The Penguin Who Knew Too Much(20)

“At the shelter?”

“We don’t have much turnover,” he said. “I’d recommend taking all four—that way they’d entertain each other much of the time.”

“All four?”

“Or how about a collabrador?” he suggested, no doubt sensing my lack of enthusiasm for beagles. “Nice collie-lab mix. Probably has good herding instincts—get along well with your llamas.”

“We have enough dogs,” I said. “And they’re not our llamas. Are you telling me there's nothing you can do?”

“When we’re full up, like now, what we usually do is get one of the nearby farms to take the overflow. Since they’re already settled in at a farm, I don’t see any reason to worry about them.”

“That's it? You’re not going to do anything about our animal problem?”

“I’ll go up to the house and check on the other animals,” he said, pulling a small notebook out of his pocket and beginning to scribble in it. “You said penguins, hyenas, and what?”

“Some kind of sniveling rat,” I muttered. I confess, I was hoping he’d take it personally, but he just nodded and jotted something in his notebook.

“I’ll check them out and let you know if you need to do anything differently for their welfare.”

With that, he turned and trudged toward the house. Great— not only was the Animal Welfare Department not going to take any of our unwanted animals, but now it was going to nitpick how we took care of them. Shaking my head, I turned back to lean against the fence as he’d been doing. Maybe contemplate the llamas until I calmed down a bit.

And contemplating the llamas was curiously calming. Though I was a little annoyed that they’d stopped humming.

“So how come Mr. Savage from the animal shelter gets humming and I don’t?” I said aloud.

“Maybe they like you,” Michael said. I started slightly when I realized that I’d been so focused on the llamas that I hadn’t noticed him coming up to lean on the fence at my side. “Apparently humming can be a sign that they’re unsettled in some way,” he added.

“Oh, if that's the case, far be it from me to unsettle the llamas.” “Unless it's a mother llama humming to her cria,” Michael went on.

“Her what?”

“Cria. Baby llama. And you know the whole thing about them spitting on people?”

“Yuck,” I said, taking a couple of steps back from the fence. “I’d forgotten about that.”

“Don’t worry,” Michael said. “They usually spit only at each other—it's part of establishing the pecking order. If a llama's been properly socialized, with other llamas, he’d spit on a human only by accident, if the human got in the middle of a llama fight. Or maybe if he was really mad at the human.”

“So how do we know these llamas have been properly socialized?”

“They haven’t spit at anyone yet. Tried to kick Spike when he got into their pasture, but that's perfectly understandable.”

“And if I told your mother you’d said that, do you think she’d take Spike back?” Spike was technically Michael's mother's dog, though we’d had him on semipermanent loan ever since her allergist had recommended a trial separation.

“I expect she’d sooner take one of the hyenas,” Michael said. “They’re smarter than dogs, you know.”

“Hyenas?”

“Llamas. The Peruvians have been breeding them for intelligence for centuries. Basically, they eat the stupid ones.”

“I’ve been at parties like that,” I said. “So you’ve been reading up on llamas?” The idea alarmed me. Since childhood, I’d known that bringing home stacks of books on a topic was a danger sign that a new enthusiasm had seized Dad. By the time I’d recognized the same symptoms in Michael, it was a little too late to change how I felt about him.

“Well, not yet,” Michael said. “There hasn’t been time. But Blake's been telling us all about them.”

“I can imagine,” I said. “I can hear him from here.”

We both turned and glanced back at the house. Randall and Vern Shiffley, along with several of Chief Burke's officers and a handful of my relatives, were gathered around something in the middle of the lawn. Blake, standing on a picnic table bench, was lecturing his makeshift student body.

“Officious old goat,” I muttered, turning back to the llamas.

“You don’t seem to like Dr. Blake much,” Michael said. “Any particular reason?”

I was opening my mouth to protest that I liked Blake just fine when I suddenly realized it would be a lie.