Trudy, the only intern on Art’s list who was still with us over the summer, came on. “I’m inside. I was getting lunch together, but I’m going to the gate as soon as I can find keys.” It didn’t matter that it was only ten a.m. and I was currently delivering the last round of breakfast. Food prep was probably the biggest job we did at the center. Trudy was working up lunch so our next round of volunteers would be able to step up to a table and start chopping as soon as they arrived around noon.
One of our daylong volunteers, Darnell, entered the conversation. “I’m on my way up there now. I can’t see anything but the trees yet.” For a moment, he went silent, though we could hear his engine rumbling in the background as he failed to let go of the “send” button. Then he said, “Oh . . . man. You gotta . . . Art! Turn your sound back on!” Another pause, then, “He sees me talking on this thing and he’s waving me to put it down. He’s out of the cart.” The cart would be one of the center’s two golf carts, which we frequently used to move around the property. Darnell continued, “He’s exactly right. There’s an orangutan outside the gate, and it’s loose.”
“Get Art back in his vehicle!” Lance shouted. “Carry him if you have to.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Darnell said. “But he’s got the gate open.”
“Who opened the gate?” Lance demanded.
“He did,” Darnell said. “Art did. Just now. And he’s walking toward it.”
Lance said, “Get Art in your vehicle if you can.”
Darnell didn’t answer, perhaps having finally obeyed Art’s instructions. Lance reached the barn and fought with the door, too impatient to treat the frame as gently as was required to open it rapidly. I took his hands off the handle, jiggled it gently, then twisted and pulled.
The outside smells gave way to contrasting odors of hay bales and veterinary disinfectants as we passed the clinic inside the barn. Although we shared our veterinarian with the animal husbandry department at Ironweed University, most of our larger primates were conditioned to present their body parts for shots, blood drawing, and light wound care without leaving their enclosures.
The clinic’s antiseptic smell faded and Lance strode in ahead of me. “What does Art think he’s doing?” He jammed his radio back in its holster. “If there’s seriously an ape . . . and if it isn’t in a cage . . .” he spluttered to a halt in front of Trudy, who was holding her keys up, waiting for us. She jingled the set, and the two of them walked out of food prep together.
Lance continued, “He cannot confront an orangutan on his own. How can he think of opening the gate and letting it in?” There was no time for me to answer because he’s Art, and when has logic or common sense ever stopped him from doing whatever crossed his mind?
“Come on!” Lance took the keychain out of Trudy’s hand, but then seemed to realize what he’d done and handed it right back. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t . . . we can’t . . .”
“I know,” Trudy said. “We’re in a rush. Come on.”
Neither of them even mentioned Lance’s and my truck, the keys to which were in my pocket. I took a different route, detouring to the offices beyond the food prep tables. I grabbed a smaller key and motioned them both to the other golf cart, the one Art hadn’t taken with him to the gate. “If Art has the radio off, it’s for noise. Our cars are going to be too loud. If Darnell didn’t already spook it in that SUV, we’d be sure to if we came roaring up in Trudy’s . . . car.” I’d nearly called Trudy’s worn sedan a wreck.
“We need to ensure our own safety!” Lance pointed out.
“Then we’ll climb in with Darnell,” I said. “Do not stand there arguing.”
Trudy jumped in beside me, and Lance ran ahead to open the larger sliding doors that we use to get vehicles into and out of the barn. As Trudy and I drove by him, Lance jumped onto the rack we normally use for carrying food or sedated primates to and from the farthest enclosures. We didn’t waste time closing the doors as we hurried down the service road.
Our preserve is located in an old-growth forest with a lot of burr oak and maple trees. So our ride was a shady one, spent in the company of trunks and loamy earth. A golf cart goes at about fifteen miles an hour even when it is absolutely racing. So, in spite of my jamming the accelerator pedal to the floor, it felt like eons before we pulled up behind Darnell’s tan SUV.
