Panda-monium

by Stuart Gibbs

  So I went myself. Yes, it was a little reckless, but it seemed far less dangerous than many things I’d done while investigating before. I was merely heading to an empty exhibit to talk to a keeper, not swimming in the hippo tank or climbing onto the roof of World of Reptiles.

  Even so, I was cautious about it, keeping alert for anyone else suspicious as I headed over. My guess was that James Van Amburg—or whoever had threatened me—wouldn’t be lurking around Panda Palace in a Li Ping costume anymore. But there was a good chance he, or someone else who worked for the bad guys, was still keeping an eye on the place. I yanked a baseball cap down over my eyes and fell in with large groups of people so I wouldn’t look like I was a kid on my own.

  There were no crowds around Panda Palace. Everyone seemed to be avoiding the place, like it had bad karma.

  I slipped inside the exhibit. The interior continued the Chinese theme of the exterior, centered around some large bamboo gardens where Li Ping—and eventually the male panda—would be on display. It was beautiful, but without tourists or pandas, it was also echoey and sad, like an abandoned house.

  Chloé Dolkart was sitting inside the exhibit, in one of the gardens, reading a book. She had propped a folding chair by a little man-made creek and was sitting in the shade of a Chinese elm tree. It looked like a really lovely place to read, although I was quite sure she wasn’t supposed to be sitting there at all, much less reading on company time. But then, she didn’t have an actual panda to take care of.

  There was a large sheet of glass between me and Chloé. Despite the multiple DO NOT KNOCK ON GLASS signs, I knocked on the glass.

  Startled, Chloé promptly toppled out of her chair and dropped her book in the creek.

  When she saw it was only me, she relaxed, then grabbed the book out of the water and pointed toward an employee access door to the right of the glass. I went over there and waited. The door, like every other employee access door at FunJungle, had a coded entry system with an electronic keypad.

  After a few seconds, Chloé opened it from the other side, glanced around to see if I was alone, then ushered me inside. “Cripes, Teddy. You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  “Sorry. I was only trying to get your attention.”

  Chloé led me down a concrete hallway with windows that looked out onto the exhibit, trying to shake the water off her book the whole way. “I know I’m not supposed to be in the exhibit like that,” she said guiltily. “But I’m required to stay here while I’m on duty, and it’s a lot nicer out there than it is in here.”

  She led me into her office. I could immediately see her point. The room was large, but dark and cramped, as it seemed to be designed more for storing panda supplies than getting any work done. Save for a small desk, the room was mostly shelves. They were filled with plastic toys for Li Ping, as well as lots of canisters of food and sheaves of bamboo that were turning brown, now that there was no panda to feed it to.

  On the plus side, though, the room smelled fantastic. Much better than any other office at FunJungle, most of which reeked of musk and animal pee.

  I sniffed the air. “Is that cinnamon?”

  “Yup.” Chloé pointed to a shelf where several restaurant-size tubs of it were lined up. “Li Ping loves it. Turns out, different pandas are into different smells. Some like honeysuckle, some like wintergreen oil. There’s one in San Diego who’s into rubbing alcohol. The idea is, once Li Ping gets here, whenever we want to lure her out on display for the tourists, we can just sprinkle some cinnamon around the exhibit and she’ll run right out.”

  The mention of cinnamon jogged my memory a bit. I couldn’t quite remember the whole conversation I’d had with Chloé the day before, but it seemed to me that she’d said something about food that was important. “So pandas eat stuff besides bamboo?” I asked.

  Chloé answered my question with a question. “Is this about Li Ping?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Did you ever tell the FBI to talk to me?”

  The question instantly confirmed that Molly hadn’t bothered to send anyone by. I felt a flash of annoyance. Before I could really think about what I was doing, I lied and said, “Yes. And they sent me.”

  “Instead of an agent?”

  “They’re really busy . . . and they figured I knew you anyhow. . . .”

  “And you’ve solved all those other crimes here,” Chloé added, coming around to the idea. “Plus, I’ll bet you know more about animals than any of them do.”

