Another morning with the chimps. Another sexual request from Herman. In his den, he stood tall and puffed his chest for one of his favorite keepers, Andrea Schuch. From long experience, Andrea recognized that look on his face and knew that it meant he wanted her to show him a little skin. Nothing too explicit. Just a glimpse of her shoulder. Andrea didn’t mind. She knew Herman had no control over his impulses. As far as she was concerned, it cost her nothing to make him happy.

“Then we go on with our lives,” she said.

How many human females expressed similar sentiments about their husbands? Just let him have what he wants, and everybody can continue with their day. Only, Herman was not human, and not all the female primate keepers were comfortable with a chimp asking them to flash their shoulders.

“It makes me crazy,” another keeper told Andrea one day. The other woman was blond. Andrea’s hair was long and straight and light brown, but Herman loved her anyway.

Andrea smiled. “It is a little crazy.”

The other keeper ignored Herman’s requests. She knew that if she gave in to him once, he would ask her to repeat the favor more times than she cared to think about.

“I don’t like to encourage that kind of behavior,” she said.

It was the nature of a keeper’s job to wind up almost every day in situations few other people could imagine. They whispered to falcons and flirted with rhinos and learned more than they ever wanted to know about the fetishes of barn owls. If they worked at the zoo long enough, they began to see what looked like human behavior in the animals, and what looked like animal behavior in the humans. It all began to overlap. When keepers were off duty, they would go to restaurants and casually survey the conversations at other tables and be able to tell, within seconds, which person in each group was the alpha. Walking through the mall, they would see adolescent girls strolling slowly in the sunlight, flipping their hair over and over like birds preening in the aviary. Turning the other way, they would see a group of adolescent boys puffing their chests and strutting just like Herman.

The difference was, the boys were still growing up and would soon be transformed into new iterations of themselves. They were going places. Their lives were commencing. But Herman had nothing beyond his exhibit and his den and the ceaseless urgency of his obsessions. He was stuck in every way.

Lee Ann believed Herman’s sexual fixation was getting worse as he grew older. She didn’t remember him being so relentlessly lustful when she’d first met him. Was it a sign of boredom? Did it mean he wanted something else he could not express? Though she knew Herman as well as any human could know a chimp, Lee Ann understood that there were limits to how much she could fathom of what was happening inside him. In many ways, he and the other chimps remained a mystery. She wished she could talk to them, explain things to them, have them translate their world to her.

She was convinced that Rukiya was easily the most intelligent of the zoo’s chimps, much smarter even than Herman. Rukiya’s temperament was different than Herman’s too. Herman was the patient leader, the one who looked out for all the others, watching out for Alex and even protecting Bamboo from the taunts of the females. Rukiya was more cunning and calculated.

Lee Ann liked to tell a story about Herman and Rukiya—a moment she had witnessed herself. The miracle of the stolen lettuce.

At mealtime in the night house, Rukiya liked to take Herman’s food. She waited until he wasn’t looking and then grabbed what she wanted. One day, Herman had some lettuce, Rukiya’s favorite. When she snatched it, Herman caught her and wrested it away. Then, to Lee Ann’s astonishment, he handed it back. Chimps are not known for their social graces. Sharing is not always their strength. Yet Herman, despite his alpha status and superior strength, had let Rukiya have the lettuce and forgiven her for stealing it.

“To me, that’s huge,” said Lee Ann.

Herman’s behavior was revealing, but so was Rukiya’s. Although chimps sometimes exhibit altruistic behavior, they also display what primatologists call Machiavellian intelligence. Many species of primates and monkeys have been observed engaging in deception and counter-deception as they compete for power, food, and mating privileges. Chimpanzees rely on numerous tactical ploys. They are capable of hiding, staging diversions, faking tantrums, faking a lack of interest, even feigning a limp. Chimps are particularly known for using such deception as they maneuver to form political alliances and to influence powerful individuals in their social groups.

