Setting Free the Bears by John Irving

Author:John Irving
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781448111879
Publisher: Transworld

The Thirteenth Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June 1967, @ 4.45 a.m.

THERE’S SOMETHING FUNNY going on here, all right.

When O. Schrutt was teasing the insomniacs in the House of Pachyderms, I went inside the Small Mammal House. Very spooky in there – with those infrared-exposed animals, thinking they live in a world with a twenty-hour night. They were all wakeful, most of them sort of shifty in their glasshouses – crouched or even pacing in the corners of their cages.

But I couldn’t see that anything in particular was wrong! There wasn’t any blood, and no one looked beaten or ravished or at Death’s Door. They were just watchful, suspicious, and too alert for nocturnal creatures supposedly put at ease in nocturnal surroundings. Take, for example, the spotted civet cat – who was panting on its belly, its hind legs spread out behind it like a seal’s tailflipper. It swished its tail, waiting for the mouse or madman who would any second now burst through the closed back door of its cage.

The back doors of these cages, I found, lead into alleys that divide and are shared by the two opposing faces of cages in each block of the Small Mammal Maze. The alleys are more like chutes for coal – a guard would have to kneel to make his way between and behind the cages, checking each labeled door. It is very nifty. A guard or feeder or cage-cleaner could creep along this passageway and know which animal’s house he was invading, just by reading the tags on the door. Very wise. You wouldn’t want to be unprepared – to carelessly dart your head inside a cage, expecting the wee Brazilian pygmy marmoset and finding instead the great curved fighting claws of the giant anteaters, or a brash, ill-tempered mongoose.

From the alley, you can get some idea of what the outside looks like to the animals. I opened the back door of the ratel’s cage, thinking that a ratel must be a wee sort of rat, and to my surprise, discovered that the ratel is a fierce, badgerlike creature of Afro-Indian heritage, silky-furred and long-clawed; but before I slammed the door in his snarling face, I got a peek at how he saw the world. Darker than dark, like a solid rectangle of black, blacker than the entrance to a cave, there was a void drawn down like a shade beyond his front window glass.

When I closed the door, I had the awful feeling that if O. Schrutt had sneaked back to his lair, he could have been watching the ratel, and would have seen me suddenly loom in the ratel’s back doorway and quickly slam the door on my own frightened face. I crept out of the chute, expecting at any moment to meet – if not O. Schrutt grunting on all fours – an ape specially trained for routing things out of the alleyways.

So when I got out in the main maze again, I went straight ahead with my business, with no more dallying.

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