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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 th
e 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. I went to O. Schrutt's room, the nightwatchman's layover spot. A percolator coffeepot, a cup with dregs, a ledger on the messy desk - the master sheet for the zoo animals, with columns for special entries, things to be on the lookout for. Like:
The giant forest hog has ingrown tusk; is caused some pain. Give aspirinated salt cubes (2), if suffering.
The ocelot is expecting, any day now.
The binturong (bearcat of Borneo) has rare disease; better watch out for it.
The bandicoot is dying.
And each animal had a number; on the master plan of the zoo, the cages were numbered in an orderly, clockwise fashion.
My God. A rare disease! Is that all - just watch out for a rare disease? The binturong has nameless, incurable suffering. And the bandicoot is dying! Just like that - dying; the rare little leaper. Keep an eye on it, sweep it out when it's through.
Into a world like this, the ocelot is giving birth. My God. Stop the whole process.
O. Schrutt's den. This ledger, this murky percolator, and hanging by a leather thong to a hook just inside the door - an electric cattle prod; beside it was a pole with a gaffinglike hook on the end.
For the life of me, I can't tell what O. Schrutt has done in here.
I looked around as long as I dared. And then I heard him coming by the bears again. I heard the famous frustration of the Asiatic Black Bear, lunging just short of O. Schrutt's combat boots. I realized I'd missed my chance, this time, for moving the safety rope about a foot in the unsafe direction. I made my break then, down by the Monkey Complex.
This time, I didn't come too close. I saw the frotter, this time. The gelada baboon, waiting for me, crouched motionless on the dark, outside terrace of his cage - hoping I'd come too close to the bars again. And when he saw I saw him, and that I wasn't coming anywhere near him, he leapt to the nearest trapeze and swung himself howling through the half-dark, landing high up on the bars, facing me. He just screamed, and the scheming Monkey Complex broke out in unison, in a banter that got all the zoo heated and talking again.
O. Schrutt came, bobbing his flashlight along, but I was easily ahead of him and under my hedge before he'd even got to the Monkey Complex.
And again, when he arrived, there wasn't so much as a spider monkey on the outside terrace. They were all swinging silently within the complex; once or twice, a thump of a trapeze, or dry slaps - as if an ape were rolling over and over, beating his chest and knees, aping laughter in a pantomime of loud and huge delight.
'You did it again!' O. Schrutt screamed. 'What are you up to?' And he lost a shade of his aggressiveness; he began again to back away, darting his flashlight through the treetops, jerking his head back from imagined, claw-carrying shapes he saw hurtling down on him. 'What's out here?' cried old O. Schrutt. And backing farther off, leaning toward the security of the Small Mammal House, he shouted, 'You damn baboon, you can't fool me! I'm not monkey enough to fall for your games!'
Then he turned and ran for the door of the Small Mammal House, looking back over his shoulder as he stumbled headlong up the stairs.
I thought: If only at this moment, there was the Asiatic Black Bear, or a mere vision of him, in the doorway - if just for a second, precisely as O. Schrutt gave a last look over his shoulder before going inside, there would be the terrible Oriental bear laying a gruff paw on the back of O. Schrutt's neck - old O. would die of fright, without a word.
But he got back inside. I heard him swearing. Then I heard doors being creaked, and at least I knew now what doors they were, and where they led. And I again heard sliding glass being slid. I thought: What glass? There was no glass I saw that slid.
But it was very soon thereafter that the cries and snarls reached me in their piecemeal fashion again, and I knew that I simply had to see the Small Mammal House while O. Schrutt was still inside and up to his dirty work.
I feel I have to risk it. If only because the bandicoot is dying - and the glossy ocelot is expecting, any day now.
(CONTINUING:)
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: PRE-HISTORY II
