Lord of the Wings (4 page)

“Blast,” he said. “I should go and deal with that. Meg, could you come and help me with something? Clarence, you take over the tour for a couple of minutes. Take them over to the Kingdom of the Night—but take them the long way round.”

“Past the hyenas?” Clarence asked.

“No, through the aviary,” Grandfather said. “That's about as far as you can get from the lions' habitat.”

With that, Grandfather strode off. For someone in his nineties he had a remarkably fast and steady stride. Clarence began gathering the class and shooing them in the opposite direction from what Grandfather had taken.

“I'll keep you posted,” I said to Michael, in an undertone, and then I set off to follow Grandfather.

“Why are you taking the children as far as possible from the lions' habitat,” I asked when I caught up with him. “The lions aren't loose, are they?”

“Of course not.” He came to a stop at the railing designed to keep people from falling into the moat around the lions' habitat. “But they do seem to have eaten a tourist.”

 

Chapter 4

“Eaten a tourist?” Was he serious? “You're remarkably calm about the tourist's fate.”

“I take a Darwinian view of it,” Grandfather said. “We do what we can to keep the tourists out and the lions in. But if some fool tourist figures out a way to circumvent all our precautions—well, there you have it.”

Grandfather was pointing to an area just outside the rugged faux-rock entrance to the indoor part of the habitat. Something was lying there. I shaded my eyes and squinted to get a better look. It appeared to be a severed hand, surrounded by a few ragged shreds of cloth.

We stood there staring at the hand for a few minutes. I found myself worrying about the repercussions for the zoo and the festival, and then mentally shook myself. I should be thinking about the poor misguided tourist. What on Earth had possessed him—or possibly her—to brave the lions' den?

“Where are the lions?” I asked.

He pointed to the highest part of the habitat, where a female lion was sitting on a rock, surveying her surroundings. On the ledge just below her a male lion was licking his paw and grooming his face with it.

“The keepers are trying to lure them inside so we can recover the hand and look to see if there are any other stray body parts,” Grandfather said. “But they're not hungry yet, so it's slow going. And we'll be saving their scat for analysis. I suppose we should call Chief Burke now.”

“Not just yet,” I said. “Do you have your binoculars with you?”

He threw open his cloak to reveal that beneath it he was wearing his usual cargo pants and a faded khaki safari vest. He patted half a dozen of the vest's pockets and eventually pulled out the small but powerful binoculars he was in the habit of carrying.

I took the binoculars and focused on the hand.

“It's wonderful how well you can see things with these,” I said.

“Let me have it when you're finished,” Grandfather said. “Do you see any other body parts?”

“I don't see any body parts at all,” I said. “That's a fake plastic hand.”

“Are you sure?”

“Either it's a fake hand, or your lions' victim has ‘Made in China' tattooed on the inside of his wrist,” I said. “Rob's been annoying us all week with one just like it.”

“You think Rob did this?” Grandfather frowned thunderously at the thought.

“He's not the only one with access to an Oriental Trading Company catalog,” I said. “There must be hundreds of those things crawling around town. Sometimes literally—you can get mechanized ones with a remote control device.”

Grandfather took the binoculars from me and made his own lengthy inspection of the hand.

“You're right,” he said. “I'm relieved to know no one's going to blame my poor lions for simply following their natural appetites. But it's all part and parcel of the problem we've been having. I've been meaning to speak to you, since you're in charge of the Gargoyle Patrol.”

“Goblin Patrol,” I said. “Or more properly the Visitor Relations and Police Liaison Patrol—but never mind that. What problem?”

“We've had a sudden upsurge in trespassers last night and this morning,” he said. “People hiding in the Creatures of the Night exhibit and having to be kicked out at closing. People trying to climb over the walls after closing…”

“You think it has something to do with the festival.”

