John Davis - Fear No Evil

She was frightened now, locked inside it, sick with the fear the deputy Sheriff had instilled into her, the horror of the men in the Erwin gun shop. She had wrapped her new sleeping bag around her shoulders. She had eaten, and had had a good few nips of whisky. But she could not sleep. She had a lot of tramping around to do tomorrow if she hoped to find them before the gunmen of Erwin. But she was too desperate to sleep.

She sat in the dark, nerves screaming with exhaustion. Big Bald rose treeless to the south, ghostly silver in the moonlight. It was completely still. Spooky. O God, the wilderness was spooky. She had tried to dismiss her fear contemptuously, then to examine it logically. But it was man’s primitive fear of the wilderness itself, its wildness, that she was afraid of, just as much as a madman with an ax. Driving up here, she had been fearful that demons would leap out of the shadows. Demons —the same that had frightened cavemen and the Pilgrim Fathers and made them set out grimly to ‘conquer the wilderness,’ turn it into a garden, to take its primeval menace out of it. Childish … But no—it was the primitive man in her.

She took a deep, tense breath, and reached for the whisky bottle.

If Bernard could see her now … Then she felt foolish for even thinking about him. She lit a cigarette with shaky fingers, and inhaled grimly.

She took another sip of whisky, and almost gagged. Then she could hear Jonas Ford saying, ‘Whisky isn’t a very feminine drink, my dear.’ Well to hell with you, Jonas, it tastes damn good, and it’s making me feel a whole lot better. Where the hell are you ? While I sit here scared witless …

She sighed.

She was not being very reasonable. It had been her wild decision to hurl herself onto a plane and get down here. Jonas was doing the right thing, staying to organize things. And what good did she think she was going to do here, anyway? What was she going to do even if she found David Jordan and the animals?

She massaged her forehead with her fingertips.

She did not know.

Except somehow stand between the animals and a bloodbath, somehow shout the hillbilly gunmen out of shooting, somehow warn David Jordan about them, somehow shout some sense into him …

David Bloody Jordan … A fat chance she had of talking any sense into him. She remembered him clearly, and he was obviously very bright—even Jonas Ford had once described him as ‘very intelligent,’ and coming from Jonas that was quite something. The keepers had talked about him with such awe, and all the stories—like the time one of the grizzly bears had got his paw jammed in a tin can that some idiot had thrown into the pen. He was going berserk, and the staff was trying to lasso him to tie him down and there was a terrible hullabaloo, and apparently David Jordan had just walked into the den, cool as a cucumber, grabbed the enraged animal’s paw and wrestled the can off. ‘Quite fearless,’ the curator of mammals had described him. ‘Damn stupid,’ Jonas Ford had said. But even Jonas had described him as ‘quite a remarkable fellow,’ and the previous vet had said that he had ‘almost a Saint Franciscan ability with animals.’ She had heard a good deal about him before he had unexpectedly turned up at the zoo.

She’d heard the commotion in the Big Cat House, and gone over to investigate, and there was the great Davey Jordan going from cage to cage, and the cats were beside themselves with excitement, purring and rubbing themselves against the bars. She had watched, fascinated. She had read a good deal about people who can do wonderful things with animals. Quietly she had walked up to him. He paid no attention to her, just stood there, in his own private world of the animals, and he was smiling and talking to them softly; she could not catch the words but they were loving, and the look on his face was? … It was a beautiful private world she had glimpsed, of love and understanding between a man and animals, which she felt she had no right to enter, an inter-feeling she would never achieve with animals no matter how hard she tried. It had been an intrusion on her part when she finally tried to talk to him. He had been vaguely aloof, almost abrupt, as if he couldn’t waste his precious moments.

She could not remember now what she had said as openers—doubtless something corny—but she remembered he had said: ‘It’s not that animals are like us— it’s us who’re like them. If you put it the other way around you’re denying the theory of evolution. We’re all part of the same animal kingdom … every Behaviorist from Flaubert to Desmond Morris agrees there’s hardly an aspect of animal behavior that isn’t relevant to ours.’

And with that he had excused himself, leaving her feeling foolish. And she had been astonished at the articulate wisdom falling from the lips of a circus hand.

Which, afterward, she had resented. After all, she was the veterinary surgeon around here, it was her domain. But she had never forgotten the look on his face, the sweet vision she had glimpsed behind those eyes.

But, by God, she resented it now, with anger and fear in her heart, sitting like a fool again in her rented car in the middle of the wilderness in the middle of the night. Why was she always such a … sucker ? For the … grand emotional gesture?

She lit another cigarette, and longed for daylight.

At three o’clock she was suddenly awake with a start, realizing she had been asleep. Her eyes darted about in the silent moonlight. Then they widened, and her stomach contracted.

A mass of moving blackness was coming out of the black forest onto the open grassy sag.

A man was jogging in the lead, and behind him were the big cats, ears back, tails low, then the elephants, then the gorillas, then the enormous bears, and behind them all was a huge man loping along with a dog. She gasped and wanted to run. All she knew was the raw human fright of wild animals coming at her. She cringed and stared. Then came the astonishment; such a disparate mixture of animals all following one man! She sat rigid at the spectacle of the magnetism some rare people have … then David Jordan glimpsed her car on the edge of the forest, and he stopped.

She collected her wits, and rolled down her window frantically. ‘Mr Jordan!’

He turned and started running for the forest, and the animals whirled around and followed him. She scrambled out of her car.

‘I’m the zoo vet—Dr. Johnson—I’m alone!’

He disappeared like a shadow into the forest, the animals crashing through the undergrowth after him. She yelled, ‘Wait—’ and stumbled into the open. ‘Mr Jordan! Look, I’m alone—I’m unarmed!’

She waited for his response, heart pounding, frightened. Then his hoarse voice came out of the black forest.

‘What do you want?’

She was so relieved she was almost crying. ‘Please—I’ve got to talk to you!’

‘What about?’

‘About the animals! This is a terrible thing you’re doing. You’ve got to give them back, for their own good!’

‘They’re not going back.’

She cried desperately across the moonlight: ‘You’ve got to listen to me! They’re going to be shot. I’ve seen the gun-crazy hillbillies in Erwin! I’ve seen them, I tell you—buying guns! And at the roadblocks. And the police are after you, and they’re not much better. You’re going to be surrounded!’

Davey crouched in the dark forest, his sweat glistening. ‘Where are they?’

‘I don’t know exactly. Last night they were at the last highway back there!’

‘They’re crazy if they shoot, that won’t get the animals back.’

‘Even the police will shoot! They’re frightened, don’t you understand? They aren’t used to wild animals here!’