can. Jackie wasn’t in today. No Wallace updates available from anyone. I stopped by the tiger exhibit and said “hello” in my best tiger poof-rumble-growl. Raj prüstened back at me, which never failed to delight. He was laid out in a patch of sun, looking bony and faded, but he had his head up and was paying attention. My chest tightened at the thought of losing him.
I ignored the lions in the next exhibit over. I couldn’t logically blame them for killing Rick, it’s what predators do, but we were hardly friends.
Walking on, I pondered the fragments from lunch. Sam was stressing out,
and I didn’t envy Ian working under him. Sam was meticulous almost to a fault—my first week, he’d trained me exactly how to coil a hose properly—and he’d been taking care of the two elephants for years. I hadn’t thought of him as closed to new ideas, but Ian hadn’t sold him on a different style of handling the animals, any more than I convinced him that Damrey was dangerous.
Who did Sam think he needed to defend himself against? My skin prickled.
Soon Wallace would recover enough to tell us what happened. Then this would all make sense, and we could settle down again. I looked forward to that.
Chapter Four
“She’s licking it,” Linda murmured, to a chorus of soft “ahhs.” We spoke in whispers, as though the clouded leopard a city block away behind thick concrete walls might somehow hear us.
It was five in the morning and we were transfixed by the video monitor in the Education office. For an hour, the den camera had showed a restless Losa turning on her straw bed, standing up only to lie down again. Several minutes ago, we’d spotted a small gray lump on the straw. Now Losa was lying curled around the lump, pink tongue at work. The light was too low for details, but it was clear that she was finally delivering her cubs. Or cub.
Linda had phoned me twice. I’d missed the first call and laid in bed half asleep trying to figure out who it could have been and what to do. But she’d dialed again immediately and this time I’d lunged before voice mail kicked in.
“Losa’s pacing around. I think this is it. Bye, gotta call Dr. Reynolds.” And she’d hung up.
Here we were, heads bumping as we leaned our faces to the monitor—me, Linda, Kayla, and Dr. Reynolds. Dr. Reynolds relaxed on her chair as though this was exactly what she expected. Kayla fidgeted on a stool. Linda and I acted as though this were the first clouded leopard birth in the history of the planet.
After several minutes of watching Losa alternate between licking her offspring and quietly panting, I stood up and started a pot of coffee. I’d brought some bananas and Linda had a bag of vegan oatmeal cookies, so I figured we would survive the morning’s drama.
The clouded leopard coat pattern is irregular blotches—“clouds”—outlined in black and tan. They have gorgeous pelts and live in southeast Asia, in forests that are fast succumbing to loggers. It follows that they are at risk of extinction from hunting and habitat loss. They are not all that common in zoos, and it was a tribute to Wallace’s wheeling and dealing that we’d gotten a pair.
In the next thirty minutes the cub managed to orient toward its mother’s belly and possibly suckled a little. We cheered its success and wondered if this chapter was over. Perhaps one cub was the allotment for this mating and pregnancy. I discovered I was rubbing my belly, unconsciously trying to include my inhabitant in our delight. Losa now knew more than I did about birth and nursing.
Linda gnawed a cookie, never taking her eyes off the monitor.
Kayla stood and stretched. “You guys look like you just won the lottery.” She sat back down and sighed.
After a quiet period, I said, “What I keep thinking about is Wallace. Clouded leopards were such a big deal for him.”
Linda said, “He asked me about them almost every day.”
Dr. Reynolds looked interested.
“He spent most of a year trying to get a pair, while I was feline keeper,” I told her. “It was Christmas and Fourth of July when he found out Losa was available. Cubs were huge for him. Is he awake enough that we could tell him? Might cheer him up.”
Dr. Reynold’s shoulders rounded forward. “I tried to visit him last night—earlier this night. He’s in ICU and I couldn’t get in. The nurses are circumspect, but my impression is that he’s still unconscious.”
“Is that another one?” Linda’s voice cut through my concern.
We stared even harder and muttered—“Did that dark bit to the left move?” “Is that a head?” “What’s that behind her leg?”—until we were all satisfied. Two cubs.
“They are so cute,” Kayla warbled. She had to be using mostly imagination given the low light level. “Is there anything cuter than baby kittens?”
“Cubs, not kittens,” Linda said absently. “Like lions.”
Even though clouded leopards are technically “big cats,” classified with lions and tigers, they weigh only thirty to fifty pounds. Losa was toward the small end.
Losa focused on the second baby while the first squirmed about randomly. Linda’s face looked as though she were about to ascend to a new level of existence well above our ordinary lives. “Two,” she breathed. “One more? How about one more?”
I handed out celebratory cookies.
“She’d better not blow it,” Linda said. “Not after all this.”
