Now, I know what you’re thinking. “How does a dog from Airy Zone even know what a penguin is?” Since this account I have had time to learn many things, but the truth is more complicated than that. You should realize by now that dogs have more understanding than their humans normally credit them with. First, Lisa’s big glowing rectangle in the living room often featured penguins, and indeed that must be where I learned the human English word (itself a derivation of human Celtic). Second, the Howl Network had sometimes told tales or used oblique references to white-headed, non-flying birds. Third, there was a significant storehouse of penguin paraphernalia in Lisa’s house, packed away in a closet: books, toys, stuffed animals that I occasionally stole and shredded which smelled like someone I did at the time recognize. I later understood that my human’s older sister, Krystal, having an especial and perhaps spiritual affinity for the animal, collected penguin trinkets and symbols, picture guides showing the variety of subspecies—although if anyone mentioned them during her visits to Lisa’s house, she became embarrassed.

This one had been huddling on the far side of a stump, one of the many obstacles that appeared in my path and yet became my path. I was clearing said stump when I looked down onto the squat, lugubrious creature, who looked back up at me, her back against the rotting wood, her flippers crossed, her upside-down eyes full with tears like a cup that left under the faucet too long and the human holding it (typically Zideo) refuses to let some out, and is forced to take slow and cautious steps to prevent spillage.

Simultaneously startled and filled with a great pity, I did what I could to change the trajectory of my landing, and flailed all four legs, hoping to paddle the air hard enough to make a difference. In the end, I clipped the stump and collided with the poor beast, the both of us tumbling into the powdered snow.

We scrambled to our feet, alarmed more than frightened. “Are you alright?” I tried to ask, but she did not know the canine speech, or even perceive it. Striking powder off of her slick white belly, she straightened what I now saw was a blue bowtie. She noticed mine, the green ornament on the front of my collar, and pointed with her flipper, her beak dropping open.

This was when it became plain that, unlike what the Howl Network had led me to believe, penguins do not have wide, flat bills like a duck, or glowing eyes like a coyote, and they did not screech like harpies. I began to think that the Howl Network was playing a game of telephone, as it were, and wondered what other misconceptions had been introduced by the he-said-she-said effect.

Now, my human editors have urged me to follow certain guidelines to make this account appealing for human readers. Namely that I should (1) stick to action, (2) avoid dreams because they are boring, and (3) never indulge in a flashback, as humans do not trust them. I hope my human readers will forgive me one, provided I keep it brief.

One weekend during Zideo’s absence in the “Plasma House,” Lisa occupied herself with chores. Chores are like errands, except that chores do not mean the human will leave the house. As far as I can tell, human chores mean either scrubbing some fixture of the house, or moving items from one room to another room. I can hardly see the purpose.

On this occasion, Lisa was piling up many of Krystal’s things on a bed and organizing them into different piles. A pile of ancient school papers which I could not read but were scrawled in an unpracticed hand made her wipe tears from her eyes, although she smiled. Pictures of Krystal and a young Commander Zideo screaming at one another made her laugh and sob alternately. Unable to prise apart the source of complex human emotion at work, I laid my chin on the carpet and let the rhythm of her sniffles lull me to sleep.

Something fell to the floor and interrupted my drowse. Another keychain, not unlike the maze. This was bulkier, more substantial, an egg shape covered in brightly colored designs and playful depictions of penguins. I was entranced by its mesmerizing color scheme, its larger-than-life penguin characters, frozen in plastic. A dead screen, sallow and inert, dominated one side of the egg, words and tiny rubber buttons lining the plastic lanes around it. Lisa had not noticed. I nudged it under the bed so that she would not take it away, waited for her to leave.

I thought she would never wrap up her joyous but tearful sifting. She picked up her small glowing rectangle and said, loudly, “Krystal, you are never going to believe what I found!” and, laugh-crying, went through the house enumerating the relics of Krystal’s childhood. I returned to the room, picked up the egg keychain, and to my current favorite pile of cushions and blankets in a corner of the living room, highly defensible with my back to a corner, and set it down.

On closer inspection, the back featured a rotund emperor penguin chick, smiling with uncontainable and glee eyes like carets, and yes—a blue bowtie.

I wanted dearly to gnaw it, but it was of such an awkward shape that it slipped through my teeth whenever I tried to bite down on it. I pawed at it and must have pressed one of the buttons.

“Pengooooooon!” chirped the thing in a shrill altissimo. But a penguin did not appear on its screen.

Instead, a sad-faced ghost floating over a lump blinked there. The lump had three characters that I committed to memory: “R.I.P.” For years, I have meant to ask Lisa or Zideo what this might mean but have yet to learn enough human English to communicate this question. Anyway, Lisa heard me and discovered my plot. She confiscated Krystal’s (dead?) Pengoon from me and called me a stinker (which was hurtful, but she rubbed my head briefly, so I didn’t feel too bad about it).

Here was that same pengoon, in the flesh. There could be no mistaking her, and she was quite alive.

She wiped her tears away with a flipper and mastered herself admirably. She did not quack or bleat (more Howl Network myths debunked) but said, surprisingly, “Hamburger?”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

I shook the snow out of my fur. I had no hamburger to share with her, although she looked so sad about the lack of one that I think I might have donated one to her, if I had. When she sniffled and blinked, her eyes were nothing more than little arches in a gray-capped face—just like the image on the egg keychain. I wanted to tell her that I recognized her, I wanted to give her the hamburger she so desired, but she spoke what seemed to me like human English.

This Shard was already full of surprises.

