Zoo Story (12 page)

Enshalla’s life was
so much simpler. Everything about her was clean and clear and imbued with ruthless purity. Unlike Herman, she never betrayed the slightest confusion about what she was. She didn’t perform. She didn’t accommodate or negotiate. She was a tiger through and through, with almost no interest in humans, except when they brought her another slab of horse ribs. When her keepers worked in her night house, she would wait until their backs were turned, then leap toward them against the mesh, growling and hissing.

Tigers have distinctive personalities, both in zoos and in the wild. Some have been characterized as daring and rash, others are relatively mild-mannered. Even though she had been born and raised in captivity, Enshalla’s personality was irredeemably, wondrously savage. She was such an intimidating animal, some keepers from other departments were reluctant to walk down the narrow, dimly lit corridor that led past her den, only a couple of feet past the piercing stare of her emerald eyes. Even though these keepers knew they were safe, it unnerved them every time she jumped at them, so close they could see her fangs gleaming in the semidarkness.

To those who worked with her every day, Enshalla’s unwielding ferocity only deepened her beauty.

“What I loved about her the most was that she was nasty,” said Pam Noel, who had worked with her for years. “She was true to her species.”

The public found Enshalla mesmerizing. On the boardwalk that overlooked her exhibit, people would throng at the railing to stare and point and yell. They loved to watch her circle the perimeter, lick her paws, jump onto her elevated platform. They were especially fascinated when the staff tossed her another serving of meat. Once, a man had asked one of the keepers why they insisted on serving meat to the zoo’s tigers. Wouldn’t a vegetarian diet be better? The keeper explained that tigers are carnivores with deeply bred instincts for hunting prey. The man was not satisfied.

“Couldn’t you give them tofu shaped to look like their prey?”

Enshalla ignored the crowd’s provocations. She didn’t bother growling at the gawkers who called out to her from above, and she didn’t pounce against the viewing window even when they pointed at her from the other side, only a few inches away. The visitors would pound the glass, trying to prod a reaction. Enshalla would gaze in the opposite direction with regal indifference, refusing to acknowledge the humans’ vulgarity with so much as a twitch of her ear.

She was an independent female, born from an independent mother. Her parents, Sumatran tigers named Dutch and Tuka, came to Lowry Park from zoos in Rotterdam and San Diego. Their early courtship bore a strong resemblance to the dynamic that would later unfold between Enshalla and Eric. Just like her daughter, Tuka was older and more experienced and confident than the male suitor brought before her. Just as with Enshalla, she lived at Lowry Park first and considered the tiger exhibit her kingdom. When Dutch arrived, she treated him as an intruder. Even though he outweighed her, Tuka dominated him at first, snarling and hissing until he hid from her wrath.

Finally Tuka relented and allowed Dutch to get close enough to mate. Even then, though, the danger was not over. Fatal violence between tigers is common. In the wild, they tend to be solitary animals, highly protective of their territories, and when two males cross paths, their conflicts sometimes end in death. Males and females typically don’t meet unless the female is in estrus; even then, the male may kill the female. And once a female gives birth, it’s not uncommon for her to kill a cub, either accidentally or to protect it from another threat. Dutch and Tuka lost their first cub, Shere-Khan, in the spring of 1990 to just such an accident. Witnesses reported that Shere-Khan was sitting near the pond that lined the front of the exhibit when he called out to his mother in a low growl, sounding like a whiny child demanding attention. Tuka went over to the cub and picked him up by his throat instead of the scruff at the back of his neck. As she held him, seemingly unaware of his distress, Shere-Khan struggled and suffocated. Once he went still, Tuka carried his body to the water at the front of the exhibit. As sobbing visitors watched, she pulled the limp cub through the water, as though she were trying to revive him. When keepers coaxed Tuka back into her den inside the night house, she dropped Shere-Khan and left his body in the exhibit. A vet tech ran out to retrieve the cub, and several staff members performed CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for an hour, to no avail.

