I picked up the phone on the third ring. “Woodland Park Zoo, primate section. Ed Vick speaking.”
“Uh, yeah, my name is Dan Stark, I’m calling from Staircase, and I wanted to talk to someone about a . . . a gorilla. Or something.” The voice was deep, gravelly, and seemed a bit slurred.
“You’re calling from . . . Staircase?”
“Yeah. The town of Staircase. In the Wonder Mountain Wilderness. On the, y’know, Olympic Peninsula.”
“Okay. . . .”
“Anyway, there’s a gorilla, or some other kind of monkey, that’s been digging in my garbage. I was wondering if the zoo might want it. To . . . to buy, or something.”
“Well, Mr. Stark, zoo policy is not to purchase animals from private collectors.”
“Uh.”
“But,” I continued, “if you seriously believe you have a gorilla on the loose there, we might be interested in sending someone to investigate. Privately held gorillas do sometimes escape from their owners, or are abandoned, and they can become a danger to themselves and others. So we would want to check it out, and if it really is a gorilla we would work with the local animal control agency to bring it in.”
“Is there, a . . . like a reward or something?”
“I’m not sure about that, but there might be a small finder’s fee.”
“Uh, okay. What do I need to do?”
“Why don’t you start by describing the situation to me?”
Stark—“call me Dan”—explained that his garbage heap was behind a chain-link fence, to keep out bears and raccoons, but something was opening the gate and ransacking the heap. He had spotted the creature on two occasions, and described it as “bigger than a cougar, but smaller than a bear, and it moved funny.”
My first impulse was to dismiss the call as a prank or mistake, but Dan seemed sincere, and if there really were a gorilla wandering the Olympic Peninsula it would be criminal to leave it out there.
“Okay, we’ll send a team to investigate. Where do you live?”
“Well . . . it’s kind of hard to find. Tell you what—I’ll meet you at, uh, milepost 23 on highway 119, just past Staircase.”
I got directions and wrote them on a tan “Friends of the Woodland Park Zoo” sticky note. It would be three or four hours’ drive. “Okay, Dan, we’ll see you tomorrow at eleven. What’s your number, in case we get lost?”
“I, uh, I don’t have a phone. I’m calling from the gas station in Staircase.”
My co-worker Sonia’s call woke me the next morning. “Nadiri’s got a real bad abscess,” she said, “and we have to drain it right away.” Nadiri was a two-year-old western lowland gorilla, one of the zoo’s most popular and photogenic animals. “There’s no way I can take the whole day to drive out to Staircase and back.”
“Well, this guy’s going to be waiting for us, and I can’t call him to postpone.” I fumbled on the bedside table, found my glasses. It was a little after six. “Tell you what . . . odds are it’s nothing, like that time in Bellingham. I’ll just go by myself.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. I’ll have my cellphone, and if there’s anything to it I’ll call the county for help.”
“Okay. Drive safely.”
“Thanks.”
I pulled off highway 119 next to Dan’s pickup, a composition in primer, rust, and moss. Dan himself leaned on its fender, scratching under one arm. Tall, thin, and leathery, he wore a frayed camouflage jacket with STARK on the pocket in black marker, blue jeans gone tattered and gray at the knees, and mud-encrusted boots. His face was creased and stubbled, shaded by a stained and battered cowboy hat. He smiled, revealing missing teeth, and extended his hand. “Dan Stark.”
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Ed Vick, from the zoo.” I looked around. “Where’s the garbage heap?”
“It’s at my place.”
“Isn’t your place around here?”
“Uh, no. It’s up the road a ways. Hop in.”
I thought for a moment about what it would be like to share a truck cabin with Dan, then said, “I need the equipment from my van. Why don’t I follow you there?”
“All right.”
