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her legs wrapped halfway around his back, which is as far as she can reach. Thezookeeper is not a small man. He is bulky and muscular and covered in a coarse dark hair. He towers over his neighbors and shows no fear of the animals, not even at feeding time when the wolves lunge toward the buckets of raw red meat that he hangs from thick, fleshy wrists. Mrs. McGinn’s daughter licks the ridges of his ear, calls him her grizzly bear.
    On his rounds he whistles in the rain and swings a pail of oats and overripe vegetables back and forth through the air. Later on he pushes a wheelbarrow full of hay from the barn to the cattle enclosure, one hand shielded over his face to keep the water from falling into his eyes. He dumps the hay over the fence while the highland cows consider him without fear, their gazes half hidden beneath their shaggy locks, their coats soaked. Behind them the antelope and the gazelle are grazing, their silhouettes soft and gold against the charcoal sky. The reindeer stands stock-still beneath a dogwood tree, his antlers caught once again in the branches. The zookeeper heaves a sigh, straddles the fence, and strides over with his garden rake to untangle the stupid beast. His boots sink several inches in the mud and it requires some effort to lift them. He grunts at the rain, exasperated and disturbed. The zoo was built in the lowest part of town, a piece of ground that used to be marshlands until it was filled in before construction. The triangle-shaped park juts out into the water, bordered on two sides by the river and on the third by a small creek that runs in front of the main entrance. At the time, the city planners believed that the site would attract native waterfowl and that the arching bridge to the entrance wouldsoon become iconic. Now the zookeeper wonders how many more days he has until the entire zoo sinks back into the swamps from which it rose.
    He trudges through the rest of his tasks while he waits for Mrs. McGinn’s daughter to join him. As the daylight fades she comes to find him where he stands in the aviary, listening to the parrot and watching the toucan swoop in yellow-green arcs. In the corner is a mesh enclosure filled with butterflies, and on the far side of the room is the pen with the lone eagle. The bird shifts on its perch when she enters, and the zookeeper turns to greet her.
    â€œAdam!” she says. She takes several swift steps forward to embrace him.
    He pulls her against his chest, feels her heart hammering through her coat and her breath blowing warm on his neck. She presses her lips briefly to his and then pulls away.
    The zookeeper reaches for her hand. Lately, she has been increasingly restless.
    â€œAre you all right, Angie?” he has asked her, five or six times a day for the past week.
    She will shrug and tell him she is fine. But a few minutes later she will inevitably ask him: “Adam, do you think it was an accident or not?”
    To be honest, the zookeeper does not particularly care. He considers himself something of a fatalist, having shoveled out enough exotic animal carcasses to be more aware than most of the ever-present pressure of mortality.
    â€œWe’ll all be gone sooner or later, Angie,” he will tell her, “whether we walk into the river or not.”
    The zookeeper finds a strange kind of comfort in the thought, but his fiancée has not seemed reassured. Now she extricates her hand from his, stooping down to lift the pail of fish he has set out for her. As he follows her out the door and over the flat wooden footbridge into the simulated savannah, he notes that the water has risen high enough to cover the planks. When he catches up to her on the path he glances sideways at her, nodding without listening to what she is telling him. Like her mother, the girl is a serious talker—and yet he appreciates the simple fact of her presence, loping along at his side with her words running quick as a hummingbird’s