Six months later, Dutch and Tuka had another cub, a female named Kecil. Then, on August 24, 1991, Tuka gave birth to a litter of three more cubs—Raja, Sacha, and Enshalla. For the first few months, the cubs stayed inside Tuka’s den, nursing and walking on wobbly legs. For their protection, they were kept separate from their father. When the cubs were about eight weeks old, Tuka’s keepers decided to briefly take Enshalla from her mother, too. Enshalla had a sore behind her ear and the keepers had noticed that Tuka was overcompensating, licking the sore incessantly. To give Enshalla a chance to heal, the staff hand-raised the cub for a couple of weeks, taking turns bringing her to their homes at night.

Ged Caddick, then the assistant general curator, remembers the young Enshalla padding across the wood floors of his south Tampa home. She slept in a pet carrier in the kitchen and accepted feedings of a gruel made of formula and meat powder, squirted into her mouth with a syringe. Before he fed her, Caddick would put on gloves so as not to leave his scent in her fur. He would pick her up by the scruff of her neck, just as a mother tiger would, and feel her body go limp. Even then, she was far from docile. She wasn’t eager to be held and had no desire to cuddle.

“She wasn’t aggressive, but she wasn’t seeking human companionship,” said Caddick. Still, “she was cute as the dickens. Cute as can be.”

Taking the cub home was a rare treat for her keepers. Once Enshalla grew, it would be far too dangerous for them to venture into the same room with her. In the zoo world, big felines are notoriously unforgiving of humans who get too close. A senior keeper at the Miami Metrozoo was slain one day when he walked into the Bengal tiger exhibit without realizing that one of the tigers was still inside the paddock. The tiger heard the keeper approaching through the night house and was waiting for him the moment he opened the service door. In another incident, a keeper at Busch Gardens was giving a behind-the-scenes tour for her parents and boyfriend when she briefly steadied herself against the bars of a lion’s cage. The lion bit down on her hand and severed her arm near the elbow. She survived, but doctors were unable to reattach her arm.

Cradling young Enshalla late at night, feeling her squirm in their laps as she gulped down the gruel, allowed Caddick and the other keepers to appreciate her with a vivid intimacy that would never again be possible. Even wearing the gloves, they could stroke her paws, which seemed far too big for the rest of her body and held the promise of how much she would grow. They could touch the smooth brown pads under those paws, and feel the rhythmic rise and fall of her lungs. When she was full and yowled to get down, they could sense the vibration rising from her throat. Holding a baby tiger is nothing like holding a housecat. The body of a fully grown cat is not nearly as thick or muscular as that of a tiger cub, and cats tend to turn in your arms with a lightness that’s completely missing from a cub. Even when it’s being playful, a baby tiger moves with a heaviness that has nothing to do with how much it weighs and everything to do with what it’s becoming. When you hold a tiger cub, it’s impossible to forget even for a second that very soon this stunning creature now nuzzling your arm will be capable of hunting and killing you. The tension between those opposites—the adorability of the fluffy cub, the menace of the apex predator waiting to emerge—is electric.

Enshalla was soon returned to Tuka. That November, she and her siblings were introduced to the public. In preparation, the staff baby-proofed the exhibit, lowering the water in the moat to eighteen inches, and allowed Tuka to take the three-month-old cubs out on a trial run, early one morning before the zoo opened, so that they could explore the exhibit quietly. By then the staff had also built a platform, raised five feet off the ground, where Tuka could retreat when she needed a moment of peace from the clamoring litter. The next day, the cubs made their debut. Tuka stepped out first while her cubs remained inside. She studied the gawkers on the boardwalk above, then decided it was safe enough to bring out the babies. She went to the doorway where the cubs were waiting and chuffed at them, making a sound, similar to a cough, that tigers use for greetings or friendly encouragement. To the crowd, it sounded like she said “poof.” At once the cubs bounded forward into the light. For the next hour or so, they followed their mother, jumping on her and splashing through the pond and shredding the exhibit’s plants and batting one another with their paws.

