The Popper Penguin Rescue

by Eliot Schrefer

  “It’s normal?” Nina asked.

  “Totally normal.”

  Over the final days of the voyage, Mae and Ernest would do their usual preening, nipping at their feathers, only now big clumps of them would come away. Beneath were revealed sleek black feathers—their adult plumage! “Would you look at that,” Nina said. “Our little penguins are growing up!”

  “They look kind of like punk rockers,” Joel said.

  They might have started getting their adult feathers, but even over the six weeks of voyage, the chicks had yet to bond with the other penguins. While Joel was busy with his homework, Ernest would stand near the other birds, but the whole time he’d be looking over at Joel, as if asking whether he was allowed to come back yet. Mae was clearer about her feelings: She’d pick fights if any Popper Penguins came between her and Nina, only calming once she was back in her arms.

  “They’ll start fitting in eventually, right?” Nina asked Mrs. Popper.

  “I’m sure,” her mother replied. “Soon we’ll be at the Drake Research Station, and we can ask the penguin experts there how we can help Mae and Ernest adjust. Now, it’s getting chillier. Draw your scarves tight, children.”

  The very next day, Yuka called out and slowed the boat. The penguins all gathered at the bow to see what had gotten his attention. Shore!

  A glacier ran right up against the water, its surfaces going from white at the edges to a brilliant blue in its core. At the far end of the giant block of ice was a gravelly beach that rose up to a stony bluff. On top was a simple red building, with aluminum sides and a peaked, snow-covered roof.

  “That’s the Drake Center for Environmental Studies,” Yuka said. “I’ve read a lot about it in my courses. They’re doing important research about our climate. Who would have thought life would come to this—I grew up near the North Pole, but now I’m at the very other end of the planet!”

  As they watched, a figure emerged from the little red building and stood at the edge of the cliff. She waved at them as she brought a megaphone to her mouth. “Hello! I’m Dr. Antonia Drake. Welcome! You can bring your boat right up to the slip.”

  “Oh, good,” Yuka said under his breath. “No shipwrecks this time.”

  By the time he had guided the boat to the dock, and Joel and Nina had hopped to shore to tie it up tight, Dr. Drake had come down to greet them. “What a long journey you’ve had,” she said. “You must be so tired.”

  “Not really!” Nina said. “We’re mostly just excited.”

  “Who’s that?” Dr. Drake asked, looking at the small penguin by Nina’s feet.

  “That’s Mae,” Joel explained. “And this is Ernest. They look like adults now, but they just finished molting. They’re the reason we started on this whole adventure!”

  In fact, Ernest hadn’t quite finished molting. He still had a tuft of fluffy feathers on the back of his head, like an old balding man.

  “They need a little help learning to socialize—” Mrs. Popper said, then she had to stop and concentrate on not falling into the sea as twenty-four penguins marched along the boat and hopped past her onto the dock, nearly knocking her over in the process.

  Patch walked to the water’s edge, stared in, then walked back. She mustered enough courage to return to the edge, then lost her nerve again and waddled back. Patch walked to the edge again, but this time another penguin crowded in behind her to see and accidentally knocked her in! She made a gork as she bobbed on the surface, then dived away. Since no seals had eaten the first penguin yet, the others plopped in after her.

  “They seem to be making themselves right at home, don’t they?” Dr. Drake said, laughing.

  “All except our two little leftovers from the Penguin Pavilion,” Nina said.

  Only Ernest and Mae remained on land.

  They looked up at the Popper children.

  They looked down at the cold sea.

  Ernest headed into the galley and started making his little-chick oork sounds as he perused the cans of fish.

  “I see what you mean,” Dr. Drake said, tapping her gloved finger against her lips as she considered the two odd young penguins. “They don’t seem to have made any progress getting used to being with other penguins. None at all.”

  Mae waddled over to the ship’s radio and pecked the power button. She lay back and listened to the music, bouncing her flippers in rhythm with the beats.

