The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [112]
As he sat next to me in the car, Clever was making all kinds of weird movements with his hands at me. His eyes were wide and imploring as he made all these enigmatic gestures with his hands and arms and fingers. I did not understand what he was getting at. Later I would realize that he was trying to communicate with me in sign language.
Mr. Lawrence, by the touch of a button, commanded the garage door to roll noisily open on greased metal tracks to reveal the sun, the pale blue sky, and the bright snowy mountains that corrugated the horizon, and the Jeep grumbled out of the garage and into the day. I had seen this place at night, but by the light of day—oh!—I had no idea that this earth might contain a place so beautiful, that all these rocks and plants, all this water and dirt, could have ever arranged themselves into such spectacular formations! The air was fresher, sharper, sweeter-smelling, and the light was crisper here, such that everything in sight seemed to be hypernaturally well-defined, in focus, more sharply drawn, as if the air and light of the city had a way of making things a little blurry, like a soft-focus lens. There was snow on the ground, but it was not particularly cold outside.
“We started the ranch as a sanctuary for endangered animals,” Mr. Lawrence said to Lydia, as I looked around at the landscape.
Clever had decided that I could not understand him. He sighed in resignation and quit trying to sign to me. Sukie sat between us and panted. Her flat pink tongue hung out of her mouth, slightly pulsating in and out of it with the rhythm of her panting. Occasionally her tongue would dry out and she quit panting to bring it back inside of her, swallow, and smile. Then she would let it fall back out of her mouth and continue the business of panting until her tongue dried out again. Clever gingerly stroked her fur.
“We’re sitting on about two hundred acres,” Mr. Lawrence continued, to Lydia. “The whole property’s surrounded by a twenty-foot-high electric fence. That’s more to keep intruders out than it is to keep the animals in. We’ve got our own little Eden here, our own Noah’s Ark. We acquire most of the animals from the entertainment industry, biomedical labs, zoos. We just want to give the animals a good home and a chance to be happy, to roam the land. Inside the property, the animals have free range. Of course in the winter most of the animals stay inside in their barns, where it’s warm. All the barns are good and heated. Most of them are African animals. They’re not used to these winters. It’s a nice day, though. I bet we’ll see some of them out and about.” Lydia nodded and put on her sunglasses. “The chimps, though?” said Mr. Lawrence. “The house chimps we just treat like regular members of the family. They’re used to living with people. They sleep in our house, they eat our food. We live with them. We live like a family. Everybody who works for us knows to treat them just like they’d treat me or Regina.”
Soon, as Mr. Lawrence piloted the rumbling vehicle down the narrow dirt road that wound snakily through the grounds of the ranch, we espied some of the animals that I had, in the life I led previously as an ape, grown up in close proximity to, often hearing, but seldom actually catching sight of, in the Lincoln Park Zoo: zebras, giraffes, rhinoceri, hippopotami, and even several elephants, lumbering around in the distance, looking absurdly out of place amid all the coniferous trees and snowy hills. This