Darnell’s SUV completely blocked the view in one direction, and the trees crowded in on either side, preventing us from assessing the situation from our distance. Once I stopped the cart, we all sat for a moment. “What now?” Trudy whispered.
Lance swung down from the rack and moved ahead on soft feet, motioning Trudy and I to stay put. “Now, we wait,” he whispered as he passed us.
“Damned machismo,” I muttered, and climbed out to follow him, Trudy close behind.
He stopped to the left of the SUV’s hood, arms raised like he wanted to grab Art and pull him back. I had to peer under one of those lifted arms while Trudy stood on her tiptoes behind me and tried to look over his shoulder. To our right, Darnell still sat at the wheel, doors shut, windows up. He was so focused on the scene unfolding in front of him that he didn’t seem to notice our arrival from behind.
And really, it was impossible not to stare. Darnell was right on both counts. Art’s orangutan was real, and there was nothing separating us from it, because Art had opened the gate. Art walked slowly forward, beckoning in gentle welcome. A textbook case of why we don’t invite tourists on the premises, but the behavior was coming from the facility director. Good that the animal was too busy pulling apart the wooden crate it had apparently been transported in to pay attention to much else. It seemed the arrival of our vehicles hadn’t signified anything worthwhile. Which meant we might have time to get Art back to safety. He knew we couldn’t walk up to an unknown ape and strike up a friendship.
We interact with our primates, but we do it in a controlled way. And we don’t do it without the safety of a solid enclosure or cage between ourselves and our charges. We also don’t handle orangutans at all, and I only seemed able to remember tidbits about them. So much of my recent knowledge came from experience with other species. What I needed right now was a good book. Or, that failing, an orangutan handler. But aside from zoos, the only accredited facility in the US that handled these great apes was in Florida.
Art murmured to the orangutan as he moved. I could hear his voice, but not the words, though I knew from his tone the things he would be saying. “Poor guy, looks like you’ve had a rough day. Bet somebody took you out for a ride and then left you here. But it’s fine now, because I’m here. I can help you out.” It was the kind of thing he said to every primate that came into our care. The kind of thing we all said to our new charges. The rest of us said the words to focus ourselves and establish some kind of vocal interaction. Art said them for the animals.
Art meant the orangutan to hear and understand him, even though his intellect must have been telling him that he needed to shut up and get in, if not Darnell’s SUV, then at least the golf cart he had driven down to the gate. But he didn’t even look behind him, and the SUV sat sandwiched between the two golf carts on our little service road, quite as if it had been parked there for the long term.
Earlier, I had thought that this kind of behavior was Art at his most batty. Now, I thought it was Art returning to his childhood. When he was a boy, Art’s mother gave him a monkey for his birthday. By the time the creature was a few years old, it had to wear a muzzle except when it was caged. Realizing that his parents were planning something dire, the young Art ran away to the zoo with it. He happened onto a sympathetic keeper who made room for Art’s little animal. And from the day he met that kindly zoo director, Art had been on his way to a career in primatology.
With that much experience, Art knew that the animal at our gates couldn’t possibly understand him. His conversations with the staff always came back to the fact that we needed to follow established patterns of positive reinforcement using re
wards and target and clicker training to achieve desired behaviors in our own captive population. It wasn’t that the primates lacked intelligence. Rather, they didn’t think like humans, and we, as their caretakers, had a responsibility to communicate with them in ways they could understand. But Art, in spite of what he knew, still believed the right tone and body language could convey a complete message. He was still healing the little kid who had to donate his own pet to save it from euthanasia. He was still personally rescuing all the other primates facing down similar fates.
He took seriously his role as a caregiver to unwanted creatures who had outgrown social roles they never should have been assigned. He wanted them to know they had found a true home at last when they entered our enclosures. Which was fine, except when he did something stupid.