  HOMECOMING

  ONCE THEY HAD finished filling their bellies with fish—“And squid,” Dr. Drake said, “that’s really their primary diet around here”—the penguins filed onto land. The Poppers and Dr. Drake lined up at the shore to watch. “This is a novel environment for the Popper Penguins,” Dr. Drake explained while Joel took notes. “They’re bound to be apprehensive about what they’ll find. We should expect them to be insecure and to stick near the boat for a long time.”

  As they emerged from the surf, though, the Popper Penguins walked in the opposite direction, heading right into the wilds of Antarctica. “Oh!” said Dr. Drake.

  Once the adult birds had marched past, Mae and Ernest made their sleepy sounds and toddled toward their nests in the boat. “Nope,” Nina said. “You’re not going to bed now—we just got here!”

  She and Joel scooped up the young birds and headed after the line of penguins. Mrs. Popper and Dr. Drake and Yuka hustled to keep up. “This is most unexpected,” Dr. Drake said. “These particular birds have never been to Antarctica, though their forebears of course came from here. Nonetheless, they’re taking their ancestral routes over the ice. It’s as if no time has gone by!”

  “Penguins are very smart,” Nina said, nodding. “You should have seen Mae at school. Can’t say she was much help on my spelling test, though.”

  “The Popper Penguins seem to be an especially intelligent line,” Mrs. Popper added. “They were able to learn sophisticated dance moves, and their act toured theaters across the country.”

  “Is it possible that the Popper Penguins have somehow passed along knowledge of where they came from, over all these years?” Yuka asked, rummaging through his backpack with his gloved hands to get his research notebook out.

  Dr. Drake shook her head. “Preposterous. That would require them to have language. Not just simple communication, but the ability to capture verb tenses, to refer to places by name. Even the most advanced chimpanzees can’t do that.”

  “I think there are a lot of things we might not know about penguins,” Nina said, patting Mae on the head. “I’m positive that she and Ernest have really in-depth conversations with each other.”

  “Mostly about where their next can of tuna fish is coming from,” Joel added.

  “I know that to a child’s eyes it can seem like animals have magical powers of communication, but the science doesn’t back that up,” Dr. Drake said as they marched.

  Nina had been working her way ahead of the group. She whirled around, arms outstretched. “Then what do you say to that?” she asked.

  They’d reached a rise in the icy field that looked out over a broad blue-white valley. It was covered in hundreds and hundreds of penguins, waddling to and fro. They clustered in the center of the basin, where the dense crowd orked and jooked and gawed, courted and canoodled and fought. Some of the penguins were sitting on nests they’d cobbled together with small rocks, and before Nina’s eyes one toddled over to the nest next door, stole a rock, and waddled it back to his own nest. Then the original owner of the rock noticed the theft and waddled over to steal the rock right back, starting a penguin fight that soon involved a half dozen neighbors.

  Similar episodes were going on throughout the massive penguin colony. There was so much to see, like in a picture book where each time you looked there was some new tiny story to discover in the illustrations.

  “This is the biggest gentoo colony in Antarctica,” Dr. Drake said proudly. “We’ve had a continuous study site here for over a hundred years.”

  “Gentoo?” Joel asked. “What’s that?”<
br />
  “There are many species of penguins in the world. Gentoo is the name of the species of the Popper Penguins. My grandfather sent Mr. Popper his original penguin from this very colony.”

  “Oh,” Joel said.

  “Oh my!” Mrs. Popper interrupted. “Have you seen what’s going on over there?”

  “That’s what I was talking about before!” Nina protested. “Now do you believe me?”

  “Wow,” Yuka said.

  “Well, I never,” Mrs. Popper said.

  The Popper Penguins, fresh off their trip from the Arctic, had waddled and tobogganed right into the middle of the gentoo colony. There they’d lined up in a row, making quiet orks that sounded almost like coughs, waiting for the attention of the other birds. And attention is just what they got. A ruckus rose from the colony as they noticed the strangers. Those that weren’t tending nests came right over, crowding in, knocking one another over to get the best view, making a deafening chorus of penguin calls.

