I looked at it and laughed.
“Old granny Eaton had one of the first black-owned businesses in Harlem,” Mercer said. “We didn’t know her, of course, but we’ve heard plenty of stories about Leola’s Plumes.”
There was a picture of the handsome woman in front of her plume shop, wearing a grand hat with several long feathers pointing back from the brim over her shoulder.
Mike was trying to read along with me, but I was moving too fast. “What’d he do to her?”
“The style of the day, according to my wife,” Mercer said, “involved feathers on the fanciest hats. The bigger the better. Peacock, ostrich, birds of paradise. But this Hornaday dude wrote a clause into the Tariff Act of 1913 that forbade the importation of wild-bird plumage for millinery purposes. Border guards actually seized shipments of feathers, if you can believe it—especially from Australia and the South Seas islands, where these tropical birds flourished.”
“Poor Leola,” I said.
“Then the Audubon Society piled on,” Mercer said. “They argued that American boys would be shooting domestic birds to fill the gap. Ducks, geese, pheasants. You get the picture.”
“What happened to Leola?” I asked.
“She moved on to beaded gowns. Nobody to bust her bubble with beads.”
In a minute, we spotted Deirdre in front of the old Heads and Horns building, talking with another young woman. When we reached them, the introductions began.
“I’m tied up in meetings all afternoon,” Deirdre said. “But you have a much better guide in Hillary Hawes. She’s been a zookeeper with us for eight years, so she’s the one to ask about the animals.”
Deirdre turned to go back into the building, then stopped and looked at me. “I’ve got a feeling that there’s something you’re not telling me,” she said. “A reason you’re here that isn’t just about a memorial service.”
“To tell you the truth, Deirdre, I can’t quite explain it all myself,” I said, letting down my guard. “But it’s an instinct I’ve got, and I think I owe it to Paul Battaglia to follow through with what my gut is saying. I owe it to you to tell you—as soon as I know.”
“Well,” she said, loosening up with the hint of a smile, “the tours are free.”
I knew what she was thinking. She didn’t want me to bring any of my bad karma into her animal safe haven. I had that same concern.
“Where would you like to start?” Hillary asked Mike.
“You’ll have to tell us,” he said. “It’s been too long.”
“Hop on,” she said, pointing to her six-seater golf cart. “I’ll give you some highlights and you tell me when to slow down and dig deeper.”
“Sounds fair,” Mike said, sitting in the front beside her.
Mercer and I took the middle row.
“I’ve got an obvious place to go,” she said. “Deirdre told me you’re interested in endangered species.”
“Thanks.”
“Have either of you guys been to that little building?”
“Not I,” Mike said.
“No,” Mercer added. “Why?”
“As you can see from the architecture, it’s one of the original campus buildings,” Hillary said.
It was a small structure, handsomely designed, like a nineteenth-century office building.
“It’s a police precinct,” she said.
“C’mon,” Mike said, pointing at the building with a laugh. “There’s no precinct at the zoo. There’s no zoo patrol.”
“We have our own security,” she said, “but this is actually a substation of the Forty-Eighth Precinct.”
“No way,” Mike said, “with real live cops?”
“Not many of them. You’ll see a cop on a scooter from time to time, especially in the summer. They’re just assigned during the day, in case a child gets separated from a parent, or someone drops a handbag in the African Plains.”
“Kind of suits me perfectly,” he said.
“No homicides here,” Hillary said.
“In this Bronx wilderness?” Mercer asked. “No murders?”
“Let’s just say we’ve had some maulings over the decades. People who wound up on the wrong side of the enclosure, but it’s their own fault,” Hillary said. “There was actually a teenager who came here in the 1920s, after her debutante party. She and her friends slipped in, pretty intoxicated, and she started dancing with a polar bear.”
“Unhappy ending?” he asked.
“She left the zoo short one arm, as the story goes,” she said. “And you probably read about the guy who jumped off the monorail a few years ago.”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “And some tigers tried to gnaw on him.”
“They didn’t get much,” Hillary said, “but he came out fine. Although nobody has a clue why he did it.”
“Those were trespassers,” Mike said. “The animals couldn’t have been guilty.”
“They weren’t,” she said. “Never a homicide here, Mike. So you just stay where you are.”
Hillary drove the cart past the Children’s Zoo and around the Bug Carousel, and stopped beyond the Butterfly Garden. I could see how easy it would be to lose ourselves in the beauty of the wildlife while tackling a more serious task.
She parked and we got off to follow her, through a short tunnel that brought us out—according to the signage—in the Congo Gorilla Forest.
“I remember a day when all the great apes were in the Primate House,” Mike said. “Cement walls and iron bars. Kind of the Attica of the animal world.”
“Before my time,” Hillary said. “But that has all changed. We’ve got acres and acres here, and of course these glass enclosures are a lot more civilized, aren’t they?”
“Who are we looking at?” Mercer asked.
“That’s Ernie,” she said.
“Big boy,” Mike said, getting up close to the glass.
