Rutting Season

He saw her every Wednesday, and he was almost certain she had seen him, but they had not spoken. He was quite recognizable and so was she. No matter the day, he wore a nice dress shirt and an even nicer tie, with reflective sunglasses. On cold days, his curly hair streamed out a little from underneath a warm wool hat. On warmer days: a fedora out of his collection, but his favorite was a made of straw.

He noticed when it was sunny, she carried a parasol, or an umbrella, and constantly stood in the shade, looking at the animals. Observing her in silence through sidelong glances, he had come to notice other features that gave her away. The shape of her chin and jaw disguised an otherwise circular face, with an unpronounced chair shaped nose, and an everlasting pony tail of black hair. Out of all this beauty, he had a fetish for her throat. She never wore anything around it, like a choker or a necklace, which was a mystery, for it was of model caliber.

He wanted to talk to her, badly, come the fourth time they crossed paths. He decided he would approach her, but when he turned around from the warthogs, she was gone. He predicted she went to the aquarium, but she had not. She was lost to him, and the zoo closed in twenty minutes.

He couldn't wait for Hump Day. He served the customers cocktails and they tipped him pretty well that week, but his mind was still stuck on those glimpses of the woman he had seen multiple times in public. He could recall her in the stands of the sea lion show, smoking a cigarette even though it was forbidden within zoo bounds. She had enjoyed her smoke quietly in the back, like a perched raven on high ground, who happened to exhume a trail of grey fumes. Was that the first time he had a good look at her under the parasol? He really didn't know. A lot of the time he spent at the zoo, he was in a daze of marihuana. Very stoned. He knew the geometry of a woman's face, but when and where this was or could have been was a mystery to him.

He gave a couple of martinis to a man and his date and thought hazily of another time when they were both in the birdhouse together. As usual, she was ahead of him, at a cage housing a magpie. She was talking to it and through the mesh, interacting with it. He thought it was beautiful... reminiscent of himself... He would have made conversation with her right then, while she cooed at the magpie, but he had retreated and went backwards through the birdhouse until she was away. He hid the disappointment from himself, but he was focused on getting back to the car so he could obtain his inhaler from the dashboard compartment. As if she took his breath away, he had felt the attack come on not a moment after he laid eyes on her. Ancillary info, he carried a big bag, but it wasn't in there. He panicked and looked around desperately, only to find that it had indeed been in his bag the whole time. She had escaped him again.

Wednesday was tomorrow. He wished for a case where she hadn't strayed from her routine. It was awful hard to find, in this situation, someone when you were looking for them. He strolled with no urgency to the reptile exhibit, the Komodo dragon's lair, the dungeon a floor below a pond with giant glass windows, as so one could see fish they didn't keep in the aquarium, then the penguin's artificial mountain. But she wasn't anywhere. Lost, with an awkward devil on his shoulder telling him he was being creepy, he resolved to make his way to his usual spot to write. He wasn't a writer, but he had tried and was trying to be one, as he had for many years. Often he would take these ramblings home and burn them. They never met his standards, and he didn't want anyone to see them.

When he was finished some odd minutes later, he examined his work and started reading it to himself in his mind. Another piece of kindling, he thought. He closed his notebook and stashed it in his bag. No progress, no mysterious woman. So he went to the forest grove (on the map it was called Teton Park) to see if the animals of the woods were out.

He stopped by the grizzly bears, the elk, and swans, listlessly. He wished he could think of something more creative to do with these animals behind bars and railings. The bears were stalking their preyless enclosure. Mama Bear was going for a swim, and this thrilled the small crowd that had gathered. The swans attracted less attention, but the man admired their beauty for a good long moment, even for it being the umpteenth time he had done so. They were no longer very exciting, but he found them serene. Same with the elks, giant and slow-moving, their muscular structures seemed like trees swaying in a strong breeze. Velvet covered their antlers. It was the beginning of September, the beginning of the rut. The massive cartilage formations above their heads were not dripping with gore just yet, but they would be soon, when the male deer would scape them off on the bark of evergreens, to sharpen them for mating season. He suspected they contained the male elks when this time had come, but he wasn't too sure.

