Offer to hold Eleanor's hand? Not if you don't want it bitten off. Of course there are no highways for her to run across without looking both ways inside the park gates. The only vehicles that come in and out through the gates are our Rangers' jeeps, which were bought more for endurance than for speed, and from age and the effects of the surfaces they run on, tend to kind of lurch along. Our park tour buses crawl even slower so everyone has a chance to take lots of photos and go "oooh." They're solar powered and can't go any faster. Tourist cars and coaches stay in the parking lot outside. Even the garage for the staff's private vehicles is outside the gates. (This is not a major issue. If you work here, you probably can't afford a private vehicle.) And the nearest highway, with like more than two lanes, is fifty miles away, on the far side of Wilsonville.

This was Eleanor's first week being allowed to help out at the zoo, and she was a little crazed. I was a little crazed, because the grown-ups had decided that Martha was too young to mentor her but I was old enough. I'm not sure the Incredible Hulk is old enough to mentor Eleanor, and Martha is actually pretty good at it. I'm not. It would be okay once we got there, and in another week or two Eleanor should have calmed down a little (I hoped) but meanwhile at 1:55 every afternoon there was a small two-legged elephant trumpeting under my window.

A normal seven-year-old would be happy helping feed baby raccoons at the orphanage. Not Eleanor. Nobody comes to Smokehill for the raccoons, and she wants to be where more of the action is.

I don't really mind Eleanor though. In some ways she's restful. She's too young to remember my mom very well, or Snark. If you think that sounds really sicko, you try being twelve years old when your mother dies and having everyone around you looking at you and thinking of her and feeling sorry for you. It doesn't help that I look like her. Right after she died — right after we knew she was dead — and people started looking at me like that, I started spending a lot of time in front of the mirror, rubbing my cheeks with my fingers. Well, maybe it was more like scratching my cheeks with my fingers, because I started leaving marks. Dad asked me why. I said I was hoping my beard would come in early. I didn't say, Because then people won't look at me like I'm my mother.

Dad was almost the only person who didn't look at me in that new way, but then he was the only other person who was missing her as much as I was. Dad said, "Oh." He didn't ask me why I wanted my beard to come in early. Maybe he guessed. Dad has a beard which he keeps short and tidy so he can make a good impression on the tourists, and the grant administrators. He scratched his own hairy cheeks for a minute and added, "You may not if it does." I stopped scratching my cheeks. And now it was two and a half years later and my beard still hadn't started coming in, but people didn't look at me so much like that any more so I could wait.

Okay, Eleanor and I usually were about a minute late, and Martha was usually there first, lining out the buckets and checking that the labels were all still legible. If anybody got the wrong grub there'd be trouble, from Eric if nothing else. Trouble from Eric is way more than enough however.

"Hiya," she'd say.

"Huh," Eleanor'd say, really offhand and casual. "What've we got?" It's quieter inside the big shed where the food lives — no tourists. That's another of the big draws for Eleanor, of course, being seen by a lot of grown-ups to be going somewhere they can't. I no longer cared about that aspect of it (but if nagged I would admit that I remembered when I did) but just getting away from them — the tourists — was always good. It's a weird life, living at Smokehill, where there's all that gorgeous, amazing, wonderful empty (I mean human empty) space just behind you, so to speak, but you live in like this tiny permanently besieged encampment where you have to kind of take a deep breath and bolt for it when you go from one cranny of no-tourists to the next.

I don't particularly want to because it makes me feel more of a mutant than ever but I suppose I should emphasize that life at Smokehill is kind of bizarre. Certainly us kids were always being told (or asked) that wasn't the way we lived peculiar. Uh, pardon me, but I was born here. So I didn't like being asked (or told). Other kids were the worst. They said things like, No pizza? Like you might say, No oxygen? Of course we have pizza. But no, we couldn't call up the local Super Pizza to deliver, that's true.

Eleanor wouldn't touch the bugs and beetles, and the bigger live (or soon-to-be-knocked-on-the-head) stuff Eric or Katie would deal with, but she'd put the vegetables and fruit in the buckets after Martha or I cut it up if it needed cutting. (Madagascariensis is such a lazy slob it won't eat its carrots unless they are chopped up first.) She wasn't really that much help since we had to keep a sharp eye on her; she felt that fairness meant that everybody got the same thing, but most of the fun food is whatever the Wilsonville and Cheyenne supermarkets feel like sending us of the stuff that's still around after its sell-by date and, for example, citrus gives russo diarrhea. But Eleanor will get older, and living at Smokehill is weird enough (okay, okay, I admit it) so it's good if you feel involved. But how many kids get to help out at a zoo? Who needs normal?

Although Martha and I both put our hours in at the orphanage. But then the orphanage is pretty good too. I like little furry baby things, which there aren't any of at the zoo. Maybe I'm more normal than Eleanor. After the lot at the zoo, something warm and furry or feathery is a nice change too, even if it may throw up all over you. And then there's warm and furry like a Yukon wolf cub. If Eleanor's lucky some day she'll get to hold the broom for it to tear the throat out of while the guy with the sedative gun gets into position.

We'd only just started by the time Katie arrived. Katie makes everyone feel nicer and calmer just by being there, even her daughters. I mean, even Eleanor. Martha is a lot like Katie herself. But after Katie got there Eleanor stopped arguing that since she didn't like celery nobody else was going to like celery either. (Madagascariensis, I swear, likes celery because the sound it makes slowly crunching it up reminds it of the crack of small bones, without any of the effort of hunting something. You'd think carrots would be even better, but no. Maybe it only hunts things with osteoporosis.)

Then Eric showed up and things went into a decline again — even Katie can't do much with Eric — but Dad says he's a good keeper and not everyone wants to live a hundred miles from the nearest real restaurant, work twelve or fourteen hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, and get paid badly, and we're lucky to have him. That's Dad's way of saying "shut up." It's a lot better than saying "shut up" but nothing is ever going to make me like Eric.

We got the buckets sorted and started carrying them out. Eleanor is not only only seven and the youngest but she's not exactly large even for seven (Martha's small for her age too but she's twelve) and only an Eleanor-type seven-year-old would insist on carrying a bucket too big and heavy for her, but of course she does. "I'll take russo," she says every day. Russo's her favorite. Russo is also at the far end of the row of cages and Martha and I have to dawdle getting the others set out to give her time, and then she and Martha have this little ritual of Eleanor pretending not to notice that Martha has to lift and dump the food through the chute, because Eleanor can't.

"She's going to wear that bucket out, dragging it like that," snapped Eric.