The Man Who Liked Lions

The Man Who Liked Lions by John Bernard Daley - A zoo is a place where some people make sport of lower animals. That included Kemper, but for him people were the lower animals!

Mr. Kemper leaned on the rail, watching the caged lions asleep in the August sun. At his side a woman lifted a whimpering little girl to her shoulder and said, 'Stop that! Look at the lions!' Then she jiggled the girl up and down. The lion opened yellow eyes, lifted his head from between his paws and yawned. Immediately the girl put her fingers over her face and began to cry. 'Shut up!' said the woman. 'You shut up right now or I'll tell that big lion to eat you up!' Looking through her fingers the girl said, 'Lions don't eat little girls.' The woman shook her. 'Of course they do! I said they did, didn't I?'

'Lions seldom eat people,' said Mr. Kemper. With all of her two hundred pounds the woman turned to face him. 'Well!' she said. The word hung like an icicle in the warm air, but Mr. Kemper waved it aside. 'Only old lions resort to human flesh. Except for the famous incident of the Tsavo man-eaters, of course.' The woman pulled her arm tighter around the girl, elbow up, as if to ward him off. 'Come on, Shirl,' she said. 'Let's go look at the taggers.' And with a warning look over her shoulder she lunged away from the rail. A big man with an unlit cigarette in his mouth took her place.

As her wide back swayed down the walk, Mr. Kemper wondered if she had a special intuition about him, like dogs, whose noses warned them that he was not quite the kind of man they were accustomed to. Women, particularly those with children, seemed to feel that way. He watched her leave, having decided that she was unsuited for what he had in mind.

The big man beside him tapped him on the shoulder and asked him for a match; at the same time Kemper saw, just beyond the retreating woman, a man in a tweed jacket and gray slacks, watching him.