The Zookeeper's Daughter, 1

Nothing seemed wrong that night. There were snoring lions, tired monkeys, alligators dreaming of being wrestled, even a dozing kangaroo. The tiger enclosure was the same, grasses swaying and trees creaking in the breeze, water still separating the habitat from its high, protective wall, faux-Indian ruins still ready to wow tourists — but the tigers were missing. No one noticed till the morning, when the keepers came for a feeding and found nothing to feed. There were no paw prints or scraps of food, no droppings or tufts of fur. It was as if no tiger had seen the inside of the enclosure, as if no animal had ever been held there at all.

I reported for work that day in my uniform, I had been working the box office for about four months, and the place was in a frenzy before dawn was painted from the sky. People sprinted from one side of the zoo to the other, checking on other animals. They were sweating and breathing heavily but speaking in clipped whispers and curt sentences while the monkeys shrieked from the trees. A search of the zoo turned up nothing, again no tracks, no evidence of tigers existing, let alone escaping. But we were sure the tigers had existed, absolutely sure, we asked every employee and everyone, especially their keepers, remembered tigers. We found stuffed tigers in the giftshop, a clear sign. So we were sure they had existed and we were sure they had been in the zoo yesterday at closing time, and we were sure they were gone.

I was on my way to the box office after checking out the scene when the zoo manager caught me, his face bright red, like a child’s balloon or a ripe cherry tomato. He was holding a rifle under his armpit.

“We need to take care of this fast,” he said.

“I work in the box office.”

“You don’t think I know that? I hired you. I know that.”

“Well, I don’t really have experience,” I looked at the rifle, “you know, hunting tigers. Or even dealing with the animals at all.”

“It’s fine. We need everyone we have on this. We’re organizing a search through the neighborhood. You’re on the second team, heading out from the south entrance.” He shoved the rifle into my hands.

I shook my head. “I can’t shoot animals, I don’t even know how to use a gun,” I said, holding it awkwardly.

“They’re tranquilizer darts. You’ll be fine.”

“What if I get mauled or … eaten?”

His mouth narrowed into a thin line. “Then I’ll just have to hire another ticket taker. We need to take care of this before the reporters show up.”

There’s a certain amount of anxiety that people experience when there’s a zoo in their neighborhood, in their town. There’s a constant worry that something is going to get loose, that an alligator will break out and eat their dog, that a jackal will get loose and eat their baby. Any mention of problems at the zoo winds up in the local papers very quickly.

“We don’t want this to turn into another cougar episode,” he said and grimaced.

I’d heard stories about the cougar almost every day since I was hired. It had escaped last summer and wondered through the town causing a panic, its progress tracked on both the nightly news and a special internet site, cougarwatch.com, set up especially for it but now defunct. It found its way into the mall at one point, sparking an immediately evacuation and causing the news anchors that night to joke about cougars shopping for Prada bags and cruising the food court for young studs. It never attacked anyone, caused no harm except the awful jokes and town-wide anxiety, but they finally shot it from a helicopter in someone’s backyard a full week after it escaped.

“Tigers — plural — tigers are a lot worse than a cougar,” he said. I nodded.

The team I was with combed through the neighborhood on foot, carrying our rifles past driveways and down cul-de-sacs and past strip malls, searching for any sign of tiger tracks. People just waking up to their eggs and OJ weren’t pleased to see us tromping through their backyards, past their in-ground pools, rifles in the air. People rubbed their eyes, did double takes. To those without coffee, we must have looked like dreams that had decided to tag along and follow them into the waking world of flesh, private hallucinations trespassing on their private property. One of them took our pictures with his phone and made a blog post about it which was read by his friends who forward it to their friends, one of whom sent it to somebody at the paper, which was how the story broke and the reporters showed up at the zoo less than an hour after the keepers discovered the animals missing.