“Sure.” Why did he always sound so abrupt when he spoke to her? “Sophie is on the right, the one in back is Sweetiepie, and the big one is Belle.”
“She’s the one that patted my head with her trunk last night and nearly scared me witless,” Tala said, smiling over his shoulder.
He gaped at her. “She touched you?”
“Through the bars. Very gently. I knew you had elephants, of course, but I didn’t know how many, and I hadn’t seen them before. I was half-asleep in that old kitchen chair pushed right up against them. I didn’t realize it was their cage.”
He bristled. “They’re not caged. Not any longer.”
“I loved it.” She leaned against the bars. “They are beautiful, aren’t they?”
“Should have seen them when they got here,” he said. “Skin and bones.”
Mace looked up over the tops of his glasses. “The bars are to keep them from investigating—actually I mean destroying—this room. Elephants are endlessly curious. Unfortunately, they are also incredibly destructive while they’re about it.”
“But last night, Belle touched me so gently.”
“She wasn’t interested in seeing the inside of your brain,” Pete said. “But if she decided to see the inside of that cabinet over there—” he pointed toward the drug cabinet “—she would just as carefully knock it over and stomp it until the doors popped off to check out what’s inside.”
“Oh.” Tala glanced at the girls, who were keeping one eye on her while they bundled hay into their mouths. “Would you do that?” she asked Sophie.
As if in answer, Sophie dipped her head and curled her trunk.
Tala laughed.
Pete jumped. Her laugh was low, but it seemed to glitter in the chill air. Suddenly he felt as though he’d happily stick on a false nose and do pratfalls over floppy clown shoes if he could hear her laugh again. Too long without a woman, he decided, that was all it was. Too much Mace, too many elephants, not enough human companionship.
A low growl came from the lioness’s enclosure. Tala looked at her quickly. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to wake the baby.”
Suddenly she was all mouse again, anxious and subdued.
“The scent of meat woke her, not you. Ah, m’dear,” Mace said over his shoulder, “might we be ready for a bite of breakfast?” He smiled over at Tala. “I’d say you’ve been christened Baby.” The lioness stared at him with narrow, yellow eyes.
“Watch it, Mace,” Pete said. “A hungry cat is a dangerous cat. Your dictum, remember? First time I went to work at the zoo.”
“This particular baby, however, is missing both her front claws and her top left incisor,” Mace said. “She could still kill me, but she’d have to work at it.”
“What?” Tala asked. She looked from the older man to the younger. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“No reason to,” Pete told her. “Didn’t make much difference last night. But it means she’s been somebody’s pet—inasmuch as a lion can ever be a pet.”
“But people will still try,” Mace said, neatly arranging bits of meat and bone in a steel bucket. The lioness rumbled in anticipation.
“Surely they know better,” Tala said. “I mean, look at the size of her, and you say she’s still young.”
Pete shrugged. “They watch a National Geographic special or an episode of Nova and see a bunch of cute lion cubs playing around on-screen and they think how great it would be to have something like that. So they pick up the phone and order one.”
“Order one? Like a pizza?”
“Not quite that simple, but even now that the government has cracked down on importing exotic animals, there are plenty of places where you can buy a lion cub born in the States and have it brought to you, if you’ve got the money, that is.”
“But it’s illegal to own exotic animals, isn’t it?” she said. “In Tennessee, I mean.”
“Sure is,” Pete agreed, forking another flake of hay toward Belle. “Some people think they’re above the law. Of course, in some places lions are used to police marijuana patches and other illegal operations. Scarier than dogs.”
“My word,” she exclaimed. “You mean she might have been guarding something up by the Hollow? What about the deer? How could you keep her from roaming to hunt?”
“Maybe you couldn’t. Maybe she got out and her owner shot her when he couldn’t get her back.”
“I can’t believe that. I grew up in the Hollow, and I wander all over it in the summertime. There’s not enough flat land to grow a decent crop of collard greens, much less marijuana.”
“All the easier to hide the plants in, m’dear,” Mace said. “You’d be surprised what some people will get up to in the name of money. Still, I wouldn’t think anyone would have declawed her or defanged her for use as a guard. More likely she was a pet that got too big and was dumped too far from home to find her way back.”
“And then shot?”
“Possibly by someone who thought she was a cougar,” Pete said. “She’s the right color.”
“But they’re protected,” Tala said. “And terribly rare. My husband was a warden and spent a good deal of time in the woods, but even he’d never seen one. I certainly haven’t. As we said, Tennessee has awfully strict laws about exotic and protected animals. People were surprised you were able to get permission to bring in your elephants.”
“You should have seen the hoops I had to jump through,” Pete said. “And the girls aren’t going to eat the neighbor’s poodle—or the neighbor’s kid, come to that.”
“No. But they might stomp him, mightn’t they?” Tala asked.
“Highly unlikely. I only take female Indian elephants. They can be a nuisance and certainly get cranky sometimes, but now that they can move around the place freely, they enjoy life—possibly for the first time since they stopped nursing on their mothers. And I’ve gone to great pains with the twelve-foot fences to ensure they don’t go rampaging through the soybean fields around here.”
Mace held the steel bucket out to Pete. “Here. Feed the lioness.”
Pete felt Tala’s breath on his shoulder as he turned away from her and walked over to the lioness’s enclosure. The cat raised her body on her right paw and tried to stand. She made a deep trilling sound in the back of her throat, then let out a full-throated roar that shook the steel walls.
“Hold on,” Pete said. He set the bucket down in front of the door to the enclosure, opened it a few inches and used the end of his pitchfork to shove the bucket inside. Then he quickly closed and locked the door.
The cat instantly swiped at the bucket with her muzzle and knocked it over so that its contents spilled on the concrete in front of her blanket. She collapsed in front of it and began to eat noisily.
Pete stood and felt Tala’s hand on his arm. Her fingers felt warm and gentle.
“She’s hungry. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s a good sign.”
“What happens now?” Tala asked.
“Damned if I know. We could be in big trouble just having her here. I need to call the Fish and Wildlife people. Find out what they want to do with her. You know anybody over there I could talk to?”
“I guess so. But please, don’t call yet. I know