Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [38]
Anna enjoyed watching Joe as he stood in his backpack on Charlie’s back, happy to be up where he could see properly, whacking Charlie on the sides of the head and shouting “Tiger? Tiger?”
“Yes, tiger,” Charlie agreed, trying blindly to catch the little fists pummeling him. “Our tigers! Swimming tigers!”
A dense crowd surrounded them, ooohing together when the door to the tigers’ inner sanctum opened and a few moments later the big cats strode out, glorious in the morning sun.
“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 Quibler 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 Cakrin 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