Did Not Survive (5 page)

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.

For most of an hour I relived the scene at the elephant barn two mornings previously, demolishing my triple dose of cub-joy. The officers who had responded first had asked innumerable questions right after the incident. This was even more intense—all the details, going through it again and again, backing up to explain how animal management worked, the little I knew of how elephants behaved, why we did things the way we did.

Over and over, I described Wallace lying on the straw, blood on his head, the ankus next to him, elephants milling around and tugging him with their trunks, his body sliding a few inches at a time as Damrey shoved him with her forefoot. I kept good control over my voice and hid my hands in my lap.

“Tell me again why you were here alone before the zoo opened.”

“All the keepers come to work before the zoo opens. We have to get the animals fed and cleaned. I was extra early because I had a night shift watching a clouded leopard who was due to give birth.” I had to explain that the monitor was in the Education office instead of at Felines for health reasons related to my own reproductive status. “I can't spend much time in the Feline building. I need to wear gloves and a face mask when I do. Cats shed an organism called toxoplasmosis that's harmful to human fetuses.” He seemed skeptical, as though I was faking Losa's pregnancy or my own.

“So you were here that night with no one around?” he asked in his deep, flat voice.

I didn't like the implication. “I filled out a behavior log. You can take a look at it. And the vet called me a few minutes before I left.”

“On your cell phone?”

“No, on the phone in the Education office.”

That seemed to satisfy him.

“Tell me about your relationship with Kevin Wallace.”

That was tricky. “He, uh, wasn't long on charm. He could be rough-tongued, although he'd lightened up a lot the last couple of months. He was fair and good at his job.”

“Who didn't like him?”

“It was an accident, right? What are you getting at?”

Detective Quintana gave me a mournful look. “Routine. We have to explore all the possibilities. Who didn't much like the guy?”

“I have no idea.” I was not going to toss him Denny.

“Your husband died here a few months ago, right? In another animal accident.”

“Yeah. It's in the police reports.” I was grateful when he decided not to dig further in that particular black hole.

Nonetheless, I felt as if I'd been clear-cut and strip-mined. When he paused to review his notes, I groped for something to salvage from this painful process. “Could he have hit his head on the wall? Maybe had a heart attack?”

Of course he didn't answer.

“Why is this a police investigation?” was my next effort.

“It's a high profile situation.” Detective Quintana handed me his card, shook my limp fingers, and said he might need to get back to me later. “Does it smell like this all the time?” he muttered. Wimp.

I held the door for him and went back to hand-feeding the penguins, grateful to be done thinking about elephants. The penguins were upset that I was late with the rest of breakfast after excluding them from an interesting visitor. Some were pushy and some were standoffish, and I was even more behind schedule when all had eaten whatever they were willing to. Mrs. Brown ate little, while her faithless ex and Mrs. Green were relaxed and hungry.

A hasty feed-run to the aviary and pond, and it was past my lunch time. I'd missed my fellow keepers, perhaps just as well. But Jackie stepped out of the café and wanted to know how my inquisition went. I shrugged. She told me that Sam and Ian were still on the hot seat.

“I wish we knew how badly he's hurt,” I said.

“‘Head trauma' is all I can find out. Which means, like, nothing. No details available. And Mr. Crandall is driving me crazy. He's coming in early and messing with everything. If Wallace doesn't come back soon, I'm going to lose my mind. I never thought I'd long to have Kevin Wallace at his desk.”

“Kevin Wallace: competent and crucial,” I suggested as a tag line. He
had
changed for the better, and I'd been slow to re-evaluate my old insecurity and aversion to authority.