In a minute, we spotted Deirdre in front of the old Heads and Horns building, talking with another young woman. When we reached them, the introductions began.
“I’m tied up in meetings all afternoon,” Deirdre said. “But you have a much better guide in Hillary Hawes. She’s been a zookeeper with us for eight years, so she’s the one to ask about the animals.”
Deirdre turned to go back into the building, then stopped and looked at me. “I’ve got a feeling that there’s something you’re not telling me,” she said. “A reason you’re here that isn’t just about a memorial service.”
“To tell you the truth, Deirdre, I can’t quite explain it all myself,” I said, letting down my guard. “But it’s an instinct I’ve got, and I think I owe it to Paul Battaglia to follow through with what my gut is saying. I owe it to you to tell you—as soon as I know.”
“Well,” she said, loosening up with the hint of a smile, “the tours are free.”
I knew what she was thinking. She didn’t want me to bring any of my bad karma into her animal safe haven. I had that same concern.
“Where would you like to start?” Hillary asked Mike.
“You’ll have to tell us,” he said. “It’s been too long.”
“Hop on,” she said, pointing to her six-seater golf cart. “I’ll give you some highlights and you tell me when to slow down and dig deeper.”
“Sounds fair,” Mike said, sitting in the front beside her.
Mercer and I took the middle row.
“I’ve got an obvious place to go,” she said. “Deirdre told me you’re interested in endangered species.”
“Thanks.”
“Have either of you guys been to that little building?”
“Not I,” Mike said.
“No,” Mercer added. “Why?”
“As you can see from the architecture, it’s one of the original campus buildings,” Hillary said.
It was a small structure, handsomely designed, like a nineteenth-century office building.
“It’s a police precinct,” she said.
“C’mon,” Mike said, pointing at the building with a laugh. “There’s no precinct at the zoo. There’s no zoo patrol.”
“We have our own security,” she said, “but this is actually a substation of the Forty-Eighth Precinct.”
“No way,” Mike said, “with real live cops?”
“Not many of them. You’ll see a cop on a scooter from time to time, especially in the summer. They’re just assigned during the day, in case a child gets separated from a parent, or someone drops a handbag in the African Plains.”
“Kind of suits me perfectly,” he said.
“No homicides here,” Hillary said.
“In this Bronx wilderness?” Mercer asked. “No murders?”
“Let’s just say we’ve had some maulings over the decades. People who wound up on the wrong side of the enclosure, but it’s their own fault,” Hillary said. “There was actually a teenager who came here in the 1920s, after her debutante party. She and her friends slipped in, pretty intoxicated, and she started dancing with a polar bear.”
“Unhappy ending?” he asked.
“She left the zoo short one arm, as the story goes,” she said. “And you probably read about the guy who jumped off the monorail a few years ago.”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “And some tigers tried to gnaw on him.”
“They didn’t get much,” Hillary said, “but he came out fine. Although nobody has a clue why he did it.”
“Those were trespassers,” Mike said. “The animals couldn’t have been guilty.”
“They weren’t,” she said. “Never a homicide here, Mike. So you just stay where you are.”
Hillary drove the cart past the Children’s Zoo and around the Bug Carousel, and stopped beyond the Butterfly Garden. I could see how easy it would be to lose ourselves in the beauty of the wildlife while tackling a more serious task.
She parked and we got off to follow her, through a short tunnel that brought us out—according to the signage—in the Congo Gorilla Forest.
“I remember a day when all the great apes were in the Primate House,” Mike said. “Cement walls and iron bars. Kind of the Attica of the animal world.”
“Before my time,” Hillary said. “But that has all changed. We’ve got acres and acres here, and of course these glass enclosures are a lot more civilized, aren’t they?”
“Who are we looking at?” Mercer asked.
“That’s Ernie,” she said.
“Big boy,” Mike said, getting up close to the glass.
“Thirty-five years old, and he weighs around five hundred pounds.”
“He’s a silverback gorilla,” Mercer said, “isn’t he?”
“Yes, the adult males grow that distinctive silver stripe down the center of their backs.”
“Born in the Congo?” I asked.
“Actually not,” Hillary said. “In Cleveland, like most other gorillas in our zoo populations throughout the country—Cleveland’s got a great gorilla-breeding program—though both Ernie’s parents were captured in the wild.”
“Hey, he survived Cleveland,” Mike said, watching as a baby gorilla swung from a viny branch and jumped onto his back. “Must be a tough guy. And none of the other gorillas in sight look anywhere near his size.”
“That’s because they’re all female or his kids,” Hillary said. “It’s his harem. Ernie’s the alpha dog in this group, and you can’t have two males around the same troop of females—not here, and not in the wild.”
“He doesn’t mind that little guy jumping onto his back?” Mike asked.
“Ernie loves his babies,” she said. “Gorillas are very social animals.”
“What does he eat to get that big?”
“Gorillas are herbivores, Mike,” Hillary said. “They mostly eat plants.”
Mike kept walking through the exhibit, watching the gorillas interact. “I guess that’s why there are no leaves left on the trees.”
“The keepers feed them leaves every day,” Hillary said, laughing at Mike. “That particular tree isn’t real.”
“What do you mean?” he said, staring into the enclosure at the fallen tree trunk as close to his nose as the piece of glass between them would allow.
“We’ve got a workshop on-site where environmental objects are simulated.”
“You’re telling me that’s fake?” Mike asked. “That huge tree trunk and all those vines the baby gorillas are swinging on?”
“Completely man-made,” Hillary said. “This exhibit is indoors and outdoors, as you can see, and covers more than six acres, one acre of which is this particular enclosure.”
“Time changes everything,” Mike said. “Now it’s the humans who are penned in and the gorillas roam free.”
“That’s the plan. You won’t see any bars in our park. There’s this glass wall to keep the animals in,” Hillary said, “but mostly they’re separated from other species—and us—by ravines and streams and artificial cliffs, and fences around the perimeters.”
We continued on our way on the wooden path, through the exhibit.
“Tell me about the trees,” Mike said.
“One of our best features,” Hillary said. “About half of the trees in the exhibit—and all of the green plants—are real. The others are fakes, but require painstaking work to be able to fool you.”