Late in the evening on Saturday, June 13, a heavy rain fell on Tbilisi, Georgia, for several hours. Zurab Gurielidze, director of the Tbilisi Zoo, was at the movies with his wife for most of it. The zoo, the largest in Georgia, sat on 22 acres in the middle of downtown. It was founded in 1927, five years after Georgia was absorbed into the former Soviet Union. Last year, 500,000 people—10 percent of the country’s population—came to glimpse African penguins, East Caucasian turs, a white rhinoceros, elephants, bears, wolves, and a dik-dik, a miniature antelope. Residents of nearby apartment buildings often called at night to say the lions were roaring loudly—were they perhaps sick? Staffers patiently explained that lions are nocturnal; they feed after dark. People paid particular attention to Shumba, the zoo’s rare white lion cub. Abandoned by his mother at birth in December 2013, hand-raised by the zoo, and now the companion of a black poodle named Karakula, Shumba had become a national celebrity, appearing on television and inspiring intense devotion from both residents and zookeepers, who called him “the white prince.”

A little after midnight, when Gurielidze and his wife checked in on the zoo, the rain had stopped, and the grounds were calm. The animals—lions, tigers, bears, and jaguars—were quiet. Gurielidze, a rugged 55-year-old with cropped gray hair and light eyes, went to check on the lower-lying parts of the zoo, which were prone to flooding during heavy rain. The predator enclosures there, which faced the Vere River, a small trickle of water flowing along the Chabua Amirejibi highway, were Soviet-designed and arguably could still be called cages. Large glass-and-wood enclosures on higher ground were under construction. Already, five lions had moved three months earlier into their new lush green home; the enclosure for the next pride was almost finished.

Gurielidze discovered a few inches of water on the ground of the hyena enclosures—the zoo had two species, a spotted couple and two striped males. But they were playing happily—jumping and butting each other into muddy puddles. Malkhaz Chitadze, a 59-year-old zookeeper, was at the door of the small house he shared on the grounds with his wife, next to the animal nursery. The couple had no children, and the zookeeper’s wife, Guliko, a 57-year old nurse with fluorescent red hair, had bottle-fed all the baby felines with the gusto befitting a den mother. But on this night, she was on bed rest inside, recovering from an arm amputation after being mauled by a tiger a few weeks before.

Gurielidze began to make his way back to his truck when the cars on the highway started blaring their horns.

Someone screamed: “Water!”