Penguin Pandemonium - The Wild Beast. Жанна Уиллис

      “Me too!” said Orson. “Just goes to show how little penguins know about entertainment. Fancy not knowing that tinkling the ivories is showbiz for playing the piano.”

      The bears could be very irritating and Rory was beginning to lose his temper.

      “You haven’t got a piano!” he yelled.

      “No, but if we did, it would be a good way to lure the visitors back,” said Orson, pretending to play a few imaginary chords. “No one’s coming to see us either. Do you know why?”

      Rory scratched his head. “Maybe it’s the weather.”

      “I bet Rory’s right,” said Blue. “Maybe people can’t get to the zoo because of the snow.”

      Orson shook his head.

      “Wrong! There are more visitors than ever, aren’t there, Ursie?”

      “Record numbers,” agreed Ursie, “but they’re not coming to see you or us because of You Know Who.”

      “What’s You Know Who, Rory?” whispered Blue.

      “You know,” he said casually. He had no idea who Ursie was talking about either, but he wasn’t going to admit that to the bears – he was hoping that one of them might let it out of the bag without him having to ask. By now, both bears had climbed up their tree to get a better look.

      “You should see the queue for the new enclosure below yours,” said Orson. “It’s enormous!”

      “Rory, Orson said it was enormous,” hissed Blue. “Maybe it’s a new kind of elephant.”

      Rory shrugged. “I thought he was talking about the queue. Or the enclosure.”

      Blue spoke to him behind her flipper so the bears couldn’t hear. “If it’s an enormous enclosure, whatever is in there must be huge, mustn’t it, Rory.”

      Before he could answer, Muriel waddled over with her girly gang of fairy penguins and demanded to know what was going on.

      “I hope you’re not talking about me behind my back, Bloop,” she said. “It’s very rude to whisper.”

      She prodded the smaller of her two friends in the tummy. “Brenda, isn’t it rude to whisper?”

      “Y…es?” whispered Brenda.

      Muriel was very bossy and Brenda found it much easier to agree with everything she said, even if she didn’t.

      “Actually, Muriel, we’ve got better things to talk about than you,” said Blue.

      Muriel preened herself and did a little shimmy.

      “Really? I don’t think so. What could possibly be better than me?”

      Blue pointed down below. “There’s a new animal in there. We’re not sure what it is, but we think it’s very large.”

      Muriel put both flippers round the tubbier member of her gang and measured her chubby waistline. “What? Larger than Hatty?”

      “I’m big-boned,” wailed Hatty.

      “Much larger than Hatty,” said Blue. “And let’s hope it’s not as mean as you are.”

      Muriel twisted her beak into a sneer and was trying to think of a witty reply when Orson and Ursie burst into song.

      “What is the terrible beast in the zoo?

      Nobody knows and we haven’t a clue.

      A hippophant, maybe? A rhinoceroo?

      What is it? Why is it? How is it? Who?

      Maybe it’s an Elephong covered in hairs,

      A great woolly mammoth – like anyone cares.

      Whatever it is that lives under the stairs,

      It can’t be as fabulous as the brown bears!”

      Whatever it was, the crowd below had grown bigger. Even the singing bears couldn’t draw their attention away from the mysterious new exhibit. Muriel went over to the viewing grille in the wall of the penguin enclosure, poked her beak through and looked down on to the rows of heads below.

      “What’s the big attraction?” she screeched. “What are you looking at? You should be looking at me!”

      Not one person turned round and if there was one thing Muriel hated, it was being ignored.

      “I’m not standing for this, are we, Hatty and Brenda!” she raged, grabbing them both by the flippers. “Come along, we’re going to teach those visitors to look up to the penguins.”

      “How?” said Hatty. “Are we going to sing a song?”

      “Are we going to do a cute group hug in front of them?” wondered Brenda.

      Muriel put her flipper down her throat and gagged.

      “No, I’m sick of cute, they’re sick of cute. We’re going to have to play dirty… Poop, poop!”

      She marched them over to the viewing grille, sat down and pushed her tail through the hole above the crowd.

      “Hatty,” frowned Brenda, “did Muriel mean it when she said poop?”

      “She must have done. She said it twice,” said Hatty.

      Muriel squeezed her eyes shut.

      “Stop twittering and poop! Aim for their hats, girls… One, two, three and FIRE!”

      Blue and Rory stared in disbelief as Muriel and her friends lifted their tails and squirted droppings all over the visitors. Some of them thought it had started to rain, but when they smelt what had landed on them, they realised it was nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with the row of little birds sitting above them.

      “Made you look, made you stare, penguin poop is in your hair!” cackled Muriel, dancing up and down triumphantly. Even the brown bears were shocked.

      “Imagine if we’d done that instead of going in the woods,” grunted Orson.

      “Terrible behaviour,” said Ursie. “I wish we’d thought of it.”

      Muriel didn’t care what anyone thought. She was so pleased with herself, she didn’t notice that the penguin keeper had arrived and was being set upon by angry visitors, demanding that he paid their dry-cleaning bills. Rory watched the scene and put his head in his flippers.

      “Muriel, how could you stoop so low?”

      “Easy! I just bent my knees,” she sniggered. “Hatty, Brenda, did you hear my joke? Rory said, ‘How did you stoop so low?’ And I said, ‘I just bent my knees…’ Now laugh!”

      “Ha ha,” said Hatty flatly, deeply ashamed of what she’d just done.

      “Hee hee,” said Brenda, who was even more embarrassed.

      But when feeding time came, Muriel finally understood that what she’d done wasn’t funny in the slightest. Thinking that the fairy penguins must have terrible upset stomachs after the pooping incident, the keeper was afraid that the other penguins might catch the same bug and dosed their supper with medicine. It tasted so awful, even Rory’s permanently hungry friends, Eddie and Clive, were struggling to force it down.

      “Does this mackerel taste fishy to you, Clive?” said Eddie.

      “Don’t be squidiculous,” said Clive. “Of course it tastes fishy, it’s fish— Eughh… No, it’s not,