When she understood that no hamburger was forthcoming, her shoulders slumped and her flippers hung, pointing desolately at the ground. It was then that I experienced what humans must feel towards us—the overwhelming desire to pull her close and protect her, but also squeeze her and rub her li’l head, and plant big wet smooches on her cheek and—

Excuse me.

Even the memory of the pengoon is subject to its charms. She was affecting my mind then and does now. She was as Lisa and her visiting work friends described me when they saw my bowtie—cute.

Animals do not have this concept in nature. Adorability does not factor into the natural impulses of beasts. We protect young, and we even show affection, but never at the same time. Her aura caused this sensation in heaps, and every moment I looked away from her, my subconscious screamed that I should check on her and make sure she was okay.

“Fire,” she said, and pointed uphill where the smell of smoke was strongest, and dark plumes melted snow from wet branches. “Help?”

I did not know how to say “Yes, absolutely, let us quit this place this instant and I will offer you what help I might, though I have no thumbs to aid me in more complex tasks.” So I stood up straight and barked once. Still a little edgy, she jumped back, but understood. We began to make our way up hill.

I would have liked to go faster, but her little webbed feet made slow progress crunching through inches-thick snow. We made our way up the ridge, and I yearned to jump from rock to rock. Even the branches of trees seemed like they offered support, and I could not put away the thought of hopping through the canopy.

“Town,” she said, pointing uphill with her flipper. “Bad man…” she waved her flippers around in gestures that were meaningless to me. Humans are able to take advantage of (often, but not universally) five individual fingers per hand, and thus have a vast lexicon of gesticulations to imbue their words with further meaning. This penguin’s flippers were little gray nubs. And though they were adorable, they were not hugely communicative.

The smell of smoke became stronger further uphill. The trees became more dense, and it became clear that the pengoon’s home was, oddly, in the woods. I rather envisioned them on habitats of jagged white ice, diving into fishing holes for their sustenance. But nothing here was simple, and from what the game fellows had said previously, this whole planetary mass was made up of the remains of game worlds from far away. With that perspective, it did not seem so strange that penguins, or pengoons, might wear bowties and desire hamburgers.

As the smoke thickened, something peculiar stood out within the chorus of individual scents. Between the odor of hot ash and the fumes of a dozen different species of trees’ barks vaporizing, I picked up on a hidden note of leather—not the decaying animal flesh that I would have expected in the woods, but the cured and hardened textile. And with it, the tang of human excitement, fast-pumping blood.

The woods, as I have said, seemed stitched together from different forests, or ideas of forests as conceived by different creative minds governing different plots of land. If I could remove the snow, I was sure I would see a grand concatenation of different soils, sods, minerals, shrubs, all unified as it were under a blanket of frigid white.

One tree, flourishing on the edge of a sudden drop and overlooking a sizable gouge in the side of the mountain whose flank we climbed, stood out from the others. From it protruded a lumpy and awkward mass of leather and canvas, snaps and drawstrings, uncovered by snow. I was the first to notice it (of course) but the penguin’s eyes grew wide when she saw that it was attached to a human—and not just any human, but one dressed to the nines in a tuxedo and top hat.

Helmgarth was watching over the ridge and into the gap so intently that he gripped the bark of a tree that he stood behind, concealing himself from whomever he observed. Humans think that dogs have a short memory, and that this is why we freak out when you come home from a short errand at the store or some such place. This is only partially true, and I will not deny that our enthusiasm renews itself at your every return. But our grudges last for a long time. I believe I have already mentioned the List. Nevertheless, I remembered that I had just left Helmgarth across the way, on the previous mountain—in the mouth of a cave, no less. How he might have gotten around us with only one path to use, somehow moving faster than I was, and without being seen, was entirely beyond me. Something was afoot.

Recalling our last interaction, I growled at him and he jumped. He wasted no time reading me, and raised his hand to point into the gap below. He only paused a moment to take in the penguin, then dismissed it as nothing unusual. “I say,” he said, a loose grip on the cane by his side. “Good to see a friendly face. We all got split up on the way in, it seems. But, look.”

I did look, although I did not want to take my eyes away from his cane even for a second. In the gap below, I could make out nothing unusual beyond a strange track in the snow, a wide, slushy streak. There was no sign of feet, whether human or beast, and it disappeared into a different cave mouth, glistening with dripping icicles. Beside it, on a short wooden post was something that looked like Lisa’s mailbox around Christmas time, a box of some kind decorated with a splash of forest green and blood red–a sprig of holly.

“It led your master in there,” said Helmgarth. “I nearly called to the two of them, but something felt wrong. Something about the way it was clearing your master’s footprints as it walked.” He shuddered. “I fear he is in danger, old bean. If the mayor were here, I’m sure he could give that thing a walloping he wouldn’t soon forget. Or Addrion could, you know… zap it.”

Well, I don’t need to tell the dogs reading this story that my heart skipped a beat. And as I looked between the pitiful little cartoonish penguin and the smoke at the top of the mountain, then back to the mouth of the cave, I certainly don’t need to tell you which I chose. I still did not fully trust Helmgarth, but I took off running down hill, dropping from stone to stone and landing to landing. The path was arduous but as before, each step became clear to me a split second before I took it.

When I reached the cave mouth, my nose confirmed my fear—my human had been here just minutes ago. He had gone much too long between showers, as he often had when he was focused on Doing A Stream, and I would have known the signature of his natural oils and greases a mile away, had it not been for the smoke.

Commander Z was in the cave. And something had him.