When I read this story about an Ohio man who released a bunch of wild animals from his home last year, it almost seemed too wild to be true. I heard
this fascinating story about the police officers who'd been responsible for catching the escaped animals and decided to do a fictionalized version of the story. I hope you enjoy it. Credit goes to those brave officers who risked their lives for that little town.
“Wild”
Aaron
Matthew Smith- 22 April 2012
“Frank!
“Frank, stop the truck. We’re here.”
I nearly
stomped on the brakes, my nerves were so fried. Instead I eased the pickup
truck to a stop on the pitch black country road, gravel still crunching under
the tires as the three men in the bed of the truck leapt to the ground.
I stepped
out of the cab and walked to the passenger side, where the chief was already up
and reaching behind the passenger seat into the back. The other three men were
passing out those elastic-banded head lamps. I took one and pulled it around my
short brown hair.
The chief
started pulling several long, hard plastic cases from the back of the truck. He
passed one to me. I took it and ignored the flip of anxiety in my stomach as my
hands went to work automatically. I set the rifle case on the ground and, with
practiced efficiency, unpacked and loaded the weapon. The five of us worked in
silence for a few minutes.
The radio
in the pickup truck crackled to life. I cried out as the gun tumbled from my
hands and clattered on the grass.
“Geez, ya
piss yourself there Frank?” one of the other officers said. The other two
chuckled while the chief leaned into the cab and picked up the radio. A moment
later he hung the radio up.
“The
Zookeeper is dead,” he said. The joking atmosphere was snuffed out like a
candle flame in a drafty room.
“So, then…”
I started.
“They’re
almost all gone,” Chief cut me off.
“They caught a pair of alligators and a chimp with the tranquilizers before
they escaped. Every one of his other ‘pets’ is loose.”
I turned
and looked behind me instinctively, though the head lamp hardly penetrated the
dense underbrush of the Tennessee wilderness.
“What are
we looking for?” An officer named Conner to my left said.
Chief
sighed. “Three black bears, two orangutans, a zebra, a giraffe, two Bengal
tigers, a hippo, nine monkeys, thirteen parrots, two crocodiles, and a polar
bear,” He read from a yellow legal pad. “Last priority is on the parrots,
gentlemen.”
“So he
just… what?” I said.
“Ol’
Charlie Longstreet rigged his cages to open on a time delay, then shot himself
in the head.” Chief flipped a page on his legal pad. “Found a suicide note
there. Evidently he wanted his animals to…” he took a breath, “eat his body.”
“And
instead, they all just ran,” Conner said.
“The
wacko’s mansion is three quarters of a mile over that ridge,” Chief pointed
over his shoulder. “It’s backed by the river, so most of the animals probably
came this way. Conner, you and Frank head south. Me, Tripp and Scotty’ll go
north. Stay in contact. If you kill something, let us know. If you see
something and don’t kill it, let us
know.”
I glanced
at the rifle in my hands. Chief must’ve been reading my mind. He said, “We’re
shooting to kill, gentlemen. Tranquilizers take too much time, and there’s no
way we’d get them all calibrated right before someone got hurt. Public safety
is our priority.” He picked up his own rifle. “Let’s go. Stay alert.”
We split
up. Conner and I stepped into the woods on the north side of the clearing. In
moments, the truck behind us was invisible, completely concealed by the thick
trees and underbrush.
We walked
in silence for a while, prowling as quietly as we could through the woods.
Every now and then we’d stop and listen before continuing forward.
“This ain’t
no way to hunt,” Conner mumbled. “We need a tree stand. Set up a blind, create
a defensible perimeter, shoot anything that comes across it.”
“National
Guard’s supposed to be pulling in by daylight,” I said. “They’re bringing in
two hundred troops. Meantime, it’s just us five.”
“Why the
hell’d Jerry and Jim have to take vacation this week?” Conner grumbled.
A sudden
rustling to our left made me freeze. I turned and played my light through the
trees, but I didn’t see anything. We stood motionless for another few seconds.
Nothing.
“I’ll
circle around and flush it out,” Conner whispered. He took slow, deliberate
steps forward, making a slow arc toward the noise. I checked my rifle for the
hundredth time and found it loaded and ready to go. I raised the weapon.
My heart
was pounding in my throat. I felt a shiver run down my back, though I could
feel sweat soaking through my uniform shirt in the muggy August night. A frozen
ball of anxiety settled in my stomach as I waited. I stood there for what felt
like hours.
There was a
sudden quick rustle in the direction we’d heard the noise- Conner had thrown a
rock or something. There was a roar of snapping branched and turned leaves, and
a huge black shape darted in front of me. Instinct took over then, my hands
moving of their own accord. I took a single shot, yanked back the bolt on the
rifle and fired again.
All motion
in the forest stopped, like time itself had been frozen. I stood there for a
moment, watching the still black mound. It didn’t move.
My radio
beeped, and I screamed like a little girl. I squeezed the microphone clipped to
my shirt. “This is Frank. Just found one of the black bears. Two shots fired.
Beast is down, repeat, beast is down.”
There was a
heavy two-foot stomping coming through the woods to my left, and Conner
reappeared a moment later. “WHOO! Did ya get him?”
“I got
him,” I said. I prodded the animal with the two of my boot. It was big,
probably three hundred pounds. Not the biggest black bear I’d ever seen, but
big enough.
I glanced
at Conner. He was grinning like he’s just won the lottery. “Come on, I want to
get one now!” He gave me a brotherly slap on the shoulder.
I stared at
the dead bear at my feet for another moment before following.
“How’s it
legal for one guy to own all these animals?” I said.
“Beats me.
Some states it ain’t. You know you can’t even have a guinea pig in California?”
Conner said as we continued trekking.