“Thirty-five years old, and he weighs around five hundred pounds.”
“He’s a silverback gorilla,” Mercer said, “isn’t he?”
“Yes, the adult males grow that distinctive silver stripe down the center of their backs.”
“Born in the Congo?” I asked.
“Actually not,” Hillary said. “In Cleveland, like most other gorillas in our zoo populations throughout the country—Cleveland’s got a great gorilla-breeding program—though both Ernie’s parents were captured in the wild.”
“Hey, he survived Cleveland,” Mike said, watching as a baby gorilla swung from a viny branch and jumped onto his back. “Must be a tough guy. And none of the other gorillas in sight look anywhere near his size.”
“That’s because they’re all female or his kids,” Hillary said. “It’s his harem. Ernie’s the alpha dog in this group, and you can’t have two males around the same troop of females—not here, and not in the wild.”
“He doesn’t mind that little guy jumping onto his back?” Mike asked.
“Ernie loves his babies,” she said. “Gorillas are very social animals.”
“What does he eat to get that big?”
“Gorillas are herbivores, Mike,” Hillary said. “They mostly eat plants.”
Mike kept walking through the exhibit, watching the gorillas interact. “I guess that’s why there are no leaves left on the trees.”
“The keepers feed them leaves every day,” Hillary said, laughing at Mike. “That particular tree isn’t real.”
“What do you mean?” he said, staring into the enclosure at the fallen tree trunk as close to his nose as the piece of glass between them would allow.
“We’ve got a workshop on-site where environmental objects are simulated.”
“You’re telling me that’s fake?” Mike asked. “That huge tree trunk and all those vines the baby gorillas are swinging on?”
“Completel
y man-made,” Hillary said. “This exhibit is indoors and outdoors, as you can see, and covers more than six acres, one acre of which is this particular enclosure.”
“Time changes everything,” Mike said. “Now it’s the humans who are penned in and the gorillas roam free.”
“That’s the plan. You won’t see any bars in our park. There’s this glass wall to keep the animals in,” Hillary said, “but mostly they’re separated from other species—and us—by ravines and streams and artificial cliffs, and fences around the perimeters.”
We continued on our way on the wooden path, through the exhibit.
“Tell me about the trees,” Mike said.
“One of our best features,” Hillary said. “About half of the trees in the exhibit—and all of the green plants—are real. The others are fakes, but require painstaking work to be able to fool you.”
“It did the job. That trunk was about seven feet in diameter.”
“There’s an entire tree crew in our shop,” she explained. “The foreman starts by making a scale model out of clay. That’s then built up and out—full size—with heavy steel pipes to create the trunk itself, and a very lightweight steel—something that can be bent and shaped—to make the limbs. The form is finished with a sort of mesh skin that they stretch over the tree trunk and then spray with an epoxy resin.”
“Tricked me for sure,” Mike said.
I wanted to find out if we were on a fool’s errand or had some purpose here.
“So what are the biggest dangers for these magnificent creatures, back in the Congo?” I asked.
“Three things, primarily,” Hillary said. “They live in a part of the world that’s been savaged by civil wars, so gorillas have been caught in the cross fire for decades. Then there’s the destruction of their habitat, as people encroach on the places where they’ve lived—the heavily forested parts of the Congo.”
She paused to watch a couple of Ernie’s kids playing with each other—a primate hide-and-seek around the giant enclosure.
“The third reason for the decline in population is poaching, of course,” she said. “There are probably fewer than nine hundred mountain gorillas left—they’re really facing extinction, as well as all the other subspecies. So you combine humans, habitat, and throw in that they also get snared in traps that are intended for other animals, like antelope, bongos, and kobs. That’s one of the reasons we work so hard on breeding efforts in zoological parks like this one.”
The poaching interested me. I hadn’t thought gorillas were hunted like rhinos but I was obviously wrong. “Poached for what?”
Hillary looked at me, as though to gauge my reaction. “For their meat, Alex. For bushmeat.”
“Bushmeat?” I asked. “Who would eat that?”
“You’d be surprised. There are a lot of locals in the Congo—men who work in the tantalite mines or loggers, and they can’t find much else in the forest to keep them going.”
“So they shoot gorillas?”
“Yes. They get about six dollars for a piece of meat the size of Mercer’s hand.”
It didn’t sound like the kind of poaching that supported an international cartel. I looked at these intelligent primates, who seemed to be mimicking our behavior so closely, and swallowed hard in disgust at the thought of harming them.
Mike picked up the thread. “We know a lot of the animals have uses in traditional medicines,” he said. “Is the gorilla one of them?”
“Occasionally,” Hillary said.
“Like an ingredient in Asian healing recipes?” he asked, going to the same continent I was thinking about.
“No. The Asians don’t seem to be interested in gorillas, thankfully.”
There goes that connection, I thought.
“Who, then?” Mercer said.
“It’s pretty much a local tradition,” she said. “Many of the Congolese feed gorilla meat to young boys in the belief it will make them grow strong or give them courage.”