Lee Ann recognized some of these traits in Rukiya—not just watching her sneak food from Herman, but seeing her manipulate his emotions as well. For instance, when Herman’s patience wore thin and he finally grew frustrated with Rukiya, the matriarch would often scream at Bamboo and chase him, acting as though the older male had done something wrong. Bamboo was always an easy scapegoat; Lee Ann had witnessed it many times. Jamie and Twiggy would join her in the chase, and together they would raise such a scene that Herman would forget he was angry with Rukiya. Instead, he would follow her lead and start tearing after Bamboo too. Rukiya and the other females, in other words, were clever enough to redirect Herman’s aggression.

“The girls are smart,” Lee Ann would say, shaking her head. “I love them, but they can be evil.”

Rukiya had a gift for transmitting her mood—contented, upset, playful—to the others. Lee Ann described her as a thermometer for the rest of the group. Rukiya was complex and multifaceted. Along with her cunning, she had a deeply nurturing side that she often displayed with Alex, her surrogate son. Rukiya was often too lenient with Alex when he threw dirt and stomped—like the other adult chimps, she tended to look the other way—but her indulgence did not change the fact that she had accepted Alex as hers and had faithfully protected and raised him for years, preparing the young male for that day when he would almost certainly take over as the alpha. Alex would probably not be mature enough to seize power for a few more years, but the transition was coming. The keepers could see it every day in his increasingly bratty behavior.

Lee Ann identified with the chimps so closely that at times, she almost forgot they were not human. If she was having a bad day, she would go into their night house and sit beside Herman and share her troubles. Through the mesh, across the divide between species, the chimp would listen.

From his perch, Herman watched the approach of the tall man with the light hair and ruddy skin. Herman didn’t know the man’s name, but he recognized him. The chimp had been given plenty of chances to study this male and notice the easy confidence in his bearing and the way other humans attended to his every word, paying him deference and respect. If the tall man lingered in front of the chimp exhibit, Herman would rock back and forth and throw dirt. He wanted the human to know who was really in charge.

Maybe it would be best to move along, said Lex Salisbury. The CEO did not appear to take offense at Herman’s displays. He understood that Herman was attuned to status and power differentials. Besides, Lex hardly needed to prove himself to a chimp. Everyone at Lowry Park knew he was the true alpha. Herman might have been animal number 000001, but in the zoo’s hierarchy of walkie-talkie ID numbers, Lex was simply known as 1.

A natural showman, Lex gave the most entertaining and educational tours of Lowry Park. Leading a visitor around the grounds one afternoon, he pointed out the Sarus cranes and talked about how they mated for life. Moving past the river otter exhibit, he described them as aquatic weasels.

“Bloodthirsty little things.”

In every corner of the zoo, he could identify every bird and every gecko and charm his guests with details and observations about every species. He talked about the underwater tunnels favored by the moray eels, and how the green tree python hunted for birds by sensing the heat of their bodies. Stopping in front of the manatee pools, he explained how manatees sport vestigial nails on their fins: “Indicative of a terrestrial past.” The vestigial-nails observation led him to whales—of which there were none at Lowry Park—and how they happen to have vestigial pelvises.

“They do an eighty-percent air exchange,” he said casually.

He was forty-five, but carried himself with the energy of someone at least a decade younger. He lived an hour north of Tampa, on a ranch stocked with zebras and warthogs and other exotic species, and he seemed to constantly be driving them back and forth in his big truck between Lowry Park and his property. Sometimes it felt as though the ranch was merely an extension of the zoo, or as though the zoo was an annex of his ranch. Lex had a habit of blurring the lines, and it made some of the people around him nervous. Lex waved them off. He was always working for the zoo, he said. When was he not working?