There was a waterfall on top of the grizzlies' stomping ground, and a bridge that took patrons over their cave. There was a ramp that exited the waterfall, and the ramp served as a platform that passerby used to see over the fence that kept in the grey wolves. The ramp ended at the place where you could circle back around to the main path around the zoo. The man was standing between the end of the ramp and this path, observing the wolves through a slate of glass that let you see them at eye level.

He could make the wolves howl. It was a real crowd pleaser, not that he liked crowds. What he did was that he inhaled by slow degrees, gathering as much air as he could into his lungs, which weren't of an impressive capacity, due to Marlboros, but it was enough. It was required to withhold a large volume of air to imitate the cry of a solemn wolf. He howled slowly before cupping his hands around his mouth, as if he was about to shout. He must've hit the right octave, and a thrill came over him as the wolves joined in.

They would howl like this for ten to twenty minutes, praying to the moon, not yet visible in the bright autumn sky.

He brought the projection of his own sound to a halt, as they didn't require further prompting. He watched them bellow. How sad they sounded, in spite of the fact that they do it to show affection for the pack, aside from announcing their location to other wolves. It was like a song with a melancholy melody, but tender lyrics.

He stood like an artist knocking over the first domino of a beautiful mandala. The chain reaction made him feel good, that he was able to make something happen within his control. The people around him watched in fascination, most of them unaware he had done this. But there was one that knew otherwise. That he was the instigator. And, yes, it was her.

He saw her smiling at him from about midway down the ramp. She was casting this sweet natured grin over her shoulder, her hands clutched to the rail along the border of crowd and beast. After a brief moment of this exchange, he looked at his feet in brown dress shoes, and began walking towards her. She did the same, as if they were old friends. In his mind he hoped that she wasn't staring at someone else she recognized. But him and him alone. Her parasol bobbed over her shoulder. She was very close now, and they spoke in rapid succession, almost at the same time.

"Hey," he said.

"How did you do that?" was her question.

"How did I do what? The wolves?" They still were howling in the background.

"Yeah! I had never seen someone do that before."

He felt at this point the command was simple enough, so he just told her, "Practice."

She nodded.

"How are you this evening?" he asked.

"I'm okay at best," she replied, almost intuitively. She was used to saying that. "What's your name?"

"My name's Tobias," he relinquished. "I'm curious what yours is."

I have been for a while, he considered saying, but did not, leaving their distant encounters at the sidelines, unspoken.

"I'm called Arabella, like from the Arctic Monkeys. And I'm also 5'4''," she relayed to him. "Like the Gorillaz song."

He hmmed. He didn't know what either of those things were. "I wish I had more details about myself to tell you," he said, instead.

"Why don't we take a walk and you can think on it?" and that was like the magic words to him. She wanted to spend time with him. This whole wait was worth it so far.

They left Teton Park and headed east. While they took no particular direction or had any physical destination, they ended up at the pandas. She learned he was 5'9'', which seemed accurate, but he had no musical bands to speak of as reference. He told her he was named after Lake Tobias, where there was a wildlife reservation. Coincidence. His mother and father met there for an insurance seminar. Their two week affair resulted in a pregnancy. They married for eight years, but hated each other, and their unwanted son was in the middle.

"After a while I started to hear people speak of me. Friends and family of my mother addressed me as being weird, and they were coming on to my isolation. Once these behaviors came to a head, I was medically diagnosed with being on the autism spectrum, and that I also had schizophrenia."

"Have you come to terms?" she asked.

"Have I come to terms?" He wasn't used to that response. "I'm not angry about it," he decided to say.

"Good," she said, in a voice that came off as genuinely caring and considerate.

They fell a little into a content silence. But he wanted to say something. Spoken words drowned out the voices he heard in his head. Or bad feelings in general. He was afraid of being alone, which he was most of the time, especially after work.

"I would have spoken to you earlier," he confessed, "but there was always something," he confided vaguely.

She didn't seemed unnerved but this. In fact she seemed completely understanding. "I think I had too many expectations," so she phrased.