The cubs were an instant hit, but their time together would be brief. As they turned one, they were all shipped to other zoos. Kecil had been sent away too. Lowry Park’s tiger exhibit and night house was not spacious enough to hold them all as they grew. Enshalla and Rajah were sent on loan to Zoo World in the Florida Panhandle. By the time she arrived at the Panama City zoo, Enshalla was no longer a fuzzy cub. She had grown into a juvenile tiger, still maturing but already showing her fiery temperament. Don Woodman, now a veterinarian in Clearwater, Florida, worked at Zoo World at the time and was one of Enshalla’s keepers. He remembers her as extraordinarily beautiful, even for a tiger, and extremely aggressive. Her moods were mercurial. She seemed torn between a desire for affection and a determination to attack anyone who tried to give it to her. When Woodman approached her den, she acted friendly and rubbed the white fur of her cheeks against the bars of her cage. But when he turned, she threw herself at him against the bars. Even though he always knew what was coming, the explosions startled him every time.

“She was a mean little cuss,” Woodman said. “If you moved, she would hiss like she was going to rip you apart.”

Enshalla’s brother, Rajah, lasted less than a day at Zoo World. The night he and Enshalla arrived, the two young tigers were still recovering from the sedatives they’d been given for the journey from Tampa. Both of them were out of it when the keepers placed them in their dens. The next morning, when the staff returned to check on them, they found Rajah dead with an injury to the back of his neck.

At first, the cub’s death was a mystery, since he had been in his den alone. But during the necropsy, it became clear that his injury was a fatal bite from a fully grown male lion in the adjoining den. During the night, the lion had managed to raise the drop gate that separated them—a guillotine gate, it’s called—and attacked Rajah while he was still half-asleep. Enshalla, housed in a different den, was not harmed. Although she had only been a few feet away, it was unclear if she would have been sufficiently awake from her drug-induced sleep to see or hear her brother being dragged into the lion’s jaws. Already separated from her mother and other siblings, she was on her own.

Sudden death hovered over Enshalla’s family, striking again and again across the generations. First Shere-Khan, then Rajah. Then one spring day in 1994, Enshalla’s father killed her mother. Dutch and Tuka were still at Lowry Park, on their own after the cubs were sent away. Although their earlier courtship had been tumultuous, the two tigers had been together for five years and seemed to be getting along well enough that the keepers were routinely pairing them. They were outside in the exhibit around noon one day when something set them off. Whatever it was, the fight did not last long. When it was over, Dutch had crushed Tuka’s windpipe. Dr. Murphy, who performed the necropsy, said afterward that the zoo did not know what had led to the death.

“Whatever produced the exchange between the two, I know that instincts took over with the male, and he reacted,” said Murphy.

In the days after, the keepers saw Dutch skulking through the dens in the night house, obviously looking for Tuka. “Certainly he knows she’s missing,” said Murphy.

Eventually, Dutch was sent to the Louisville Zoo. His departure, and Tuka’s death, left Lowry Park with openings in its tiger exhibit, and Enshalla was brought back from Panama City later that year. By then she was turning three, a fully grown young adult, much stronger and more indomitable than when she’d been sent away. Returning to the place where she had been born, she was ready to claim it as her own.

In the nine years since, male Sumatrans had been rotated into the exhibit for Enshalla’s approval. With each of them, there had been no doubt who was in charge. The keepers admired her refusal to submit, either to other tigers or to humans. Even when the keepers fed her, leaving her meat inside her den, Enshalla would growl at them to get out and let her eat in peace. They were trained to check and recheck every lock in her night house and to maintain a safe distance. They never entered the same enclosure with her or the other tigers. These precautions did not lessen the heart-quickening awe Enshalla inspired. In the early mornings, when she was still inside her den and the keepers went into her empty exhibit to clean and rake, they saw horse ribs scattered on the ground and smelled the tang of the scent she sprayed to mark her territory. Standing in that place, they knew they were no longer at the top of the food chain. Still, they did their best to let Enshalla know they loved her. At Halloween, they gave her pumpkins to tear open. For Cinco de Mayo, they gave her a piñata stuffed with horsemeat. They even learned to chuff for her. Sometimes, she chuffed back.

One of her keepers, Carie Peterson, showered her with sweet-talk.

“Hi, baby girl,” Carie called out to her one morning. “Hey, princess.”

Enshalla answered with a half-roar, half-snort.

“She’s mad at me,” Carie said, laughing.

She didn’t mind the tiger’s moods. Enshalla was her favorite, and she made no attempt to hide it. She insisted that Enshalla was hers and hers alone.