Lex was good at drawing other kinds of lines. He would share stories about his upbringing—a childhood in Alaska; his university days in Sydney, Australia; his master’s thesis on heat-exchange rates in parrots from New Zealand. But when people asked about his current life outside Lowry Park or inquired about a visit to his ranch, he gently steered the conversation in other directions. His desire for privacy was understandable enough. What was striking was the velvet ease of his deflection. In the spring of 2004, as Lowry Park was gearing up for the grand opening of Safari Africa, he had just gotten married again. Almost no one at the zoo had heard a word. At this point in his career, Lex was as much a politician as anything else. As such he devoted himself to the habits and behavior of his fellow Homo sapiens, especially those with the money and connections to help him take Lowry Park into the future. His job relied on grace, discretion, politesse.

“It’s a different skill set,” he said.

He had to know how to woo mayors and governors. At cocktail parties he needed to be ready to talk about manatees and meerkats with wealthy matrons who could endow another addition to the zoo. From the Swazi court to the Hillsborough County Commission, Lex thrived as an alpha who had to win over other alphas without seeming to challenge their authority. His degree in social anthropology helped. So did his sense of mission and the encyclopedia of species inside his head. Lex understood that the animals were his best marketing tools. The creatures proved irresistible in the jaded halls of power. That was why Lex carried Ivan, the Eurasian eagle owl, on his gloved hand before the Florida Senate. It was why he made sure baby alligators and prehensile skinks and screech owls were on display every spring as bejeweled guests arrived at Karamu, the zoo’s annual black-tie fund-raiser.

Perhaps most crucial of all was Lex’s evangelism for what zoos can mean to the future of the planet. He was fervent about the promise of Lowry Park as a refuge for endangered species.

“A zoo can be a stationary ark,” he would say. “It can be more than entertainment.”

The analogy was a bit of a conceit, because it had long been established that zoos—not just Lowry Park, but all the zoos in the world—don’t have enough combined space or resources to save more than a fraction of the species that were disappearing. Even so, there was no question that the conservation efforts mattered. Every species given refuge was one fewer wiped out.

Lex’s sermons did not always play well among the staff. Some were tired of hearing him brag about Lowry Park’s fiscal self-sufficiency. Most U.S. zoos, he pointed out, receive about 40 percent of their funding from taxes. Lowry Park, he said, relied on public funds for only 3 percent. To make ends meet, the zoo had to squeeze the most out of every dollar.

The keepers valued self-reliance too. But a good portion of them worked for a couple of dollars an hour more than minimum wage, while Lex’s salary for the 2004 fiscal year would top $200,000—more than the city of Tampa paid its mayor. Why, the keepers wondered, should they get such a small slice of the pie when their CEO’s plate overflowed? These complaints were almost always whispered, and for good reason. Outside the zoo, Lex’s style was polished, understated, seductive. Inside, he was demanding and not to be crossed. If someone displeased him, he did not hesitate to say so. He punished. He exiled. Employees who differed with him had a way of leaving the zoo quietly under vaguely described circumstances.

Compared with Herman, Lex was a much more aggressive and savvy leader. Unlike the chimp, he understood that being nice was not necessarily part of an alpha’s job. He recognized that not everyone liked his style, and did not care. If staff members didn’t agree with the way he ran the zoo, then he advised them to look for a new job.

“Because I’m not going to leave,” he said. “It’s not a democracy. It’s a benevolent dictatorship.”

Lex accepted that his decision to bring the four elephants from Africa had plunged the zoo into an international controversy. He thought the furor was worth it if it moved Lowry Park forward. He despised inertia. Looking toward the future, he saw the zoo’s handful of elephants growing into a mighty breeding herd. They would need more room. He was mulling over the idea of a game park. Maybe in Pasco County, just north of Tampa, or Polk County, to the east.

“In five years, we’re going to need to have them on fifty acres or more,” he said. “You can’t have the biggest vertebrates in the world in a city park.”

Lex made this last statement on March 3, 2004, during a lengthy interview in his office that covered his childhood, his parents, his mentors over the decades, and his sixteen-year-old son, Alex. Throughout the conversation he appeared open and relaxed. But he never breathed a word that his wedding would be the very next day.