  “Right,” I said. “So . . . about the food?”

  “Oh. Right!” Chloé beamed, excited to be a part of the investigation. “In the wild, pandas eat mostly bamboo. It’s about ninety-nine percent of their diet. But they occasionally also eat things like small rodents or musk deer fawns.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “Pandas eat meat?”

  “Well, they’re bears. Although here, we weren’t really planning on feeding them meat. Most zoos don’t. But we did intend to supplement their bamboo with other things.” Chloé pointed to more large canisters on the shelves. “Sugar cane, rice, high-fiber biscuits. Plus some more perishable stuff like yams and apples.”

  “Can pandas get by without any bamboo at all, then?”

  “I suppose they could, but behaviorally, that probably wouldn’t be the best idea. The concept behind all panda conservation is to eventually release pandas back into the wild. Probably not Li Ping herself, but maybe her offspring. So the pandas need to know how to forage in their natural habitat, and that means learning to eat bamboo. Lots of it. Most of a panda’s waking life is spent eating. In the wild, they’ll spend about sixteen hours a day doing it. In captivity, we try to simulate that.”

  “And I guess their digestive tracts are designed for bamboo too?” I asked.

  “Actually,” Chloé replied, “they’re not.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Like I said, the panda is a bear, so it has the digestive tract of a carnivore. Meanwhile, bamboo is a grass.”

  “It is?”

  “The fastest-growing grass on earth. Some varieties can grow a few inches a day. Now, grass is hard enough to digest when an animal is designed for it, like a cow. They have really long digestive tracts with four stomachs to handle the job. And they regurgitate their cud to chew it repeatedly. But a panda doesn’t have anything like that. Its digestive tract is short, like ours. So it barely gets any nutrients at all from the bamboo. That’s why they have to eat so much of it.”

  Our conversation from the day before came back to me. “Right. Yesterday you said they have to eat twenty-five pounds a day.”

  “More than twenty-five,” Chloé corrected. “A big male can eat up to forty pounds of bamboo a day. But the average is around thirty.”

  Something clicked in my mind. I suddenly realized what the important thing I needed to know about pandas was. “So if they eat that much bamboo and they can’t digest it well, how much do they go to the bathroom?”

  “Constantly,” Chloé said. “They’ll poop forty times a day. Food goes straight through them. Feed one an apple, and it’ll be out the other end in fifteen minutes. The bamboo takes a bit longer, though. It’s not unusual for them to produce fifty pounds of poop in a day.”

  “But that’s even more weight than they take in,” I pointed out.

  “Exactly. The water they drink combines with the food in their digestive tracts. It comes out in these big old nuggets about the size and shape of an avocado.”

  “Holy cow.”

  “You mean holy something else,” Chloé said. “Everyone else at FunJungle thinks this is going to be a big glamour job. Like, I’m just going to sit here and pet the pandas all day. But they’re a lot of work. They’re tough to feed, they’re nearly impossible to breed, and man, that’s a lot of poop to clean up every day.”

  It’s still a lot less than the elephants, I thought. But I didn’t say it. As it was, my mind was racing with other ideas. I’d found out what I needed to know from Chloé. And
it changed everything about the investigation. I needed to get in touch with the FBI right away.

  “Well, thanks for your time,” I said, edging toward the door.

  Unfortunately, Chloé seemed desperate to talk. She’d been forgotten in all the chaos about the panda. A large part of her job was supposed to be talking to guests about the pandas, but she hadn’t had a chance to do it yet. So I was her test audience. “Want to know something else amazing about pandas?” she asked. “Their jaw muscles are massive! It comes from all that bamboo chewing. That’s why their faces look so round. Which is part of the reason they look so cute to us. Human baby faces are round too.”

  “Fascinating,” I said. “Sorry, but I really have to go. . . .”

  “Or did you know that a panda is only the size of a stick of butter when it’s born? And it only weighs three to five ounces. That’s 1/900th the weight of its mother.”