We’d walked
another twenty minutes when the shots rang out. Two shots, loud, from a high
powered hunting rifle like we were carrying. We froze as they echoed across the
dark, still night. Suddenly a series of short pops followed. A flock of birds
took flight from the treetops to our right, a hundred yards or more away.
“That was a
handgun,” I said. I touched my radio. “Chief, you guys alright?”
Silence.
“Chief!?” I
said again.
“We’re okay
Frank,” came Tripp’s voice. “It was a damned Tiger. We saw both of ‘em. Scotty
got off two shots with his rifle, dropped one. The second one charged. I took a
shot with my handgun, but it got away. Looked like it was heading in your
direction.”
“Good news,
it’s pissed!” said Scotty’s voice.
Conner made
a noise that sounded like an excited hiccup.
“How can
you be so damn excited?” I said, taking my gun in two hands again.
“Man, it’s
like we’re on safari! How can you not
be?”
I rolled my
eyes. In the darkness, I’m sure he didn’t see.
We trekked
slowly and carefully now, trying to make as little noise as possible in the
darkness. We walked side by side, each scanning the forest for a hundred and
eighty degrees as we moved. The night was so still that it started to creep me
out. There weren’t any insects chirping, no birds or owls or frogs or anything.
It was like the woods knew that something was wrong and everything was waiting
to see what would happen.
I felt
sweat sticking my shirt to my back, but I was still ice cold. My head lamp cast
strange, flickering shadows across the trees and thorns in front of me. Light
reflecting off of the damp leaves looked like the eyes of hungry predators in
the forest, each one waiting for me to turn my back so it could attack.
“Shh,”
Conner said suddenly, and I froze. We stood there in the darkness for a minute,
the light from our lamps still. He reached up and switched his off. “Lights
out. Don’t want to startle ‘em.”
I failed to
see how allowing them to sneak up on us in the dark would startle them, but I
obliged. In a moment my eyes adjusted to the gloom. I could just barely make
out Conner’s silhouette in the wane moonlight that penetrated the tree canopy
above our heads.
“I don’t
hear anything,” I said, but Conner shushed me. He crept forward, gun raised,
into a thicket of brush. In a second he’d vanished entirely.
A terror,
something dark and penetrating and older than I could comprehend began to
bubble in my stomach. Surrounded by darkness, cut off from my allies,
potentially surrounded by wild predators, I felt my heart begin beating double
time. The fear started to crawl up my throat like a living thing attempting to
escape my body. I tried to swallow it down, but it was no use. My
fight-or-flight instincts were screaming at me to turn and run; Run the hell away! Get back to the truck and get out of this
nightmare!
I didn’t realize
my breath was coming in gasps until I started getting light headed. I couldn’t
take the darkness. I reached up to my head lamp.
The
wilderness exploded around me, the darkness a sudden chaos of snapping tree
limbs and the roar of torn underbrush. Conner cried out from somewhere nearby.
A muzzle flash tore a hole in the inky shadows just long enough for me to get
glimpse of Conner laying on his back ten yards away. The gunshot deafened me,
the ringing in my ears adding an eerie timbre to the darkness.
I snapped
on my light.
Standing
over Conner was a huge, hulking form, several hundred pounds of orange fur,
muscle and claws. It looked up at me with shining, penetrating yellow eyes,
frozen in the beam of my lamp. Its muzzle was wet and red.
The deep,
old fear flooded my brain and froze me in place. It looked at me indifferently,
like I might look at a piece of furniture that someone had placed in my path.
The shining pools of yellow light in its skull looked otherworldly; a demon crawled
out of the deepest pits of hell and sent to find me and Conner. It didn’t just
scare me. It was fear, the living
embodiment of everything violent and murderous and terrible.
I couldn’t
move if I had to. My legs weren’t listening to my brain; the fear had shut down
everything in my body.
So instead
of running, I raised my gun and shot it in the head.
The gunshot
sent my ears back to ringing and tossed back the tiger’s huge head. Blood and
gore rained from the hole in its skull as its massive body went into spasms,
trying to flee even though it was already dead. I cocked the bolt on the rifle,
took and fired another shot at the flailing monster. It hit the thing just
below the neck.
Conner was
scooting through the leaves and mud on his butt, frantically pedaling toward
me. The beast fell and rolled, its massive, deadly paws tossing the forest
floor. Finally after twenty seconds of horror, it stopped moving.
I knelt to
Conner. His forearm was maimed, his uniform sleeve shredded, his skin a mess of
blood, skin and dirt. His face was as white as a sheet.
I dropped
my own gun to the dirt and stripped my shirt off, turned it inside out and
wrapped the clean part against his arm to stop the bleeding. I picked my radio
off of the grass where I’d plucked it from my shirt.
“Office
down,” I called. “Conner’s hurt. We found the other tiger. Took him down, but
he got Conner. It’s bad. Get medical out here, now!” I wiped my face with one
cold, clammy hand. My heart rate was starting to return to normal. I looked to
the dead beast less than five yards away, the huge, primal killing machine that
I’d just dispatched.
Each paw
was nearly bigger than my head. Even without the claws, one blow would’ve
knocked the sense out of me. It would’ve killed me without trying, without any
effort at all. With the simplicity I’d use to go to open a can of beer. I was
that insignificant.
My eyes
tracked to the mortal wound on its head, and I turned away. The whole scenario
was too horrible, too violent and wrong
to think about.
Conner took
a sharp intake of breath as he wound the shirt tighter around his mangled arm.
I dropped the radio and dove at him.
“Quit
trying to talk,” I said.
“You ass,
Frank,” Conner gasped.
“…What?”
“I said the
next one was mine.”
“…Conner,
you’re a dumb ass. Tell ya what, since you can’t do tigers, I’ll save the
parrots for you. Okay?”
“Screw you,
Frank.”