"What do you mean? I'm confused," which he didn't like.

"I wanted you to come up to me," she said, laughing.

"Oh!" He lightened up.

Right when he thought they were all adults here, she scuttled towards a barrier that overlooked a large moat and a hilly field scattered with play things for animals.

"I'm a sucker for otters," she said, smiling back at him. He went to stand beside her, and he loved how the burst of parasol she had cast huge shadows over the water. Her reflection looked like the upside down bulb of a tulip.

He didn't know much otter trivia, which felt like he needed to say next. But having drawn a blank he tried to amuse her. "What would you name that one?"

She looked closely at the animal playing with a rock with its back in the water. "Oscar," she said.

"That's a good name."

They stopped again in front of the pandas, where there were a number of people. Without regard for them, Arabella addressed the stupidity of the pandas while he agreed with his whole black heart.

"They won't even have sex to salvage their species. Look at them. Bamboo doesn't even have much nutrients, so they have to eat a gazllion pounds of it." She was amusing herself now, and there was a chuckle in her voice. It wasn't evil. It's was okay to bash animals. Or at least in his book.

"I'd call them Lucky and Munchy. Because that's basically who they are right now, like..."

The sun was going down. Night was approaching. The zoo would be closed soon, so they walked together to the exit.

"You have a good night," she told him as they stood in from of the animal monuments outside the zoo, not knowing exactly what to say.

"You too, m'dear. I'm glad I met you."

Before she strolled across the parking lot to her car, she gave him a simple wave, which he returned. The horizon, lit with orange and pink clouds and a still-bluish sky painted the sky above him and the zoo entrance. Now it was her turn to wait for Wednesday longingly, for it wasn't until then did she get a good focused look at his face. She avoided eye contact most of the time. She didn't tell him this, but she had her own list of mental issues as well. Nonetheless, she could see that his handsomeness outweighed that of the sun's. The sunset tried, but it just wasn't as kind on her eyes.

It wasn't that meeting her was enough. It was quite the opposite. But he had been let down by too many encounters. How many times had he bid a fond farewell to a woman at the bar on the promising note that she would return? A lot.

He contented himself that it was a nice evening spent with a lovely person, but resolved to still spend his next off day at the zoo, at the very least, to visit those dummy pandas and otters for the memory's sake.

So he did. He didn't see her, but he got too excited when he saw long hair of a black variety in some woman, who turned around and was considerably old. He went on his way. He smoked at his usual spot in front of the small train station they used for farm rides, and he felt compelled to visit the wolves. To give the memory a send off, since it was bothering him so much. Why had he told her about his name? His mental health? Why had he left these shards of very personal info inside this woman? Had he really thought, just for a second, that she'd reappear? He didn't think on it to know. So he hiked his bag up on his shoulder and carried himself back to Teton Park.

The wolves were all lounging in the sun, which shone like a merciless eye. The rays were warm in the chilly breeze. It was deeper into the season, and the elk had indeed been preparing to fight for the females. Their antlers hung with strips of bloody cartilage.

He hoped they would put them up at least by next week. No matter how you spun it, it was unsettling.

But he didn't look at the massive deer long. He just casually strolled by the wolves and difficultly made his call while walking. Two times in a row was rare, but it happened. Their howls sailed into the fall air.

Meanwhile, the woman with the parasol heard this: the ritualistic, guttural sound of the wolves from her position in front of the vultures. They were feasting on carnage the zookeepers had thrown in there, but her attention was stolen. She started to skip to Teton Park.

He was sitting by the geyser, weighing the odds of him getting caught if he smoked a cigarette.

When he saw her, he looked up at a lacy clad woman with an umbrella tossed over her shoulder.

It's the lady, he said, as he revived her name from his dead hopes. Arabella...

"How are you, Tobias?" she asked from afar.

"I'm doing better now," he told her honestly. "I didn't expect to see you again," it just sort of came out like a diehard confession.

"Well here I am," she said, "I've been thinking about you."

Tobias wasn't naive or stupid. She was thinking this could go somewhere. And maybe it could. Who knows, he thought.

"What have you been thinking?"

