I Heard Animals' Voices novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Green Pen

At dawn Tierney and Derrick find the schedule keeping the tigers apart, and Dr. Bramhall announces a public assessment she will run herself on Friday.

At five forty-five the next morning, the zoo smelled like wet hay and bleach, and I was already losing an argument with a tiger.

"Ask him if she ate," Duke said, pacing along the fence of Yard A. "Ask what she had. Ask if she said anything about me."

"I'm not asking him that," I said.

Derrick was walking beside me with two paper cups, and he handed me the one that wasn't coffee.

"Hot chocolate," he said. "You're eighteen."

"Thanks," I said, and then, because I never edit, "Duke wants to know if Poppy ate."

"She ate," Derrick said. "Four pounds of beef, and she left the bone."

"She says that's a message," Duke said, outraged. "She left the bone on purpose. What does the bone mean?"

"He says the bone means something," I said.

"It means she was full."

Duke stopped pacing. "Then why was she looking at the wall?"

I passed that on too.

"Because the wall is where her yard is," said Derrick, "and I would stare at a wall too if I'd spent a month listening to you."

I stopped walking.

He kept going for two steps before he realized I wasn't with him.

"I mean," he said, "that's what I would say to him, if he could hear me."

"Right," I said.

"Which he can't," said Derrick.

"Obviously," I said, and drank my hot chocolate.

The gate was behind the feed shed, where the two yards met in a long wire fence.

A steel door sat in the middle of it, with a chain looped twice through the handle and a brass padlock the size of my fist.

On the shed wall hung a whiteboard covered in green marker.

I read it slowly.

Duke, Yard A, ten to ten-forty. Poppy, Yard B, ten-fifty to eleven-thirty.

Poppy, Yard A, two o'clock. Duke, Yard B, two-ten.

Every single day, in neat green capitals, the two of them were let out ten minutes apart.

They were never outside at the same time, not for one minute of the day.

"It's not a mistake," I said. "Nobody writes a schedule this neat by accident."

"It's a rotation," Derrick said. "It keeps the male calm. It's the standard model."

"For what, a tiger who hates her?"

"For one who might hurt her," he said. "Lorna reads him that way."

"And you?"

He looked at the board, then at the padlock, and said nothing.

Poppy had come to the fence on the other side and was sitting with her back to us, very pointedly.

"Tell him the key is on a ring on her belt," she said, "and the head keeper has the other. Nobody else has opened it since spring."

I told him.

"I know," said Derrick.

"You know?" I said.

"I read the log." He pointed at a clipboard on a nail. "The last name on the gate sheet is hers. It's been hers for four months."

"Four months," I said, and stepped back to get a better look at the board, and my sneaker landed on a patch of wet concrete.

My foot went one way and the rest of me went another.

A hand closed around my upper arm and stopped me before I hit the ground.

It was warm, and very large, and it did not let go once I was steady.

His thumb moved, once, against the inside of my elbow.

I told myself vets check pulses.

"Watch the step," he said.

His voice came out flat.

I did not say any of the things I could have said, like I'm watching something, or let go of me, or not yet.

"Eighteen is very young," he said.

I looked at his hand, and he looked at it too, and he let go.

"I'm aware," I said.

Behind the fence, Duke let out a long, wounded breath. "Oh, that's rich. He gets to touch someone."

"Be quiet, Duke," said Poppy.

I did not repeat that one, which was a first for me.

Heels clicked on the path behind us.

Dr. Bramhall came around the shed corner in a fresh pair of khakis, with her tablet under one arm and two people in expensive coats following her.

The man had a tour badge that said Donor, and the woman was holding a travel mug with the zoo's logo on it.

"And here is the young lady I mentioned," said Dr. Bramhall, in the voice of a woman introducing a problem.

"She has seven days to convince us that an animal that has hospitalized three of our people is, quote, courting."

The woman gasped politely.

"I'd like to see the gate log with the donors," I said. "It's right there on the nail."

"The gate is a safety measure," Dr. Bramhall said. "Everyone who is not trained stays on this side of it."

"Duke and Poppy are trained to like each other," I said.

Duke whooped, loud enough that the man in the good coat took a step back.

Dr. Bramhall smiled at him, then at me, and I felt it down my neck.

"In the spirit of the seven days," she said, "I'd like to propose a formal behavioral assessment."

"Next Sunday, noon, with the press. I will personally run the gates and bring them together under supervised conditions."

"If he behaves, I will be the first to admit I was wrong."

"And if he doesn't?" said the donor.

"Then nobody will have to argue about him anymore," Dr. Bramhall said gently.

Derrick's hand tightened on the gate sheet.

I did not need to hear Duke to know he'd understood every word.

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