Read Online The Zoo at the Edge of the World by Eric Kahn Gale - Free Book Online

parents, a wife! If he gets lucky, he might even have some children appear at his table.” Heppa spotted me peeking through the door and discreetly waved me in. “There is a family in your colors, and each relationship is unique. Green and blue have not spoken for several years. Yellow and red are in business together; purple and orange are having a baby.” Heppa put a hand to the side of her mouth. “But it is an ugly baby.”
    A large table full of female guests tittered at Heppa’s joke. They wore paint-covered smocks over their fancy vacation wear and worked on nature scenes.
    Heppa stepped away from the table and led me to the back of the classroom. “Hello, my dear.” She greeted me warmly and wrapped leathery arms around my neck. Her embrace was comforting; she was like the grandmothers I’d read about in books.
    I felt unsure of myself from my encounter with Jarro and took a deep breath in anticipation of speaking, but Heppa gave me a look of infinite patience.
    â€œHeppa!” a lady in a red hat called out. “Can you help me, please?”
    â€œIn a moment, darling,” Heppa said sweetly. “I am conversing with my friend.”
    She turned back to me and I very simply said, “P-paint?”
    â€œOf course.” She smiled and led me to a cart full of supplies. “Take anything you wish.”
    Â 
    â€œSeeds! Seeds!”
    Kenji made an excellent distraction, dragging an open bag of seeds around the Blue Birdcage. All the birds jumped off their perches and madly chased her. Even Tappet, deciding his dance could wait, left his girlfriend on the wall and went to get some breakfast.
    Amidst the chaos, I rushed over to the corner where the painted brown bird was. I thought it’d be cruel to paint her off the wall entirely; Tappet would be heartbroken, wondering where she’d gone. So I decided on a different plan.
    Female birds of paradise are drab creatures, usually just two shades of brown. But males, like Tappet, are brightly colored, with beaks and wings in yellows, greens, and blues. So I took my paints and made some colorful embellishments.
    Once the seeds had run out and the birds stopped chasing Kenji round the cage, Tappet returned to his little clearing by the mural. Kenji and I watched from the farthest wall as he cleaned up his display area, stretched out his wings, and prepared to dance. He squawked once, and froze.
    He hopped up close to the wall and leaped backward, then leaned toward it again.
    â€œI’m sorry, my friend,” he said to the mural. “I suppose that’s my mistake.”
    He laughed, shook himself off, and flew up into the ropes, where the two real birds of paradise were waiting.

12.
    H aving the power of animal speech made me infinitely better at my job. I solved problems that had been plaguing us for months. After cleaning up the Blue Birdcage, I learned that the bats were getting sick because their berries weren’t ripe, and I made a note to replace them out. Dreyfus hadn’t been drinking enough water because someone had raised a flagpole by his water trough and it was scaring him. The sloths told me they’d feel safer if there were more branches on the fake trees, and I gladly installed some. The tapirs had me dig them a mud bath so they could keep from getting sunburned. But the greatest victory of the day was helping Mala, our spectacled bear.
    Mala hadn’t been nursing her little cub, Bashtee, so I had to enter the den a few times a day to feed him donkey milk from a bottle. This was bad for two reasons. The first is that babies need what’s in their mother’s milk to stay healthy. The second is that to get donkey milk, you have to milk a donkey, and I’m not even going to tell you what that’s like.
    When I asked Mala why she hadn’t been nursing her cub, she told me that he’d gone missing after she birthed him. “That’s the boy’s cub,”