A single golden jackal just then trotted toward Cuthbert. They were normally the only animals visible from outside the zoo, but from his grotto, he was less than five or six meters from them.
“Almost time,” Cuthbert said to the animal. “I am coming for you—just minutes now.” Zero hour, when the zoo closed, was near. The jackals weren’t otters, but they also intrigued Cuthbert, if only because they were the animals he saw most. Our names are lie, they would call to him, over and over. Let us free just one just two just three just one. Lie, our names, lie, lie. He did not understand what the jackals meant by all this, but he had a guess: they were always being told to “lie,” like dogs, by a certain ilk of self-amused bystander outside the zoo, and the poor jackals had come to think of the intransitive verb as their collective name.
“You can find new names,” Cuthbert had answered. “Anything you want.”
We’re lie, they said.
Cuthbert admired their humped, scruffly backs, angular faces, the brown swabs of tails—all tangible dog-pieces darting about a sparse pen like small rages on legs. There was a dark energy in them that made him feel stronger.
Still, he would forsake jackals in a second for a chance to visit otters. Neither he nor the public at large could get even a glimpse of otters from outside the zoo. To Cuthbert, they were the most English, most sacred, most miraculous wild animals still on earth (he didn’t realize that the zoo’s Asian species actually came from an annoyed flax farmer in Thailand who had grudgingly decided not to poison them).
CUTHBERT’S PLAN, IF one could call it such, was to set free a single jackal at first, then go from there. The lions and the otters could not be first, as they presented many logistical challenges. The idea of releasing other animals tantalized him, but even for Cuthbert, that also seemed, as of now, a bit crazy. He was no activist, no animal sentimentalist, no mere vandal. He was not trying to “make a statement” but to let select animals craft their own.
However things unfolded after that, the one thing Cuthbert knew he must accomplish, at any cost, was to free the otters. If they did know where to find Drystan, they held in their black claws, in his view, the future of all Britain—of all Earth.
He heard them then, in a susurrus of watersongs: gagoga gagoga gagoga miltsung miltsung miltsung.
“I am coming,” he said. “You’ll see.”
A lone jackal was watching him, watching him talk to himself.
“Don’t mind this dotty fool,” he said to the jackal. “I’ve got otters on the brain.” The jackal tilted his head to one side, then the other, puzzling over the old man.
Cuthbert imagined it running across the great dark spaces of the Regent’s Park as joyfully as it might have, long ago, on the savannas of Ngorongoro. Releasing it would be a sort of ritual of atonement, of hope. He’d been able to watch these creatures all winter, as carefully as any nonpaying observer could, sizing up security issues, obtaining any necessary equipment. The jackals were by far the easiest choice, much simpler than the otters. They also struck him as oddly innocent in their messages to him. They were just dogs, he said to himself. Little ones, too. They called themselves lies, as though they genuinely didn’t believe in their right to exist. They only want to run about the park. They had asked, calmly and without unctuousness, for a simple release. That’s what any dog wants and needs, he felt.
Just one, they had said. Just two, just three, let us free!
AFTER HALF AN HOUR or so of dazed staring, Cuthbert took a packet of diatom-and-cinnamon chewing gum from his pocket and put a piece into his mouth. Already, he could feel a distant nervousness again, a thunder-footed jackboot of Flōt withdrawal on the far edges of his being but tramping toward him brutally with tiny, hard limbs. He got the orb back out. He took another belt off it, screwed the cap back on, and hid it beneath the shirt fragment.
The zoo’s lights were beginning to pop on like an outbreak of giant orange flowers. The activity within the zoo seemed to be winding down, and finally he decided—making a woeful error—that it must be closed.
“Time now,” he whispered. He wondered whether he might just not pick up a bottle again—ever. He smiled. Could it be that easy? Could he follow the otters and lions to a new life on the other side of Flōt, one in which he might see Drystan again? It was always easy to “quit” when he was kaylied.