Night of the Animals(112)
He made a belching sound, then a set of aggressive chuckles. He ran a few meters, ducking under draping two-inch-thick ropes. He batted at an enormous nylon ball across the cramped, mustard-smelling room. It bounced off the ceiling so hard, it hit the floor once and bounced against the ceiling again; considering the low height of the ceiling, however, the feat was not especially surprising. He scrambled atop a large plywood box in his chamber so that he could peer through a window slit and look out toward the disturbances. He slammed his fist against the wall, and screamed. He felt excited; something was happening, he sensed. He was trying, in his gorilla way, to ready himself.
At the zoo, his depression thrived. He had begun slapping food bowls away and pushing keepers away with a force that bordered on the dangerous. He interacted less and less with the public and sometimes threw balls and giant toys at them. They bounced off the fencing, and the humans had a laugh.
Now Kibali’s back was turning silver, but he would never be able to start his own troop. His penetrating, shrewd black eyes mismatched his degraded captivity. He was developing angina pectoris of late, a result of his sedentary life and the chocolate bars and éclairs one errant zookeeper would sometimes give him, furtively. Guests would normally see Kibali through the humiliating window and try to get him to look at them with those eyes; their tapping on the window annoyed him to no end, triggering the ache in his chest and left shoulder.
The chimps seemed to be laughing at him. Kibali roared. He did not like chimp-noise. It reminded him of humans. He ran out of his night quarters into the tall but narrow outdoor section of his living space. When he saw the man, he quieted for a moment, stifling a groan. This human did not seem to hold much hope for him, but he would wait and watch. It was astonishing to be visited at this hour. Something unusual was afoot, and much like this man, he, too, felt he had nothing to lose.
“You,” he called to Cuthbert. “You are headed toward the chimpanzees. Do not go there.” But Cuthbert could hardly hear the noble gorilla, for his head was now a proverbial barrel of monkeys.
tell them the lord of animals comes
IT NEARLY BROKE WHAT WAS LEFT OF CUTHBERT’S own mangled heart to hear the primates cry to him. “Please now please now please now please now,” the putty-faced rhesus macaques kept hollering. “Now now now now now help!” Five golden tamarins, their elegantly styled red manes puffed with anxiety, crowded onto a horizontal tree limb and simply repeated a mysterious phrase—we promise you—but at wildly different pitches and volumes, and Cuthbert was beginning to feel unable to cope.
“Hang on then,” he kept saying. He could not stop listening, but the more he listened, the more sure he became that the “monkeys” ought to be freed right away.
He started with the chimpanzees, who were closest to him, still softly hooing. It was a very bad decision.
As soon as he stepped with his bolt cutters off the cement apron near the pavilion entrance, and toward their cage, the chimps whimpered a few times, then exploded. LIKE US, NOISY AND SHOWY, read their sign. If they were “like us,” they were a particularly earsplitting example of Homininae. Their screams were like the sound of several children being stabbed to death. Cuthbert gave a stupid grin, and with his wobbly hands got to work on the fence. He dimly sensed that he was facing something bigger than he could handle. The four chimps started shoving each other against the fence. One of them, a dominant male named Buddy, climbed right up the back of a smaller, younger teenager, and grasped the fence. He glowered down at Cuthbert, slapping his hand against the cage. The teenager, Ollie, peered up and barked at Buddy, whipping his head from side to side. Cuthbert wasn’t sure whether the chimps were scared or angry or both.
The indoor viewing window and the building’s main doors were armed with loud, guardhouse-notifying alarms, but the outdoor cage itself, which served all the different primate exhibits, was not, and Cuthbert’s bolt cutters flew through the fencing with little effort. Within minutes, he had created a rectangular door, loose on three sides, and before he could finish a fourth, the chimps had shoved the door open a few inches.
Ollie sidled toward the gap and pushed his arm through. He managed to grab hold of the sleeve of Cuthbert’s jumper and tore it asunder as if pulling a tissue from a Kleenex box. The chimps shrieked and passed the sleeve around. Cuthbert was a little shocked and engrossed for a few seconds, but he kept working. With every new cut, he loosened his “door” to the greater structure, and the chimps drove it open more. Finally, Ollie heaved himself nearly through, but just as the young chimp was about to clear the cage, Buddy vaulted down, and yanked Ollie back, jealously. Ollie scraped his forearm badly on the fence’s jagged opening, and screamed banefully.
What happened next came with a grim celerity. The injury somehow turned Cuthbert into an enemy in the chimps’ eyes. All four of the chimps piled out of the cage, and set upon him. They knocked Cuthbert down and Buddy bit him viciously on the nose, tearing a nostril away from his face. Cuthbert barely seemed to feel it; he wisely rolled onto his stomach and balled up. The others made waa-bark noises, as if egging Buddy on, but Buddy broke off the attack and stepped back. He whimpered again a few times.
There was a comparative silence, and the chimps seemed to be checking each other’s fur for something, inspecting. They began hooing again.
Buddy finally spoke. He said to Cuthbert: “You stay away from us, geeza, you stay away.” Cuthbert raised his head cautiously. He could barely open his eyes, and blood dripped fast off his face. He pressed the heel of his hand, shaky as ever, against the ripped nostril. It did not hurt, but a squinty feeling filled his eyes.