Albert realized that future generations would probably appreciate a chronicle of our adventures embarked on to alter history, so he wrote down the full names of each passenger. He already knew that Rory’s last name was Zamba, but he didn’t know the others. Ooga’s surname, he then found out, is Ah-Ooga (so his name is Ooga Ah-Ooga); Tubthumper and Chumbawumba’s surname is Modoc; the Elephant siblings noted, though, that it was hardly ever necessary for them to use their surname, as they were the only sibling elephants named Tubthumper and Chumbawumba in all of Africa, believe it or not). Yukyuk said she only had the one name, and that it was her middle name.
“If you have a middle name, you must have a first name,” Albert responded, confused.
“Nope. All I’ve got is a middle name: Yukyuk. That’s it. That’s all she wrote — literally: when I was born, the nurse wrote in the log:
“NFN?” Tubthumper asked. “So you do have a first name — even if it’s just initials. What do they stand for?”
“No, I don’t have a first name. ‘NFN’ stands for ‘No First Name.’ So, as you can see clearly now: I have no first name.”
“That makes no sense,” Chumbawumba said, getting kind of agitated about it, despite the fact that he probably shouldn’t care.
Rory merely looked on, grinning and slowly lashing his tail back and forth. He found the whole conversation whimsically ludicrous, and could barely suppress a chuckle himself.
“Well,” Yukyuk admitted, “Full disclosure: I have been told that I do have a first name, but that it’s silent, and thus has no orthographic representation.”
Chumbawumba now lost his cool. Ears flared, trunk raised, and trumpet blaring, he said the whole thing was ridiculous, and stomped off into the forest to give himself a chance to work off some of his exasperation about the matter and cool down.
Ooga, feeling the same way about the verbal exchange as Rory, was jumping up and down with glee, feeling that the name itself was humorous enough, but Chumbawumba’s violent reaction to it made it even more so.
Tubthumper, although not upset about it, was nevertheless curious. “I have to agree with my brother: If you only have one name, why wouldn’t it be a first name? I’ve heard of people (and animals) having no middle name before, but I’ve never heard of someone having no first name.”
“Family tradition says they asked my dad what he wanted to name me, and he was going to choose a first name for me, but he was speechless, and the nurse got impatient and moved on to my middle name, which my mom chose.”
“Why did your mom choose ‘Yukyuk’? Is it a family name, her maiden name, or” —
“She didn’t.”
“What do you mean, ‘She didn’t’? She didn’t choose it?”
“Nope.”
“Then ...”
“My mom was laughing so uproariously about the nurse getting angry at my dad for not being able to make up his mind about the first name he wanted to give me, that” —
“I thought you said he was speechless.”
“OK, OK; Here’s the real story, if you must know: The nurse came in, obviously in a hurry and already out of patience, due to being busy with too many patients. The nurse snapped up the clipboard, barked at my dad for a name, and foot-tappingly waited with the pen poised above the sheet.”
“And then what happened?” Tubthumper asked.
“My dad couldn’t make up his mind on a name. He said, ‘Bertha ... no, Gertie ... no, Grace ... no, Chastity ... no, Ina ... no, Irene ... no, Della ... no, Prudence ... no, Penelope — that’s when the nurse scribbled down ‘NFN’ for ‘No First Name.’ By then my mom was laughing so hysterically — or ‘hyenically,’ as some people refer to it — that she couldn’t answer the nurse regarding what my middle name was to be, and so the overworked Nightingale simply wrote down the sounds my mother was making phonetically.”
“The nurse was a Nightingale?” Albert asked.
“What else? Aren’t all nurses Nightingales?” Yukyuk replied, stunned by the question.
“I didn’t even know Hyenas were born in hospitals,” said Albert.
“Who said anything about a hospital? This was underneath a bush in the Serengeti,” said Yukyuk.
“No hospital, and yet they had to fill out paperwork?” Albert wondered, scratching his head.
“Paperwork is one thing you can never seem to avoid,” Yukyuk asserted, rolling her eyes and shaking her head. “Even in the animal world, bureaucracy abounds.”
“So when this Nightingale visited you, she” —
“She? It wasn’t a hen, it was a rooster. His name was Rufus.”
“Those were the days,” Chumbawumba said, who had calmed down enough to return to the group. “Back then, the Nightingales made bush calls. Now you have to go to where they live if you want to get some medical attention.”
“Yeah, and it’s not always real easy to climb up in those trees to where they are,” agreed Jowls the Hippo.
Albert didn’t know how much of all that to believe. As he walked away to clear his head, he heard Yukyuk begin to chuckle, which apparently was infectious, as many of the others began stomping their feet (Tubthumper, Chumbawumba, and Jowls), clapping their hands (Ooga), slapping their tails on the ground (Rory and Jubatus), and ruffling their feathers (Falcona). So Albert then had his doubts whether any of it was true. Apparently the animals were just ‘pulling his leg.’