Gator on the Loose!

by Sue Stauffacher

  A tall, tanned man holding a broom handle came out from behind the fence and approached the crowd that had gathered. Keisha wondered if he was David Critchlow. To get to the front of the pen, he had to walk around a pond about half the size of the city pool. The pond was lined with some kind of black fabric that was held down every few feet with used tires.

  That’s when Keisha saw the alligators. Dozens of pairs of eyes and nostrils were bobbing in the water. With all her alligator knowledge, Keisha had never seen alligators do this. They seemed happy to her, floaty, like clouds.

  Instead of coming to the front of the enclosure, the man walked slowly around the edge of the pond, stepping over alligators and examining big-leaved plants lined up in black pots, which Keisha thought he must be ready to plant in the ground soon. As he moved a coil of hose, one of the larger alligators in the pond suddenly raised its head high in the air and brought it down—smack!—on the surface of the water.

  “What was that?” asked a boy in a blue baseball cap. His mama pulled him toward her as if the alligator were about to launch itself over the fence.

  “Mister, will you give it another piece of charcoal?” A little girl in a playsuit, even younger than Razi, was pointing at the alligators. She looked afraid and fascinated at the same time.

  The man laughed. “All in good time. And it’s David, by the way. I like that a lot better than ‘mister.’ We’re just getting a new recruit in the back, and I wanted to make sure we had the pen ready.

  “That head slap you saw just now was one of seven vocalizations we know that alligators make. As far as I can tell, that one is closest to a teenager’s whoop and holler.”

  As David took up his position by the fence opposite the crowd of onlookers, Keisha watched the alligators in the water and all around him. They seemed to move a little closer to him…. It was as if they hadn’t noticed him before and now they started to pay attention.

  “You see, every time I come into the enclosure, I need the alligators to see me doing other things. It wouldn’t be very good for them or for me if they just associated me with food.”

  “Put another rock on his tongue. Pleeeease!”

  Daddy came up behind Keisha and grabbed her shoulders. “Mission accomplished,” he whispered in her ear.

  “Can I see her before we leave?” Keisha whispered back.

  Daddy glanced up at David. “I think so,” he said.

  “All right, all right,” David said. He held up something in his hand. It did look like a piece of brown charcoal.

  “Not many people know that Purina Mills makes a food that is the perfect blend of vitamins, minerals and fiber for alligators. This is pretty much what we feed our group here. Unless they do something really big in training. Then they get a frozen rat or a quail.”

  “I didn’t know you could train alligators,” an older lady in a very OL pair of elastic-waist pants said.

  “Oh, you can train alligators. You just have to know what their limits are.”

  While David was speaking, Keisha noticed a medium-sized alligator stepping slowly toward him. At first, it put its head on one of David’s big wader boots. Then it curled its body in a half circle just behind David. Was this David’s special alligator? Keisha wondered. The one that was most like his pet?

  “Are you training them for the circus?” the little boy wanted to know.

  “No, no, nothing like that.” Though the alligator was behind him, David seemed to know it was there, because when it opened its mouth and let out a hiss, David turned and poked the back of its neck with the broom handle.

  Before anyone could stop him, the boy put his feet in the rungs of the first fence and began to climb. “Why are you hitting him? Don’t do that.”

  In one quick move, Daddy lifted the boy off the fence and set him next to his mother. David tipped his hat in appreciation.

  “I’m not hitting him. I’m correcting him. That’s a sensitive area, and they don’t like that, just as I don’t like to be hissed at.”

  Alligators were very cute, but Keisha thought she might not like having a congregation of them all around her. Right now, David had at least two dozen behind him. Most were in the pond, a few were in muddy wallows around the pond’s edge and more were using that slow half crawl that brought them closer and closer until they settled around his feet.

  “But they like you,” the little girl said. “Look, they’re all coming closer.”

  “Correction. They like this.” David held up the piece of alligator food.

  Twisting his cap backward, the little boy kicked at the fence. “What do you train them for, then?”

