Page 89 of Tiger Queen

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Who was on the phone?”

He blinked twice before answering. “That was the director of KWS. The Kenya Wildlife Service. They’re creating a new national park near Lake Victoria. They saw all the attention around our zoo today…”

“Really?” I gasped. “Do they want to accept some of our animals?”

“No, not some,” David said slowly. “They’re willing to take all of our animals.”

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Rachel

The negotiations went surprisingly smooth. The Kenya Wildlife Service was eager to get something official hammered out so they could make the announcement. We suspected that they were trying to piggy-back on our viral fame to get some media attention for their new park, but we certainly didn’t mind.

The announcements went out to a lot of excitement and fanfare. KWS was taking all of our big cats for their new national park, which would span five thousand square kilometers. Furthermore, they were accepting our chimps, birds, and various other animals for one of their other parks. The only hiccup were the two North American Wolves, which weren’t suitable for Kenya. But KWS pulled some strings and found a sanctuary in Montana that was working on a wolf reintegration program, and they were willing to take ours.

Sometime in the next six weeks—pending the completion of other prerequisites and supplies—the animals would all be transferred to permanent homes.

As soon as the papers were signed and faxed over to them, the four of us screamed and cheered and hugged in the office.

Now that we had a GoFundMe account with donations totaling seven digits, we didn’t need to keep the park open. But David convinced me to open it for one last day to give visitors a chance to say goodbye to the animals. We let everyone in for free and reduced the prices on our gift shop items by ninety percent to try to get rid of the inventory. By the end of the day we were giving them out for free as visitors left the zoo.

The GoFundMe donations slowed down after the initial rush from our viral video, but the money kept trickling in. Which was good, because the new park in Kenya needed financial assistance transporting the animals halfway across the world. That was a shockingly expensive process, as it turned out. An order of magnitude more expensive than simply moving animals from North Carolina to Florida.

Despite those cost estimations, we were left with more money in the GoFundMe account than we knew what to do with. “Anyone have any ideas?” David asked one night during dinner.

“We could donate it all,” Anthony suggested. “To the KWS, or some US charities.”

“I think we should reimburse the two of you,” I said, pointing my fork at Anthony and David. “You two put a lot of your own money into this place. You should get that back.”

“Even if we do that, we’re left with close to a million dollars,” David replied.

“Shit. Let’s buy an island,” Jake said.

“Most islands cost more than a million dollars,” David replied dryly.

“What about a small island?”

“We’re not buying an island,” David said.

“I have an idea!” Anthony suddenly said.

David slammed his fork down. “Not an island! We don’t need an island!”

“It was just a joke,” Jake said, then gave me a wink.

“My idea is not island-related,” Anthony announced. “I was thinking we could create some sort of scholarship. That’s something people do, right? Create a scholarship and take applicants every year, then award it to the person with the best essay or whatever? It could be a scholarship for someone working in veterinary medicine. We could put dad’s name on it.”

“The Carl Haines Veterinary Scholarship,” David said. “I kind of like the sound of that.”

“That would help undo the reputation he had,” Anthony continued. “Build up a little bit of good karma for once, you know?”

Everyone glanced at Jake. He pushed food around with his fork.

“I like it,” he finally said. “That’d be real nice.”

“He would hate it,” David said.

Jake barked a laugh. “He would. All the more reason to do it.”

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