Lance muttered, “You’re going to get yourself killed, Art.” But he spoke so softly that even I barely heard him. Art was too far ahead. Reaching out to pull him back was impossible. And none of us wanted to spook the animal the man was trying to cozy up to. Not to mention nobody brought a dart gun to the party.
We owned them. Sometimes, especially if we were called into a bad situation by the police, wary animals could only be sedated with darts. But estimating the weight of a full-grown orangutan would have required seeing it first. Not to mention that this whole adventure had started with honking. That creature arrived in a car, and it was in the middle of an adrenaline rush, which could completely neutralize the tranquilizer. A dart would probably only startle it and make it mad. I was relieved we’d forgotten the guns.
But then, it was pretty clear we needed something. The orangutan didn’t look or smell like it was having the most winning day so far. Even from a distance, I could see that its orange hair looked dull and dirty. More than that, the hair was obviously tousled and matted, the back hair trailing down to the ground in dreadlocks that must have been collecting excretions. A rank odor of feces and decay emanated from the animal so strongly that I couldn’t imagine coming into close contact with it without first putting on several layers of facial mask. It was like standing next to garbage.
Possibly, it would be so exhausted that Art could coax it through the gate, and we could get Art into Darnell’s SUV to talk about the situation. If it was conditioned to humans, it would consider the fence a barrier, even though it could easily vault over it. Maybe we could get it in and work from there. It wasn’t a healthy animal, and I wished I could recall the list of diseases it might be carrying. I found myself simultaneously hoping that its bad health would prevent it from hurting Art and fearing that those conditions would make it more likely to lash out. But Arthur Jamison Hooper was not considering these things. He was walking forward with the very clear intent of getting the newcomer in.
“Jesus, Art,” I muttered.
The center was Art’s creation. It was his baby. He was a true conservationist who understood that monkeys and apes are not at all like the differently-sized humans television shows and films would have us believe. Even as youths, they can have behaviors that seem erratic to untrained eyes. But youngsters are smaller, less likely to break skin and bones when they act outside human expectations. And this was no youth. Yet Art was an impulsive man, somewhat unpredictable himself, and quite convinced of his own charms. Like all of us, he talked to the animals in our care while he tended to them. But he was demonstrating his most prominent trait right now, a complete lack of common sense. Or rather, a complete inability to prioritize common sense over love. Art considered himself personally responsible for everything that happened at the center. He thought he could fix anything. Rather than wait for the rest of us to arrive after his hurried call on the radio, he had taken action.
“Where can we even put it?” Trudy whispered.
That was another problem. We weren’t equipped for orangutans. We had no enclosure, except for the one already home to fifteen chimpanzees, that could house a primate this big for any long term. And we couldn’t dump a new housemate on the chimps. The newcomer needed to be quarantined until we could get him, if not directly to Florida, then at least to a zoo.
In fact, a zoo sounded like an excellent idea. All of the regional zoos had orangutans. Perhaps one of them could house this animal until the folks from down south could collect it. Our first call would be to the Ohio Zoo, where our friend Christian Baker worked as a keeper. He and his staff had been part of the crew that had intervened to save the lives of several animals when a couple of angry former employees in Michigan managed to turn loose an entire private zoo. Many animals were shot when they gamboled into town, but the keepers had saved a few. Perhaps they could lure in and trap this orangutan.
We had acted as intermediaries in the past, when an orangutan in an Indiana roadside zoo had suddenly become an inappropriate attraction. But again, in that case, we’d quickly gotten help from our friends at the Ohio Zoo.
The orangutan turned. The plate-like cheek pads that gave the top half of the animal’s face its squashed appearance rotated away from the crate and toward our director. Art shifted his own body seamlessly into reverse. The big ape took one step, then another, and a third to follow before it stopped again, looking around at its environment in complete befuddlement.
And then it bellowed, a furious belch vocalization that startled me backwards several steps.