When he returned to work from his honeymoon, Lex would stand in another ceremony. This one would be as public as it gets. Safari Africa, the child of his hopes and energies and years of orchestration on two continents, was about to be unveiled. Lex had wagered everything to bring the elephants from the African savanna to the center stage of his zoo. This was his moment. The test.

A cool Saturday evening. A fat moon lit the sky. Diamonds sparkled inside augmented cleavage.

All of Lowry Park Zoo was closed and dark, except for the front pavilion and fountain, which were strung with paper lanterns and overflowing with champagne and cocktails and $250 dinners of filet mignon and sea bass. This evening, the zoo was hosting its sixteenth annual Karamu black-tie gala. This year’s theme was Komodo & Kimonos, which explained, sort of, the lanterns, the troupe of performers undulating inside the giant yellow dragon, and the snapdragons and orchids waiting at every table, along with fortune cookies containing a breathless message from a corporate sponsor: Good fortune smiles on AmSouth customers!

From their tables, the celebrants gazed into a sea of the wealthy and connected and surgically enhanced. At the zoo, attention was almost always directed toward the behavior of other animals. But on this one night, the spotlight turned to the ruling species. Karamu was the zoo’s greatest gathering of alphas. They came to see and be seen, to assert their place in the hierarchy, to show off their jewelry and their curves. Sex, money, and power intersected in a glittering tableau. The hidden currents, churning beneath the civilized veneer, slipped into view. The human exhibit, in full display.

Not everyone was thrilled to be there. At a back table, one of the men—his name was Mike—was complaining between the courses. At his house, he usually decided what to do for fun on Saturday nights. Just this once, he had followed his wife’s lead.

“Next thing you know, I’m in a tux,” he said, appealing to the other men around him. He turned to his spouse. “Why don’t you just kick me in the balls?”

On the far side of the pavilion, Lex shook hands and accepted congratulatory hugs as he introduced everyone to his new wife, Elena Sheppa. The news of their wedding swept through the crowd. Other women appraised the bride, who shimmered in pearls and pink and the aura of newlywed bliss. Someone explained that she was an artist, a sculptor who worked with glass. The consensus held that she was lovely. Unlike so many other men at the gala, Lex looked at ease in his formal wear, hugging Elena close as he smiled and made eye contact with the titans who had come to supply the zoo with cash. An array of CEOs was on hand, along with assorted tycoons, bank execs, law partners, plus one man in a black-on-black tux who was described, again and again, as the orthodontist to all of South Tampa.

A droning buzz arose from the tables. The guests laughed and gossiped and told jokes. They talked so much, at such volume, it was hard to make out what any of them were saying. It did not matter. Just to watch them was far more enlightening. These were primates, after all. Respectable men and women, yes. The highest echelons of Tampa society. But still primates.

What would a field anthropologist, studying this elite sampling of the species, have observed in their behavior? Perhaps the way the males puffed out their chests—no different from the boys at the mall—and swaggered as they approached another alpha. Or the gleam in their eyes as they tested one another with death-grip handshakes. Some skipped the handshake combat and moved directly to mock wrestling, wrapping their arms around one another’s shoulders, squeezing and smothering their potential rivals until they surrendered. Once these contests were completed, some of the alphas stood together and surveyed the breeding choices among the crowd.

“I’m hungry now,” said one.

The behavior of the women was equally primal. Many had dedicated countless hours and great expense to ensuring that every eye turned their way. Since they were at a zoo, the females had borrowed from nature’s palette and showcased themselves with feathers and leopard prints and fur. Even Pam Iorio, Tampa’s mayor, had gone wild. Known for her monochromatic wardrobe, she was now wearing a zebra print. “Good to see you again,” she said to one well-wisher after another, smiling her official smile. “Good to see you again.” A few of the women—not the mayor—were testing the boundaries of how much flesh could be laid bare without inviting the censure of other females in the tribe. One woman wore a shiny black gown, the front of which plunged to just above her navel, revealing her perfectly tanned torso and one hemisphere of each perfectly round breast. Keeping the other hemispheres under wraps was a minor feat of engineering.

