Giraffe and Penguin Become Pen PalsEven after sending his reply, Penguin could not stop thinking about Giraffe’s letter. What on earth was a neck, and did he have one?
He was still wondering when Seal arrived with another letter from Giraffe.
“What do I look like?” Penguin asked the Professor when they met for school that day.
“You’re mostly black and white.”
“That’s what I thought,” Penguin said.
Then he disappeared.
A moment later he returned with the bucket. Clankety-clank, clankety-clank.
And then he climbed inside.
“Professor,” he asked, “am I still black and white?”
“Yes, you are the same. Black and white.”
“Thank you, sir!” Penguin said with a big grin.
Giraffe and Pelican read the letter together.
“Pelican,” said Giraffe when they had finished, “I still wonder what on earth Penguin looks like.”
“I could go and find out,” Pelican suggested.
Whale Sea did not seem so far away now, and he wanted to see Whale Point. Pelican had never been there because Seal took care of delivering all the letters once they reached Whale Sea.
Giraffe looked tempted for a moment, but then he shook his head.
“No, don’t do that. It’s more fun imagining. I’m going to keep writing to Penguin and see if I can dress up to look like him. Will you help me?”
“You’re going to try to look like Penguin? That’s a crazy idea.”
They both burst out laughing.
And that is how the once-bored Giraffe became pen pals with Penguin.
On Whale Point, the Professor and Penguin had begun to look forward to Giraffe’s letters, too.
“Professor! Giraffe says he wants to dress up to look like me!”
“You know, I’ve lived a long time,” the Professor said, “but I’ve never heard of anything like this before.” He perked up at the very thought of it.
Pelican was becoming a hard worker, just like Seal.
Of course, this was partly because the fish in Whale Sea were so delicious. But it was also because Pelican was having so much fun delivering Giraffe’s letters.
He was also learning more about Seal. Seal’s father, and his grandfather, and his grandfather’s father, and the father of his grandfather’s father, and the father of the father of his grandfather’s father had all been in charge of the mail for Whale Sea. In fact, Seal was the tenth-generation delivery seal in his family.
“Wow! Ten generations!” Pelican exclaimed. “That’s amazing!”
So once again, Pelican puffed up his chest, flapped his wings, and flew towards the other side of the horizon.
“He has wings but they’re very small? Maybe they are just for decoration? What do you think, Pelican?”
Pelican was trying to figure out what Penguin looked like, too.
“Hmmm. He said he’s good at swimming, right? But he can’t fly. I wonder if he can walk.”
“My goodness. He has two short legs, just like you, Pelican.”
Their laughter drifted on the soft breeze. By this time, Pelican had begun to spend all his free time with Giraffe.
“Why don’t we try drawing a picture of him?” he suggested.
“That’s a great idea.”
They read all of Penguin’s letters over again.
Giraffe tilted his head. “Pelican, what do you think he means when he says he has no neck, or that maybe he is all neck?”
Just then a snake slithered by.
“Giraffe, look at that!” said Pelican. “You can’t really tell if Snake has a neck or not, can you? He looks like he doesn’t have one, but then again he looks like he is all neck. Maybe Penguin looks like him!”
“I bet you’re right!” Giraffe said.
Giraffe drew a picture of a snake with a beak and two wings standing on two short legs.
“That looks very odd,” he said.
“You look pretty odd yourself, now that I think about it,” Pelican said.
He stared at Giraffe’s long neck for some time. Then he said, “I bet Penguin means that he can’t tell where his neck begins or ends. Like Snake.”
Pelican drew a long straight body and added a beak, two wings and two legs.
“Oh, I see. Yes, that looks better… And he says he’s black and white…”
They tried making the body black on one side and white on the other, then black on top and white on the bottom, and then added polka dots to see how that looked.
“Giraffe, look!” Pelican said.
“Black and white!” they shouted.
And so their picture of ‘Penguin’ was done. Now Giraffe was ready to dress up like his pen pal.