The animal’s meaning was clear. It considered Art an intruder into its territory and wanted him out. When Art suddenly stopped moving backwards, the orangutan charged, screeching threats as it ran. It used both its hands and feet to surge forward. Before any of us could act, one great hairy arm shot out and batted Art out of the way before the animal passed him and bolted into the trees, still vocalizing loudly.
Art staggered a few feet and landed beside the road with a soft whuff. Darnell shoved open his door and jumped out to race forward with Lance. Art jumped up almost as soon as he hit the ground and hobbled toward the SUV, his common sense seemingly restored by the rough landing. So Darnell scrambled back in and leaned across to open his passenger door instead, while the rest of us piled gracelessly into the back.
Art reached the vehicle as I dragged myself out from under the pile of me, Lance, and Trudy. Art was scolding us: “You came too soon! You came too soon!”
The orangutan had stopped short at the tree line, and it now stood huffing at our vehicle, deciding whether or not it was, in fact, a threat.
Art and Lance slammed their respective doors simultaneously, suddenly dampening the ape’s noise and cutting back the smell.
“We came too soon?” Lance said. “You wanted us to let that thing mangle you in the cart?”
“What?” Art seemed to shake something off to hear Lance. “I wanted you to . . . no . . . no . . . of course I needed help.” Then, Art’s face cracked open in a grin. “Did you see that? It was so gentle putting me in my place. It could have killed me instead of pushing me out of the way. Ha ha!” He ended on a gleeful laugh that suggested he hadn’t learned much of a lesson from getting too close.
“We need to lure it down to the barn,” Art went on, strategizing now. “It’s not ideal. But until we can . . . until something more appropriate . . . with food . . .”
While Art was talking, the orangutan offered one last shout at the SUV, then took off into the trees.
“There he goes,” Lance said as we watched it vanish. “Now what?”
“It’s fine,” Art said. “It’s all right. It looks half starved. My God, it needs our help. Did you see its backside? I think it should be pretty easy to draw in. I thought, but I never expected . . . something like this to happen. Darnell, can you take us back up?”
Darnell put his SUV in reverse, but he stopped immediately when we all felt a thump.
CHAPTER 3
* * *
“Oh damn,” Lance said. “We forgot about the carts.”
I hadn’t set the brake, so the golf cart rolled back a few feet and one wheel bumped off the road. We waited until we were at least reasonabl
y sure the orangutan wasn’t coming right back, and then Lance and I got out and pushed the one cart back onto the road while Art returned to the other. Lance performed a cursory inspection. “It’s fine.” We led the parade back up to the barn.
By the time we arrived, Art’s good humor had been fully restored. He zipped around to park first, then jumped down and clapped his hands. “Now,” he said, leading us all into the barn. “Here’s what we need to do. Noel and Lance, you’ve only got a couple more hours today. This could take all afternoon.” He paused, laughing. “Did you see that beauty?” he asked us. “My God, when we get him back in shape he’ll be three hundred pounds. He was so close. He touched me.”
“I’ll say he touched you,” Darnell said. “He almost ripped your head clean off.”
“No, no, no.” Art chortled his way over to food prep, where he continued the work Trudy had been engaged in before the orangutan’s arrival. “That’s the thing. It didn’t hurt me. It could have done exactly that, Darnell. One smack. Boom. I’m gone. It pulled its punch, on purpose. It spooked,” he said. “If it hadn’t . . . Well, we’ll find him.”
I didn’t cut in. Now wasn’t the time for lectures, but Art had one coming. I met Lance’s eyes, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. If anyone else on the staff had precipitated such rank stupidity, personal affection wouldn’t have stopped Lance and I from firing that person on the spot. Art was very lucky he outranked us both.
Now that he was happy again, Art began zestfully hacking a number of fruits while giving us instructions. It didn’t seem to matter to him that the food had not yet been organized or that others would be arriving in the near future to address this project. His hands clearly wanted for action. Lance backed quietly away from the tables and into our office. I followed him as Art began to think out loud.
The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) Page 2