Free Tiger in Trouble by Eric Walters Page B

Pooky!” Mrs. Armstrong sang out as she rushed across the room and threw her arms around his neck. “Just wait until you see the things I bought today! You’re going to love them!”
    “I’m sure I will,” he said. When he pushed another button, the gigantic screen clicked, darkened and faded away to black.
    “These must be our campers,” he said, as he rose from the chair and came toward us. He circled us, staring, his head cocked to one side, a hand on his chin, as if he was inspecting us. “Is this all of them?”
    “That’s all for the first week,” Mrs. Armstrong said.
    “I guess some ideas work out better than others,” he said. “Hopefully you’ll all have a good week. Apparently Vladimir knows all sorts of things about animals.”
    “But not as much as your father,” Danny said.
    “And how would you know that?” Mr. Armstrong asked.
    “Vladimir told us about him.”
    “Yes, I’ve been told many stories myself. They say he always had time for an injured animal. Shame the same couldn’t be said about people. By the way, Vladimir, how are those lion cubs doing?”
    “Doing good.”
    “Excellent. That’s great news!”
    It was nice that he was interested in the animals —
    “I’ve already received bids for all of them,” he continued.
    “Bids? You mean like in selling them?” I asked.
    “Of course. I had three more e-mail offers today.”
    “But why are you selling them?” Nick asked.
    “It takes a great deal of money to raise, feed and maintain animals, especially large animals,” he said.
    There was enough money spent on those packages we had just carried in to feed the whole park for a month.
    “And you simply can’t keep every animal that’s born or your space would be overrun in no time,” he continued.
    I thought about all the empty pens in the park. There was lots of space still to be filled before there was any danger of them being “overrun.”
    “Will the cubs be ready to go in a few weeks?” Mr. Armstrong asked.
    Vladimir shrugged in response.
    “Because their value goes down pretty fast as they get older. Do you kids have any idea what a baby lion is going for on the market these days?” He paused. “Come to think of it, that’s none of your business.” He turned back to the TV, clicking the game on again. The sound blasted out at us.
    Mrs. Armstrong motioned us to the door and we exited. She closed the door behind us.
    •
    “Did you hear that?” Nick asked, his voice cutting through the darkness of the cabin where we all lay in our beds.
    “It would be hard to miss,” I answered back.
    “What was it?” Danny asked.
    “Maybe a lion,” Samantha replied.
    “Nope, not a lion. More like a jaguar or a leopard,” Nick disagreed.
    Both the jaguars and the leopards weren’t too far from our cabin. What a strange thought. We were going to go to sleep almost within sight, and definitely within sound, of more than two dozen types of different animals. It was weird, but kind of wonderful.
    The call came once again. It was somehow high-pitched and growly at the same time. I had no idea what it was. It could have been aliens for all I knew. What I did know was that lying here in the dark with the different animal noises coming in through the open window was keeping me awake. Not that I would have necessarily been able to sleep even if it was completely quiet. There was just too much to think about — or as my mother said, to “process.”
    Aside from the new sights, the animals and sleeping in this new place all squished up with three other kids, I was trying to figure out Vladimir and Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong.
    Vladimir reminded me of some of the animals we’d seen: big, playful and sort of friendly, rubbing against the bars and licking our hands. Still, they had long claws and sharp teeth, and a lick could become a bite pretty quick — a bite that could take off a finger, a hand or even an arm. I liked Vladimir, or at least I thought I liked him, but there