Dan drove the truck at demonic speed half a mile down the highway, then swerved onto a logging road marked with a sign too small for me to read. We stayed on that road for a couple of miles, then took a gravel road, which forked and forked again. I was too busy trying to follow to look at my map, but I didn’t think this road would be on it anyway. Finally we bumped and jounced for half an hour up a rutted, unlabeled dirt track to a squalid shack that had to be Dan’s house.
As Dan got out of his truck I stared, appalled, at the house: a rectangular box not much bigger than the trailer I’d shared with two other grad students on my first trip to Borneo. The roof was rusty corrugated metal, and the walls were covered with metal printing plates from old newspapers. There was one window and one door, both with dented aluminum frames, and greasy smoke curled from a blackened chimney pipe. It was an affront to the majestic Douglas firs and western hemlocks at whose feet it squatted. “It’s not much to look at,” Dan said over his shoulder, “but I call it home.”
There were several smaller buildings nearby. Nailed to the wall of one of them, head down, was the skin of a black bear. It was half rotted; flies and wasps buzzed around the lolling head.
“So what is it you do here?” I asked, trying to keep the disgust out of my voice.
“Hunt and trap, mostly. For cash I do a little metal work. Hinges, gates, that sort of thing. I have a forge.” He gestured to one of the outbuildings.
“Well. That’s very interesting. Now, where’s this garbage heap?”
The chain-link fence surrounding the heap was rusted and battered, looking in several places as though it had been kicked almost through from the inside. Garbage was scattered all around the enclosure, and to a lesser extent outside it as well. Several crows took flight as we approached.
The gate had a simple catch, closed with a scarred padlock. “I had to lock it to keep the critter out,” Dan said.
I examined the catch more closely. It was not something a bear could open; a raccoon might manage it, but it was too high off the ground. “You say the creature opened this gate more than once?”
“Yeah. It’s been going on for weeks.”
“There’s no chance you left it open by accident?”
Dan’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of idiot do you think I am?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Would you please open the gate?” Dan pulled a loose bundle of keys from his pocket, opened the lock. I stooped and examined the soft ground near the gate, both inside and out of the enclosure. The area was pretty severely trampled, but there were some thirty-centimeter prints I couldn’t identify—narrow in the tarsal area and broad in the phalangeal. And a small pile of droppings, fairly fresh.
“You’re a hunter, you say, Dan? What do you make of that?”
“It’s not deer scat, that’s for sure. Too big for cougar, and bear don’t stink like that.”
“Indeed.” I probed the droppings with a stick. Seeds indicated a diet of berries, and there was a lot of other vegetable fiber, but no hair or other indication that meat was being eaten. And it certainly did stink. I sealed a sample into a plastic bag.
“So what is it, a gorilla?”
I sat back on my haunches. “Well, Dan, I’ve shoveled out a lot of gorilla enclosures, but I’ve never seen anything exactly like this. And it’s unusual for herbivore feces to have this strong a smell.” I stood up, tossing the stick onto the garbage heap. “Perhaps the animal is sick.” I braced my hands in the small of my back, stretched. There were no other signs immediately visible. “Let’s take a walk around, see what else there is to see.”
An hour and a half later, we sat in the dimness of Dan’s shack, with Dan nursing a Pabst Blue Ribbon from his wheezing refrigerator. On the table between us sat a crudely made clay vase, glazed with childish splotches in green and blue, holding an incongruous spray of delicate pale pink starflowers. But I kept glancing at the wall behind him, where a shotgun and two rifles rested on pegs . . . clean, well oiled, and ready for immediate action.
“I have to tell you,” I said, “I am not quite sure what we have here. It might be a gorilla, or possibly an orangutan, or it might be something else . . . something I’m not familiar with.” I stared pensively out the window at my van. “I’m pretty sure it’s a large primate of some sort. I’d like to call the county, get the local animal control people out here.” I opened my briefcase, took out my cellphone and black book. As I looked up the number, I said, “The zoo will coordinate with them, of course, in case it’s an endangered species.”
“I don’t think so,” said Dan. I looked up just in time to see the heavy black iron skillet coming down on my head.…
