The polar bears had staged a bloody battle, with two of them dead, two dying and the rest so badly mauled that there was little hope they would live. Two buck deer, with locked horns, were fighting to the death. Monkey Island was in an uproar, with half of the little creatures mysteriously dead — dead, the keepers said, of too much excitement. A nervous condition.
'It ain't natural,' protested Pop, when they were inside. 'Animals don't fight like that.'
Riggs was yelling into a telephone.
Outside a rifle roared.
Pop flinched.
'Maybe that's Nero.' he groaned. 'Nero, that I raised from a cub. Bottle-fed him, I did.'
There were traces of tears in the old man's eyes.
It was Nero. But Nero, before he died, had reached out for the man who held the rifle and had killed him with a single vicious blow that crushed his skull.
Later that day, in his office, Doctor Gilmer smote the newspaper that lay open on his desk.
'You see that?' he asked Jack Woods.