Tuesday, September 23, 2008

From a huddle to a romp

The Penguin mother had just taken over the duty of sitting on the egg from the Penguin father. This was one of the few colonies this far down south. The colony was never really far away from the edge of the water, but none of the penguins were in it. A pod of orcas were nearby, and the penguins were weary, the nesting mothers especially so. The father penguin was checking his camcorder, he wanted to be as prepared as he could for the big moment. The camcorder was a gift from the men, it had large buttons that could be easily used with the flipper, and the resulting images were broadcasted by radio to a secure server. They were broadcasted back if the father penguin wanted a playback.
The father penguin and the mother penguin had come together for the season to have this child. They would go their separate ways after the Antarctic summer and find different mates in the next season. They were hardly devoted to each other, functioning like automatons, but their lives revolved around the egg, to which they were totally devoted. The egg was thick, and well protected from stray accidents, but that never came about. While the father penguin nested, the mother penguin went in search of food, and then they would trade places, the mother penguin nested and the father penguin went out in search of food. The egg itself was large and mostly white, with a few specks of brown.
After a time the egg cracked, the father penguin was recording the proceedings. What wriggled out was a long creature with short brown hair, with legs where the flippers should have been, and a rather large and elongated . The father penguin looked at his child. The brown coloring was acceptable, it was a rare occurrence, but not unheard of amongst penguins. Every now and then, along came a brown chick. It would have trouble finding a mate, but otherwise they tended to live normal lives. The paws instead of the flippers were unheard of. The snout-like beak was also unheard of. There was something terribly wrong with this chick. The mother penguin looked at the abomination, and thought vague penguin thoughts about the hard times ahead.
The baby penguin cried at different times in the night, it spend hours putting its beak into the snow and searching... for something, and the parents had to combine their efforts to keep it away from the bob of seals nearby, it could easily get eaten.
It was hard work, the other penguins would have nothing to do with the creature, and the baby penguin would not go in with the other baby penguins. The parents lost a lot of food because the baby had to be tended separately from the crèche. The mother penguin came up with an idea. It was cruel to abandon the creature, and yet, it was impossible to bring it up. It was a miserable creation, and the best hope was to hand it over to the humans. This meant going on a long trek away from the rookery, but it would be worth it. The father penguin agreed to this, and together, they left for the warmer seas, roughly in the direction of a base they knew about. All along, the father penguin was recording the proceedings of his child.
When the parents left the other penguins behind, a technician at the servers noticed the creature in the myraid streams of video coming in. It stood out pretty clearly. Looking more like a small dog than a penguin, with what looked like a flipper where the tail should have been. This must have been some kind of a mutant. The video was broadcast over and over again, and all over the world, people started tuning in to watch the progress of the two penguins. The humans at the closest Antarctic base were informed about the penguins, and asked to intercept them. Meanwhile, the tabloids went crazy with caps from the video stream, never clear enough to give a definite form, but it looked alien, the feathers were too thin and too narrow - almost like tufts of hair, the feet were as brown as the rest of the body, and there was no white patch on the stomach, but nothing else could be made out as it was so small.
Meanwhile, the penguins flitted from floe to floe, in search of the humans, keeping the child warm, protecting it from the seals and the orcas, and happy about the fact that at least it ate fish. Their voyage did not last too long. They came across the three men and the women in the bright red jackets. The father penguin approached close enough, but the mother penguin was a little nervous. The baby penguin approached the humans fearlessly on its own violation, and after exchanging a few puzzled penguin remarks, the parents waddled off, back to their own rookery, never to mate with each other again.
The puzzled humans were shocked. It was impossible for a creature like this to be born from an egg. Was it a platypus? or a weasel? or maybe a beaver? Hell, it might even be a polecat. This was definitely not a bird, or mother nature had surprises hidden in the DNA that no one had heard of. They took the creature with them back to the base, to house it and study it in more detail. On the way, along the shore, came a huge bevy of otters. From the shore till the horizon, the otters swam with branches in their mouths, towards some big dam project further south. The creature could smell something, it cried, and a few voices cried back from the sea. It escaped the hands of the confused man holding it, and dove right into the sea. Then it swam off into the horizon, amongst its own, off to build that big dam they were all planning, the otter-zion.

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