Kings in Exile

The last king of his kind paces behind iron bars. Last Bull, a magnificent buffalo who once thundered across the plains, now lives in a zoological park, the final remnant of a vanishing species. Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, one of Canada's finest nature writers, gives this noble creature voice and grief and memory in equal measure. When a bull moose named Kaiser arrives at the enclosure, the tension crackles. Two kings, stripped of their kingdoms, circle each other in a rivalry that feels like war. The moose is massive, arrogant, and new to captivity's shame. Last Bull is older, slower, but he carries something the moose has already lost: the weight of knowing what freedom tasted like. This is not a simple animal story. It is a meditation on captivity, on the wounds civilization inflicts on the wild, and on the strange dignity that survives even in cages. Roberts writes with piercing tenderness about what it means to be the last of anything, to be watched by those who will never understand what has been taken.