Page 20 of Tiger Queen

“Is Jake fine with that?”

“He will be.”

“You said the two of you don’t see eye-to-eye. I don’t want there to be any issues.”

“Anthony and I are on the same page, and together we own two-thirds of the zoo. Jake can disagree with our direction all he wants. It doesn’t matter.”

I nodded and started signing forms. “Jake used to work here?”

“We all worked here,” David replied. “When we were kids. Kind of the family business. But Anthony went to college, and I left soon after that to open up my first gym. Jake stayed and worked at the zoo for four or five years.”

“Why did he leave?”

“He and dad had a falling out. It’s complicated.”

I turned the page and signed the next form. Something about liability. “He seems like he knows what he’s doing.”

“We need all the help we can get. I’m glad he’s here.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “Is the salary okay? I took the average pay from dad’s payroll sheet and bumped it up a little because it looked low.”

I scanned the next page until I came to the number. Four hundred dollars a week, for an initial period of eight weeks. For a normal nine-to-five job that would come out to ten bucks an hour. But I knew I would be working far more than forty hours a week.

“It’s perfect,” I said as I signed the last page. Money wasn’t the primary reason I was here. This job was to help boost my resume so I could get a position at a real animal sanctuary.

Once everything was signed we got some lunch. The employee fridge had deli meat and cheese and bread, so I made a bologna sandwich with mustard. It was simple, but I wasn’t picky. I had spent the last eight years as a broke college student getting by on cheese sandwiches and Ramen noodles. David rolled up slices of bologna and cheese and ate them without the bread.

“Does the zoo have a database of the animals and their vet reports?” I asked. “You probably don’t know since you just got here…”

“Actually, it’s all on the computer in the vet office,” David replied. “There’s a folder on the desktop labeled Medical Records.”

The computer in the vet office was old and took five minutes to boot up. It didn’t even require a login, and it was still using Windows XP. I opened the Medical Records folder on the desktop and groaned.

“You have got to be kidding me.”

Rather than a single database of information, there were four hundred different files in the folder. They were all plain text files, a different one for each individual animal. I opened the one labeled BELLA.txt, which was one of the female tigers.

COUGH ON TUESDAY

KEEPS FIGHTING WITH CHLOE.

MARCH 8: WON’T EAT

FINE AGAIN ON MONDAY

COUGH IS BACK

I closed the file and opened another one. It was similar. There were notes inside without dates or specific information. Just random thoughts that didn’t help me at all.

“This will not do.”

I spent the next hour setting up my personal Google Drive on this computer. Then I created several spreadsheets, one for each class of animal. A tiger spreadsheet, a wolf spreadsheet, a spreadsheet for the chimps. Each spreadsheet had a different tab for each individual animal.

Once that was set up I started filling in the notes I had taken while feeding them this morning. I marked the entry with today’s date. That took another hour, but when I was done I felt like things were more organized.

I spent the afternoon wandering around the zoo and observing the animals some more. How they interacted with each other, their difference in behavior when they were fed instead of hungry. Things would have been much easier if the previous employees were here, because then I could pick their brain about certain behaviors. Without that, it would take me days and weeks to get a feel for how the animals behaved.

Jake was in the bird area, removing the trays under each cage and cleaning them out, then putting fresh newspaper and sawdust down. He looked angry, so I steered clear of him. Bird behavior wasn’t as important as the rest of the animals, anyway.

Even though all I did was watch the animals, the day flew by. I returned to the vet office and inputted additional information for each animal. By then it was seven o’clock.

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