  Once they had the attention of the other penguins, the Popper Penguins began to perform.

  While the Antarctic penguins watched, Patch lay on the ice for a long pause, then pretended to wake up and stand and look about. Another penguin joined her, peering about dramatically. They were followed by ten more, until there were twelve penguins in all. They marched in a perfect circle, all waddling in unison, then formed a square before becoming a semicircle. Two of them separated from the group and got into a mock fight, buffeting each other with their flippers and biting the air. They both fell over, as if dead.

  “They’re performing Nelson and Columbus!” Nina exclaimed.

  “Oh no, does that mean the ladder-and-board act from the original show is next?” Joel asked, covering his eyes. “I heard that was a complete disaster.”

  As they watched, the twelve penguins marched in formation up an ice cliff, where they crowded at the summit. Then they went completely still.

  “What’s supposed to happen now?” Mrs. Popper asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Joel said.

  The audience of a thousand penguins and five humans began to murmur.

  Then Patch let out an ear-piercing cry. As one, the penguins made a great show of pushing one another to the ground, tobogganing off the peak in all directions, letting out loud squawks as they tumbled away before getting to their feet again down at the bottom, appearing very proud of themselves. It all looked a bit like a firework display, only made of penguins.

  Once they were finished, the Popper Penguins lined themselves back up in a straight line, while the Antarctic penguins broke out into a raucous chorus of orks and gaws. The Popper Penguins took neat bows, or at least as best they were able with their stout bodies. (It was difficult to bow without a waist.)

  The gentoos surged forward, crowding around the Popper Penguins, greeting them with a frantic display of clacking beaks and loud calls. They lifted the Popper Penguins so they surfed over the top of the colony, making orks of delight as they accepted the crowd’s admiration.

  “Well, I’ll be!” Yuka said.

  “The scientific world has never seen anything like this,” Dr. Drake marveled.

  “The Popper Penguins passed down stories about Antarctica and Stillwater!” Nina said.

  “Maybe they’ll keep passing these stories down in the wild colony here,” Yuka proposed.

  “Fascinating,” said Dr. Drake. “We’ll need to publish studies on this right away. Are you prepared to work with me, Yuka?”

  “I’m revising my dissertation in my head right now!” he said. He and Dr. Drake then descended into a lot of scientific language that Nina and Joel couldn’t understand at all.

  Their attention was soon drawn to the young chicks at their feet. Mae and Ernest had enjoyed the Popper show, jumping up and down in glee and doing their own pantomime version of the specialized steps along with the Popper Penguins. But now they looked almost mournful. Head down, Ernest was already making his slow waddling progress back to the boat. Mae made an oork that sounded very familiar to the Popper kids by now: She was ready for some canned tuna fish. Ernest made an oork that they also knew very well: It was time for his favorite nature program on the ship’s shortwave radio.

  Joel gave Nina a long look. Their plan for getting the two young chicks back to the wild wasn’t working out. Not at all.

  FAREWELL, DR. DRAKE

  WHILE JOEL AND Nina holed up in the research station, they heard a clamor from the icy valley as the Popper Penguins gave yet another command performance.

  The Popper children weren’t out enjoying the show, though—they were too worried about Mae and Ernest. The young penguins were eating dried squid from a pile on the floor, in between moves in their version of chess. Joel and Nina hadn’t been able to figure out the rules yet, but it seemed to involve a lot of pecking and fighting and pawns flying everywhere.

  “It’s almost like they don’t know that they’re penguins,” Joel said.

  “I’d say that’s exactly right,” Dr. Drake said from the doorway. Nina and Joel looked up, startled. “When they’re born, young birds go through a process called imprinting. In order to learn the right habits and bird manners, they study whatever animal they first see when they hatch. Normally that’s another penguin, of course. In this case, though, it was you!”

  “But the original Popper Penguins were able to go live in the wild,” Nina protested.

