Part 2
“About an hour.”
Rachel set the screwdriver in an empty tray and lowered the shutter. Before the steel was all the way down, the little female woke crying.
A single blow sounded from Gideon’s side. Dust sifted from the frame.
Rachel turned back to the cubs. With the view blocked, her flashlight caught what our feeding had missed: cloudy moisture beneath the scraped muzzle of the first male.
She called Calvin to the sanitation cabinet.
“Coveralls and boots stay in this room. Bottles, cleaning tools, everything. We need a separate route for Gideon’s staff.”
“I’ll mark it.”
“And no crossing over after cub duty. Not for a minute.”
She looked at me as she said it.
“The ventilation isn’t the whole building, Mom. You handle them, then touch his controls. That tool goes on a workbench somebody else uses. We don’t know what these cubs carry.”
I stood with a damp towel in my hands while she began putting labels on clean equipment.
By morning, we had four heated pens, samples packed for the laboratory, fluids running where Rachel wanted them, and a quarantine boundary across the keeper aisle. The driver took the samples out before the last usable crossing closed.
Calvin fixed a temporary plate over the damaged shutter guide. His wrench slipped once, scraping his knuckles. He put it down, waited, then picked it up with his other hand.
At daylight, I called the state veterinarian.
I described the room, the barriers, the open shutter, the unexamined cubs, and the screwdriver. Rachel washed feeding equipment at the sink without turning around. When the veterinarian asked whether anyone had authorized the visual exposure, I said no.
Our quarantine was extended by thirty days. There would be an inspection, additional testing, and no transfer to a more capable nursery until the required results and clearance were in hand. By the time I added the likely expenses, most of our winter hay reserve was spoken for.
Rachel dried her hands after I hung up.
“You report everything after nobody can stop you.”
“I made the call.”
“You could’ve made it before.”
The broken roof was visible from the window. She’d walked through the water and carried the same cold cubs I had. There was nothing about the emergency she needed explained.
“They ate,” I said.
Rachel laid the towel over the sink edge.
“Dad could get a whole argument out of an animal finishing breakfast. A specialist said Gideon needed something different, and he’d point to an empty food tub.”
“He wasn’t careless with him.”
“No. He loved him.” She paused. “So do you.”
Three years before Daniel died, Rachel had arranged for Gideon to be assessed at a primate center in Maryland. It hadn’t been a promise of a gorilla family. It had been a chance to consider facilities, people, and options we didn’t have.
Daniel canceled the trip. At the board meeting, I supported him. I said years of knowing an animal had to count.
Rachel was twenty-nine then. Her credentials lay in the folder in front of her while we talked over them.
“Your father said he wouldn’t let Gideon be shipped off again.”
Rachel’s answer was quiet.
“That promise wasn’t Gideon’s choice.”
Behind the shutter, a pan hit concrete. We heard two grunts, a pause, and the familiar three taps. The cubs answered from their pens.
Rachel picked up the treatment sheet.
The first results were better than we’d feared. Dehydration, parasites, and an ordinary respiratory infection had become dangerous in animals left cold and poorly fed. Repeat examinations supported the findings. Gideon developed no symptoms.
None of that shortened the isolation order.
The shutter stayed down. After the inspection, Calvin replaced the damaged guide properly, but the new hardware didn’t get used. Clean clothing, separate equipment, dedicated staff: Rachel checked the arrangement every day.
We gave the cubs names when descriptions began making the medication charts harder to read safely. The little female became May. April was almost over, and on her worst night the coming month had seemed a considerable distance away.
Her towel-making sister was Tansy. Calvin named the scraped-nose male Bram. Rachel called the fourth Mack after finding him sprawled happily in a tipped water bowl.
For the first ten days, her hospital covered every shift she was missing. She slept on the short couch in Daniel’s old office, with her phone on her chest. A change in the cub-room alarm woke her before it woke anyone else.
One morning, she stood at the counter wearing one boot, staring at a medication calculation.
“I can’t remember whether I entered it,” she said.
I took the pen and put a wrapped sandwich in her hand. Toast, egg, a little mustard kept away from the bread. She’d complained about soggy lunches in high school, and I still made hers the old way.
She ate while we checked the previous treatment entry together. Then she finished the arithmetic and reached for my left hand.
I’d kept a split thumb hidden inside my glove. Rachel cleaned it and taped gauze over the crack.
“Don’t turn breakfast into a truce,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
She gave me a look, then took another bite.
We hadn’t sat alone over food since Christmas.
May needed a feeding tube for two days. After that, she accepted Rachel’s bottle. Bram fought every dose with a small, determined growl. Tansy insisted on having fabric beneath her forefeet before eating. Mack swallowed too greedily and had to be stopped and given time to breathe.
Across the wall, Gideon abandoned the nest beside his window. Each evening, he carried bedding to the closed shutter. The cubs crowded the corresponding sides of their pens.
They had no view through the steel and no shared airflow to carry scent, but the building carried sound. Pans scraped. Feet moved. Cubs called. Gideon knocked.
Rachel was back on a day off when she reviewed the twelfth night’s recordings. On the screen, Gideon tapped the ledge and waited while four small bodies changed position toward him.
She glanced at me.
“Keep your face out of the conclusions.”
“My face hasn’t written a word.”
“It’s submitted a full report.”
I laughed before I could help it. Rachel turned the footage back a few seconds and watched again.
When the extended quarantine finally ended, she called the state veterinarian, our primate consultant, and Talven, a big-cat refuge in Pennsylvania. Together they worked through a proposal: brief visual access, protected by both barriers and the sealed viewing panel, with retreat available and someone ready to lower the shutter.
“Five minutes to start,” Rachel told us. “A display, a rush, an animal unable to get away, and we stop. We don’t wait to see whether it gets worse.”
Calvin checked the repaired track. I stood beside the controls with my notebook.
Rachel put the operating handle in his hand…
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