  “Well, as they get bigger, we want to be able to move them.” David pointed to the other side of the field. “In August, we’ll be putting them in their winter enclosure at night. It’s hard to make an alligator move if he doesn’t want to.”

  “So you can say ‘come,’ just like I do to my dog?”

  “Well, it’s a bit more complicated than training a dog because alligators don’t respond to language as well as dogs do. But with some hard work, S-P-O-T here”—David used his broom handle to point to an alligator standing off to the side—“has been trained to come forward for his treat.”

  Keisha glanced around at the little crowd that had grown to five, maybe six children her brother’s age. No one yelled out the name Spot as Razi would have done.

  Suddenly Grandma was behind her, rustling a big paper bag. Keisha had been thinking about using her allowance to buy Razi a plastic poison dart frog, but it looked like maybe Grandma had it covered.

  “Spot, come,” David said. Nothing happened.

  David leaned over so that he was closer to the alligator that must be Spot. How could he tell them apart? “Spot, come!”

  Suddenly Spot lifted his body off the ground. With four or five quick steps, he was at David’s feet. He opened his mouth.

  David tossed the alligator chow into the back of his mouth. At the moment Spot’s piece of alligator chow disappeared, three other alligators opened their mouths and hissed.

  “Watch out!” Grandma squeezed Keisha’s shoulder hard. “You’re about to be gator chow, David!”

  David straightened. “They’re like little kids pounding on the table. They want me to know they’re ready, too.”

  “Well, in my neighborhood, that’s a fighting noise.”

  “You can’t judge alligators by the way you think,” David told Grandma. “These guys”—he circled his broom handle all around him—“they’re just frogs with teeth.”

  Big teeth, Keisha thought. Lots and lots of them.

  A tractor sputtered by on the road, and a couple of the bigger “frogs with teeth” arched their necks so that their heads were up out of the water. Then they commenced to bellow. It was such a powerful noise, in addition to the tractor, which was doing a pretty good job making a powerful noise itself, that the children looked uncertain. Some covered their ears.

  “This is worse than the motocross,” said the boy in the blue baseball cap, pressing his hands to his ears.

  David shouted over the noise, “It’s just instinctive. They are responding to the noise as if there are other alligators in the area. They do that sometimes with tractors, motorcycles…. You should hear what they do when it thunders.”

  The children didn’t look too happy about this possibility.

  “Okay, so should we get a big one out here? Look out at the pond. You see lots of heads over there. Which one is the biggest?”

  David waited as the children jostled and pointed. It was generally agreed that the alligator in the center of the pond, the one that floated with most of its back showing as well as its eyes and nose, was the biggest.

  “You’re right! Claudius is our biggest alligator, but he used to be much bigger. He came from a zoo where he was in a very small pen. No one exercised him. They just fed him. He was four hundred pounds. He was so fat he couldn’t walk. He just scooted over the ground. We had to put him on a diet.
Any guesses on what is alligator diet food?”

  Suggestions bubbled up from the group around the enclosure. “Lettuce? Birdseed?”

  David formed a zero with his fingers. “Nothing. No food for nine months. As you might imagine, he didn’t like us very much. We made him waddle around for some exercise, but no food. He’s much better now. A trim three hundred pounds. So get your cameras ready. I’m going to call Claudius.”

  David waited while people dug in their bags.

  “Claudius. Come!”

  Unlike Spot, Claudius did not need a repeat invitation. Water streamed away from his snout as he lifted himself out of the water and his legs paddled him forward. There were a few alligators between Claudius and the food in David’s hand. Claudius churned over them, stepping on heads and backs. The alligators near David scuttled away. Claudius was the king. He was the size of a movie alligator! Keisha thought he must be at least twelve feet long. When he opened his mouth, David dropped two pellets in. With one swallow, they were gone.

  Claudius liked his food! The cameras clicked away.

  Keisha heard her name being called. She turned to see Carmen hurrying toward them with a squirming bundle in her arms.