The night was all about display. Many of the females towered in stillettos, drawing the attention of men all around. The effect of the heels—the extension of the calves, the raising of their hindquarters—made a statement remarkably similar to Enshalla’s presentation to Eric during their mating dance. With their footwear these women were instinctively paying homage to a primal truth that strutted through every cocktail party and late-night soiree. It was no accident that such shoes were called CFM pumps. One man whose wife was among the most provocatively dressed stood guard at her side, watching the other males openly stare. For most of the night, the man kept one hand attached to his wife’s body—first her arm, then the small of her back. Then, in front of everyone, he traced his fingers down her spine and cupped his palm around the top of her backside. His claim was clear enough.

Up front, the auctioneer was accepting bids for one of the elephants. “Ten thousand dollars right here,” he cried. “Come on, we need eleven!”

The evening was a smash. One couple bid $11,000 to adopt an elephant for a year, calling the pledge a wedding present to Lex and his new wife. Another couple bid $30,000 to adopt three elephants. By the time the proceeds were counted, Lowry Park had raised more than $195,000. Near the end, when the band picked up the tempo and a conga line looped around the tables, Lex approached a dozen or so guests, and whispered, “Come with me.”

Lex led them away from the lights and the music and the dancing, but the group did not care. He had promised them a special late-night preview of the elephants. The select few he had chosen included some of the zoo’s heavy-hitter donors, as well as Dick Greco—the former mayor who had hobnobbed with Herman at City Hall three decades before. Greco was still a big supporter of Lowry Park. Through the darkened zoo all of them went, past the free-flight aviary and the petting zoo empty now of children and goats, past the warthogs and the giraffes and zebras. Outside the elephant building, Lex bewitched the group with the narrative of the giants waiting inside, telling how they had lost their families as calves and how the zoo had rescued them from another death sentence in Swaziland and how they were flown across the Atlantic in defiance of PETA.

“Did you say the animal-rights groups wanted them shot?” someone asked.

“Yes,” said Lex. “Because they feel they’re better off dead than in a zoo.”

The answer was a little simplistic, yes. But this was not the time for a nuanced discourse on the history and ethics of translocating wild species. The elephant building was the epicenter of Lex’s territory. He would tell the story however he saw fit.

He unlocked the front door and escorted everyone into the Africa department’s office, where he paused again. The man had a talent for ratcheting expectations. He told the group about Ellie and how her whole family group had been shot in Namibia and how she was brought to the United States as a tiny orphaned calf.

“That’s incredible!” a voice called out.

The group was too big to squeeze inside the elephant barn at once, so Lex split them into two groups, reminding everyone to stay behind the yellow line that extended several feet away from the stalls. As the guests stepped inside, their mouths dropped. The elephants were lined up before them, pressing against the bars, trunks waving. Up close, they seemed much bigger. More real. More vivid.

Lex introduced Mbali, who extended her trunk almost to his face.

“Does she want human contact?” someone asked.

“No,” said Lex, staying clear. “She’s just smelling me.”

“This is Ellie,” he said, walking to the front of another stall. “Do you see how much bigger she is than the other elephants?”

Ellie, too, reached toward him.

“That’s OK, sweetie pie.”

The visitors stood transfixed at the yellow line, captivated as they stared up into the elephants’ faces and sensed the intelligence and curiosity swirling inside. When Lex turned off the light to leave, the elephants’ trunks were still in the air, beckoning.

