Fifty Degrees Below

‘Tiger! Tiger!’

The crowd cheered. The tigers ignored the commotion. They padded around on the washed grass, sniffing things. One marked the big tree in their quadrant, protected from claws if not from pee by a new wooden cladding, and the crowd said ‘Ah.’ Nick explained to the people around him that these were Bengal tigers that had been washed out to sea in a big flood of the Brahmaputra, not the Ganges; that they had survived by swimming together for an unknown period of time, and that the Brahmaputra’s name changed to the Tsangpo after a dramatic bend upstream. Anna asked if the Ganges too hadn’t been flooding at least a little bit. Joe jumped up and down in his backpack, nearly toppling forward over Charlie’s head. Charlie listened to Nick, as did Frank Vanderwal, standing behind them among the Khembalis.

Rudra Cakrin gave a small speech, translated by Drepung, thanking the zoo and all its people, and then the Quiblers.

‘Tiger tiger tiger!’

Frank grinned to see Joe’s excitement. ‘Ooooop!’ he cried, imitating the gibbons, which excited Joe even more. It seemed to Anna that Frank was in an unusually good mood. Some of the FONZies came by and gave him a big round button that said FOG on it, and he took another one from them and pinned it to Nick’s shirt. Nick asked the volunteers a barrage of questions about the zoo animals still on the loose, at the same time eagerly perusing the FOG brochure they gave him. ‘Have any animals gotten as far as Bethesda?’

Frank replied for the FONZies, allowing them to move on in their rounds. ‘They’re finding smaller ones all over. They seem to be radiating out the tributary streams from Rock Creek. You can check the website and get all the latest sightings, and track the radio signals from the ones that have been tagged. When you join FOG, you can call in GPS locations for any ferals that you see.’

‘Cool! Can we go and look for some?’

‘I hope so,’ Frank said. ‘That would be fun.’ He looked over at Anna and she nodded, feeling pleased. ‘We could make an expedition of it.’

‘Is Rock Creek Park open yet?’

‘It is if you’re in the FOG.’

‘Is it safe?’ Anna asked.

‘Sure. I mean there are parts of the gorge where the new walls are still unstable, but we would stay away from those. There’s an overlook where you can see the torn-up part and the new pond where a lot of them drink.’

‘Cool!’

The larger of the swimming tigers slouched down to the moat and tested the water with his huge paw.

‘Tiger tiger tiger!’

The tiger looked up. He eyed Joe, tilted back his massive head, roared briefly at what had to be the lowest frequencies audible to humans, or even lower. It was a sound mostly felt in the stomach.

‘Ooooooh,’ Joe said. The crowd said the same.

Frank was grinning with what Anna now thought of as his true smile. ‘Now that’s a vocalization,’ he said.

Rudra Chakrin spoke for a while in Tibetan, and Drepung then translated.

‘The tiger is a sacred animal, of course. He stands for courage. When we are at home, his name is not to be said aloud; that would be bad luck. Instead he is called King of the Mountain, or the Big Insect.’

‘The Big Insect?’ Nick repeated incredulously. ‘That’d just make him mad!’

The larger tiger, a male, padded over to the tree and raked the new cladding, leaving a clean set of claw marks on the fresh wood. The crowd ooohed again.

Frank hooted. ‘Hey, I’m going to go see if I can set the gibbons off. Nick, do you want to join me?’

‘To do what?’

‘I want to try to get the gibbons to sing. I know they’ve recaptured one or two.’

‘Oh, no thanks. I think I’ll stay here and keep watching the tigers.’

‘Sure. You’ll be able to hear the gibbons from here, if they do it.’

Eventually the tigers flopped down in the morning shade and stared into space. The zoo people made speeches as the crowd dispersed through the rest of the zoo. Some pretty vigorous whooping from the direction of the gibbons’ enclosure nevertheless did not sound quite like the creatures themselves. After a while Frank rejoined them, shaking his head. ‘There’s only one gibbon couple that’s been recovered. The rest are out in the park. I’ve seen some of them. It’s neat,’ he told Nick. ‘You’ll like it.’

Drepung came over. ‘Would you join our little party in the visitors’ center?’ he asked Frank.

‘Sure, thanks. My pleasure.’

They walked up the zoo paths together to a building near the entry on Connecticut. Drepung led the Quiblers and Frank to a room in back, and Rudra Cakrin guided them to seats around a round table under a window. He came over and shook Frank’s hand: ‘Hello, Frank. Welcome. Please to meet you. Please to sit. Eat some food, drink some tea.’

Frank looked startled. ‘So you do speak English!’

The old man smiled. ‘Oh yes, very good English. Drepung make me take lessons.’

Drepung rolled his eyes and shook his head. Padma and Sucandra joined them as they passed out sample cups of Tibetan tea. The cross-eyed expression on Nick’s face when he smelled his cup gave Drepung a good laugh. ‘You don’t have to try it,’ he assured the boy.

‘It’s like each ingredient has gone bad in a completely different way,’ Frank commented after a taste.

‘Bad to begin with,’ Drepung said.

‘Good!’ Rudra exclaimed. ‘Good stuff.’

He hunched forward to slurp at his cup. He did not much resemble the commanding figure who had given the lecture at NSF, Anna thought, which perhaps explained why Frank was regarding him so curiously.

‘So you’ve been taking English lessons?’ Frank said. ‘Or maybe it’s like Charlie said? That you spoke English all along, but didn’t want to tell us?’

‘Charlie say that?’

‘I was just joking,’ Charlie said.

‘Charlie very funny.’

‘Yes … so you are taking lessons?’

‘I am scientist. Study English like a bug.’

‘A scientist!’

‘I am always scientist.’

‘Me too. But I thought you said, at your lecture, that rationality wasn’t enough. That an excess of reason was a form of madness.’

Rudra consulted with Drepung, then said, ‘Science is more than reason. More stronger.’ He elbowed Drepung, who elaborated:

‘Rudra Cakrin uses a word for science that is something like devotion. A kind of devotion, he says. A way to honor, or worship.’

‘Worship what, though?’