  “I thought before you left, you would like to hold our little guy, Alphabet Soup.”

  The other children crowded around Carmen and Keisha.

  “Let me see! Can I hold him, too?”

  The alligator lay still in Carmen’s hands, his little legs dangling, as if being carried by a human being was almost too much for him to handle. He was not even half the size of Pumpkin-Petunia and had a band around his mouth.

  “Why isn’t he with the other ones?” the girl in the playsuit wanted to know.

  “Because he’s too small yet,” Carmen told her. “They might eat him. Or a blue heron or a sandhill crane might make him into dinner.”

  “Lady, can I hold that, too?” asked the boy in the baseball cap.

  “I’m going to show Keisha how to hold him first. You have to hold him in a special way to keep control,” Carmen said.

  She took Keisha’s right hand and placed her palm just beneath the alligator’s front legs. “Now curl your index finger up around its neck and close your left hand around its back legs.” As soon as Carmen had transferred Alphabet Soup to Keisha, the little alligator started twisting all over the place.

  “Just hold on,” Carmen said. “He’s doing the death roll.”

  Keisha was too polite to tell Carmen that she knew what the death roll was. She tried not to fight the alligator but to hold on and let him wriggle.

  “Keisha.” Daddy had come up behind her. He was letting her know that he was there if she needed him. “This is what the alligator was doing with Dan, remember?”

  “The death roll?” Keisha asked, taking some deep breaths.

  Just as suddenly as it had begun twisting and turning, the alligator stopped. It lay limp in Keisha’s hands, its little legs dangling again, eyes closed. Keisha held him up so that she could see his second eyelid, the scales behind his ear holes, his needle-like teeth. She didn’t care what anybody said about alligators. She thought they were adorable.

  “You can see why kids would want one,” Carmen said to the crowd around them. “What I tell children when they ask their parents to buy them an alligator is: What would happen if I put you in a little tank? You’d still grow big, wouldn’t you?”

  “Sweetie …” Daddy took Keisha’s hand. “We better collect Grandma and say good-bye.”

  Keisha asked Daddy if she could sit on his shoulders. She wanted to see the alligator sanctuary from a bird’s-eye view. Daddy understood. He bent down and Keisha got on. She looked at the alligators rolling in the grass. She watched them lying in their wallows and floating on the edge of the pond as if suspended. Every rescued alligator deserved a place like this.

  Keisha leaned over to whisper in Daddy’s ear, “Can we visit Pumpkin-Petunia now?”

  Daddy looked over at David, who was talking to a new group of visitors. He pointed to the back enclosure, the one behind the big fence. David gave him a thumbs-up. Daddy started off at a trot that joggled Keisha so much she had to grab his head.

  “My eyes! I’m blind.” He turned around in a circle.

  “Daddy!” Keisha giggled. “People are looking.”

  “Oh, in that case.” Daddy went down on one knee so Keisha could climb off. “We don’t want anyone following us.” They walked around the corner of the enclosure. Several big pens had been set up, with high walls around the sides and back and the same wire fencing at the front. There were much larger alligators in the first and second pens. The third seemed to be empty, except for a little rustling grass near the back of the pen, where the uncut grass grew tall. That was where Keisha thought Pumpkin-Petunia might be hiding. She looked around the big pen and noticed it had its very own wallow.

  “Can I take a picture of Pumpkin-Petunia and her wallow?” she asked. “To show Razi?”

  “Sure.” Daddy handed Keisha his cell phone.

  Keisha stood quietly, waiting for a glimpse of Pumpkin-Petunia, but her scaly friend didn’t want to be around humans at the moment. Keisha thought maybe she’d had enough of humans for a while. Though it was hard to say good-bye, Keisha felt so much better about her little alligator’s life now. Pumpkin-Petunia could be around other alligators—when she grew big enough, so they wouldn’t eat her. She would be in a large pen with grass and muddy places just like her native home.