Sunlight. Bulldozers chugging and beeping, construction workers scurrying. Plumes of dust rising about the five and a half acres that would soon be known as Safari Africa. A few weeks before the May 28 opening, Brian Morrow, Lowry Park’s design guru, stood in the middle of the commotion and surveyed his creation. Brian’s title was director of capital construction. As a boy, he had designed a model theme park in his family’s basement, with a roller coaster and a Ferris wheel. Now he created exhibits at the zoo, studying eroded riverbanks and weathered stones—all so he could heighten the public’s sense that they were truly setting foot in Africa.

“Replicating nature,” he called it, and he loved the immense scale of what the zoo was attempting. “Africa is big. The exhibits are big. The animals are big.”

One of Lowry Park’s goals, he explained, was to put visitors as close to the animals as possible without endangering anyone on either side of the fence. That’s why the zoo had built a platform where guests could stand at eye level with giraffes and feed them by hand, and a raised viewing area where they could watch from above as the elephants swam in their new 250,000-gallon pool. “It’s all about the idea of the juxtaposition of humans and nature,” Brian said. “Proximity equals excitement, and excitement will turn into a connection and love for animals.”

From another person’s mouth, these sentiments might have sounded Orwellian. Bubbling out of Brian, with all his enthusiasm, they made you want to hug a wildebeest. Even Brian, however, would have acknowledged the limits of such artifice. No matter how much ingenuity and delight he and others poured into this project, Safari Africa could never come close to the real thing. Msholo and Mbali and Sdudla and Matjeka must have recognized this better than any of the humans. The Swazi elephants appeared to have adjusted to the new world as well as anyone could have expected. But the acres of the open elephant yards and the accompanying pool were a long way from the landscape they had once roamed. It was true that their former herds in Swaziland were systematically tearing down the trees inside the game parks. Still, what remained was glorious: deep thickets where the red leopard grass grew past the ears of baby rhinos, the watering holes crowded with wildebeests and impalas, drinking deeply as they watched for crocodiles. Some things could not be replicated.

As opening day for Safari Africa drew closer, a sense of momentum could be felt in every department of the zoo. Carie and the rest of the Asia staff exulted in the budding relationship between their beloved Sumatran tigers, who were now peacefully sharing the exhibit almost every day. So far Enshalla showed no sign of pregnancy, but she and Eric were mating frequently. One day, Enshalla had even allowed the male to join her on the tiger platform—the same one that had been built as her mother’s haven when Enshalla was still a cub—and had curled herself at Eric’s feet, exuding contentment.

The famously reserved demeanor of the aviary staff had been replaced by tremulous expectation as they awaited the arrival of the zoo’s first argus pheasant chick. The female pheasant had laid eggs before, but none had ever hatched. The keepers could tell this time would be different, because they had been candling the pheasant’s egg—placing it under a bright beam of light that allowed them to see within and evaluate the viability of the embryo. Under the light, the brown shell became translucent and the embryo revealed itself as a deep crimson form stirring in a web of veins that spidered through the yolk. One of the keepers pointed to a tiny dent in the shell where the embryo was already pushing with its beak.

“This is the pip right here,” she said. “We found it this morning.”

The aviary staff was keeping the egg inside an incubator, readying a warm new home for the chick. Soon it would make its entrance, chipping its way into the world. The morning after the first pip appeared, the staff could see the tip of a beak, poking from inside. When they returned from lunch, they found the argus chick standing in the incubator, wet and sticky, surrounded by tiny shards of the brown shell.

“When he made his mind up,” said one keeper, “he was ready.”

In those crucial first hours, they tried not to touch him too much. They didn’t want him imprinting on them, mistaking one of them for his mother. The successful hatching made them almost dizzy. Beaming, they led visitors back to the incubator to show off their new arrival. The chick, tiny and brown and fuzzy, stood in the light, softly peeping.

The zoo had entered a streak unlike any it had ever seen before. Safari Africa was going to be a monster hit, Lex and his team could already feel it. All of them, meanwhile, were crowing because the latest issue of Child magazine declared Lowry Park the best zoo for kids in the United States.

