Jamie Bradley knew he was in deep trouble the instant he heard the chimpanzees give that "Eee-yahh" scream the chimp, Cheetah, does in the Tarzan movies.
"It means fear. I knew they'd attack," said Bradley, the volunteer Great Apes Building worker who was badly bitten and mauled by chimpanzees Feb. 27 at Hogle Zoo.Bradley had gotten used to the excited cry chimps give when they're worked up.
"More like a barking. A whining. The hoo-hoo-hoo type of thing," Bradley, 28, said Saturday from his Centerville home.
But the high-pitched scream meant the chimpanzees had seen something calling to the most primal side of nature.
Survival.
A door inadvertently left open.
"It was like a jailbreak then," said Al Gray, an attorney from the law firm, Smith & Glauser, which has a claim pending for Bradley against the Utah Zoological Society, the nonprofit group under contract to manage Hogle Zoo.
From the first bite, Bradley could see how helpless he was in trying to fight off the three chimps suddenly on the loose -- Tammy, Chip and Happy.
"They got me right here first," Bradley said, removing a plastic medical shield from his left forearm, revealing a moonscape of deep reddish-purple craters left by razor canines.
The chimps flipped him like a human flapjack. Though adult chimps normally are 150-200 pounds and 3 1/2-4 feet tall, their strength is 5 to 10 times that of the average human.
It was no problem for the animals to rag-doll Bradley around the cage.
"When I was working with them, you'd see them hang by one finger from a bolt half-an-inch out of the wall," Bradley said. "They're incredibly strong in the forearms and hands."
Bradley did his best to fend them off.
"I was on one side, then the other. My face. My back. I couldn't do anything to push them off at all," he said.
Chimps bite, then rip with their teeth, Bradley said.
"Like biting a roll or meat, like beef jerky," he said. "Not like a dog that bites and releases. It's a chomp and tear type of thing."
His abiding thought during the attack:
"I knew if they got to my neck, that would be the end," Bradley said. "I was very conscious my jugular vein was there and if they bit it, I would die."
The chimps didn't cease their attack until two things happened. One, zoo worker Kimberly Tropea threw herself fearlessly on top of Bradley in a valiant attempt to save him.
Nature helped there, Bradley feels.
"Attacking male chimps will destroy males. They'll let females join the troop. Basic breeding. Basic biology. Basic evolution," Bradley said.
For whatever reason, the chimps relaxed their attack momentarily.
Second, zoo personnel came running up and shot two chimps, Chip and Happy, dead.
"They had to shoot. The animals were on top of me. They had no choice," Bradley said.
Bradley has a lifelong love of animals -- has, present tense, not had. He hated seeing the chimps shot. In fact, his first instinct had been not to fight back for fear he might be hurting them.
By the end of the attack, he could only be thankful.
"At that point, it was them or me," he said.
Bradley never felt pain during the ordeal.
"Shock is a wonderful thing," he said.
Once he got to University of Utah hospital, that all changed. He spent the next 3 1/2 weeks there in tremendous pain or medicated stupor as doctors worked through four surgeries to patch Bradley's ripped, bitten and beaten body.
Bradley's left ear was nearly bitten off.
"It was dangling by one thin strip of tissue," he said.
As he sat in his living room, the ear appeared nicely spliced.
"They're pretty proud of that work," he said.
The rest of his body is responding much more slowly to the brutality of the attacks.
One bite ripped off Bradley's left nostril and a major portion of his nose. Doctors have sliced and folded over a piece of his left cheek to cover the nose.
Tuesday, surgeons are scheduled to take ear cartilage and transfer it to Bradley's nose, to form the foundation of new nasal construction.
Bradley's forehead is a roadmap of zigs and zags of purple scars. Five to six months from now, plastic surgeons will try to ply their skills there.
Lifting his right pantleg, Bradley revealed a puckered minefield of more than a dozen deep-tooth punctures and tears across his shin, calf and ankles.
"They said the bites went clear through the muscle and stirred up the tissue underneath," said Gene Bradley, Jamie's mother.
The left leg bears the furrows of still-red scratch marks.
Bradley's eyelids were torn, requiring stitches. The tissue was so swollen he couldn't open his eyes for two weeks after the incident.
"I'd pry them open with my fingers, but when I blinked the stitches dragged across my eyes. It hurt too bad to keep doing it," Jamie Bradley said.
To battle infection from the bites, doctors treated Jamie Bradley with three antibiotics. Those disturbed digestion. He lost 30 pounds.
Both hands were fractured. He almost lost the right finger on his right hand. He wasn't so lucky on the left. That ring finger was completely bitten off. The middle and forefingers were clomped down to the second knuckles. A dying tendon had to be removed from the back of the left hand. An open wound still seeps there.
That's the thing giving him the most trouble right now.
"A lot of phantom pain from the missing fingers," he said.
Even sitting and recounting his injuries -- looking at a year before he knows where he stands medically with his appearance and use of his left hand -- Jamie Bradley doesn't blame the chimps.
"They were just reacting like they react," he said. "It's natural. A wild animal instinct."
He'd seen the chimps vent their frustrations with captivity numerous times.
"They love to clap their hands to get visitors to come up to the cage," he said. "Then when you turn your back, they'll come slapping hard against the window to watch you jump."
A lifelong love of animals led Jamie Bradley to zoo volunteer work.
"I kept as many pets as they'd let me," he said.
Tweety the parakeet. William, the head fish, and his aquarium brood. Pokey, the poodle-terrier mutt, whose puppies Jamie Bradley helped deliver.
Once he found field mice in a woodpile in the family home, then in Clearfield.
"Jamie took care of them like a family," Gene Bradley said.
In their seven years in Centerville, Jamie Bradley often has been drawn to the eagles and hawks soaring through the valley.
"He'll sit out there for hours watching them," Gene Bradley said.
That love of nature is why Jamie Bradley never minded even the tedious side of zoo work.
"Most people don't like to clean up after a dog, much less turkey vulture vomit," Jamie Bradley said with a grin. "I just always enjoyed being around the animals and watching the public interact."
He got to liking zoo work so much, he began switching his classes at Salt Lake Community College from electronics to biology. Now he dreams of working again with animals.
Gene Bradley wishes he wouldn't. She always had a bad feeling about his zoo work, fearing for his safety.
But it was nothing like the dread she had the morning of the attack. Jamie Bradley had come to her the night before, sat on the edge of the bed and spoke of the night watchman's job the zoo had offered him. He was scheduled to start the week after the incident.
"I couldn't sleep the next morning when Jamie left," Gene Bradley said. "I got up and cleaned the whole house. Mother's premonition."
When the phone rang, Gene Bradley sensed trouble before she saw the zoo's listing on the caller ID.
"I knew he was hurt," she said.
Jamie Bradley feels his mother's anxiety. But the call of the animals is too strong.
The other night he watched "Project X" on TV. It's the Matthew Broderick-Helen Hunt flick where chimpanzees confined in a government experiment rebel and go on a rampage.
"I had no nightmares. I guess that's the way I deal with things," Jamie Bradley said.
But it'll be awhile before he sees whether the scars X-ed all over his body disappear as easily.