“We don't normally get a lot of attempted stowaways,” he said. “Especially not ones dressed up like vampires and zombies. So far all they seem to have done is strew empty beer bottles and soda cans around and take selfies in the Bat Cave—of course, that's probably because so far we've always caught them pretty quickly. But getting something like a dozen of them in the last twenty-four hours is strange and alarming.”

“Have you told Chief Burke?”

“I have.” Grandfather nodded sharply. “He says he'll do what he can, but the festival's got him stretched pretty thin. So I've put out a call for help to the Brigade.”

Blake's Brigade was what we all called the loosely organized but fanatically devoted group of bird and animal lovers who regularly volunteered to help Grandfather with his animal welfare and environmental projects.

“That's good,” I said. “Because my patrols are stretched pretty thin, too. And Randall says we're expecting the attendance to increase almost geometrically from now until Saturday.”

“I figured we could add the Brigade people to your Goblin Patrol,” Grandfather said. “Use them to keep an eye on the zoo. And on that haunted house of Smoot's. If you ask me, that's drawing in an unruly element.”

“Certainly a weird element,” I said. “I'll be glad to see just about any of the Brigade who show up.” And come to think of it, the few I wouldn't be glad to see were probably in jail rather than the Brigade these days.

“No sense hanging around here,” Grandfather said. “The keepers can take care of retrieving the fake hand. Let's get back to the tour.”

Since Clarence had taken the children to the Creatures of the Night by a roundabout route to ensure that they couldn't possibly catch a glimpse of anything unfortunate at the lions' habitat, we caught up with them before they'd gotten too far in their tour. We found them standing in front of the Naked Mole Rat exhibit, a wall twelve feet high and twenty feet wide that was entirely covered with a six-inch-deep glass-fronted, dirt-filled habitat.

“It's like an ant farm,” one of the first graders said. “Only bigger.”

“And with rats instead of ants,” another said.

“Naked rats!” Noah exclaimed, and at least half the children tittered. I sighed. Was it normal for first graders to display this mixture of embarrassment and fascination with words like “naked”? Surely I'd been older before I'd had any idea that some words held such power to shock the grown-ups.

“The naked mole rat is so called because of its almost complete absence of fur.” Grandfather seemed oblivious to the children's glee at hearing the forbidden word uttered again. “Just as we humans have sometimes been called ‘naked apes' because we have so little hair compared with other primates.”

As I could have predicted, the children exploded into laughter and had to be shushed by Mrs. Shiffley and the nearby chaperones. Grandfather continued on inexorably, explaining how the naked mole rats regulated their temperature, how their social structure was similar to that of bees and ants, and how their colonies built tunnel systems several miles in cumulative length.

Perhaps Grandfather was wiser than I gave him credit for. By the time he began explaining how the naked mole rat could live up to thirty years and held the record for the longest life of any rodent species, the children had heard the word “naked” so often that they'd largely stopped snickering and were listening about as attentively as you'd expect for first graders.

“Let's move on!” Grandfather exclaimed, emphasizing his words by rapping his walking stick on the floor. He strode forward as if leading an expedition through the jungle or the veldt. Most of the class hurried to keep up with him, and Mrs. Shiffley brought up the rear, gently encouraging any laggers to keep up with their classmates.

We inspected fossas and cacomistles, aardvarks, springhaas, and bush babies—the bush babies, who looked like animated teddy bears with enormous eyes, were a particular favorite. But the more bloodthirsty children—my own two among them—were growing restless to see more dangerous animals.

I suspected that Grandfather shared their eagerness.

“Let's move on to the Louisiana Swamp,” he called.

“Are there crocodiles in the swamp?” Mason wanted to know.

“Of course not,” Grandfather said. “There are no crocodiles in Louisiana!”

Many of the children, particularly the small boys, who had perked up when they heard Mason's question, slumped with disappointment.

“The only place in the United States where crocodiles live is in South Florida,” Grandfather said. “In Louisiana, they have alligators.”