Somehow, I couldn’t see Paul Battaglia risking his life for bushmeat.
“No international angle to gorillas?” I asked.
Hillary Hawes shook her head. “But I can show you plenty of that, if you’re looking for risky business,” she said, winding us along the path and back toward her cart.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“We haven’t discussed trafficking yet.”
“Wild animals?” Mike said. “Trafficked? You mean they’re smuggled out of Africa and shipped abroad?”
“We can try to stop the slaughter,” Hillary said, “but as long as there is a demand for products, the animals—and their most valuable parts—will be trafficked around the world. That’s where the big money is—and that’s what traffickers think is worth killing for.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“Talk to us about trafficking,” I said.
Hillary sat behind the wheel of the cart and started to drive. “I’m a keeper, you understand. I care for the animals here. I’ll certainly tell you what I know, and Deirdre can also point you in the right direction.”
“What’s here?” Mike asked. “What’s in this zoo that’s endangered and trafficked?”
“Where do you want to start?” she said, trying to deal with Mike’s attitude as the sightseeing tour changed to a more intense form of conversation. “I don’t know where you want me to go.”
“Just drive,” he said. “Take us to see things you know about.”
“I can do that, but I meant information. What are you looking for?”
“Years ago,” I said, trying to stay loose and easy with Hillary, “there was a Supreme Court decision on pornography that resulted in a justice writing one of the most famous lines in that institution’s history. He couldn’t define the materials that fit the definition of hard-core pornography, but Justice Stewart famously said, ‘I know it when I see it.’”
“I guess I can guide you that far,” Hillary said, stepping on the accelerator. “Do you know about pangolins?”
“Did you say ‘penguins’?” Mercer asked.
“No, pangolins. They’re the most trafficked mammals in the world.”
“I’ve never heard of them,” I said.
“Most Americans haven’t, but they’re incredibly valuable,” Hillary said. “Think of them as small anteaters, covered with scales. Four species live in sub-Saharan Africa, and four in Asia.”
“What are they trafficked for?”
“Again, for their meat. But unlike gorillas, the pangolins are considered a delicacy, so they’re in much greater demand beyond Africa than bushmeat is,” she said. “And then there are the pangolin’s scales.”
“Literally, the scales that cover them?” I said.
“Yes. The scales are made of keratin,” she said, “which is the same substance as our fingernails. But the Asians think it cures a variety of ailments—so they roast the scales or boil them in oil, then serve them up. It’s traditional Chinese medicine.”
“Got it. All about Asia,” Mike said. I could see the imaginary wheels turning in his mind as he registered the Chinese association. “Where to now?”
“I’m getting wilder,” Hillary said. She juiced the cart and sped on the roadway—dodging school groups, parents, strollers, and tourists to get to the entrance to the monorail, which was literally called a Ride on the Wild Side.
She skipped past the waiting crowd of visitors—everyone from ticket takers to security seemed to know her—and took us to the front of the line.
“Best way to show you the most animals is this way—from above—over the Asian wildlife preserve. You’ll see everything, pick out what you want to know more about, and I’ll answer all your questions, if I can.”
One of the trains was pulling out of the station as we climbed the stairs to get to it.
“Don’t worry,” Hillary said.
“We usually run three or four of these a day—nine cars per train—so there’ll be another one along in ten or twelve minutes. It’s only a twenty-minute ride. You’re lucky, because even though the park is open all winter, this ride shuts down at the end of this month.”
“Why’s that?” Mike asked.
“Not all of the animals can survive outside all winter,” she said. “You can’t quite spot them from the air, but behind each of these areas, there are corrals where they get fed and spend the night. They’re sheltered when they need to be. That’s where their food is kept, too—apples and fruit and greens. All in the corrals.”
“What happened to the Skyfari?” Mike said.
“I remember that,” I said. “Trams like ski gondolas that carried us over the African plains. I was always terrified—when the high winds started to blow—that I’d wind up as lunch for one of the lions.”
“Another one of your misplaced fears, Coop,” Mike said.
“They’re out of service these last few years,” Hillary said. “Too many mechanical problems, and everyone loves the monorail even more.”
We had our own private monorail trip, high above the wide-open spaces that were home to an astounding variety of species. As promised, none were penned or restricted to small places. Each looked to be quite at home, and if there were fences around them, they were quite invisible to us.
Hillary provided the commentary as we cruised slowly on our trek. The rail car was open, too, so I asked Mike for his phone and started to photograph the animals. Mercer was writing down the details.
“The first thing you see below us are deer and antelope,” she said. “This part of the park encompasses more than thirty acres, so the designers were really able to re-create the habitats of their homes.”
“It looks like there are horses grazing with the deer,” Mercer said.
“There are. Mongolian wild horses. Stockier animals than the horses you know, with a short mane that looks like a Mohawk cut,” Hillary said.
“They’re so beautiful,” I said.
“They were believed to be extinct in the wild,” she said. “Then they were reintroduced a few years ago, and while endangered—though not from poaching—they seem to be coming back.”
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