Chapter Twenty-Two

Meanwhile . . .

The grand Minnesota Zoo sits in a suburb south of the Twin Cities. About twenty miles, as the crow flies.

The Minnesota Zoo opened several decades ago, its founders having envisioned a new kind of zoo—no more animals trapped in small iron-and-concrete cages serving life sentences for the crime of being interesting, staring out at the families gaping back at them, waiting for the occasional little girl or boy with a big heart who would look into their eyes and see the sadness there and take a little bit of it away with them.

No more of that. This would be a new zoo, one where animals had room to roam, one where they lived—not in cages, but in carefully constructed habitats, scrupulous facsimiles of their natural environments, the next best thing to actually being there.

I have to say, they did a good job.

Here the animals had space; here they had grass and trees and water; here they were separated from people by glass partitions or simple fences instead of cages. Here a state-of-the-art monorail transported visitors across the nearly five hundred acres of land. It was revolutionary, and soon other zoos around the country decided that there were other options for their animals besides close quarters and misery.

Today the Minnesota Zoo is a leader in conservation, working to save endangered rhinos, wolf pups, Asian wild horses. Prize exhibits include the African penguins, the Amur tigers, the Canada lynx, and of course the rare and wonderful beluga whales—Peanut and Aphrodite.

The zoo is usually crowded in September, and if you want to be near the whales when no one else is, you need to be at the gates at eight a.m. with the school groups in their matching T-shirts and the parents with strollers.

So on this morning no one was at the top of the tank to see the man clutching a large brown briefcase as he stared down into the pool watching Peanut and Aphrodite swim. And they missed quite a sight. For the man placed the briefcase on the concrete, opened it up, and pulled out three items not normally found in your average briefcase: a pair of industrial gloves, a tightly sealed mason jar filled with some kind of shimmering light, and a foot-long walleye.

Quickly he put the gloves on, careful to tuck them under his sleeves, opened the mason jar, delicately rubbed the contents on the walleye, then dangled the now-shimmering fish over the tank.

The white whales had already had their seven a.m. breakfasts of herring and smelt, as they did every day, and they normally would not eat again until lunch. But Peanut was not going to say no to a good snack if offered. So, as it had been trained to do for years, it rose up out of the water and gulped down the fish, Aphrodite—more wary, perhaps, of the change in routine—lingering underneath.

If anyone human had been watching, it would have seemed like time stopped for a moment. The whale was perfectly still, mouth around the fish. Then the man leaned forward and placed his hand on the whale’s smooth head.

And in a blink, the whale was gone.

Just gone.

But if anyone had been looking carefully—anyone besides me, that is—they would have seen the man place a long white figurine in his briefcase, snap it shut, and stroll away from the whale tank.