After months of studying more than 150 accredited zoos, Child had rated Lowry Park above the biggest institutions in the country, with the San Diego Zoo earning the number-two slot. In its article, the magazine saluted Lowry Park for its hands-on exhibits, its array of children’s educational programs, and its longstanding commitment to rehabilitating manatees. The judges also commended the zoo’s commitment to safety and noted that the staff scheduled Code One drills every month. “The most of our survey,” the magazine said.

More good news followed. That same month, attendance hit a historic benchmark as the staff welcomed the ten-millionth visitor to walk through the gates since the new zoo opened in 1988. The lucky guest—a soldier on leave with his wife and children—appeared slightly stunned at the ceremony that awaited him on the other side.

A banner was unfurled. A TV crew hovered. “Congratulations!” someone called out.

Amid the celebrations, there was one more piece of news. No banners were raised for this one. Only a few days after his hatching, the argus pheasant chick died from an infection. The aviary keepers were devastated. To have the chick snatched away, just as they were getting their hopes up, was too hard. The loss, unknown to anyone outside the zoo, was another turn of nature’s wheel, a quiet reminder that no matter how hard the keepers worked to care for their animals, there would always be complications that could not be foreseen, outcomes that could not be forestalled.

One morning that spring, Andrea Schuch was giving a talk on chimpanzees when a visitor said something troubling. Andrea had just explained that chimps are humans’ closest genetic relative when a little girl, listening on, shook her head.

“No, they’re not,” said the child. “Because God made us.”

Andrea knew there was no point in arguing. But for days, the exchange stuck with her. Even though the girl had obviously been repeating what her parents or another adult had taught her, she had posed an almost timeless question. For centuries, Aristotle and Descartes and other philosophers after them have debated whether animals possessed souls, or reason, or enough sentience to grant them any rights. But for Andrea, the answer was obvious. After her time at the zoo, she could not accept the notion that animals stood outside the sight of God.

“Are you going to tell me that they don’t have souls and a place in heaven? That seems very wrong.”

Sometimes, when she sat by the window of the orangutan exhibit, Rango would plop down on the other side of the glass, only a few inches away. He would look into her eyes, and she would look into his, and she could feel him gazing into her core.

No, Rango definitely had a soul. So did Herman, and Rukiya, and the others, too.

Andrea was sure of it.

The final days before the debut of Safari Africa were somehow both chaotic and exhilarating. Brian Morrow gave instructions nonstop on both his walkie-talkie and his cell phone. Brian French and the rest of the Africa staff pushed through a stream of last-minute tasks, sweat dripping down their faces. One of the warthogs briefly escaped. The giraffes balked at leaving their barn. A bongo antelope proved so skittish, the staff had to calm him with a small dose of a sedative.

Then, just when it seemed the zoo had been pushed beyond capacity, everything fell into place. At the unveiling, Lex posed for the TV cameras with Mayor Iorio and other dignitaries, all of them holding giant scissors for the cutting of the ribbon draped before the entrance of the tunnel that led to the elephants and the rest of the new animals. Iorio had left her zebra-print jacket at home. Instead she donned a safari hat.

“I think we should celebrate these elephants,” she said, turning to Lex in front of the crowd that waited behind the dignitaries. “Where are they? Are they back there?”

Lex grinned. “Yeah.”

“Are they happy?”

A bigger grin. “Yeah.”

Someone counted to three, and the ribbon fell, and the crowd spilled forward. Emerging from the tunnel into the light, a little girl spied the warthogs and yelled “Pumbaa!” The crowd moved on to the bongo and the hornbills and the crowned cranes and the zebras, and finally to the overlook above the elephant yards, where Ellie and Matjeka were walking together, ears flapping, tails swishing, every giant step and every curlicue of their trunks registering on the faces of all the humans literally gasping with delight.

Lex stood back and studied the reactions and never stopped smiling.

In the rush of that morning, a rumor spread through some of the visitors. When asked if it was true, Lee Ann nodded.

Ellie was pregnant.