  It wasn’t a perfect happy-movie ending for Pumpkin-Petunia because she could never go back to the wild. But when Razi told the story, Pumpkin-Petunia would “and then” herself to a pretty good “the end” here at the Critchlow Alligator Sanctuary. And Keisha would even be able to visit her!

  She settled for taking pictures of the big alligators and the wallows. As she was reviewing the pictures of the big muddy holes, she said, “Maybe I won’t show these to Razi. Maybe we’ll just keep these for reference.”

  “Good point,” Daddy said. “Why give Razi more ideas than he already has?”

  Chapter Twelve

  Back home, Keisha watched Razi splashing in the bathtub and thought about what Carmen had said about alligators and how they didn’t stop growing big.

  “Razi, did you know that a baby alligator will grow about a foot a year? Boy alligators grow up to fifteen feet, and girl alligators are around nine.”

  “That’s past my eyebrows,” Razi said, sticking a clump of bubble-bath foam on his chin. “I want to get out now. Close your eyes, Keisha.”

  Keisha closed her eyes. She was wondering how she could teach people that those cute little alligator hatchlings could grow big. She grabbed the bath towel and held it out to Razi, closing her eyes until she heard the water slosh.

  “Razi, don’t forget to shake off before you step—”

  Too late. Razi was climbing over the side of the tub. Keisha pressed her eyes closed again. Water flew everywhere. Razi must be dancing from foot to foot.

  “Just put something on so I can see again!”

  “It’s time to measure me. You can open your eyes.” Dressed in his pajama bottoms, Razi had pulled the towel around him like a superhero cape.

  Keisha rub-a-dubbed Razi with the towel until Mama appeared in the bathroom doorway.

  “Do you think you grow like a reed, Mr. Razi Carter? I just measured you a few days ago.”

  “I grow like an alligator!” Razi said. “A foot a year.”

  There was a place behind the bathroom door where the Carters kept a pencil record of the children as they grew. Mama had put a small mark in red for every foot so the children could see their progress. Razi stood there, his damp head making a spot on the wall.

  The image of Razi waiting to be measured inspired Keisha. “Razi, that’s a great idea!”

  Keisha handed Mama Razi’s towel and ran to find the phone. When Aaliyah picked up, Keisha could barely contain her excitement: “I think I know how we can make some money for t
he alligator sanctuary and educate people about not buying alligator babies and get some free advertising for Carters’ Urban Rescue,” she said, all in one breath. “I just don’t know how we’re going to market it.”

  “Let me get my lemonade,” Aaliyah said, “and a piece of paper.”

  *

  The next morning, Daddy took Razi and the baby to the park because Keisha needed kids who colored inside the lines. Zeke and Zack and Aaliyah and Wen all volunteered. Grandma Alice found a copyright-free drawing of an alligator on the Internet, and Mama projected it on the wall. The children copied it onto a piece of butcher paper, which they then spread out on the kitchen table to make the Alligator Growth Chart, brought to you by Carters’ Urban Rescue.

  Everyone began to color in the alligator. Grandma had to raid her own colored-pencil box to get enough greens.

  From her research on the Internet, Aaliyah thought the poster should be three feet long and would hang between three and six feet from the floor. It’s at those heights that most kids want to know how fast they’re growing. This meant that the children only had room to picture the alligator from tummy to snout, but Mama said that was okay because children could imagine the rest.

  “Perfect,” Mama said. “When they grow close to the top, they will be teenagers, and yet this is the size of a six-year-old alligator.”

  “How are we going to copy this?” Aaliyah asked. “Do we have a budget? Color copies cost a lot of money.”

  “Mr. Malone told Daddy he would help us out using the zoo’s big printer in the education office.”

  Zeke stood back, examining their efforts. “Hmmm … it still needs something. How about if we say here: ‘You’re as high as an alligator eye’?”

  “Good idea, but you have to print neat.”

  “Let Wen do it. She’s got the best handwriting.”

  They worked all morning, with only one chin-chin and pomegranate juice break.