Page 28 of Tiger Queen

He rubbed them and pushed them away while walking back to the shovel. They loped along next to him like it was a game. He picked up the shovel, started to resume his work, then stopped to look at me.

“You gonna feed them, or just stand there?”

Sufficiently cowed, I went back to the Mule to retrieve the food trays.

14

Rachel

I spent the morning feeding the animals. Normally this type of job would be split among two or three employees, but since it was just me it took all morning. A quick break for lunch—bologna sandwiches again—and then David and I cleaned the food prep room.

“What’s next, doc?” David asked when we were done. “I’ve got some financial stuff to do, but I can help for about an hour.”

I pulled out my notepad. “The enclosures need to be weeded. The grass is getting long, which harbors ticks and fleas. Most of the cages still need to be mucked out, too. Jake has been doing that all morning but he’s only a third of the way done.”

David grabbed a shovel. “I’ll take the dirty work.”

I put a hand on his arm. It was like touching a brick wall. “I’ll muck. You can grab the weed-whacker.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

As I pushed the shovel and wheelbarrow through the zoo, I wondered why I had been so insistent on taking the shittier—literally—job. Maybe it was because I didn’t want the guys thinking that I was afraid of doing the dirty work around here. Jake had made a comment about that to his brothers yesterday.

Mucking out cages was disgusting work. I had done plenty of it during my residency, but I had thought those days were over. Doctors of veterinary medicine didn’t normally do grunt work. But this zoo was anything but normal, and sanitary living conditions were the most important thing to keep animals safe.

As I cleaned out the chimp cages, I looked inward. Why did I care about what Jake thought? I normally didn’t let guys get to me that way. Either a guy liked me or he didn’t. I never felt the need to impress them.

Once again, Ashley’s comments itched inside my skull. Was I letting their attractiveness cloud my judgment?

“I’m just cleaning up shit,” I told Maurice the chimpanzee. “It needs to get done. That’s all there is to it.”

Maurice stared back at me from the temporary pen, judging me with his too-human eyes.

David’s weed-whacker buzzed over in the wolf enclosure while I worked. After an hour it went silent, presumably as he returned to the visitor’s center to work on the financial stuff he had mentioned. When I was done mucking out the rest of the cages I retrieved the weed-whacker from the equipment shed and picked up where he had left off. I moved through the pedestrian walkways, cutting the grass away from the path. Even though it wasn’t in the animal enclosure, it was still too close to them. Unkempt grass simply being nearby would cause the spread of ticks and fleas.

When I was done with the pedestrian paths I cleaned up the grass around Caesar’s cage. The big enclosure with the six females needed it next. Unlike Jake, I didn’t feel safe enough to do the work while the animals were around me. I waited until Jake was on the other side of the zoo, then I used a handful of chicken necks to lure them into the temporary pen and closed them off. The girls looked offended.

“Just because you’re friendly with Jake doesn’t mean you’ll be friendly with me,” I told them. As if to emphasize the point, one of them—Bella, I thought—snarled at me unhappily.

It was hot work, and I sweated profusely until the sun fell beneath the trees to the west. The temperature immediately dropped twenty degrees. If it was this bad in May, I didn’t want to see what it would be like in July or August.

Depending on how long it took David to move the big cats, I might be done by then.

As I moved the weed-whacker around the outside of the enclosure, the hair on the back of my neck stiffened. I looked around and saw Anthony on the other side of the enclosure fence, a hundred feet away, taking photos with a Canon DSLR camera.

Photos of me.

I let go of the trigger and the weed-whacker winded down. “Hey! What are you doing!”

He lowered the camera. “I’m taking photos.”

I gripped the weed-whacker like a weapon as I marched across the enclosure. “I can see that. Why are you taking photos of me?”

“They’re for the GoFundMe page,” he explained. “I’ve got the page all set up, but I’ve been doing research on effective tactics for drawing donations. Describing all the work that needs to be done isn’t enough. We need photos of the work itself. That’s what tugs on people’s heart strings and makes them open up their wallets.”

“Then why aren’t you taking photos of Jake and David?” I demanded.

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