(1968) Setting Free the Bears by John Irving

Author:John Irving [Irving, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345417985
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 1979-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Eleventh Zoo Watch: Tuesday 6 June, 1967, @ 4.15a.m.

I can't imagine what O. Schrutt could be doing to them. I still hear them; the whole zoo is listening. Now and then there's a door that opens suddenly on some awful animal music, and just as suddenly closes - muffles the cry.

I can only guess: O. Schrutt is beating them, one by one.

It's clearly anguish. Whenever the cries blare full force, there's an answer from the rest of the zoo. A monkey scolds, a large cat coughs, the Various Aquatic Birds are practicing take-offs and landings; bears pace; the great gray boomer is viciously shadow-boxing; more subtly, in the Reptile House, the great, snakes twine and untwine. Everyone seems in angry mourning for the creatures under infrared.

I can only guess: O. Schrutt is mating with them, one by one.

There's a herd of Miscellaneous Range Animals just behind my hedgerow; they're huddled round each other, conspiring. I can guess what they're saying, nipping each other's ears with their strange, herbivorous teeth: Schrutt's at it again. Did you hear the last one?

Brannick's giant rat. I know its terrible bark anywhere.

Oh, the zoo is full of gossip.

A moment ago, I crept out of my hedgerow and down to the empty Biergarten to have a word with the bears. They were all in a stew. The most fierce and famous Asiatic Black Bear squatted and roared himself upright, lunging into the bars as I scurried past his cage. I saw his shaggy arms still groping out for me when I was half a zoo block away. The Famous Asiatic Black Bear must have been thinking of his captor, Hinley Gouch - and was interpreting the nameless diabolics of O. Schrutt as no more than another capture of that deceiving Hinley Couch's kind. For the terrible Asiatic Black Bear, all men must be Hinley Gouch - especially O. Schrutt.

I tried to calm them all, but the Asiatic Black Bear was unfit for reason. I did whisper to the polar bears that they shouldn't take it out on each other, and they floated, though uneasily, thereafter; I did beg the grizzly to have a seat and collect his thoughts, which, after a half-blind charge at me, he begrudgingly did; my gentle pair of Rare Spectacled Bears were so very worried that they hugged each other upright.

Oh, I can only guess: O. Schrutt - mad fetishist! -what is your evil indulgence that frenzies the whole zoo?

But no one can tell me. I'm in some haunted bazaar in someplace more scheming than Istanbul; in their cages and behind their fences, the animals are gossiping In a language more violent and foreign than Turkish.

I even tried a little Serbo-Croat with a Slavic-looking great brown bear. But no one can tell me a thing.

I can only guess what the last shriek meant: O. Schrutt, with ritual slowness, is strangling the coati-mundi. The cry pushes thickly through the lavender maze; now it's cut off like all the rest.

Now sliding glass is slid.

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