Then the snarling baboons: smiling, snowy-haired hamadryases, and the dog-faced geladas; my red-chested male, now forgetting his grievances. And the chacma baboons, the biggest; and perhaps I shouldn't have let out that old hundred-twenty-pound male.
Then gibbons, a whole horde. And chimpanzees, all six - one potbellied, who shoved the others and bit a spider monkey's tail. But I passed over, ashamed, the male, two-hundred-pound orangutan, and the quarter-ton lowland gorilla from the Gulf of Guinea. They couldn't believe it; they let me get almost to the door before they cried out, enraged and very envious. The orangutan tore his swinging tire off the rope and crammed it through the bars, squishing it up as thin as a bicycle tube. The lowland gorilla folded his tin water dish, as neatly as an envelope.
And the primates I released were not quiet, the frotting ingrates. I could hear my primates smashing ashtrays off the tables in the Biergarten.
'Graff,' said Gallen, 'you've got to calm them down or get us out.'
'These antelope types are safe enough,' I said, 'and they might distract the monkeys.' So I bolted for the pens - stretching from the Monkey Complex to the Australian's Little Colony - turning loose the aoudad, the anoa and the addax; letting go the gerenuk, the gemsbok and the gaur. I should have thought twice about the frotting gaur - tallest of wild oxen of the world - but I just read the name and didn't see him lurking in the dark. This bull stood six-foot-four at the shoulders, and I thought the gaur was a sort of diminutive goat. When he thundered out the fence gate past me, Gallen screamed, 'What's that, Graff?' And it tore by her smashing down hedges, frightened blind. 'What was it, Graff?' said Gallen, pinned down alongside the waiting zebras. 'You promised, Graff!' she cried.
'My mistake!' I cried. 'You let out those zebras now!' While I promptly loosed the sleek impala and the knobby Siberian ibex; all the Australians, and selected others.
But the zoo wasn't getting any quieter. The elephants blatted their brassy notes - resounding in the ponds of squabbling birds.
What harm would an elephant do? I thought. Just one, of course. And I could pick a docile one, certainly.
So I was off, scattering a conspiracy of gibbons cowering by the house for Big Loud Cats, and by the mysteriously silent hippohouse, where the hippo, I could only guess, was underwater and oblivious to this activity. Just as well, for sure, I thought - with his great plant-reeking mouth.
Inside the House of Pachyderms, the elephants were swaying, lifting their leg chains and thudding their trunks against each other's sides. I selected an old, large and chewed-eared African, and set my key in his shackles. He was so nice; I had to lead him by his trunk, out the Pachyderm House door, through which he barely fitted and where his presence scattered those conniving gibbons. But apparently, the elephant was a little deaf and had appeared so docile inside because he hadn't heard the rumpus. Because, outside, he jerked his trunk out of my hand and moved off at a steady, sideways trot, gathering speed, crushing shrubs and flattening down the iron rails along the paths.
I thought: Please don't let Gallen see him, God. And heard more ashtrays crash in whatever game the scheming monkeys played at the Biergarten.
Then I passed the tall, screened ruins where the giant birds of prey were perched, and thought: Not you. You'll eat the smaller monkeys. And for a second, thought: Which would at least keep them quiet.
But I went on back to the Small Mammal House, to collect my thoughts and see how old O. was doing with the anteaters. I met Gallen on the steps; she crouched in the purple light.
'I saw an elephant, Graff,' she said. 'I want to leave right now.'
'Just one elephant,' I said, dashing inside to spy O. Schrutt rumpled in a corner, his eyes watering with sawdust. The giant anteaters sat happily in the center of the glass-house, spiraling their tongues around their long snouts, calmly watching over old O.
This will never do, I thought - O. Schrutt must be kept on his toes. And I crawled back in the chute again, enticing and prodding the anteaters out of there - telling Schrutt, before I opened the chute door, that if I saw his eyes looking at me, I'd bring in the Chinese fishing cat.
Of course, I didn't. I exchanged the anteaters for the ratel - a surly, snarling badgerlike oval of hair and claws, with a long memory concerning Schrutt, I was sure. But the ratel was too small, I knew, to ever initiate a full-scale assault on old O. - even in the lumped and trussed condition.
I just popped open the chute door and called down to Schrutt, 'Here's little ratel!' And nudged the fat snarler inside. I watched them from the glass front; they respected each other from opposite corners, before the ratel grasped the situation Schrutt was in and boldly began a strutting show of himself, across the center of the cage.
But when I began lifting glass fronts elsewhere in the maze - releasing small and reasonable animals - I had to contend with Gallen again.
'You're not going to do a thing t
o that mother ocelot,' she said.
'Of course I won't,' I said, displaying my common sense for her to see - turning loose the casual sloth and the dour wombat, but passing by the lean, low, liver-colored jaguarundi. And letting go the zippy coati-mundi.
Of course, the anteaters were a nuisance - just blocking traffic in the aisle where they sat, watching the ratel and old O. Schrutt.
Gallen said, 'Please, Graff. Can't we leave now?'
And I said, 'We've got to muster them together, at one gate or another.' Then I turned the mongoose loose, of which Gallen disapproved, and freed the reluctant slow loris and the ring-tailed lemur, feeling more reasonable every minute.
Just to show you how reasonable I was, I did not free the poor binturong - the bearcat of Borneo - not wanting other animals to catch his rare disease.
And I gave a silent bow to the empty glass house of the bandicoot, already escaped this world.
But when I shook off nagging Gallen and emerged on the steps outside again, I was greeted by those animals, I hadn't selected. And they weren't cheering me now. They were tyrannical; they raged their envy. Forever present gibbons were sitting at the step bottom, shrugging shoulders and spitting. When I reached the path, they chattered accusations. They threw stones at me; I threw some back. I swung at one gibbon with the keyring, but he danced to the path rail and flung himself into the brush. Then I was assaulted with weed clods, sticks and general earth.
'You're free to go!' I screamed. 'Why don't you? Don't ask for too much!' And responding to my voice was what sounded like the utter demolishment of the Biergarten. I pelted down there, through a crunchy dust of littered ashtrays. This was a primate sort of destruction, for sure; a vandalism of a shocking, human type. They had shattered the onetime funhouse mirror; chunks of it lay all over the Biergarten terrace. I kept looking down at my puzzlework reflection, looming over myself.
'Just one more and that does me,' I said. And moved to the reeking cage of the Rare Spectacled Bears, who were hiding behind their drinking-and-dunking pool when I opened their cage. I had to shout at them to make them come out. They came shoulder to shoulder across the floor, heads lowered like whipped dogs. They turned circles through the destroyed Biergarten, running too close together and butting themselves into umbrellas and hissing monkeys.