But for Lorna, it ran even deeper than that. When surrounded by animals, she felt more herself, more alive, even her senses seemed more acute: noting the milky smell of a puppy’s breath, the coarse feel of a cat’s tongue on the back of her hand, the rumble of a frightened dog, more felt under her palm than heard. She had always been that way, going back to childhood. From third grade on, she knew she wanted to be a veterinarian. And over time, while other colleagues grew jaded, her bond only grew stronger.
As Lorna continued to feed the cub, she walked the bank of kennels. The conjoined monkeys shared a middle cage. The two were clutched together, asleep, nestled in a warm pile of towels. She noted the small white bandages over their elbows where they’d collected blood samples and run intravenous fluids to hydrate the mistreated pair. A steel dish in a corner held a pile of monkey chow, along with slivers of fresh bananas.
Lorna had already reviewed the medical file hanging on a clipboard below the cage. Their blood chemistries and CBC were unremarkable. Mild anemia and elevated liver enzymes, most likely from prolonged malnourishment. But despite the terror of their new surroundings, the pair had eaten well after their initial tests.
She noted that someone had already filled in the space for the patients’ names. They had scribbled in Huey and Dewey.
She smiled. So much for professional detachment. But she could hardly complain. She rocked the cub in her arm like a baby. She had named him Bagheera after the panther from Kipling’s Jungle Book.
Still, despite the endearment of names, the facility had a mystery to solve concerning these animals. Someone had gone to some effort to produce this bizarre cargo. Blood had been shed to cover it up. But why and to what end-and more importantly who were they?
Lorna sensed that answers were locked within these animals. Shortly after arriving, each had undergone a thorough physical exam, including a full-body Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan. The MRI data was still being compiled by a new computer-modeling program, which used the data to produce three-dimensional images of all internal organs. She was anxious to see the results.
What other genetic abnormalities might they find?
At the back of the ward, a hay-lined run held the small lamb, a little girl. She lay in a pile of straw, looking forlorn without her mother. Large brown eyes stared at Lorna as she passed. She was worried about the lamb. So far she had refused to nurse off a bottle.
Before Lorna could ponder other ways to get the lamb to suckle, a loud irritated squawk drew her attention to the final patient. She turned to the last survivor of the trawler. An avian expert on staff determined the bird to be a male African Grey parrot, a species from the rain forests of West and Central Africa. Though without any feathers or plumage, that identification remained far from certain. The judgment was based on the bird’s characteristic white irises. Set against black pupils and gray-green skin, the color pattern made the eyes excessively expressive.
She knew he wanted out of the cage. The parrot had already escaped once. Shortly after arriving here, he had used his beak and claw to flip the door latch and swing it open. They found the bird atop the bank of cages, screaming whenever anyone came close. They’d had to use a net to capture him and return him to his kennel, its door securely locked now.
“Sorry, Charlie,” she said as she stepped closer.
The parrot leaped to the front of the bars and flashed its eyes, black pupils waxing and waning in anger.
“Igor!“ the bird screamed at her in an eerily human voice. “Igor… good, Igor… Igor, Igor, Igor…”
Lorna realized what he was trying to communicate. She smiled. “So my little man, you’re Igor.” She stressed the last word, clearly his name.
His eyes stopped flashing. The bird cocked his head back and forth, studying her more quizzically, like someone debating whether to share a secret.
The name was disturbingly fitting. Igor was Dr. Frankenstein’s deformed assistant. Someone out there had a black sense of humor.
The parrot turned his head to the side, staring at her with one eye. “Want to go. Go away. I’m sorry.”
A chill crept through with his words. She knew psittacine species, which included all parrots, had a brain-to-body ratio equal to that of chimpanzees. Parrots were the smartest of all birds with the cognitive capacity, according to some studies, of a five-year-old child.
Igor’s nervous words reminded her of the famous case study of Alex, an African Grey parrot owned by Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a professor of psychology at Brandeis University. Alex wielded a vocabulary of a hundred and fifty words and showed an amazing ability to solve problems. He could answer questions, count numbers, even understood the concept of zero. And more than that, the bird could also express his feelings quite plainly. When Alex had been left at a veterinary hospital for a surgical procedure, he had pleaded with his owner: Come here. I love you. I’m sorry. I want to go back. Igor’s words here in the isolation ward echoed eerily that same cognition and understanding.
Curious, she moved to place the jaguar cub back into its cage. The cub had finished the bottle and was already contently half asleep.
Igor continued to watch her, tracking her as she returned Bagheera to a woolen nest of blankets. Once she had the cub settled, she crossed back to the parrot and leaned closer.
She spoke softly. “Hello, Igor.”
“Hello,” he mimicked back and climbed up and down the bars, still clearly nervous with his new surroundings.
She struggled to think of a way to help calm him-then remembered her visit to the trawler’s hold and had a sudden inspiration. She slipped a PDA out of her pocket and keyed up the calculator. She pressed the icon for a familiar Greek letter.
Once ready, she asked, “Igor, what is pi?”
The parrot froze on the cage door, eyed her again, then hopped back to his wooden perch. He stared at her with one eye, then the other.
“C’mon, Igor. What is pi?”
He squawked again, his head jogged up and down a couple of times, then he began a familiar recitation. “Three one four one five nine two six five…”
His head continued to bob with each number, rhythmic and regular. She stared at her calculator’s display. It was the mathematical constant pi. The number sequence was correct. The parrot’s nervous shivering slowly settled as he continued, passing beyond the number of digits on her PDA’s display. He sank low to his perch and crouched over his claws, clearly finding some solace in the concentrated repetition, like someone knitting or an old man working a crossword puzzle.
He went on and on, slipping into an almost hypnotic rhythm.
She lost count of the number of digits he spouted.
It had to be well over a hundred.
She didn’t know if the continuing sequence was just nonsense, but she planned on repeating the test at the first opportunity. She listened for several minutes in stunned silence, recognizing she would need pages and pages of the mathematical constant to see if the bird was correct.
How long a sequence has he memorized? And who taught him?
Before she could consider this further, the door to the isolation ward pushed open with a soft pop of its double seals. Igor immediately fell silent. She turned as the lanky figure of Dr. Carlton Metoyer strode into the ward.
“ Carlton,” she said, surprised by the director’s unannounced visit. “What are you doing down here?”
He offered her a warm fatherly smile. “I see you’ve finished feeding Bagheera.” He stressed the cub’s new name, his eyes dancing with amusement.
She inwardly groaned. She had only mentioned the cub’s name to her research assistant, but as always, word traveled quickly across ACRES. She felt a flush warm her cheeks. She was supposed to be a postdoctoral fellow, not a preteen with a new kitten.