Night of the Animals(56)
The Children’s Zoo was meant to look like an old-fashioned, working twentieth-century farm. It contained a half-size red barn with white accents, a miniature sty for the hogs, and a bank of wire rabbit hutches. Near the barn, a colorful set of panels posed questions for children. Is it true that goats will eat anything? The display was supposed to look like a set of stables, and you lifted little wooden “barn” doors to view the answers. Actually, goats are fussy! At the London Zoo, they are offered a blend of oats, barley, linseed and soya . . .
The jackals were not fussy. Two young bitches leaped over the picket fence and barreled toward the barn. Outside, in the corral, the llama let out a high, pulsing set of orgles. These caught the attention of the jackals, who paused and gazed at this Peruvian oddity for a moment, then roved toward a three-sided oak shelter where the llama stood.
It was a young, ungelded male, piebald with a black “mask” over its eyes. It bucked forward, darting and kicking. The jackals tried to nip at its cloven toes. They barked maniacally. The llama emitted piercing screams. Every time the jackals tried to get beneath it, it dribbled them back. Soon, a third, male jackal appeared. It scrambled into the fight with a fresh energy and tried to climb up the haunches of the llama, gnashing its teeth, frantically pulling up hanks of woolen hair like a boy who’d dropped all his pocket change on the ground and was trying to grab every last coin. But when the llama spun around and began to cough, it seemed to startle the jackals.
A bolt of dark slime shot from the llama’s mouth onto the male jackal. The substance was greenish and plentiful, at least a pint. It hit the jackal like an angry smack, spattering over its head and neck. There was a strong, sour stench. The dog whimpered like a puppy, and began circling pathetically, chomping at its own back like a dog chasing its tail. The bitches broke off the fight, and crossed the barnyard, away from the llama. They sniffed at their unlucky brother, and tended to him, but the stench was powerful and disturbing.
The pack members preened themselves for a full ten minutes, stopping to howl in ragged chorus, and to bite tenderly at one another. Soon, the two other male jackals released by Cuthbert appeared. There was a general refrain of pack-joy, a violent merriment.
We catch we kill we eat we live!
The llama, which had calmed down, watched them stiffly. It had defeated the canines, but they could find easier prey.
The jackals howled again, in furious bliss, and trotted along the edges of the corral, sniffing at a sun-blanched Ribena sip-bag and a tiny green butterfly hairclip and a lost ￡10 coin. Two stopped to lick at the glistening snails that crept up the fence posts at night like darkness’s very jewels.
Eventually the pack began ducking into the barn, one by one, stalking, then as a pack. With the spring, the keepers left the main door open in the evening. The mule, especially, enjoyed the cool air. Sometimes, a starling or mockingbird would fly in and perch on its hay feeder.
When the mule finally perceived the jackals, she neighed stridently. She was a strong, old creature, a retired draft animal whose mother was a Clydesdale and father a favorite beach donkey from Anglesey. She started kicking at the stable walls. It sounded like she would beat the place down.
One by one, the jackals slipped beneath one of the stable doors. Behind it, they found the two poor, tethered goat brothers. They were sweet, blond billies who were fawned over by children. Aside from the occasional cruel boy, they had never seen a predator in their lives. Now they faced their most ancient enemy, the same species who had chased their wild ancestors in the Zagros foothills of Persia.
The jackals set upon one of the goats all at once. Within a few seconds, the pack had managed to wedge part of its liver out. The other goat bleated in horror, kicking repeatedly from the stall’s corner, until the jackals massed upon it and brought it, too, to the hay-strewn floor. Each of the goats, conscious and in shock, choking, could feel the dogs rooting in their insides, the snouts digging for their meek, soft hearts. In their caprine minds, there were picture-thoughts amid the agony: a grassy meadowland; buckthorn berries on sugary twigs; a range of granite massifs climbing to ever higher playgrounds of stone. And then the pictures stopped.
The mule, in the opposite stable stall, who thought of the goats as small, equine associates, brayed without end. Soon, the llama began screaming again, too, and from there another wave of anxiety washed across the entire southern end of the zoo.
Cuthbert could not see any of this, but he could hear it. It was clear something ghastly and heartbreaking had happened. Neither inebriation, delusions, nor hepatic brain-fog could screen the shock of it. He did not want to guess at the details, what harmless being was being torn to pieces. What had he caused?
“Damn, damn, damn,” he said to himself.
Soon, another new set of cries rose. There were feral chitters and dumb groans. So many animals, in an uproar again. It seemed to Cuthbert that, perhaps, his great plan to free as many animals as possible was causing only universal torment.
He stood still, taking it all in, angling his head to hear every detail.
“Bugger,” he said. After a full minute or so, the noises abruptly stopped.
He remained on the path near the jackal kennels, not sure where to go next.
“Blessed bloody Jesus.”
He started swinging his bolt cutters with one hand, back and forth, until the loose handle scraped against the ground. The security lamps blazed like daylight. Everything had seemed so straightforward moments before. There was an existential danger to all Britain’s—and the entire earth’s—animals, a threat posed by the Heaven’s Gate cult, by social disorder, and by widespread apathy toward the animal kingdom. His solution had seemed magnificently simple: just let the animals out—all of them. He had not seriously considered that the freed animals presented any danger to the caged ones. What am I doing, then? Stop me, God, help me! He tried to visualize St. Cuthbert, a living statue, the ice on his legs getting licked by an otter’s tongue, his flesh scoured with the enzymes of miracles.