Dr. Reynolds shook her head and fingered her hair. “We’ll keep the area quiet around her. She’s got another den to move them to if she gets nervous. She’ll be fine.”
“She’s a timid cat,” Linda fretted.
“Not like she was when she first came,” I reminded her. “She settled in a lot.”
“Maybe we should have waited to breed her, given her more time…Never mind, I’m wound up,” Linda said. “It’s just that these cats make every step so hard.”
“I’ve raised house-cat kittens,” Kayla said. “It wasn’t that hard.”
A little silence fell. We all knew that wild felines sometimes kill their young if they’re disturbed, sometimes even if they aren’t. First-time mothers are especially likely to fail. It happens in the wild, too, not just zoos. All our worries were shifting this direction.
Dr. Reynolds had a small edge to her voice. “We could hand raise them, and we might have to, but I prefer to have her raise them if at all possible. They need to nurse to take in colostrum. That will provide some protection against disease until their own immune systems start to work. They’ll also behave more normally if their mother raises them. We’ll pull them only as a last resort.”
I knew all about colostrum from the pregnancy books my mother had piled on me. It’s the first milk a lactating mammal produces, watery and full of antibodies. Eventually I would be churning it out myself.
Kayla persisted. “You’re the boss and all that, Jean, but couldn’t you let them nurse and then pull them? I mean…what if she freaks out and kills them?”
She didn’t seem to realize that she was poking at a sore spot. Linda stayed current on the latest in clouded leopard management, and the latest from other zoos said that hand rearing looked like the best way to go. Aside from protecting them from mommy dearest, hand-rearing resulted in cats that were calmer and more tolerant of changes in their environment. Linda was all for pulling the cubs and Wallace had been amenable, but Dr. Reynolds was firmly on the side of mother rearing. With most mammal species, everyone would have agreed with her. But clouded leopards were a tough species to manage, and conventional methods didn’t work as well.
Dr. Reynolds said, “We will start out giving Losa every—”
“Another one!” Linda said. “Three! Three! Hot damn!”
We watched until it was time to start work. Losa behaved perfectly, cleaning the three cubs and lying still for them to nurse. The babies were totally incompetent, inching around in the wrong direction, tangling up with each other and with Losa’s legs, exhausting themselves in futile struggles to find sustenance. I wanted to grab them and stick each one on a nipple. It’s a wonder that any creature survives without human help. But by the time I had to leave, all three had been attached at least briefly.
I stood up to go, suddenly stiff and aching. Linda practically skipped to the white board on the wall and wrote down the date and time. Underneath, she wrote “0.0.3 Neofelis nebulosa.”
“I’ll bite,” Kayla said. “I know the Latin for clouded leopards, but not the number stuff. We didn’t use that in the clinics I’ve worked in.”
“This is the first significant birth or hatchings since we started here,” said Dr. Reynolds. “The
first number is males in the litter or clutch, if it’s birds. The second is females. Since we don’t know the sexes yet, we can only put the litter size in the third place.”
Linda wrapped her arms around me in a brief hug. “We did it. I am so happy for us,” she said in my ear.
I grinned all the way to the Commissary to clock in. No one but Hap was around to hear the news, but he bumped bellies with me.“Congrats! You’re on a reproductive roll. Keep them coming!”
I wrote on the whiteboard at the time clock: 0.0.3 Neofelis nebulosa and the date. It looked fine in my handwriting, too.
Dr. Reynolds would make the official report to Mr. Crandall, who would report it to the press. He would be delighted to have good news to share with newspapers and television, after the spate of bad publicity about the accident. “Rogue” was the most common adjective for Damrey in the press, and questions were being asked about her future. The parents of the little girl who had won the draw-an-elephant contest were threatening to sue. The zoo had “knowingly” endangered their child by having her picture taken petting Damrey. This was weeks before Wallace’s accident and the girl was thrilled, but a TV reporter interviewed the family and got the father worked up. I wished we had more good news in the pipeline.
It was Monday. Calvin had taken the day off since he had come in Saturday to help out after Wallace’s injury, and I worked Birds alone. I was still feeding the penguins and still smiling every time I thought about Losa when Jackie called to let me know a police officer was on his way. All too soon, a big old guy with a buzz cut and keen eyes in a sagging face knocked on the door and said, “Ms. Oakley? Detective Quintana. I’d like a few minutes of your time.” He wore a black jacket with a white shirt, black pants, and black shoes. He looked like an undertaker. An undertaker with a bulge under his left armpit.
I instructed him on use of the disinfectant footbath, persuaded him to wash his hands, and poured coffee into one of the elegant blue cups Linda had made for me. I shut the keeper door on penguins that wished to observe and critique. He sniffed at bird by-products and fish, winced, and got down to business. Penguins brayed in the background. He set out a tape recorder, and I agreed to its use.
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