Lion Down (FunJungle) - Hardcover

Gibbs, Stuart

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1534424733 ISBN 13: 9781534424739

Verlag: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Teddy Fitzroy returns as FunJungle’s resident sleuth when a lion is falsely accused of killing a distinguished dog in the latest novel in New York Times bestselling author Stuart Gibbs’s FunJungle series.

For once, operations at the enormous zoo/theme park appear to be running smoothly (except for the occasional herring-related mishap in the penguin exhibit) and Teddy Fitzroy is finally able to give detective work a rest. But then a local lion is accused of killing a famous dog—and the dog’s owner, an inflammatory radio host, goes on a crusade to have the cat declared a nuisance so it can be hunted. But it looks like the lion might have been framed, and a renegade animal activist wants Teddy and Summer to help prove it. Soon, Teddy finds himself wrapped up in the middle of his most bizarre, hilarious, and dangerous case yet.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stuart Gibbs is the author of five New York Times bestselling series: Spy School, FunJungle, Moon Base Alpha, Charlie Thorne, and Once Upon a Tim—as well as the new nonfiction series Spy School Secret Files. He has written screenplays, worked on a whole bunch of animated films, developed TV shows, been a newspaper columnist, and researched capybaras. Stuart lives with his family in Los Angeles. You can learn more about what he’s up to at StuartGibbs.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Lion Down

1

THE FISH CANNON

I got mixed up in all the cougar chaos the same morning I was shot with a herring.

The herring incident happened while I was helping feed the penguins at FunJungle Wild Animal Park, early on a Saturday morning in late May, before the park had officially opened for the day. My girlfriend, Summer, was also there. I was only thirteen, and Summer was fourteen, but since Summer’s father, J.J. McCracken, owned FunJungle and both my parents worked there, we often got to go behind the scenes.

FunJungle’s penguin exhibit was one of the largest in the world, with 416 birds on display: a mix of emperors, chinstraps, Adélies, macaronis, gentoos, and kings. Normally, I wasn’t a big fan of being in with the penguins. Yes, they were cute, but all those birds generated a lot of poop, and penguin poop reeks. The exhibit smelled like a latrine full of rotten fish. However, Summer and I were braving the stench for two reasons:

First, a heat wave was frying central Texas. Normally, the temperature in late May should have merely been uncomfortably warm; instead, it was blisteringly hot. The day before, in science class, we had fried an egg on the school parking lot. Meanwhile, the penguin exhibit was chilled to twenty degrees Fahrenheit. It was the perfect way to beat the heat.

Second, we got to use a cannon.

It wasn’t a real cannon. There was no gunpowder or anything like that. Instead, it was a pneumatic plastic tube created by the Zoom Corporation to move fish at high speeds.

Zoom had originally invented the cannon to help salmon get past dams in the Pacific Northwest. Salmon are born in mountain lakes, swim downstream to the ocean to mature, and then, years later, return to the exact same lakes where they were born in order to spawn. Unfortunately, dams often prevent the salmon from returning to their headwaters, and until recently, the only option had been to build expensive fish ladders, which were like giant concrete staircases the salmon could “climb” by jumping from one pool to the next. Firing the fish through a pneumatic tube over the dam was a lot cheaper—albeit somewhat ridiculous. J.J. McCracken had liked the idea, though. He had invested a good deal of money in Zoom, and while he was explaining the concept to Summer one night at dinner, she had suggested that maybe the tubes could be used for dead fish as well as live ones.

J.J. McCracken was a smart man, but he always claimed his daughter was even smarter; so when she made suggestions, he listened. (After all, Summer had come up with the whole idea for FunJungle itself when she was only seven.) Summer’s logic went like this: FunJungle couldn’t feed the penguins live fish, because it was hard to control parasites in a live food supply and we didn’t want the penguins to get sick. So all their food was frozen and then thawed out for feeding time. In the case of the penguins, this amounted to over 700 pounds of fish a day. Normally, the keepers fed the penguins by tossing little chunks to each of them, which was very time-consuming and promoted abnormal behavior.

“That’s not how penguins get food in the wild,” Summer had told her father. “In the exhibit, they look like a bunch of pet dogs, sitting around, begging for treats. It’s not natural!”

“It’s still awfully popular,” J.J. had argued. “At feeding time, I’ve seen crowds seven people deep at the glass.”

“Well, imagine how much bigger the crowds would be if they saw the penguins actually do something,” Summer said. “Suppose you shot the fish into the water and the penguins had to chase them down! It would allow the penguins to act more like they do in the wild, and it would be much more exciting for the visitors.”

J.J. had pondered that for a bit, then grinned proudly. “All right,” he’d said. “Let’s give it a shot.”

Which was how, two weeks later, Summer and I found ourselves in the penguin exhibit early on a Saturday morning, loading frozen herring into a fish cannon.

Getting there that early hadn’t been any trouble for me; I lived in FunJungle’s employee housing, which was a collection of double-wide trailer homes not far past the back fence of the park. J.J. owned ten square miles of property in the Texas Hill Country, of which FunJungle only took up a fraction. (So far, at least; J.J. was hoping to greatly expand his theme park empire in the future with additions to FunJungle and new resort hotels.) Out my door there was nothing but forest. Although I liked hiking in the woods, there was nothing else to do around there except visit FunJungle. I had my own employee pass that let me enter the park whenever I wanted, as both my parents tended to be there rather than at home.

My mother was the head primatologist at FunJungle, while Dad was the park’s official photographer (though he still got away to take photos for National Geographic on occasion). Dad had accompanied me to the park that morning, but Mom had already been at work. Most animals wake up early, which means keepers have to be there early too—Mom was often on the job by five a.m.

Cindy Salerno, the head penguin keeper, lived a few trailers away from us. She was always cheerful and friendly and she baked a mean apple pie. (Although, as an occupational hazard, no matter how much she showered, she always smelled slightly like fish.) Cindy knew me well enough to trust me to help out with the cannon; she didn’t know Summer that well, but J.J. had insisted Summer be there that morning because the whole thing was her idea. Cindy was excited about the fish cannon, but had felt we should give it a test run before the tourists arrived, just in case something went wrong.

This turned out to be a very shrewd idea.

At eight a.m. it was already sweltering outdoors, but inside the penguin exhibit we were dressed for winter. It was actually snowing in there. A special machine had been built for this. An enormous modified snow-cone maker shaved flakes of ice off giant cubes and blew them through vents in the ceiling. The snow then wafted down and piled up in drifts. The machine ran for a few hours every morning, generating over a ton of fresh snow a day. The penguins loved it. They were dancing in the shower of flakes, waggling their stubby wings in delight.

I enjoyed the snow quite a bit myself. I had never lived anywhere it snowed, and even though I knew this was fake, it was still fun. The only drawback was that I didn’t own any serious winter clothing and had to borrow ski clothes from Summer. The parka wasn’t too girly, but it still had a fringe of pink fluff around the hood. Meanwhile, we were also wearing tall rubber waders to protect ourselves from the penguins. (Penguins aren’t too aggressive, but if you crowded them, they would sometimes peck your shins to make you back off.) FunJungle had only purchased waders in adult sizes—no one had ever considered that thirteen-year-olds might be wearing them—so they rode ridiculously high on our legs.

“You are a serious fashion disaster,” Summer informed me as we lugged the fish cannon into the exhibit.

“You don’t look much better,” I told her, pulling out my phone. “Maybe I should post your photo. . . .”

“Don’t you dare!”...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1534424733
• ISBN 13: 9781534424739
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; AA Utrecht; 3584; Niederlande