  Normally, I would have loved to hear more panda facts, but time was of the essence and I was desperate. I pulled out my phone, pretending a text had come in, and faked reading it. “Oh man!” I gasped. “This is from the FBI! I have to report back to them right away!”

  “Ooh!” Chloé exclaimed. “Has there been a break in the case?”

  “I think so. Thanks for all your help!”

  “Happy to give it. And if you want to come back to hear some more, feel free. I’m here all day. By myself. With nothing else to do.” She looked so sad, I almost stuck around for a few additional panda facts. But I couldn’t. Because if I was right about what I was thinking, then the FBI was making a huge mistake in their investigation.

  “I’ll come back soon,” I told her, then ducked out of the office, wound my way back through Panda Palace, and hurried across FunJungle.

  As I did, I quickly dialed Summer on my phone.

  She picked up on the second ring. “Hey. What’s up?”

  “I learned something important about the panda case. I need to talk to the FBI right away.”

  “It might be too late for that. They’re arresting Carlos Gomez right now.”

  “What?”

  “It’s all over the news. Where have you been?”

  “Investigating! And the FBI is wrong! I don’t think the NFF had anything to do with this!”

  Summer said something else, but I couldn’t make it out. I was crossing the dead zone for cell service at FunJungle.

  “Hold on, I can’t hear you,” I said.

  There was a lot of static on the line, and then I caught a faint bit of Summer’s voice. “I can barely hear you either. You’re . . .”

  I stopped and backed up a few feet, where the reception had been merely lousy, rather than horrible. “Summer? Hello?”

  “. . . getting to FunJungle right now . . .” she said. “Meet . . . Polar Pavi . . .”

  “Meet you at Polar Pavilion?” I repeated.

  There was something that sounded vaguely like “yes” followed by one last snippet of conversation: “. . . too hot outside . . .” After that, the call dropped.

  I took off for Polar Pavilion.

  Summer was right; it was way too hot outside. Even hotter than the day before. I hadn’t run far before I’d sweated right through my shirt.

  I was almost at Polar Pavilion when I heard someone shout my name. “Teddy!” There was a screech of tires to my left, followed by the scream of some tourists and a thump.

  I turned to see Marge O’Malley at the wheel of her golf cart. She was back on the job—and causing trouble as usual. She appeared to have slammed into a tourist and knocked the poor fellow into the landscaping. His pale legs waved in the air while the rest of him was buried headfirst in a shrubbery.

  “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” Marge snapped at him, then returned her attention to me. “Teddy! Wait right there! I need to talk to you!”

  I kept on running. The last thing I needed at the moment was Marge trying to horn in on my investigation. She wouldn’t be any help at all—and she was probably the only person at FunJungle who Molly O’Malley wanted to hear from less than me.

  Luckily, Marge couldn’t follow me right away. She still had to help the tourist she’d bowled over. So she kept bellowing at me, as though that might work. “Teddy! Teddy!!! Tedddddddyyyyyyy!!!!”

  I pretended like I didn’t hear her, which Marge must have known was an act. She was so loud, people in the parking lot had probably heard her. The next time she saw me, she’d definitely be angry with me, but at the moment, that was a relatively minor problem.

  I shoved through the doors into the Polar Pavilion. The Arctic air hit me like a slap in the face. Now that I was so sweaty, it was actually a bit too cold in the exhibit. It felt as though all the water on my body had instantly turned to ice, much of it in very uncomfortable places, like my armpits and my underwear.

  I glanced around for Summer but didn’t see her. It was feeding time for the penguins, so almost all the guests were crowded around that tank, rather than the polar bears. In fact, the polar bear viewing was about as empty as I’d ever seen it. The bears themselves weren’t putting on much of a show. They were merely lying on the ice, half-asleep. So even the few tourists in the area were migrating toward the penguins.

  If Summer wanted to meet me, I figured she wouldn’t be in the crowds; she’d be out where I could see her. Only, given that I hadn’t heard much of her call, I had no idea what she even thought her ETA at Polar Pavilion would be.

