James Patterson - Zoo

Darkness. Stench. Claustrophobia.

In the pipe, I could hear sounds coming from someplace I figured was at the opposite end. Yelping, whining. Dog sounds.

Eventually I ran out of pipe. I stood up in the dark of some new room. The smell was even more concentrated here. Had I climbed into the sewer?

There was a dim, barely luminous light on somewhere, a weak orange flicker. My eyes adjusted.

Below me, the sunken floor of the ballroom-size underground chamber was moving.

As far beyond me as I could see, there was a squirming mass of eyes, teeth, hair.

The dogs were moving around and on top of each other in a way I had never seen before. They were slithering against each other like worms in a can. I was within scenting distance for all of them, but not a single one even turned toward me.

Many of them were copulating. The dogs fucked impassively, with slack tongues and unchanging expressions. Others looked sick, their hides mottled in what looked like a whitish mold. Small fights broke out here and there. A few dogs would come together in a sudden tumble of kicking legs, snapping jaws, and barking—blazing into sudden fits, one dog dominating and another surrendering with a pitiful whine, the other dogs skulking away quickly. The room was foggy and hot with moving bodies, wet with breath and tongues. Snorting. Sneezing. Heads twitching. Legs scratching.

Along the wall of the chamber to my right, galleries had been carved in the raw dirt walls and in them, female dogs were nursing puppies. The swollen bitches lay on their sides, their bloated bellies looking tender and thin-skinned, pink, jiggling with the weight of milk as the puppies suckled.

I looked out across the squirming underground orgy of dogs. These dogs were acting as if they were organized somehow, as if they had a hive mind. They were acting more like insects than like mammals.

Then that lightbulb clicked on again above my head. The hive mind. Bugs. That proved to be one of the keys to understanding what was going on.

The animals were all acting like social insects—swarming, teeming, feeding, breeding.

The sight reminded me of something I once saw on a research trip to Costa Rica in grad school. The time I saw an ant death spiral. It’s an amazing thing. We came across hundreds and hundreds of ants, all running together in a giant spiraling circle. It was as though they were running laps, spiraling and spiraling together, a squirming black whirlpool of ants. It shows you the power of pheromones. Ants follow one another by their pheromone trails. When you see a line of marching ants, it means that each ant is following the chemical trail of the one in front it, picking up the scent with its sensitive antennae. But every once in a while something happens that breaks the pheromone trail—a log falls on the middle of the line, for example. And suddenly some ant in the middle of the chain now finds himself at the front of a new one. He panics. (I’m anthropomorphizing here, but bear with me.) He runs around like crazy, searching for another pheromone trail to follow. Eventually he finds one, and starts following this other ant. But unbeknownst to him, he’s just found the pheromone trail of the ant in the back of his own line. And then the column turns into a loop that winds and winds in on itself as the ants, blindly following one another, simply run around and around in circles until they die.

And I thought: pheromones.

SCRAMBLING, HUFFING, NEARLY ten meters up in the tree, Cheslav Prokopovich stops climbing and tentatively leans out, distributing his weight carefully along the limbs of the Siberian pine, which are getting thinner at this height.

Through the mesh of crisscrossing branches, he can see for several kilometers down the rocky river valley, its horizontal visual panorama interrupted only by the tall and starkly looming transcontinental radio tower that is the reason for the village’s existence this far north.

But sightseeing is the least of his concerns this afternoon.

Prokopovich carefully unstraps his rifle from his back and flicks a downward glance at the forest floor, looking for the other members of his hunting party. From this height, Sasha, Jirg, and Kiril look identical. The three Russians are wearing army boots and cheap camouflage hunting coveralls. All of them are stocky, bald, and chunky-featured, as if they’re built out of rocks.

Lifelong friends and residents of Inta, the four men had worked together in the nickel mine that opened up in the heady times after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their annual late-summer hunt is supposed to be a time of respite before the snow and ice come, before the arctic temperatures drive them inside and underground for six months beside the fire—six long, boring, maddeningly sedentary months of bottomless cups of vodka and endless hands of durak.

All year, Prokopovich anticipates this excursion, especially the sunny moment before he bags his elk—that full-body tremble of excitement, the childlike splashing of his heart inside his chest.

His heart is splashing now, Prokopovich thinks as he breathes on his rifle’s scope and dries it with his sleeve.

The weapon Prokopovich presses to his cheek is a handcrafted Mosin-Nagant hunting rifle. Through the scope’s reticle he scans the boreal forest of evergreens, firs, and pines that green the landscape. He is looking for any slight sign of movement.

Specifically, he is looking for the wolves. The wolves that have been chasing them since morning.

There are several dozen, maybe more. The biggest and most aggressive wolves he has ever seen. Why so many wolves have decided to pack together and come after them Prokopovich does not know. He only knows that if Kiril had not woken up early to take a piss and seen them in the distance, loping up the mountainside like lava flowing in reverse, they might already be dead.

Prokopovich rests the sight on the rattletrap rail bridge that spans the ravine they crossed earlier. The abandoned rail line was built by gulag prisoners in the 1950s, when Inta’s network of government labor camps was still running. Their plan had been to head up the mountain across the dilapidated old bridge. They thought the wolves would be unable or too afraid to cross it. Up in the tree, he spies the bridge through the rifle scope, waits, and watches.

Prokopovich is thinking about his wife when the wolves break cover from the tree line en masse and head for the ravine.

“’Tchyo za ga’lima,” Prokopovich mutters to himself as the animals head straight for the bridge.

He watches as they begin to fastidiously work their way across, gingerly picking over the decrepit wooden ties and iron beams, one by one, paw by nimble paw.

“Blya!” Prokopovich says to the sky. “Vse zayebalo!”

Whore!

Fuck it all!

SPITTING OUT A sticky pine needle, Prokopovich rivets his eyes on the approaching wolves. They are moving fast, but he tries to count them. Soon, the task of counting them becomes overwhelming. He can’t. There are too many. What he sees is impossible. He has heard of packs of ten, maybe fifteen. Surely there must be fifty wolves spilling out of the trees, funneling over the bridge after them.

Prokopovich straps the rifle on his back and hurries down the tree.

“What now, hunter man?” Kiril says, soothing his nerves with a swig of vodka from his canteen.

Kiril’s face is cauliflowered and enflamed with rosacea. His eyes are like raisins.

Prokopovich pauses for a moment, frowning. It is not Sasha, who still plays hockey, or his cousin Jirg, the weight lifter, whom he is worried about; it is the largest of the men, his best friend, Kiril, who causes him concern. The big, boisterous fool is squatting against the trunk of a tree, wheezing like a concertina from the exertion of the morning’s uphill march. Kiril is fat as a swine and smokes like a broken truck, and is as slow-moving as sap in January.