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  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 dou
bt 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.

  “She’s my cat,” Carie would say. “If she ever leaves, I’m leaving with her.”

  Like the rest of the staff, she was closely following Enshalla’s and Eric’s courtship dance. She prayed that eventually Enshalla would warm to the young virgin and that together they would conceive a litter, thereby adding to the world’s dwindling number of Sumatran tigers. Even so, as a modern woman with modern notions, Carie took great satisfaction in Enshalla’s refusal to automatically concede to the male imperative. It made the keeper happy that many of the female animals she worked with dominated the males in their exhibits.

  “All our girls are like that here,” said Carie, beaming.

  Enshalla’s invincibility posed a threat to the future of her species. Feminism was a human invention, just like morality and ethics and the vegan principles espoused by the man who wanted to feed the tigers tofu. Nature was indifferent to the hopes embedded in these ideas. It unfolded outside our notions of progress, justice, right and wrong. If Enshalla was going to ever have a litter, it had to be soon. She had just turned thirteen and was approaching the end of her reproductive window. If she rejected Eric, how many more suitors could be brought before her? How many more chances did she realistically have? Like her species, she was running out of time.

  Patrolling her territory, the queen circled quietly. She slinked past the rock walls that held her in and traced a path along the edge of the moat. In the water, her reflection moved with her—a shimmer of orange and black, disappearing.

  Across the way, the king was chasing his minders. It was a game they had played for years, and one of his favorites. The keepers would dash along the exterior of the high mesh wall at the back of the chimp exhibit, and from the other side, Herman would tear after them, laughing and nodding ecstatically.

  The keepers loved it too. It made them happy to lure Herman away from another nap on his rock shelf and to see him so engaged and excited, running hard, showing a glimpse of youthful energy. To many staff members, Herman was Lowry Park. Waves of primate keepers had worked with him, and as they all came and went, he had always been there. Zoo-keeping tends to be a young person’s profession, and many of his current keepers had not been born when he first arrived. They could not picture Lowry Park without him. Still, they wondered how much longer he could hold on. Sooner or later, his heart had to give out, or another chimp would topple him from the throne.

  At the moment, Herman had no rivals. There were still only two other males in the group. Bamboo was even older and slower than him and was relegated to such a lowly status in the hierarchy that the females sometimes felt at liberty to bully him. Alex, the adolescent male, looked up to Herman so much that he often imitated him, puffing himself up and rocking back and forth and acting as though he were in charge. But inside any chimp group, even a small and stable one like Herman’s, power is always fluid. Alliances shift. Secret deals are made. A new male, stronger and more ambitious, could be transferred from another zoo and take over, just as Chester had done before. Alex, growing fast, might look at Herman one day and gauge the slowness of his gait and decide it was time for a change.

  It was hard to imagine what Herman would do then, what he would have left. If he were no longer the king, who would he be?

  No need to worry about that right now. There were no threats on the horizon, no challengers looming. For the moment, Herman could while away whatever days he had left, indulging in the privileges of his position—flirting with pretty women, rolling in the dirt with Bamboo, sticking his long black leathery feet through the mesh of his den so his keepers could give him another pedicure. Sometimes, when the afternoon light turned amber and they summoned Herman inside for the night, the chimp ignored them. If he was especially stubborn, they asked one of his favorite blondes on staff—he was particularly enamored of a woman in the Asia department—to stand near the door and call his name. Ever hopeful, Herman would race toward her, running on all fours.

  After so many years in this place, he had become a gray eminence. An old man at dusk, hanging on.

  Chapter 6

  Cold-Blooded

  The burning heart of the day was always the most quiet. Hours passed when nothing happened, when a hush fell over the grounds and the sunbaked toddlers passed out in their strollers and all the other species seemed to have retreated into the shade to doze and dream. Then without warning, the spell would break and the zoo would explode back to life. In a flash, the animals were licking newborn babies clean or plotting a rival’s downfall or courting another sexual conquest—giving themselves over to lust, greed, rage, vanity, ambition, even something that might be called love. For a moment, the world would open and offer a glimpse into its logic and design, its random joys and casual cruelties.

  That October, Virginia Edmonds and the other manatee keepers were still working around the clock to save Loo, the abandoned calf found in the Caloosahatchee River. He’d been having trouble adjusting to the formula. One Friday evening, Virginia was in the medical tank with Loo, feeding him with the bottle again, when the calf began to shake. He seemed to be seizing. Murphy was summoned, and a small oxygen mask was placed on Loo’s small gray face. But it was no good. A few minutes later, he died in Virginia’s arms.

  After losing Buttonwood only a couple of months before, the other keepers were better prepared for Loo’s death. It hurt, seeing another calf slip away. But after eleven years at Lowry Park, they had learned to accept that some animals would die, no matter how much care they gave them.

  “We have a lot of death, no matter what we do.”

  A necropsy would be conducted to determine how Loo had died. Maybe the zoo would discover something that could help. Some kernel of insight that could improve the odds, ever so slightly, the next time an abandoned calf was brought to them and they held him in the cold water through the night.

  Death was part of the daily fabric. Mice disappeared down the digestive tracts of eagles. Bears got old and passed away. Squirrels made the fatal error of venturing into the chimp exhibit on a day when Rukiya and Twiggy felt like hunting.

  Immersed in the everyday drama of so many species, the staff saw the cycles of life and death endlessly repeating. Sometimes the wheel turned so fast, it made them dizzy.

  The keepers in the herps and aquatics department were grinning. One of their male sea horses had just given birth to a new brood.

  A male, yes. The way it works with sea horses, the female deposits the eggs into a pouch on the male’s stomach. He fertilizes the eggs, then carries them in the pouch for two weeks. “Pregnant males,” they’re called. When the babies are big enough to swim, the mal
e pushes them into the water.

  “They’re good at birthing,” said Dan Costell, one of the herps keepers, pointing toward the tank where the sea horses were swimming.

  Floating near their parents, the babies looked like specks of dirt. Viewed through a magnifying glass, though, they were revealed as tiny dragons, with blinking eyes and shivering dorsal fins and S-shaped bodies plated in crenellated armor from their coronets to the ends of their curving tails. More than a hundred of them had been born into this brood—not unusual for sea horses. They were wondrous creations, somehow both majestic and otherworldly, and in all likelihood, most of them would soon be dead. Sea horse babies have high mortality rates, sometimes 90 percent or more.