  I fished my phone out to see if she’d texted me more information.

  As I did, I suddenly became aware of one other person in the pavilion. Someone was coming up behind me very quickly. The thud of his feet on the floor gave me the uneasy sense of trouble approaching.

  I spun around to face him.

  Or, at least, I tried.

  Before I could, whoever it was grabbed me from behind and hoisted me into the air.

  Then he threw me over the railing into the polar bear exhibit.

  POLAR BEARS

  Even though I was only in the air for a second, if that, it felt as though time was stretched out. Each fraction of that second seemed considerably longer, as so much was happening at once.

  As I flew through the air, I torqued my body around, grasping for my attacker, figuring that my only recourse was to grab on to him and thus, keep from going over the rail. I didn’t spin quickly enough, though. He’d moved too fast and was much stronger than I was, flinging me surprisingly far out over the water. I didn’t have a chance to grab him—although I did catch a glimpse of his face.

  James Van Amburg.

  Even though this glimpse was incredibly brief, I still recognized the big, burly body and bald head from the photo Molly had shown me. The look on his face was eerily stoic, given what he’d just done to me. He showed the same amount of emotion most people showed for a fly they’d swatted.

  No one else in the exhibit seemed to have noticed me. James had chosen the perfect time to attack. Everyone else was watching the penguins.

  The polar bears noticed me, however. I heard both of them huff with what might have been excitement or hunger.

  I tried to yell for help.

  By then it was too late. Before I could make a sound, I hit the water.

  It was freezing. The shock of it instantly made my muscles seize and my lungs collapse, catching any noise I was about to make in my throat.

  I quickly sank below the surface. James had thrown me so hard that I plunged several feet down before stopping. I got a mouthful of water, which tasted disgustingly of salt and raw fish and chilled my insides as well.

  The moat was painted black so that the polar bears would stand out when viewed from above. Inside, it was dark as a cave, with only weak blue light filtering down through the ice chunks floating on the surface. The cold surrounded me and crushed me. It was like when you get a brain freeze from eating ice cream, only throughout your entire body.

  The cold clouded my brain, too. I knew there were polar bears in the exhi
bit with me. And I knew that, if the bears didn’t get me, the icy water could make me hypothermic and kill me as well. I had to move quickly if I wanted to live. But I couldn’t get my limbs to start moving the right way. I struggled to orient myself and paddle upward.

  I hadn’t had the time to take a good breath before being thrown into the water. My muscles and my brain were screaming for oxygen as I fought my way upward. The darkness of the moat seemed to close in.

  And then, miraculously, I burst through the surface. I clonked my head on a chunk of ice and sucked in air, thrilled that I was somehow still alive.

  For a few more seconds, at least.

  There was a loud grunt from behind me. I swiveled around to discover that one of the polar bears had dove into the moat and was coming for me. A huge blur of white sliced through the water.

  “Help!” I yelled, as loud as I could, then swam like heck.

  A few months before, during a different investigation, I had ended up in the shark tank. And while that had been scary, I had known that sharks generally don’t attack humans. Especially sharks in zoos, which are well fed and content.

  Polar bears were something else entirely.

  Polar bears in the wild occasionally stalked humans. And they had been known to maul people who’d ended up in their zoo exhibits. I was significantly smaller than the bears, and the smells that FunJungle pumped into the exhibit kept them stimulated and ready to hunt; to them, I was potential prey. Even if they weren’t hungry, they were still territorial, and I had invaded their space.

  I had found myself in some dangerous situations before, but I’d never felt that I was actively being hunted before. It was the most terrifying thing I’d ever experienced.

  I swam away as fast as I could, but weighed down by my wet clothes and shoes, I was no match for the bear. It quickly bore down on me.

  I reached the wall of the moat where I’d been flung over the railing, but there was no way to climb out. The surface was slick, and safety was seven feet above my head.

  There was a terrifying growl behind me. The polar bear lifted its head from the water and came in for the kill, so close I could smell the stink of its breath from its gaping mouth.