"I just wanna know some more about you."

"What do you wanna know?"

"How old are you? I'm nineteen," she said.

And he responded, "Twenty-five. I just had my birthday last month."

"What did you do?"

He paused and said, "Nothing. I don't like my birthday."

They strolled a bit while she did some quiet math. She didn't have a friend that old, nor had she been with someone of that age either. The gap was large to her, and attractive. An older man.

"I had my birthday recently too. We must be close in birthdays. I had mine at Owen Brennan's. I ate oysters for breakfast."

He didn't like oysters. "Ugh," he said. "Seafood."

"You don't like it?" she asked excitedly. "It's good."

"I'll be here," he said playfully, "when all of you see that I'm right."

She didn't know exactly what that meant, but she laughed.

"Can I show you my favorite place?" he asked.

"Where is it?" It was too early to trek anywhere outside the zoo, she was thinking. She'd have to make an awkward refusal and this would've affected her mood and thoughts of him.

But there was no need to be worried. "It's back at the beginning of the trail," he said.

She was relieved. "I don't mind."

They circled around and went past the monkeys to Cat Country. He took her to the tigers. There was window down a side road that was visible from the main walkway. They went down to it, and she noticed a crack in the glass. It was a pretty size-able crack, and a small tunnel of wind blew through the hole and made a small whine.

He began coaxing the tiger pacing around in the cage to come forth. The broken area was at level with Arabella's chin. And the tiger's maw could align with it when it climbed upon the rock dividing the glass.

"Every morning I stop by to see her. She breathes into the glass. And I stand pretty close. So I can feel and smell the tiger's breath."

She leaned forward, much to his surprise, and inhaled.

"Tiger's breath," she said simply.

"Yea."

"What a powerful way to begin the day," she uttered.

He suddenly liked her a hell of a lot more, by like 1000%. He did not expect her to center her face to the tiger's slack mouthed jaw. But she had.

"I wanna show you another place," he said.

She looked up at the tiger's neutral face and smiled a little before turning away.

"Farewell m'dear," Tobias told the tiger.

They went back through the Sierra, past the zebras and giraffes, just stomping the ground in their patterned coats. They stopped and looked at the ostriches a while, because the towering birds were initiating some interesting dances. Mating dances, doing can-cans with their wings. There's a lot of pre-coitus at this time in the zoo, he thought, remembering the elk.

They turned the corner towards the flamingos at first, but went left below a tribal gate. The path was tiled in vermillion and cyan colored diamonds. A small building squatted to the immediate right, where the public restrooms were. The trail curved in all directions like a sidewinder. The hippos were out, like giant grey manatees with feet cycling through the water. They paused for a long moment, and he asked her, "What would you name him?" gesturing to the closest hippo.

She looked him in the eyes, "Biggie Smalls."

A woman after my own heart, he thought. He smirked and even laughed a bit, saying, "I love Biggie Smalls."

"I didn't know that," she said, feeling pleased.

"Yea. I used to listen to his first album."

They walked on to approach the end of the hippo exhibit, but there was a turn. There he stepped in that direction and she followed. It led to a double rail of stairs that conjoined at a two story balcony. He knew that seldom did people come here, even though it was an attractive feature. It provided a great top-down view of the alligators.

"This is where I come to write," he told her, sitting down in the steps.

"You write?" This came as very interesting news. She was once published in her school year book.

"I try," he confessed. "Most of it is shit. I tend to burn pages a lot."

"I bet it's not," she said. "I'd love to read some sometime."

He looked at her, an unlit cigarette appearing between his lips. Ideas bloomed as slow as morning glories in his mind.

She thought of a talent wasted on fire. How tragic, she began to think herself.

"What do you write?"

"I'm working on a story, but I was a poetry major at some point."

She was thinking of going to school. She was young enough. A little over a complete year out of high school. And her dream since her middle grades had been to major in literature.

"That's crazy," she said, respiring. "I've read tons of books, tons of poetry..."

He made a move to just start speaking the last 18 lines of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. She was wildly impressed. She could recognize that it was a work of The Bard, and things got even more clear after she heard the name, "Puck."