Mother to Tigers

You are a Bengal tiger cub,

one of three – Dacca, Rajpur, Raniganj – abandoned by your mother.

You are so cold and thin that someone with kind hands puts you on a heating pad and sits by you for hours, moistening your mouth with milk.

When you give a weak cry and look up, there is a human face almost crying too.

Your new mother is Helen Delaney Martini, who has already raised a lion cub in her New York apartment. Tigers in the bathtub will be no problem for her and her husband, Fred.

This remarkable book – strikingly striped as tigers are, sympathetically spoken as any child could wish – tells the story of Helen Martini, founder of the Bronx Zoo’s animal nursery in 1944 and its first woman zookeeper