CHAPTER 1
Aoife Gallagher wore a name tag with her name on it in Irish, and then below that, parenthetically and phonetically, (EEE-fah). It had been a mostly-successful venture in teaching tourists how to say her name in the four years she'd worked at the Shamrock Safari Wildlife Park, just off the coast of Cork, Ireland.
Amostlysuccessful venture. There were still a fair number of people who went at it from an attempt to make the letters do what they would in English. Those people called her A-oy-fee, or Oi-fee, and Aoife tried not to let it drive her mad.
Over those four years, unrelated to the issue of her name, Aoife had been fighting a second slow descent into madness, one over which she had much less control.
There wereday trippersat the wildlife park.
Not the humans, obviously.Peoplewere expected to come for a day. Some of them had annual passes, and were there several days a month. Sometimes even several days a week. Aoife knewthem. They were the artists who brought sketchpads and umbrellas so they could work even in the rain. They were the photographers who sat motionlessly beside the cheetah runfor hours on end, or propped their cameras on a tree stump and waited for the moment a pelican flew ponderously across the lake. They were the young mothers whose toddling children were simultaneously contained on the island's hundred-acre, fenced park, and also able to run free. Aoifeknewthem. They werefine.
No, it was theanimalday trippers that were the problem.
The golden eagle who had been there just in time for the August bank holiday, for example, which had—to the best of Aoife's ability to tell—left at 6 o'clock pm every day, as soon as the park closed, just like all the park attendees. She'd stopped by early on the Tuesday morning after the long weekend to admire it, and it was gone. The zookeeper cleaning the cage shrugged it off as a loaner, but people didn't really have golden eagles just sitting around toloan, for heaven's sake.
Or the African elephant that had been there the following June, over the midsummer celebrations. It had been a beautiful huge animal, ears fanning the air like the Irish sun was hot enough even for its sub-Saharan heritage. Peoplefloodedto the park to see the new visitor.
And at the end of the week, it was gone.
Elephants did not justtravel casuallyfrom one zoo or wildlife park to another. It was a massive, major undertaking to get an elephant from one location to another, unless you walked it, Aoife guessed, but that would just be a differentkindof major undertaking. And nobody had walked an African elephant across Ireland. Or across the Irish Sea, for that matter, becauseall the elephants in Ireland were Asian elephants.She knew this. Everyone in Ireland who paid any attention to the zoos knew this, especially because the Dublin Zoo's elephant breeding program was world-famous for its success, so elephants werea big dealaround these parts. In more ways than one!
Then there'd been the orangutan family staying for a short visit "while their habitat was rebuilt," just before Halloween. Aoife had actually gotten on the train and gone up to Dublin to visit the zoo and see if the orangutans were there, that time. They were. All of them, tolerating the gibbons who shared an island with them. Actually, one of the female orangutans was great friends with one of the gibbons, who had recently been very eager to introduce her new baby to her giant orange friend. Aoife thought that was lovely, really.
But it didn't explain where the safari park's week-long orangutan visitors had come from. It didn't explain how a black bear family had by all appearancesdropped byfor the Teddy Bear's Picnic theme day. It didn't explain why the local news occasionally mentioned a sighting of one of the island's great birds, except it was never a bird the wildlife park actuallyhad.
Aoife tried very hard to put it all out of her mind, most of the time. However the animals appeared, they were great for business. Even Aoife herself had been none-too-secretly thrilled by the bears and the elephant, which were well outside the park's usual fare.
They had a tremendous range of fantastic beasts there all the time, of course. The park focused on conservation and preservation, and allowed the animals to roam freely within the constraints of safety. But bears were unusual, and getting to see some up close and personal had been pretty neat, even if their presence at the park was inexplicable.
Her determination to not think about it fell apart every time a new, unexpected visitor arrived for a few days. Fortunately it didn't happen quite often enough to haunt her every waking thought. Notquiteoften enough. For almost every major holiday, yes, but also notquiteoften enough to send her spare.
The park kept her busy, anyway: Aoife's official job was education and outreach. She spent most of every day talkingto visitors, answering questions about zoos in general and the wildlife park in particular. She also maintained an encyclopedic personal knowledge of not only the animals at the Shamrock Safari park, but also the inhabitants of the Dublin and Belfast Zoos, and, unexpectedly, dinosaurs.
Aoife had not, honestly, imagined she would need to know anything about dinosaurs when she'd gotten a degree in wildlife resource management and gone to work for the park. She had somehow assumed the questions asked of her would be more or less limited to living or recently extinct animals, and how to shape the world so they could save more species from extinction.
On the positive side, she had learned more about dinosaurs than she ever expected to know, and could now talk confidently to any child under the age of nine on a topic upon which theyallhad opinions. It was frankly astonishing how many of them could yank a conversation around to dinosaurs, regardless of what she'd been talking about in the first place. She'd learned to recognize a certain gleam in childish eyes that preceded a dinosaur question, and could usually head them off with a well-timed, "And we'll talk about dinosaurs later!"
It confused the adults, or at least, the ones without children, but it usually bought her enough time to finish her lecture before the kids started asking about dinosaurs. And today her tour group was entirely made upofadults, which meant she could have a whole blissful day with no dinosaurs.
She'd come in the back gate near the capybara lake, and was now working her way toward the front gate, where she'd be meeting the tour group in about an hour. Coming in early meant she could take the slow way around and greet whatever animals were up and awake already, which always felt like a grand way to start her day. She turned left at the 'African Savannah,' where the giraffes, zebras, oryx and (unexpectedly and thematically inappropriately) wallabies lived. Her plan was to walk all theway around to visit the tigers before greeting the tour group at half nine.
Whistling and singing along to her ear buds and bumping her elbow against the work radio she wore on her hip, she was about two enclosures before the tigers when she noticed a lion in the ‘bear pit.’
Aoife stopped. She stepped back, one step, two, three. Turned her head, and looked down into the enclosure.
It wasn'treallya bear pit, and never had been. It was actually a sort of all-purpose enclosure, unusually shallow by comparison to most of the others in the park. Aoife had never understood why it they hadn't deepened it for safety.
As it was, it had room for even a large, pacing carnivore like the lion. There were also places to climb and lounge for the orangutans who had been its most recent occupants, or for smaller animals like some red pandas who had once stayed there briefly. There were no overhangs to let most animals climb and jump out, but its glass walls also weren't very high.
More importantly, they weren't very highandthey didn't have inward-slanted tops to keep gigantic cats who were excellent leapersfrom jumping out.
Aoife's stomach gurgled horribly. The lion, which was lying on his back, legs sprawled in an undignified manner so he could absorb as much sunshine as possible, lifted his head. The effort made his tail curl between his legs, and he looked at her with interest, then chuffed.
Hairs sprang up on Aoife's arms and on her nape, a chill down her spine as her hind brain informed her that now was a very good time to run.
Except she was quite,quitecertain the lion could clear the top of the enclosure if it felt like it, and running away from a 200-kilo predator seemed like an extremely bad idea. Trying very hard not to shiver, she inched a foot forward, which was asmuch as she could convince herself to move. After several inches she had almost taken a whole step.
The lion, however, had taken several. He flipped over onto its feet and paced closer to her. His tail lashed and he tilted its head, which was slightly better than him crouching on its belly with its tail lashing, but was not actually great.