Hope returned to the faces of the small children.

“And you have lots of alligators in your swamp, don't you, Great-grandpa?” Josh asked.

“We have eleven of them,” Grandfather said.

Murmurs of satisfaction greeted this announcement.

“Do alligators really not eat people?” Noah asked.

Grandfather appeared to be pondering that question—perhaps weighing the dangers of alarming the timid children with the satisfaction of thrilling the rest.

“Well,” he said. “They don't do it nearly as often as crocodiles do. Alligators are more timid, and when they see a human, they just want to run away from us. But if you annoy them or scare them, they'll attack. Or if they're really hungry. And unfortunately, alligators who see a lot of humans become less scared of them—and our alligators see a lot of humans. We try to feed them regularly, but don't stick your hands over the railing. You never know when one might feel like a snack.”

Most of the children seemed quite eager to visit the swamp. But as Grandfather led the children out of the African habitat, I heard Mason's voice.

“But we don't get to see crocodiles.” His tone wasn't quite a whine—more like a plaintive sigh.

“Not in the Louisiana Swamp habitat,” Grandfather said. “I keep the crocodiles in the Australian Bush habitat. Five of them. We'll get to that before too long.”

“Yay!” Mason exclaimed.

Visitors entered the swamp habitat through a replica of a bayou trapper's cabin, complete with rough board walls and several objects that I assumed were antique traps. It had two doors leading out into the faux swamp and several windows that let cautious visitors inspect the attraction before venturing out into it. The children hurried through the cabin without a second glance, swarming out of both doors onto the wooden boardwalk that wound through the dimly lit swamp. Michael and I paused in the cabin and found a window where we could watch what the children were up to without being caught in the middle of the noisy, jostling herd.

Although when he wanted to, Grandfather could do a great job of calming the herd.

“Let's be as quiet as we can so the alligators will surface to check us out,” he said.

A hush fell over the swamp, so you could actually hear the bullfrogs booming and small rustles and splashes as unseen creatures slipped through the underbrush or hopped into a pool. The pale trunks of cypress trees emerged from the murky depths and disappeared into the shadows overhead. Great swathes of Spanish moss trailed down into the water and shivered occasionally in what would be, in a real swamp, a passing breeze. Here, I knew, it was only a sophisticated ventilation system, designed to give the impression of random breezes, but it was still delightful.

“I like it,” Michael murmured. “We should come back sometime when it's less crowded.”

“Grandfather would be happy to give us a private tour, before or after hours,” I replied. “Once the Halloween rush is over.”

I heard a splashing noise, accompanied by gasps and a few squeals from the children.

“That,” Grandfather said. “Is a thirteen-foot male alligator. His name is Vincent Price.”

Clearly the children had never heard of the Merchant of Menace, but a few of the parents tittered. The children merely gazed down at Vincent with fascination.

The alligator habitat was between our window and the stretch of boardwalk where Grandfather had taken the class, so from our vantage point, we could see the alligator's eyes just above the surface and the children crowding closely around Grandfather to peer down at it. I worried briefly about how strong the fence between the children and the water was, and then reminded myself that Grandfather would have made sure it was strong enough to withstand anything the human crowds could do to it. Though I suspected his reasons had more to do with protecting the animals from the human visitors than vice versa.

The children oohed and aahed as he explained some of the alligators' most important features—including, since Grandfather was a staunch environmentalist, the important service they performed to the environment by eating vast quantities of nutria.

“What's that?” one of the children asked.

“An alien invasive species,” Grandfather said. And then, seeing that none of the children understood this, he added, “Think of a giant wet rat that eats everything in sight. They're destroying the environment in many parts of the south. The alligators help us get rid of them.”

He and the children contemplated the alligator with renewed approval. The alligator seemed to be studying them back.

“Dr. Blake,” one of the children piped up. “I thought you said alligators didn't eat people.”

“Not usually,” Grandfather said.