  Dr. Drake nodded. “You’ll remember that Mr. Popper’s first penguin, Captain Cook, was an adult. When he was a chick, he’d been around other penguins. By the time chicks were in Stillwater, they had other penguins around to imprint on. These two weren’t in the same situation, unfortunately. It’s not your fault—you did the best you could with these eggs. But I’m afraid they won’t survive out here in the wild without parents, just like human children wouldn’t.”

  With that, Mae let out a loud squid burp as she picked up a black rook with her beak, deftly depositing it on the other side of the board. Ernest squawked in outrage at the move, then settled down. He gently tapped each of the white pieces with his beak, considering his options.

  “It’s true, there aren’t many chess sets in the wild,” Joel said.

  “Or nature hours for Ernest to listen to on the radio,” Nina added.

  “I suspect these aren’t gentoos, either, but Magellanic penguins. Those penguins don’t even live in the Antarctic, but in South America. To be honest, Ernest might be female and Mae might be male. I could be wrong on that, though—even after all these years working with penguins, it’s still hard for me to tell the sexes apart without a blood test.”

  “Oh my,” Nina said.

  Just then there was a clamor outside as the Popper Penguins finished their big act. Mrs. Popper and Yuka burst in, breathless. “This was the best show yet!” Mrs. Popper said. “The Popper Penguins have really gotten their comic timing down. I’m proud of them.”

  “At least the Popper Penguins have found a good home,” Joel said. “They’re basically celebrities down here.”

  Nina threw her arms around her mother’s waist, burying her face in the pockets of her puffy coat. “Mae and Ernest aren’t even the same species as all these other penguins, Mom,” she cried.

  “Oh dear,” Mrs. Popper said. “What would you suggest, Dr. Drake? What’s best for our little penguins?”

  “They can’t live in the wild, but they could do a lot of good for the penguins that do,” Dr. Drake said. “As the planet warms from human activity, this ice is melting, and the penguins’ homeland is in greater and greater danger. Sometimes we lose entire colonies of penguins because of the melting ice down here. It sounds like the Penguin Pavilion didn’t do things right, but you could. What if you brought Mae and Ernest to visit schools in the winter, when it’s cold enough for them to be out and about, so kids everywhere could learn about penguins? Other times of year, scientists and interested children could come visit your birds in your frozen basement. I’m sure the Popper Foundation w
ould be interested in funding such a place, with you as the caretaker.”

  Mrs. Popper looked surprised. “Money has been tight, and I’d be honored to do something to help the penguins. I’ve been making some charcoal sketches of the Popper show. Maybe I could sell art of Mae and Ernest, to support the Popper Foundation’s work.”

  Nina kept her arms around her mother but pulled her head back to look up, amazed. “Really?” she said, her face streaked with tears.

  Joel jumped up and down. “This is amazing! We’re going to keep Mae and Ernest!”

  The penguins in question scolded the humans for their interruption, before returning to their chess game.

  “I’m going to stay down here with Dr. Drake, writing my dissertation on the transmission of knowledge between generations of gentoo penguins,” Yuka said. “But I’ll need to go back up to Stillwater first to draft my study plan with my professor. I could take you—and our two young penguin ambassadors—up with me.”

  “That’s great news, Yuka,” Mrs. Popper said. “And great news for the gentoo penguins, that they’ll be the subjects of your study.”

  “It’s just about as far away from home as an Inuit can get,” he said. “My family will miss me for a few years.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be very proud of your contribution to science,” Mrs. Popper said.

  “I hope so!”

  And so it was that only a few days later, the Popper family and their two young penguins lined up at the stern of the boat. “Just think, Joel!” Nina said. “We’re going to be bringing our penguins back to school, after all!”

  “And for a good purpose this time,” Joel added.

  The boat began to pull away from the dock. In unison, Mae and Ernest made a new kind of noise, a sort of yewk.

  “What does that call mean?” Mrs. Popper asked as she waved goodbye to Dr. Drake.

  “I think it means they’re content,” Joel said.

  “‘Content,’” Nina said. “That word was on my spelling test, once upon a time.”